Hot off the presses

Being the "book-o-philes" that myself and the madAngel are I found this quite cool.

"...the Espresso Book Machine can print any of 500,000 titles while you wait"

As much as I come to rely on e-books for reference material and research, and on audiobooks to keep current on my reading list with a very busy schedule, I still have a strong affinity for holding and reading from the printed page.

Question of the Day

Are Violent Video Games Adequately Preparing Children For The Apocalypse?




Personally I think the paper & dice RPGs and Apocalyptic Sci-Fi of my youth provided much better preparation for the coming apocalypse than the *blip* *blip* *ka-pow* video games today's kids play. When the End of Days comes, these Generation Y Millennial kids are going to choke looking for "power-ups" and BFG-9000s while those of use who learned to scheme and innovate shall inherit the wasteland.

One step farther into The Collective

I did it.  I've been iPhoned...sucked deeper into the Apple collective less than a month after getting my new iMac.  My Samsung Blackjack became available for hardware upgrade under my cell phone contract a couple of days before leaving for DragonCon (meaning I could avoid paying the outrageous full purchase price for the phone) and I made the move.  I was lucky enough to find an AT&T store that actually had some in stock (several people I know talked about 2-3 week waiting lists for these things), so I picked up the 18Gig version in black & chrome (of course).  

After being on the thing for a couple of weeks now I can say I am very very happy with it.  There are a good many sound critiques I can make about Apple, but the one thing I can never deny is that they know how to make a very user friendly consumer product and the iPhone is more proof of that.  The usability is amazingly simple, the phone doesn't even come with an instruction book because it doesn't need one, it is THAT intuitive.  The only thing I had to look up (via the online web manual, accessible via the phone) was how to setup voicemail.  It was really really simple to do (you have to call your cell phone number from the cell phone and it walks you through the setup), but it is the one thing that wasn't intuitively obvious from just tapping around on the phone.

So here is my summary of my iPhone experience thus far:

• The built in GPS & mapping via google maps is cool.
  
• The web browsing speed is snappy, and the large display is much better that the one on my Blackjack.
  
• To setup my email access all I had to do is click on Google as my provider, type in ID and password and I was all synced up (it uses IMAP protocol instead of POP).  Here again, the much larger display was nice to have.
  
• The phone has some sort of tilt sensor such that when you rotate the screen 90 degrees it will rotate and reformat the display on the fly.  Very nice for web browsing.
  
• The virtual keypad is nice, and deceptively easy to use.  Even though the keys look close together on the screen, I rarely have problems with the phone sensing the wrong key being tapped even when I'm sure I've fat fingered it.  I'm not sure how it manages this feat, the touch sensor is just incredible from my experience.  Your mileage may vary.
  
• There are apparently lots of free and for-pay widgets (applications) available for the phone and more being written everyday.  
• Managing your phone sync data using iTunes is weird, but it works easy enough.
• The voicemail interface allows you to select which specific voicemail you want to listen to via the virtual display instead of having to listen through all of them in sequence until you get to the one you want. 
• The screen is not pressure sensitive, it uses sensors to detect the electromagnetic field produced by your skin so you don't have to worry about random buttons being pushed as you slip it into your holster.  This was a really annoying problem with my Blackjack.

iMac

Over the last week I dipped my toes back into Apple world. I briefly played around with the Mac G4 Cube back in 2000. The main draw at the time was it's heritage. Since my college days I was a big fan of the amazingly powerful (if commercially an amazing flop) NeXT Computer. The new G4 Cube was one of the first machines released by Apple with their new OS, heavily based on the NeXTStep OS. Having many other irons in the fire at the time, and the cube being a bit underpowered and feature weak, the cube languished.

Fast forward 8 years. Having followed the ongoing development of all thing Mac in the Tech Press, and the positive experiences of several friends (Hat tip to Charles F. & Dave H.), after weeks of internal debate I went into the local Apple store and picked up one of the new 20-inch, 2.66GHz, 2GB Ram iMacs. I was originally only going to pick up one of the small Mac-Mini machines to 'play around with'. But the mad angel managed to "up sell" me into a nicer iMac. "You'll quickly feel constrained and wish you'd bought the bigger one. Then you'll buy the bigger one and this one will sit. So you're getting off cheaper by just buying the bigger one now" she said. How could I say no when faced with such logic?

So I picked up the iMac and a copy of VMWare (to allow me to run windows or other operating systems in a virtual machine on my iMac) and am now in the process of migrating my Home Business functions off of my TC1100 Tablet onto the the Mac. The VMWare will help me avoid having to purchase Mac specific versions of some software for a bit (Quickbooks, Quicken Business Law and my Tax advisor software being my most important apps). I'm not sure I'm going to be willing to pay the cost of a Mac specific license of Office anytime soon.

I had originally planned to clone the drive on my Tablet and run it as a Virtual Machine under VMWare so I could avoid the hassle of reinstalling all the software. The cloning process was very easy (though it did take time to clone a 30Gig drive into a 19Gig image and copy it over to the Mac) and the virtual Tablet XP image quickly booted and was prompting me for login on. HOWEVER, once logged-in Microsoft's activation prompt came up telling me I had to activate this version of windows. Apparently Windows noticed the change from the original CPU on the Tablet to my virtualized CPU and wont activate unless I call Microsoft. Ugh! So I've still got to sort that out. But it looks like I may have to dig up a new license of XP to install on the Mac. Additionally, I've had a failure of my wireless mouse. But AppleCare support is shipping me a replacement over the next few days. So I'm using another USB mouse for the time being.

All that said, I've been happy thus far with the new Mac. Very robust, very stable, lots of interesting features. And of course the OS is Unix based. I think the general home and business-use transition will be a non-event. However, I still have my high powered PC Gaming Machine. I am told VMWare does very well to allow you to play PC games but I've obviously not tried that yet

Cool Tech

Moving from Global Warming to CPU cooling.... The Danes have come up with cool new CPU cooling technology. Better than big metal heat-syncs, better than liquid cooling...it's a big liquid metal heat-sync with an electromagnetic pump. In other words instead of traditional coolant and a noisey fish-tank pump, it's a heat tower filled with liquid metal, circulated through the system via silent electromagnetics. But from the looks of it, you're gonna' need a bigger case!



Click [HERE] for the full article


[cross posted]