Archive for the “System Tech” Category

While the world waits for Apple to release official news about their new tablet computer, a few smaller (and lesser known) companies are releasing their own touch screen tablets.  Archos has a few models out, there’s the viliv, and then there’s the whole CrunchPad thing which is now called the JooJoo.  And I’ve never played with any of them.  I have however been (for some reason) drooling for an iSlate for the past year or so.  And in my impatience I prematurely ordered a Camangi WebStation and am ready to report the bad news…

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TLP001 – In the premiere episode of “The tomorrowland.com Podcast” I review the Promise SmartStor NS4600, and discuss setting it up, using it as a media server, and explain how to set up a dynamic dns so that you can access it remotely and stream videos to your iphone over the net.  Click Podcast in the header bar to watch the episode here in HD!

With less than 30 days until WWDC I’m starting to get anxious about what new Apple iGadgets might (or might not) be released.  Will Steve Jobs be back from his curious sick leave to unveil the next big thing?  Or will it be another disappointing and uneventful keynote?  The rumors have certainly been flowing recently and whether they’re based on anything real or are just wishful thinking on the part of a few fan boys, they’ve got me hopeful that my dream mac might be in my hands soon enough.  Either way, what might be has been enough to make me hold off on upgrading my first generation iPhone – hoping that I’m only a month or two away from that third gen iPhone hardware to go along with the 3.0 iPhone software.  But what will this new iPhone be?  And what of this controversial mac tablet?

About 2 months ago I was mocking up my own concept for a mac tablet when real life got in the way of blogging.  Since then I’ve blogged very little.  I’ve also seen (on other sites) a couple of very cool mockups, one that would be completely awesome but is at least a few years off due to it’s flexible OLED design, and another that is extremely close to what I was planning.  Whipping up a fake now would be completely academic.

Being somewhat of a fan boy myself it’s sometimes difficult to distinguish between my wish list and what I expect will really be released.  But here’s my take on WWDC 09… Read… »

This week I sold my old G5 along with a 23″ Cinema Wide Display, a BlackMagic card, Sonnet Tempo eSata card, and a Sonnet Fusion 500P populated with 5 x 500GB hard drives. It was a complete edit system including lots of fast storage, but as part of my “out with the old – in with the new” theme, it all had to go.

Hindsight certainly is 20/20 and I like to review technology after the fact to reflect on how well it worked. Overall my G5 was a great machine and it was difficult to let it go. But a couple of the components were very hard to let go: the monitor, and the storage…
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Like many others, I downloaded the beta of Safari 4 and am trying to get used to the new window layout.

One of the new features shows all your top visited sites as a grid of thumbnails. While on the surface it’s an interesting feature, it’s a bit annoying in it’s current state.  It also raises some interesting questions about things like “are advertisers paying for impressions for ads that are only shown on thumbnails?” But that’s probably a topic for a different post.

The feature also falls in line with a new trend at Apple – which is to take control away from the consumer and make certain choices for them. I originally thought of this Top Sites page as a cool way of keeping track of the main sites I want to visit each day. However, the way Apple sees it your Top Sites are explicitly the pages that you actually visit the most. Rather than giving you a list-view of sites and allowing you to drag pages into there from say, your bookmarks, all you can do is rearrange pages, and remove the ones you don’t want to see in your top sites. When a page is deleted the next most visited page is animated into place. It’s an annoying task to try to get specific pages on there. BUT NOW there’s currently no way to a secret way to manually edit those Top Sites.  (SEE UPDATE AFTER THE JUMP!)

SO! If you want tomorrowland.com to be one of your Top Sites you’ll need to start visiting us more often and convince the Safari 4 gods to make it one of your Top Sites.

But there’s more.. When I was trying to organize my Top Sites I accidentally deleted tomorrowland.com, which is certainly MY Top Site. So HOW do you get it back?

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The upcoming Dell Mini 10 looks to be a great machine, and if my hunch is right it could be an even better hacintosh than the Dell Mini 9.  The bigger, higher rez screen and real (as in reasonably sized) hard drive will put it in a different category over the 9.  Plus the normal keyboard helps too.

UPDATE: Apparently my hunch was wrong. Several commenters have pointed out that the graphics card in the Dell Mini 10 is not compatible with Leopard. A real shame since from all other accounts it would appear to be a good candidate. None-the-less, if you do want to order one for a windows machine the rest of the post is still applicable…

The official launch of the Mini 10 isn’t for a week or two, but here’s a little known fact: Even though there is no pricing information on the website, and no online order form, you can order one today if you know how to do it.  Read on for details, specs, and pricing info…

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The Dell Inspiron Mini 10 has finally appeared on Dell’s website, although it’s not actually for sale yet. The big question is will we be able to install Leopard on it like we can on the Mini 9’s?

There’s already a ton a buzz and speculation going on in the forums. I’m sure once they start shipping they’ll be hacked within a few hours. Read… »

I normally don’t link to outside blogs but this one needs to be mentioned because it relates to my Dell Mini 9 Leopard install video.  Here’s the story on Gizmodo, here it is on 9 to 5 Mac.

I found it odd that Wired had posted a video on how to install Leopard on an MSI Wind when a) it was sort of old news, and b) it was a much more complicated process than the one I used. But even more odd was the fact that they were suggesting people download a hacked version of Leopard from Pirate Bay. Apple eventually got wind (pun intentional) of it and early reports were that they were suing Wired. Now that the dust has settled it appears that Wired has just been asked to pull the video.

Will I be asked to pull my video?  I hope not – but I also doubt it.  The fact is that in my video you can see me break the seal on a brand new Leopard box. No where do I ever suggest stealing Leopard – quite the opposite. If you’re going to experiment with Leopard on a non-apple box I think you should go out and get a fresh copy.

I’ll also give the update that our Dell Mini Hackintosh is still working great.  However, if and when Apple releases a reasonable replacement for it, we’ll sell the Dell and buy a real Apple.

Apple has always often been the innovator. The company that sets the trends. We’ve seen it time and time again with the iMac, the iPod, the iPhone. And not just full products but also ideas and technology, like adopting firewire early or dropping floppy discs early, or integrating touch so well. Think about how the touch capabilities on the iPhone has influenced a plethora of copy cat products.

Some might believe that Apple innovated the GUI and the mouse. But they DIDN’T, they stole plagiarized those technologies during a visit to PARC, Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center. Some of Apple’s best innovations have been things that they’ve RE-invented. But Apple hasn’t really innovated anything since the iPhone – and that was years ago. Every MacWorld and WWDC since then has been mostly disappointing.

It’s time for Apple to “innovate” again. There are 4 products I saw at CES that Apple needs to look at, reverse engineer, license, or plagiarize. Read… »

Today at CES the SD Association announced a specification for SDXC, or SD eXtended Capacity that “provides up to 2 terabytes storage capacity and accelerates SD interface read/write speeds to 104 megabytes per second this year, with a road map to 300 megabytes per second.” Here is the Press Release.

While this might become one vehicle that proves my 2009 prediction of “512MB flash thumb drives under $100 by the end of the year”, it’s important to note the distinction that the SD Association today released a spec, not an actual product. Still, it is an exciting announcement full of possibilities. According to their PR (I haven’t done the math yet) a 2TB memory stick would hold 60 hours of HD video. Of course, 2TB is the upper limit of the spec. Chances are that the initial products would not be anywhere near 2TB.  But it paves the way.