Fiat Lux
New to me, that is. I recently adopted an iPod Touch from a friend who had upgraded to a Pre and didn’t want the Touch anymore. It came with me on my recent trip to NYC and I had a chance to put it through its paces pretty thoroughly along the way.
I like it quite a bit — for games, web browsing, and of course music. Battery life is decent (a cross-country flight didn’t even drain half the charge) and the screen is lovely. But I am still glad that I didn’t get an iPhone. The iPod’s virtual keyboard does not even come close to being as good as a real keyboard and I’d go nuts trying to manage my email with it.
I do feel a bit silly carrying an iPod Touch as well as a Blackberry. I think it’s the size. I’ve had an iPod Nano for ages, so I shouldn’t feel different about the Touch, but it is bigger than a Nano and that seems to matter. Even so, it’s not a showstopping issue.
I really hate the lack of a decent web browser on the Blackberry but its superb email handling still makes it the winning smartphone for my needs. Unless an AT&T Palm Pre comes out and utterly blows me away, looks like I’ll be staying a two-gadget gal for the foreseeable future.
But it is about music.
One thing that technology has done to music is the decline of shared musical spaces. Years ago, it was habit for me to bring a boom box and a pile of tapes or CDs to the office & play music every day. Music was a shared experience — coworkers would bring in and trade CDs, vote some stuff on or off the playlist, even make office mix tapes. It wasn’t a paradise — especially when your co-workers had very different musical tastes — but it was more social.
Now, each of us sits at our desks plugged into our own private music streams. Nobody has to argue about whether or not [Band X] is good work music, or negotiate a preferred volume level — but also we’re more isolated from each other.
On the whole I’m not sure it’s a step in the right direction.
I couldn’t resist. I should be focusing on getting my trip photos dealt with, but instead I did a little hack project this weekend.
The fact that the Dell Mini 9 is one of the few netbooks out there that can run OSX has not gone unnoticed. And after hearing from one of the Adobe community folks that the method for turning a Mini into a “Hackintosh” really did work as reported, I was intrigued. So when an extra Mini crossed my path, I decided to give to a try.
The necessary ingredients:
One Macbook Pro, One Dell Mini 9 (1 GB RAM, 16 GB SSD HD), One copy of OSX 10.5.6, One 16GB USB drive. Not pictured: a 2nd USB thumb drive for the bootloader.
How I did it: the “Two USB Drive” version described here.
It was actually quite easy. The only pain in the butt was getting the ISO of the OSX install disk onto the thumb drive — it took a long time. Other than that, though, everything worked as described. After the standard installation and setup process and a few reboots, I had this:
There was only about 2GB of free space left on the drive after installation, but Monolingual cleaned out almost 3GB of additional space. I used Xmark to sync my bookmarks onto Safari, threw on a copy of NeoOffice in case I need to do any basic document editing, and added Last.FM so I can listen to music without having to load any MP3s onto the Mini.
I haven’t tested the Bluetooth yet but everything else is working like a charm. I can stream videos, listen to music, check email, and do pretty much anything else I need to, on a machine that’s small enough to fit into my purse. I can even plug SDHC cards from my camera right into the Mini and then upload photos to the cloud. And I don’t have to put up with Windows to do any of it. 
The only drawback is the tiny keyboard on the Mini. It’s fine for a few emails but I wouldn’t want to use it for extended writing.
And yes, installing OSX onto non-Apple hardware is most likely a violation of the EULA (and may void the Dell warranty as well) so bear that in mind if you decide you want to give this experiment a try.
(Hint: Having a sweet little Hackintosh is worth it IMHO)
Not to sound like a total corporate shill but Photoshop CS4 is the utter shizz. Isn’t this neat? I dropped a few photos in, Photoshop did all the stitching. Took almost no time.
I was struck by something when looking at some website analytics today.
This is the image I was looking at:
Notice that line of dots across the middle of the state? That’s no accident. Here’s why:
The Erie Canal was a major engineering feat of the early 1800s and was a key transport path for over 100 years, although after around 1950 or so it stopped being a significant part of the commercial transportation network.
It’s kind of neat that the canal is visible from cyberspace.
Despite my relative blogging paucity of late, I’m hardly shy about putting personal information online. Between Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and the various other odds and ends of my online life, I’ve shared quite a lot over the years. And given my relatively unique name, it’s quite easy to enter a few search strings and pull up an awful lot of detail about me. But Google Latitude is a bridge too far, even for me.
Here’s a quick rundown on Latitude, if it hasn’t gotten onto your radar screen yet:
This Wednesday, Google launched its much-anticipated location-tracking service, Latitude, which uses the GPS hardware found in smart phones (such as Google Android phones and BlackBerry and Windows Mobile handsets) to pinpoint your position on a map and share that information with your friends.
I’ve always been very clear about the line between personal and private information, and Latitude falls smack into the camp of private, as far as I’m concerned. It’s too much sharing. I’ll happily tell the world what I just ordered at Starbucks, but that doesn’t mean I want to world along for the ride as I walk down the street carrying my coffee.
Perhaps it’s a gender thing, but I find the concept that someone can know exactly where I am at all times to be more than a little scary. My work address is easy to find, but being able to see exactly when or what direction I’m walking in when I leave at night? Sorry, but that’s just not something I want the world to get access to.
And yes, I know that by default Latitude wouldn’t share anything unless I actively made the choice to share it, and yes, I know that simply by having a GPS-enabled phone, the phone company already can track me if they want to. If some government agency forces AT&T to give up my personal data, there’s not a whole hell of a lot I can do about it. But if a person I’ve shared my location with gets their phone stolen, their account hacked, or even decides to sell access to their account, that’s a different story.
I know not everyone feels this way, and they’re perfectly happy checking in on Brightkite or adding everyone in their address book to Latitude. I wish them well. But that’s a party I’m just not joining.