I received some sort of keyboard firmware update today. I was restarting my MacBook Pro and was in a rush, so when I saw a message about a keyboard update, I just accepted. I have a MacBook Pro, 15 inch, 2.33 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, for those keeping score at home.
To my surprise, when I rebooted, my trackpad and keyboard were dead! Dead dead. Not even available for a PRAM reset during boot.
So I borrowed a USB keyboard and mouse, which worked fine. I tried several things, for two hours, until I found another MacBook Pro EFI Firmware Update.app from Sept. 27, 2007. I installed that, which rolled me back, I guess. Then I got my keyboard and trackpad back.
But I was minutes away from giving up and driving to the Apple Store.
Of course, without the external USB mouse and keyboard, it would have been impossible to do this. At one point I only had an external mouse, and was unable to enter my password to allow the install. I suppose it is funny in retrospect. I wish there was a on-screen keyboard of some sort.
When Steve Jobs announced movie rentals for iTunes and Apple TV, he promised 1,000 titles in the first month. We’re at less than 400 and it is easily apparent to anyone with an Apple TV that you need probably more like 10,000 to make it a decent service.
The whole idea of being able to have a library on demand in your living room is great. I love it. I can’t wait. But it has to really be a library. I really need to be able to have a good chance of finding a movie that I want to watch. As it is, I’ve only watched three movies, and only one of those three was something I really wanted to see. The other two were opportunities to use the service. Now it has been 2 weeks and I have no interest (or have already seen or own on DVD) the rest of the catalog. Meanwhile, my wife and I have thrown out dozens of ideas on various evenings of movies we’d like to see. Things from the 70s, 80s and 90s. Nothing too unusual, really. But we didn’t find them on Apple TV, so on the Tivo wish-list they went.
Apple should really work at getting the back catalogs of the major studios online. As it is, any new buzz from Apple TV take 2 is already fading. It may be too late to save Apple TV, after a brief moment where it looked like it might succeed.
You might look into your iPhone and discover that it’s full of stars. That is, if you download one of these cool astronomy apps for your iPhone.
iSkygaze provides backyard astronomers with information on where and when objects will be viewable from their location. It provides rise/set times, current location in sky and basic brightness, as well as some other information on several easily viewable night sky objects. I do wish it expressed magnitude in standard numbers though.
The folks at Space.com bring us Starry Night Mobile, an iPhone friendly version of their stellar astronomy app Starry Night.
This is a super cool web app that lets you set any time or location and see a graphic representation of the sky.
My personal hobby is to watch satellites pass overhead from my hot tub. Though I would not get an iPhone near a hot tub, there’s an app that will let me know what to look for before I get in. Look Up is another little App that will let you know when some of the bigger satellites will be passing overhead. If you want to view information all the satellites that might be visible from your location, you’ll still have to go to the Heavens-above Website.
I’m hoping that when the SDK for the iPhone arrives, that we’ll see some cool telescope control apps from the iPhone.
It didn’t take long before somebody turned an jailbroken iPhone and turned it into a musical instrument. Moo-Cow-Music did just that, in fact, they created not one but three virtual instruments for the iPhone: a Guitar, a drum, and a piano. The best part is that the applications are donation-ware. Call your friends on their iPhones and let ’em know you are getting the band back together. But you might have to get into a shred-off with the first all iPhone band, iBand. You can check out the iBand in this YouTube video.
But Moo-Cow-Music isn’t the only instrument maker out there, there’s also the open source Pocket Guitar from Shinya Kasatani. Here’s a picture of the elegant interface of the Pocket guitar:
But wait there’s more! If you were thinking that you were left out just because you play an instrument called the Gansa in a Balinese Gamelan orchestra, you’d be wrong. Just download a little app called Gangsa by Masayuki Akamatsu, who has a bunch of other handy iPhone apps including the perennial favorite iPhone electric shaver app.
It will be interesting to see,what’s going to happen to all the jailbroken iPhones and apps once the iPhone SDK is released, hopefully it will allow the developers to make more stable legitimate applications. Then let the battle of the iBands begin!
I was talking to one of my students and she said that she would switch to a Mac. But she didn’t want to have to buy all of her apps over again. I asked what apps she was talking about and she said, her office apps, Word, Excel and Powerpoint. My first thought was you could get Office for Mac and then I thought you can do all of that with online apps like Google Docs. Welcome to cloud computing.
While Macs are relatively free of viruses and spyware and malware in general there is one area that isn’t as secure as you may think. That area is identity protection. And one way criminals steal your information is from phishing.
The Second Life virtual world generally requires some serious computer power to run, mainly for it’s real-time 3-D graphics. So being able to run SL on an iPhone, requires some trickery.
It’s cold here. So very cold. A dreadfully chilly, finger numbing cold. Oh. It’s not cold outside. I’m talking about inside. During the winter months my wife prefers the thermostat to be set in the minus 30s – even if that means a crust of ice in the toilets. As a loyal non-complaining hubby I simply don all that’s wearable and jump up and down a lot. Regrettably the the extra-wear and the hopping aren’t enough, the chill still finds me and the house shakes from my shivering. If it weren’t for the radiating heat of my Macbook Pro Core Duo our warm cats would be stuffed in my armpits.
When this spiffy laptop warms up it gets really hot. Hot enough to cook waffles or brand cattle. If you’re wife is about to have a baby this is the computer you want to boil the obligatory water. It will have it to a churning roil in minutes. I think the water is for baby soup.
Others have complained that their Macbook Pros get just as hot, and I can’t help but wonder if the silhouetted dancers in iPod ads are hopping barefoot on a floor of Macbooks.
The excessive heat may infuriate those with sensitive laps and annoy the already hot, but I see it as a feature. An uncomfortable relief from the cruel touch of the chilly months. Or from a wife’s cold cold hands.
I was on the phone with a friend, trying to help him solve a Web design problem, and he said, “The client wants it to work on an 800 by 600 screen,” and I said, “What? Nobody designs for 800 by 600 anymore,” And then I realized that pixel creep had happened to me. That’s right folks, we’ve super-sized again. 1024 by 768 is the new 640 by 480. If those numbers are Greek (or geek) to you, I’m talking about screen size.
I teach classes on GarageBand and Soundtrack Pro at the local community college. We have video projectors and these things called Smart Boards, where you can navigate the computer screen from the projection screen. This is like magic except that the maximum screen size is 1024 X 768. This is the minimum recommended size for those applications. GarageBand is cramped but usable and Soundtrack Pro is practically unusable, as is Final Cut Pro. I have to wonder when it was that the software engineers all got together and said from now on, no applications under 1024 X 768?
I’m spoiled, with dual 20″ LCDs at the MacMost office and a 20″ iMac with another 20″ LCD at home, but I gotta feel sorry for you if you’re still stuck with a CRT that only does 1024 X 768. It’s only a matter of time before the minimum will be full HD 1920 X 1440, and CRTs and VGA will be a distant memory.
With Apple’s release of iPhone update 1.1.4 we get exciting new, um, well, nothing. Looks like it is just a bug fix release. I wish I knew what the bugs were, but they don’t say.
But anyway, it is a free release, so no big deal, right? But even though the release is free to us, doesn’t make it free to Apple. Consider just the bandwidth costs. Everyone that downloads the update is requesting 160MB from Apple. If there are 4 million iPhones out there, then that is 160MB x 4 million, or 640 million MB, which is the same as 640TB (terabyte) of data transfered. Looking around, I see that $100 per TB is “discount” bandwidth, so that totals $64,000.
That’s a nice salary for an engineer. Well, in northern California, a salary for a starting engineer.
Now, Apple probably gets even better rates on bandwidth than I can imagine. Plus, the needs of the iTunes music store probably dwarfs this 640TB distribution anyway. But the idea is that this does cost them something, so it is unlikely it is just superficial bug fixes. More likely it is something dealing with DRM, communication with AT&T’s network, hooks for the upcoming SDK or something like that. I’m sure they don’t release a set of “bug fixes” without a very good reason.
Okay The new MacBookPros came out today and three of the four models sport the NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT 512MB graphics card. and I say card because these reportedly use the NVIDIA MXM graphics card connector. I remember a while back that I read in a Gizmodo article that the new 24″ iMacs used the MXM connector and were theoretically upgradeable. Do you see where I’m going with this?
