Solutions Thinking

• Apple understands solutions. Selling solutions is not just selling a bundle of software and hardware (and perhaps some services), it’s selling the (wait for it) solution to a problem.  The most recent example I’ve noticed: the iSync program that syncs your computer with a PDA or cellphone. It warns you with a dialogue box if more than 5% of your calendar entries change, and allows you to inspect/correct the flagged entries. Compare this with naive software (most everything else that comes to mind) that would just blindly overwrite your calendar if something is messed up.  Even though iSync doesn’t sync to my new cellphone (not supported), I still admire it just for this one little feature. 
• I don’t mind paying a premium for Apple hardware or software because I know that they will interact seamlessly, get out of the way, and provide a solution for me.  I’m planning to replace my DLink wireless router with a pricier Apple one (perhaps the Time Capsule) because I know that I can buy another one and extend my network (because that’s what people will want to do).  I couldn’t run my old Linksys or this DLink in bridge mode, but all the Airports will. 

Switch

So, I switched.  Immediately after the MWSF 2008 keynote, I ordered myself a white MacBook.  I bought the 2.2 GHz Santa Rosa-based one, with a 120 GB hard disk and 1 GiB RAM, and then immediately ordered 4 GiB from crucial.com.

Instead of bringing my work laptop home (which runs XP of course) I now have this mac.  In an ironic twist, I now bring this laptop to work most days.  The trouble is, I’m now so at home with MacOS again that I get really annoyed when I can’t get XP to work the same way.  I love the fact that it’s a real UNIX under the hood, combined with the GUI goodness of MacOS (which I last used for real with System 8.6 (9?  John, what disks did I give you with the Performa?) 

Of course as soon as I got this machine, A. said “I need a new pooter, mine’s too slow” so we bought her a Mac Mini and reused my old 17″ CRT that was sitting in the basement (I managed to give away Doug’s old monitor already).  Now I want a Time Capsule (and an AirPort express stuck in my stereo closet).  

I think my existing DLink router has gone insane, because I can’t connect to its admin page any more and my WiFi connection just disappears every couple of minutes.  Well, the connection is still there, but no packets get routed anywhere.  A traceroute to 192.168.0.1 stars out.  Really annoying.

 

Internet TV

I’m probably behind the times, but I finally downloaded Democracy player last night.  I first heard about it through someone’s throwaway comment on TWiT a few weeks back (so it didn’t end up in the show notes) and I remember thinking “that’s going to be hard to search for, it’s a really common term”.  Of course I didn’t write it down.  So I tried a lot of Google searches with common words and “video”.  Nothing.  There was a pointer to it in the comments of the TWiT.tv blog, I immediately bookmarked it in del.icio.us so I wouldn’t forget it again.

It’s really good.  It’s an RSS aggregator for video.  It’s Internet TV.  It’s TiVOesque.  It’s partially written in Python.  It’s annoying that it took me this long to find it.  I’ve never bothered to watch video podcasts before (like, say, Command N) because it’s such a pain to download the file, then stick it somewhere, then double-click it to watch it (and hope I have a compatible player), then delete it, blah blah blah.  With Democracy it’s dead easy.  This and something like MythTV (or a TiVO, or just a MPEG card like my Hauppauge PVR-150) changes the way I want to watch TV from now on.

Recommended.

Happy Robbie Burns Day!

Have a wee dram and some haggis, in celebration of Scotland’s beloved bard.  My favourite dram comes from http://www.ardbeg.com/ (which I visited in 1999 and 2000).  Unfortunately, we will not be having a party tonight to celebrate.  We haven’t had one for a couple of years, and it’ll probably be a couple more before we have another one.

If you’re trying to build a library, I recommend getting books of tasting notes like Michael Jackson’s Malt Whisky Companion or Jim Murray’s Malt Whiskey Bible.

WordPress thoughts

I like how easy it is to add Technorati tags to the post.  In Blogger I was hacking them into the raw HTML (and they never looked proper).  I can’t seem to change the template, I get stuck with whatever they make available — I guess if I really wanted to munge it I’d run it myself (getting the source from WordPress.org).  So I won’t complain.  I like the well-thought-out methods for adding links and managing blogrolls.  Nicely done — don’t have to get in there munging with CSS or HTML templates.

Technorati Tags: blog, blogging,

SelfStyled 2.0

So, I don’t know if this is 2.0 or 3.0 (4.0?) since I’ve had a few fits and starts. I really like the Performancing interface to it.

Technorati Tags: blog

New WordPress blog

I’ve been trying to use Performancing
to update my blog, because typing in a text window is so 20th century. However, it has problems connecting to Blogger, and judging by the support forums there is no easy way to fix it. WordPress seemed to be a better backend judging by the comments, so I’m trying it out.  I know that Doug uses it, so it must be reasonably good. We’ll see how this goes.