Apple: “Do be evil.”
July 18th, 2010
Apple still makes exceptionally good and cool products, many of which may be the best in their classes. That’s not the issue. Apple’s antenna problems with the iPhone 4 are negligible even seen on their own, and piffling when compared to the quality of the iPhone 4, which is an astoundingly good smartphone. That’s also not the issue. The issue is that Apple is becoming an increasingly obnoxious company that it’s almost impossible to like.
The iPhone 4 “Antennagate” fuss is a perfect example of Apple’s dysfunctional public persona. A couple of years ago leading CNET podcaster Molly Wood summed up the same observation in her classic Apple is my bad boyfriend rant, and things have been getting worse rather than better since then. You just can’t help getting the impression that this is a company that is being prevaricating, arrogant, slippery and disingenuous to and frequently beyond the point of dishonesty in almost everything they do.
Convert TextExpander snippets for Windows
July 9th, 2009
If you use both Mac and Windows you may have wished you could use your Mac TextExpander snippet files on your Windows computers or virtual machines. TextExpander radically speeds up your work if you often need to use the same text blocks, and having the same texts with the same hotstrings available on Windows makes life a lot easier.
This post provides a free Perl converter script and instructions for converting your Mac TextExpander snippet files so that you can use them on a Windows machine with the free, open-source AutoHotKey program. In addition to this I will show you how to manage your snippet files for multiple machines in a free Dropbox account. Dropbox is a much better solution for synching your snippets than MobileMe and if you combine these two strategies you’ll never have to worry about synching your snippets again – both on multiple Macs and across Mac and Windows machines (including Windows virtual machines in Parallels or Fusion).
Version 1.2:
Cursor position: The 1.2 version now supports the caret/cursor position macro. This will work reliably provided your snippets don’t contain the clipboard pasting macro or date macros that use full month and weekday names or date numbers without leading zeros. All these things will throw the position count off (AHK doesn’t have a “put cursor here” macro).
Version 1.1:
The 1.1 version adds the following improvements:
Expand mode (immediately, at delimiter with keep/delete) is read from TextExpander and exported to the AHK script.
Abbreviation mode (case sensitive/ignore case) is read from TextExpander and exported to the AHK script. However, “Adapt snippet to case of abbreviation” does not work in AHK – at least, I haven’t been able to make it work.
The keep/abandon delimiter macros in individual snippets are now evaluated and work correctly in AHK.
“Equitable Artists” media business model
May 4th, 2009
What is the value of mass-distributed media when its distribution effectively costs little or nothing (if distributed virally via BitTorrent)? And how does this value correspond to the value of the work that went into producing it? In fact, does it correspond at all any more? If ten million people want to buy a song that I wrote, does the money they pay for that song really belong to me? Did I work for it, in the sense that the money paid corresponds to my labor? And if it doesn’t belong to me, who does it belong to?
I have utopian vision on this: At the moment the “big sellers” in the media world get an obscene amount of money for their work and countless other artists get almost nothing. Suppose we create a new media distribution model called “Equitable Artists” (yes, that’s a reference back to United Artists) that works like this, using a new record label as an example:
- All the money received for all the sales from the label’s artists goes into a big pool
- The big sellers get more money than the small sellers, but using a key that still distributes the money more equitably
- There is a maximum limit on income anyone working for the label can get, including both artists and label owners
- All the money left over goes to the promotion and development of new artists, young artists etc.
There are a lot of stumbling-blocks to this, among other things whether artists would actually sign for a label like this. However, people also said that open source wouldn’t work, and it does. Just an idea for the day…
MediaLink: Make the PS3 a Mac media center
February 6th, 2009
For a long time I was frustrated that I couldn’t access the media files on my Mac with my PlayStation 3, which has everything needed to be a great multimedia center, in addition to being one of the best BluRay players around (and incidentally allowing you to play some pretty good video games as well). Recently I discovered Nullriver MediaLink, which comes close to making Apple’s own AppleTV unnecessary. With one small but important restriction, MediaLink is a perfect solution for accessing all the media on your Mac on your TV. At just $20, it’s worth every penny and more.
The restriction? MediaLink can’t (yet) play anything with Apple’s copy protection on it, which means all movies, TV series and videos bought in the iTunes Store, in addition to any iTunes tracks you still haven’t converted to non-DRM. This is currently where the AppleTV still has a major advantage, but I’ve corresponded with Nullriver and they indicated that they’re working on a solution. My guess would be they want to somehow make it possible to register the PS3 as one of the up to five “computers” that are allowed to play your iTunes protected content. If and when they manage that, MediaLink is going to be the kickass solution for PS3/Mac integration.
Windows 7: Microsoft gets it right
January 25th, 2009
I’ve been playing around with Windows 7 for ever a week now and I have to say that this time Microsoft really got it right. It’s everything that Vista should have been and it’s probably the best operating system that Microsoft has ever produced. The only downside is Internet Explorer 8, which is worse than ever. Hopefully the errors are bugs, if not life is going to get a lot harder for web designers, yet again.
With Apple working so hard to piss off their users (matte screen on 17″ only and costs more, no more firewire on the Macbook, only one firewire port on the 15″, non-removable battery on the 17″) Windows 7 is a welcome breath of fresh air. If Apple don’t clean up their act I may be switching back to Windows machines again real soon.
The iPod Touch as a Bluetooth Phone
December 27th, 2007
I just got a nifty little gadget from Gear4 called the BluEye that adds Bluetooth, an FM radio and a wired remote to my iPod Touch and effectively transforms it into a phone with voice dialing. When calls come in anything playing on the Touch is automatically paused and you accept the call by pressing Play on the remote. If your phone supports voice dialing you can use that too, you just press the Bluetooth button on the remote once and speak the name to dial. This means that you can leave the phone in your pocket pretty much all the time and you don’t miss calls because you’re listening to your iPod. You also have the added advantage of the wired remote, so you can pause, skip tracks and adjust the volume without having to futz around with the touchscreen.
New multilayer HD video format
September 16th, 2007
Adding to the HD format wars confusion comes a new contestant, HD Versatile Multilayer Disc (HD VMD), from the upstart British tech company New Medium Enterprises. What sounds like a new layer of insanity in the video formats farce may actually turn the industry on its head.
HD VMD uses regular red laser technology and large numbers of multiple layers — with up to 30 layers on a single disc it can match or exceed the capacities of BluRay and HD DVD. It has several huge advantages:
Magnatune’s music podcasts
September 15th, 2007
The Magnatune music podcasts on the iTunes store are a terrific deal. There are nearly fifty different podcasts for virtually all kinds of music genres and every podcast is an hour of great music at 128kbps, without advertising and completely free, and it looks like new podcasts are added at regular intervals. It’s a great way to get into some of the really good music that Magnatune distributes. Just search for “Magnatune” in the podcasts section of iTunes store.
In addition to distributing good music Magnatune also has a Creative Commons license — you’re allowed to use all their music without royalties in non-commercial podcasts and the rates are also very reasonable for commercial use, based on what you are turning over. They also do a fair 50/50 split with the artists and when you buy stuff you get to choose what you want to pay, you have the right to give away copies to three friends (no DRM) and can download all qualities all the way up to CD quality WAV files. Highly recommended, lots of good music!
Boiled Frogs: Apple gets into nickel and dime crime
September 14th, 2007
Apple is the latest major company to get into nickel and dime crime, which is safe, legal and fantastically profitable. Their new iPhone ringtones function gets people to pay 99 cents for something they already own, and money for nothing is always the best best profit margin you can have. It used to be called theft.
Robbers used to hang out in the woods and collect loot from unwary travellers by threatening to insert sharp instruments into their soft parts or banging them over the head with a heavy stick. This is no longer necessary, there are much better ways to boil a frog nowadays.
DVD Format Wars
September 13th, 2007
Maybe it’s time to treat digital media formats in the same way as radio spectrum bandwidth: We don’t have any problem with regulating the radio spectrum because it’s clearly a limited resource that everybody needs to use. Leaving it completely open would obviously make the spectrum useless.
The same applies to digital formats, it’s just not as immediately obvious. For example, a situation in which four or five different high-definition DVD formats coexist would effectively be as chaotic and useless as an unregulated radio spectrum.
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