Archive for October, 2006
October 16th, 2006 by matt
My saga of a working MacBook continues today with the return of the unit after the Apple Store elves installed a new heat sink. Again I am surprised and impressed by the quick turnaround time:
I dropped off my MacBook Saturday afternoon at the Apple Store, and they said it could take 3 business days. Just after lunch today I received a call that it was ready, and a short while later I had it back in my hands. That’s 48 hours turnaround starting on a Saturday afternoon - I think that’s impressive by any standard.
Having to take my new MacBook in 3 different times for the same problem is frustrating and disappointing, though. My experience has been that Apple - on the front lines at least - maintains a high focus on responding quickly to the customer.
I’m not sure, however, of the whole process Apple went through to figure out the root cause of the MacBook random shutdown issue itself. It seems like 3-4 months is a long time to work on the issue before figuring it out. They’ve had no shortage of machines to evaluate, judging by the Apple discussion board and other incidental experiences. I’m willing, for now, to chalk it up to working out the kinks of a new hardware and processor platform.
Hopefully the heat sink really does fix the issue.
October 14th, 2006 by matt
As I was afraid of, the 2 random shutdowns on my MacBook have turned into a flurry of random shutdowns over the past few days. It was doing all the same things as last time, so I knew the problem was back. Sometimes it would go for a few hours before just powering off, sometimes it would only last 15 minutes.
The problem was only getting worse, so I knew I had to go see my friends at the Apple Store again. This afternoon I took the MacBook in. The guy at the Genius Bar who helped me confirmed that Apple now knows what is causing the random shutdowns - the heat sink. He also said that they can change them out in the store now and do not have to send them back to the repair depot.
When I brought it in for my first round of random shutdowns in August, they did send it off to the repair depot and replaced the top case, trackpad and keyboard. Obviously that did help the situation, but didn’t address the root cause of the problem since they didn’t change out the heat sink.
Now I have an estimated 3 business days (so Wednesday or Thursday) before I have my MacBook back. At least I’ll be relatively sure that this won’t happen again, but it’s incredibly inconvenient and dissatisfying to have this new machine fail yet again.
Hopefully I’ll have some good news in a few days.
October 13th, 2006 by matt
It’s time to vote again in the software development contest where you get to choose which great idea becomes an actual Mac software application. Round 3 in MyDreamApp has begun.
The field of 9 remaining contestants will be whittled down to 6 soon. Who do you want to stay? Who doesn’t make the cut?
it’s up to you (and the thousands of others who will cast their votes). I still like Blossom and Portal as my favorites, but I also think Cookbook, Hijack and Atmosphere have some potential.
Your vote will earn you a free license to VoiceCandy, a nifty voice recorder and voice effects-maker for your Mac from PotionFactory. It’s called the PhotoBooth of voice, in fact.
Head on over and vote.
October 13th, 2006 by matt
Secret Agent Phone by Inweeknessbe
As the buzz about the possible iPhone from Apple swirls about, one interesting point that’s come out is how unsatisfied most people are with their cellphones or PDA’s. Given the exquisite user experience that the Mac and iPod offer, coupled with the end-to-end control of hardware, OS and content that Apple now has, it’s only natural to look at cellphones and hope that Apple could do some magic with them.
I, for one, am interested in what Apple may offer in a cellphone / PDA / music player. However, I don’t really want or need a super all-in-one device right now. Here’s what I really want in a cellphone.
Continue reading ‘What I Want in a CellPhone’
October 11th, 2006 by matt
Today I discovered the Yahoo Time Capsule. Yahoo is collecting expressions that capture our current world in various media forms through November 8. They have organized the collection around the following themes:
- love
- anger
- fun
- sorrow
- faith
- beauty
- past
- now
- hope
- you
Anyone can submit “words”, “picture”, “video”, “sound” or “drawing” media to the collection, and you can optionally add tags, a description, demographic info about yourself and your geography.
Continue reading ‘Yahoo’s Digital Time Capsule’
October 10th, 2006 by matt
After having gone through the Macbook Random Shutdown Syndrome once already, and having my MacBook apparently repaired, I thought I was past the hardware issues. My MacBook even ran cooler once I got it back from repair, and there was a nice new trackpad and nice new - stain free - top case.
All has been going well with the fixed MacBook, or mostly. The top case, which is the housing that goes around the keyboard and includes the platform on which your wrists rest when typing, has begun to develop new wear marks, or stains, from my hands. It’s noticeably discolored where my wrists go, and that’s in just about 6 weeks of use since I got it back.
Then, 5 days ago, right in the middle of me doing something especially amazing and cool (hey, it’s a Mac, remember), the system suddenly shut down. Just like the random shutdowns of long ago (August), it happened again. Then yesterday, while doing more amazing and cool stuff it happened again.
Continue reading ‘More MacBook Shutdowns…’
October 9th, 2006 by matt
Google announced today that the recent rumors were true and that they acquired the most popular video hosting and sharing site YouTube for $1.65 billion in Google stock.
The deal makes sense from the aspect of the information Giant absorbing more raw sources of information, namely user-generated video. Google is all about getting their hands on information and making it available and accessible to anyone. Of course one of their ultimate goals is to sell advertising by organizing ads by very specific content. With over 100 million video views a day, YouTube has a huge chunk of content that people want to access.
On the other hand, having the giant financial foundation of Google underneath the site that hosts thousands of copyright violations of music and video now would seem to give more motivation to the copyright holders to seek to recover some money. Look for several lawsuits against Google to appear now that there is actually some money behind the service - and therefore money for copyright violation lawsuits or settlements.
Continue reading ‘Facial Recognition in Videos? Google’s Possible Plans for YouTube’
October 8th, 2006 by matt
Before I describe how I have come to use and depend on RapidoWrite, I want to detail a little background for other recent converts to Mac from a PC.
I’ve written about Roboform being one of the critical apps I used on my PC to securely store and manage my passwords and website login info. Another critical app was ActiveWords, the many-things-to-many-people app of the PC.
ActiveWords allows you to use keyboard shortcuts to execute scripts, auto-type text, initiate programs or open webpages. It’s both simple and incredibly useful and really became the heart of how I controlled things on my PC. There is a lot more to say about ActiveWords that I won’t say here, I’ll leave it at this: if you are using a PC, then I am confident that you will use it more efficiently with ActiveWords and I highly recommend you check it out.
Continue reading ‘RapidoWrite Fills In Your Blanks’
October 8th, 2006 by matt
As I’ve spent more time on my growing passion / hobby of photography over the past year, the way I process and store my photos has changed.
When I started with digital photography, I just had my digital camera and my PC. Then, I found out about Picasa and began to use it to process my photos. I then learned about Paint.net and started to use it from time to time for the more detailed adjustments that required layers. Then I found out about Photoshop, but couldn’t (and still can’t) afford it. Fortunately, there’s Gimp, which is open source (free) and does many, if not most, of the functions Photoshop can do.
After switching to a Mac 4 months ago (135 days to be exact) I began to use iPhoto as a central processing and organizing function. I can do many basic color and exposure adjustments in iPhoto, and then I use Gimp for the more creative and advanced work.
Along the way I discovered Flickr as well and began to use it as the way to share and display my photos.
However, now I’m starting to use a few other services - Tabblo, Zooomr and Riya to store and share my photos, and I need to decide which pics go where. Each of these photo sharing services has a different way to upload, and only Flickr and Tabblo can export directly from iPhoto.
I also need to figure out a more consistent approach to how I rename and store edited photos outside of iPhoto (i.e. in Gimp). In other words, I need to define how & where within my folder structure I’m going to store my edited photos and what I’m going to name them.
I don’t have much money to put into photography right now, so buying Photoshop or Aperture isn’t an option for me. I have a decent camera, but it’s not a DSLR, which is what I’m saving my pennies for, and it therefore limits some of what I can do. So, I’m not a pro or even a high level amateur, but I’d like to be one someday.
If you have any recommendations on a digital photography workflow or thoughts on how I could better define mine, I’d love to hear from you. I’ll write more as I figure out what works best.
October 7th, 2006 by matt
Don’t Ask Me About My Business Model originally uploaded by FactoryJoe
In the web1.0 world, the predominant business model was one of 2 possibilities:
- Come up with a great idea, hype it, form a company, do an IPO, cash out ASAP.
or
- Come up with a great idea, hype it, deliver something, sell to a big corporation, cash out.
In both cases it was irrelevant whether you actually delivered very much on the hype of your idea, product or service, or whether you could actually demonstrate such business fundamentals as revenue, cost models and cash management.
The important thing was to build perceived value through hyping your company and then find a way to cash out. In many cases there was no real or lasting value to these companies, no tangible assets or property - even very little intellectual property - that was created in all of these transactions.
When value is not based on tangible assets, eventually the value will drop and correct itself. Thus Web1.0 led to Bubble1.0 and the ensuing Burst1.0.
Continue reading ‘What Is Your Output Model?’
October 5th, 2006 by matt
I don’t mean to turn this blog into a commercial for the ScobleShow, but Robert Scoble has some simply fantastic interviews on his opening week and a half of his new show at PodTech. It would be a shame not to discuss and point them out.
The first show he released last Monday was of a video walk-through of an Internet printing company, Printing For Less.
As Scoble summarizes in the show notes:
This tour of Printing for Less is one of those times when you can see something special: a CEO, Andrew Field, who loves what he does and loves the employees who work for him.
Continue reading ‘Effective Leadership from a Tech CEO … In Montana’
October 4th, 2006 by matt
For those who have latched on to ecto as their favorite blog editor for the Mac, you will be excited to know that Adrian Tijsseling, the author of ecto, has created a build of ecto for Intel Macs.
If you have an Intel Mac and have used ecto, you know that it’s very slow, as it had to run through Rosetta since there was no universal binary version. In fact it’s sluggishness tempted me to switch to some other client until Adrian was ready with version 3, which he’s still working on.
No more temptation, the Intel binary is lighting fast. Get it from his blog post on the subject.
Thank you, Adrian!
October 4th, 2006 by matt
One of the things that a lot of people use the Internet for is sharing pictures and family news with other family members. You can easily do this through photo sharing services like Flickr or Photobucket, and some start blogs to chronicle family life and more personal types of things that most people outside of one’s family wouldn’t really care much about.
I suspect that many, if not most, of the people sending photos to their mother-in-law either in email, on Photobucket or on some other web page haven’t thought much about privacy and security of their info. It’s fairly easy to put your pictures up somewhere and then to write some stuff about what happened when you went to the zoo yesterday and little Johnny spilled his ice cream in front of the camels. But who do you really want to read and see this stuff?
Continue reading ‘What’s the Best Way to be Publicly Private?’
October 3rd, 2006 by matt
The footer of this site notes that it is efficiently hosted by Dreamhost. I’ve been with Dreamhost for about 6 months now and have been very pleased with their level of service and with the features they offer for the price.
Today, they announced that they are increasing their allocations for storage and monthly bandwidth for all their plans. And not just a 5%, 10% or even 25% increase. They are doubling the already generous monthly bandwidth levels and increasing the disk space limits by ten times!
For their first level of hosting plans, the disk space previously was 25Gb and a 1Tb monthly bandwidth limit. This is decent overall - probably low on the disk limit but high on the monthly bandwidth compared to other hosting services. But now, they’ve just blown away the old limits to offer something completely unique.
And, as was the case previously, your disk space and monthly bandwidth limits increase on a weekly basis for every week that you are a customer. What a great way to reward loyalty and build “stickyness” into their service offering.
If you’re looking for a hosting service, at least spend a few minutes looking at what Dreamhost has to offer. I’m a very satisfied customer.
October 3rd, 2006 by matt
Robert Scoble published an edition of his new ScobleShow on PodTech last week with an interview with Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz. Scoble’s first question got right to the heart of what a lot of people are wondering: “Why does Sun matter?”
The general impression that many of us have had of the Solaris-maker is of a aging and decreasingly relevant hardware provider and promoter of an old OS that seemed to be great 10 years ago. A company who’s dotcom bubble burst as big as anyone’s in the early 2000’s, Sun has just seemed to be struggling along selling big, expensive hardware and an old OS.
Continue reading ‘Jonathan Schwartz of Sun Makes a Compelling Argument for Sun’s Future’