Cheap classical collections

[Thanks to Andy]

Sadly and typically only available to US customers, here are ultra-cheap MP3 collections of classical music.

For Europe/UK, here's a similar offer. (Still highly economical, and I have just bought several of them. A remarkable and sudden expansion of my collection!)

All the world's a stage

"The American: businesslike, unwilling to be distracted.
      The Canadian: self-absorbed and disconnected from  reality.
              The Italian and the French: ”LOOK AT THAT BUTT”

Big Body, Big Screen

State of the Art - Big Body, Big Screen - Droid X Is This Month’s Superphone, NYT review article.
Interesting to hear of all the upsides, dowsides, and sidesides of the best of Android phones right now.
The first thing I noticed is that the cheapest contract with this phone is $90 a month! When the two years is up, you've paid over two grand to use your smartphone! This is clearly not not meant for weekend users.

How to Make Free iPhone Ringtone with iTunes

How to Make Free iPhone Ringtone with iTunes, article.

It works on my Mac, I haven't tried it with Windows.
(It only works with DRM-free songs.)

I've not been into the whole ringtone thing, particularly not paying two or three bucks for one, as the kiddies seem quite willing to. But now I got an iPhone finally, and I could take a bit of song to make a ringtone, it seemed the time to do so. So I made one from Bowie: Heroes (live), Talking Heads: Wild, Wild Life, and Ugress: Decepticons. (Mail me if you wannem.) 
I admit it does spice up a phone call, like a custom wallpaper spices up a computer screen.
It can't be one with great precision, though,  it seems the export process does not allow for split seconds.

Update: Laurie says:
It's better and very precise if you use Garage Band. Also you can use any track in your collection, not just the DRM free tracks.

iOS oddities

Here's an oddity I've noticed on both the iPad and the iPhone: I plug in the device, iTunes pops up and does its stuff, and then reports that the device is now updated and synced. But a new app I bought has not appeared on the device. So I sync manually via the File menu, and now the app does appear on the device after sync. The last time I did (on the iPhone, two minutes ago), it was quite many items which did not cross over until I did it manually. I think this is quite odd behavior. I'd think a sync is a sync is a sync, but it seems not.

---

Another thing, when texting on the iPhone, how do you get around the flippin auto-word correction!? I can't get the flippin device to accept the word "hmmm", it writes all kinds of things instead.
(I'd be thankful to know 1: how to turn it off altogether and 2: how to override it manually in particular instances.)

Update: Anonymous said:
RTFM, numbskull!!!!!
SHEESH!

eolake said...
It doesn't *come* with an effin' manual, blockhead.

OK, so I'll do my own research, jeezz, just trying to communicate here...

... It turns out that until quite recently, you actually had to jailbreak the phone (voiding the warrenty) to do this. But after a recent update, it can be done under Settings/General/Keyboard.
Although I still haven't found a way to override it in individual circumstances.

KC Aussie said...
When you are typing something and it offers a correction (a little bubble above or below the word you are typing, text is blue), you can press the "x" in the in the bubble to dismiss the bubble and the correction offered.
What I have found is that over time it seems to learn words or abbreviations. For example, in notes to myself I often write the first three letters of the day of the week (Mon, Tue, Wed, etc) and it would always change the "Wed" to We'd" ... what I found is that if I dismissed the offered correction eventually it was no long offered.
I'm not sure how many times you have to dismiss a correction before your preferred spelling becomes added to the dictionary iOS uses.

Thanks, friend.

By the way, why isn't there an effin manual? When I buy a camera, it comes with a manual. At the very least a PDF one. You would think that a company like Apple puts so much care and pride into creating an awesome product like the iPhone, they would want people to be able to figure out all the hundreds of features it has.
And surely the features are documented somewhere, otherwise they couldn't even build the phone. So why don't they hire somebody to convert that document into a public-friendly manual which would make their customers that much more happy? It's not like they can't pay, they have like $20B in the bank.

Books as apps, on iPad

Small tip for iPad users: beware when buying ebooks as "apps", because most of them were made for iPhone, and were never updated to the iPad, so the screen/text is either very small or very blurry (if you double-size it).
Looks like this:

Twitter limits bandwidth

I wrote to the maker of my Twitter app (Kiwi) and told them that I have problems posting pictures. They replied that Twitter recently has dramatically reduced the "rate limit" for all twitter apps, and it's creating many problems (like user lookups) which it's hard to do anything about.

For me, it helps to post pictures to my own server (or DropBox), and then just post the link with a tweet. (Only thing is I think those posted on Twitpic is available to more people, but I'm not sure.)
But in the bigger picture, it shows the potential problem with all free services: it attracts millions of people, but 'who you gonna call' when the caca hits the fan? What are you gonna demand, your money back?

DS Styles iPh case

I've gotten a case for my iPhone. First case I've ever gotten for a phone. But since the iPhone is mostly glass, and despite testing showing it to be at least as tough as phones are generally, it felt appropriate.
I quite like this case. It sits well in the hand, works against slipping, feels like it protects the phone, has a nice pattern, and yet you can see the steel and other features, which I feel is important. All the access openings are perfect. It exists in a few other colors too.

I tried Apple's bumper case, and I feel it's a failure compared to this case. The Bumper hides the beautiful steel, and it does not protect the back glass.

CS-Styles have wasted no time in promoting that it helps with Apple's little antenna problem too.       :-)

I like their Chinese-English promotional text:

"Now the world is crazy by the new release iPhone 4. Come on everyone. Keep your pace on and do the complete prepare for it. DS Lattice Silicone Case is a have-must. The lattice pattern is simple but fashion."

It's poetry.

The Targus chick

I can't get over this chick, she does something to me. If she used that face and tone of voice to tell me a shirt she was selling looked nice on me, I'd be helpless.
She sounds like every mundane little feature of the product gives her personal and abundant joy and pleasure. Kool.



What's funny is that she can do it every time. There are several different cases, and her: "Love your new iPad? Want to keep it safe and sound?" sounds the same and exactly as bubbly as the first one. Good performance.

"The Z-case features a fashionable and sophisticated look, designed specifically to suit your personable style."

Well, that assumes that I'm fashionable and sophisticated... which I've not often been accused of. :-)

But if this lovely woman will come round to my house, she can sell me *all* the cases in all the colors.

The one below may be my favorite. The moment where she lovingly rubs the case up and down is not suggestive at all though, no no no, don't get me wrong.

Making a portrait on the iPad

Like I predicted before the iPad came out, there is already lots and lots of good art being made on it. Apart from pressure sensitivity, there's really not a lot you can do with the more expensive Wacom Cintiq that you can't do on an iPad. (And an intriquing area, barely explored yet, is replacing speed for pressure sensitivity, for example making a line thinner when you move your finger or stylus faster.)

Dodocase web page

I haven't gotten my Dodocase yet (they're backordered), but one thing I know: this is an exemplarily beautiful web page.  Beautiful, big photos on a good looking, minimalistic page, neutral background color, gorgeous logo and buttons, and again, wonderfully simple. A lot of web designers might do well to take note.

They have some videos here. Here's a video review.
One thing though: a couple of vids on youboob shows how the pad is no longer held firmly in place after a few weeks. This is unfortunate to say the least, it might fall out onto a hard place. I have mailed Dodo to get a solution to that, should it happen with mine. Update: I got an answer, they'll include some extra corner rubber bumpers.

Modern parking tech

[Thanks to Mark]

High-tech parking technology in Budapest, video. (Note: loud sound, which can't be adjusted.)

This is very cool. One only has to hope that Budapest is not prone to power-outs, or the software prone to Blue Screens Of Death.       :-)

Don Norman at Business of Software 2009

Don Norman at Business of Software 2009, video.
This is a fun video with many good points.
He mentions how he worked once as a consultant for Apple, and he wanted a legacy and decided to try to coordinate just one little simple thing: the power switch. And everybody agreed that it would be great if the power switch was recognizable over their whole product line, division by division. But after half a year of trying, they gave up, it couldn't be done. Big groups of people simply can't agree.

I also like his many fine examples about how complexity is not always bad. Its very true. Many years ago I wrote a poem which included a line about the Beautiful Complexity of the Universe, or something on those lines, and people disagreed with it, because Everybody Knows that simplicity is beautiful, not complexity... well, have you looked at the scoring card of a piece by Bach?

Reading

I mentioned how I've read at least a couple of books, or the equivalent, per week all my life. I don't really "get" people who don't read, even though there are many, many of them. For me it's like not breathing.

I remember having a discussion at nine or ten with a playmate. He insisted Batman could fly. He proved it by pointing to a drawing in a comic where Batman was hovering under the ceiling in a room. He had not read the text, which said that a big magnet was pulling up Bats by the metal things in his gadget belt. It was a shock to me that he did not read the text in his comic books.


Update:
ganesha games said...
I broke up with a girlfriend when I realized that having her around all the time was preventing me from reading. 'Nuff said.

eolake said...
ROTFL!!
Exactly. If that had really been the case, I would have done the same thing. And I think *very* few people have their priorities that way around. Most people will change *everything* for their lover.

A field of tablets

It seems from various reports that there are some quite interesting smart-phones out there running the Android system. Well,  I'm not interested in getting another phone, but a thought occurred to me: somebody might attempt to compete with the iPad. Well, actually that's pretty much a given; the "might" comes in here: some of these products might actually be good!

Perhaps using the Android system (which I've not tried), but that's less important (this article does not make me optimistic). I would like to see a field of choices of interesting tablet devices, both from Apple and other makers. For example a small and light one like a Kindle, but faster and with a better screen. Or a larger one than the iPad, for more complex tasks and productivity and connectivity. Or whatever, I'm sure there are thousands of options and functions we haven't dreamed of yet. It could become interesting.

I hope it does. I hope they won't all be like the Zune, brown in reality and in spirit. (Brown?? Who wants a brown gadget?)

Update: Alex mentions Cisco's interesting Cius. (I'm not sure what it does, I got too distracted by the buzz words and the beautiful vicepresident.)

Crossing from Free to Paid options

I've made a new kind of promotional page on Domai: a full thumbnail page in the free section, but just a few of the thumbnails (clearly highlighted) links to big images.

This kind of page was an attempt to replicate something I heard in a podcast.
Marco Arment, the maker of the excellent software Instapaper, talked about how people, surely partly out of sheer inertia, will keep using the free version of a thing forever, unless missing something becomes too uncomfortable. In his case, he limits the free version of Instapaper to save ten articles*, which helps a lot of people over the mental hurdle to sign up for the Pro version for five bucks.

It's an issue for a very big number of internet businesses: how to get more people to cross over from the free content to paid content.

So I'm experimenting on how to get a larger percentage of the huge number of free-bee visitors to feel that they are missing out until they actually get their membership. Showing thumbnails of the pictures they aren't getting for free is one idea, I don't yet have data on whether it works.

---

*Marco says he added the 10-article limit last summer (2009). Clearly he changed his mind, in this 2008 blog post, he strongly denied a rumor that this limit existed then:

"There’s no limit of how many articles you can store with Instapaper Free [...]. There has never been such a limit. As I have previously discussed in depth, I never want to impose artificial, frustrating restrictions on Free that make it a bad product."

So I'm guessing he changed his mind at some point about whether such a limit would make the free version a Bad Product.  I'm not saying this is bad, it's a reasonable limit, it's his product, and he's free to change his mind however he wants.

I'm just wondering whether it's ten articles total, ten per day, or ten unread at any one time. I'm guessing the last one. 
(BTW, I don't have experience with the free version, because when I heard of Instapaper, I got so enthusiastic that I bought the Pro version right away (and haven't regretted it one second).)
Update: Marco informs me:

It's 10 unread articles stored on the iPhone at once. As people read and Archive them, it downloads more until it has 10.

-

Live in the Now?

I'd heard it all the time, 'Live in the moment.' But if I did that, I'd weigh more than a dump truck. Losing weight wasn't about the moment at all; it was about having faith in the future. It was about knowing there would be another meal in a few hours.
           -- Stephanie Klein


Yes, "live in the Now" was a hugely popular mental and spiritual admonishment in the noughties. But I never really understood why it was.
For one thing, "Now" is just another part of Time. You're still validating the falsehood of time.
For another thing, how do you do it? It's all very easy to say "stop worrying about the past and future, just live in the Now", but how do you do it? I find it hard to believe that many people have been able to go from gut-wrenching worry to peaceful relaxation by simply remembering to "live in the Now".

Is the pad an ebook-reader replacement?

My pal Glenn Fleishman from TidBITS has some interesting comments on this podcast.
For example he is asked whether the Amazon Kindle and the iPad are really in the same market. At first I disagreed with his statement that the iPad is not really an ebook-reader replacement, because it did replace the Kindle for me. But then he explained, and I agree: the iPad is basically too heavy to be really practical, and for some people, it is needlessly complex and expensive, if they only want a book replacement. If the Kindle had a better and faster screen, I'd probably still use it. (I'd like to see comparison photos of the old Kindle DX and the new one, to see how big that asserted contrast improvement is.)

I don't care too much to read with a book on a table. Or in any position where I have to bend my neck to look down at it. Not comfortable for long periods. I prefer to be very much leaned back, half lying down, and have the "book" above/in front of me. The iPad is too heavy to do this for long. I can use it as much as I do partly due to a solution which is to big and clumsy for most people: a book holder, simple a big floor-stand which holds a book or ebook reader for you.

That being said, though, if they could make an iPad at half the weight I would not have any want at all for another e-reader. (I don't like sitting in the sun, so the screen visibility is no issue.)
And I'll bet the Kindle has not inspired as many nice cases as the iPad already has. (This is just one of several companies' products I've seen this week. There are also this and this.) (Man, get a load of the video on the Targus page! Talk about perky and enthusiastic! Like she just can hardly contain her pleasure at this lovely product! Well done.) (Almost overdone. I think I would mock her if she didn't turn me on so much.)

---

Glenn also wrote this article about using software to block distractions on the computer, something I touched on once. I think I even found the "Isolator" app that he used while writing this article.

How does Twitter pay the bills?

I've googled around a bit trying to find out how Twitter pay their bills, and how they intend to become profitable in the future (seeing as I can't imagine they are so now). But I haven't found anything except many other people asking the same question. Has anybody seen anything solid? It must be amazingly expensive to run such a super-popular service.

This is something I find highly amusing: on the wiki page for Twitter, it says:

"The Industry Standard has remarked that Twitter's long-term viability is limited by a lack of revenue..."

Only in the Internet age is an income considered optional for a business! Too friggin' funny. This is like saying: "Joe Blow's long-term health outlook is limited by his refusal to eat or drink anything".
The Financial Dictionary says: "When evaluating stocks, revenue growth serves as an indication of a company's health." 
But in the Internet age, it's apparently entirely incidental to the stock value! Nut city.

TTL sez:
How they plan to become profitable? By displaying ads, or rather sponsored tweets.
Mind you, this is all over the net. It was covered by pretty much every newspaper when it was announced in April.


Aha. After 40-something years, it finally bites me in the ass that I don't read news. Thanks, dude.
-

Yeah Yeah Yeahs: Our Time

Feedback noise

Here's a delightfully weird little thing:

On my new Windows computer, I played around with Dragon NaturallySpeaking (dictation software), and with Win7's built-in dictation feature.
At some point, the computer started making a sound-feedback, and an infernally loud screech developed within seconds. In desperation I plugged in a headset to stop it.

And now I can't unplug the headset without the feedback screech developing again! This is despite the speech recognition now being turned off, and the machine having been rebooted...

Any tips?

Update: Robb said:
You have an open microphone somewhere that's feeding back into the Dragon software. Kill (mute) the microphone and the feedback will disappear.

eolake said...
But Dragon is off. And the only mike is the one built into the iMac.
(I used a USB mic when testing Dragon, but that's unplugged.)

But you could be right though I don't understand it: I just now went and made a search for 'microphone' and found an "audio device" control panel. There were two active microphones in the panel, which I guess must be software items, not real things. I "deactivated" the one which seemed related to Dragon, and the problem is now gone. Thanks.

"Acquired by Amazon"

Contest reminder

Just to remind: "Children in Color" photo contest, deadline July 15. Early entries are few yet, but good, so get cracking!

[Updated] Jakob Nielsen Tests iPad and Kindle Reading Speeds

Jakob Nielsen Tests iPad and Kindle Reading Speeds, article.
Thanks to TidBITS, which comments:

Do you read faster or slower on a device like an iPad or Kindle, in comparison with a physical book? The overall answer, according to usability expert Jakob Nielsen, is about 5% to 10% slower (with the same comprehension of what was read). That's statistically significant, though not all that much slower. (We suspect it may have to do with years of familiarity with the form factor of the book.) More interesting was that on a 1 to 7 scale, users rated their satisfaction at 5.8 for the iPad, 5.7 for the Kindle, and 5.6 for the physical book, with the traditional PC trailing behind at only 3.6.

Update: Ganesha Games says:
This is so odd to me. Since I have the kindle, and then the iPad, my reading speed has increased by roughly 25%, with better comprehension (I read in English, which is a second language to me, so the in-built dictionaries and word search functions are a bliss).

The extreme portability of both devices also means I can read a lot when on trains, at the dentist's, in line at the post office or bank, and so on, and the availability of cheap or free reading materials have vastly increased the quantity of my reading.

But I've always been a heavy reader so maybe I'm out of the norm (a novel a week, plus a non-fiction book spread over maybe three weeks if it's heavy, plus rulebooks for games and reference materials/blogs/websites on a daily basis, and 7-8 comics a week are an average for me).

Eolake:
When I was a kid and teen, my father drove us to the library every Monday when it was open in the evening. And I remember that every week I would borrow and fully read about five to six books. Per week! Plus school reading. Of course, each book was not War And Peace, but still, now it seems rather extraordinary. 'Smatteroffact it must have been extraordinary, because I hardly remember seeing anybody but me and my father there in those evening hours.

I am probably also faster reading on the iPad, I haven't tried to measure it, but at least I now prefer it over reading on paper.

"Vortex" screensaver

Back in in my nineties day job using Windows '95, one of my favorite things of the OS was a screensaver, I think it was called Vortex, but I'm not sure. It froze an image of whatever you had on your screen, windows and all, and then it animated it with a sort of vortex which swirled around on the screen. It was beautiful, and I think it's amazing it could be done with a friggin' 486 computer.

I liked particularly to run it with the Gogh Starry Night painting, because the vortices fit well with those in the sky. Below is a screenshot (well, looks like several combined) of the screensaver running, which I made back then.

Hmm, I can see the screenshot is actually taken on my Mac back then, so this means it might be from 2000, and that I had managed to find a Mac OS 8 equivalent.
 Anyway, I'd be grateful if anybody can find such a screensaver for me, either for Mac OS X (Snow Leopard) or Windows (Win7).

Topless woman uses bare breasts to stop ATV noise feud

[Thanks to Louis]

Topless woman uses bare breasts to stop ATV noise feud, article.

Good for her.
People who will continually let their children be that noisy in public deserver all the gymnophobia they can scrape together.

Apple and the problematic signal bars

New Apple press release about the problematic mood-swinging signal bars in the iPhone 4. They actually say:

"Upon investigation, we were stunned to find that the formula we use to calculate how many bars of signal strength to display is totally wrong."

Formula? Formula!? How complex can it be? It's not like the strength of a signal is a multi-dimensional thing, it's a straightforward two-dimensional scale.
I think Apple will hear for this one for a while.

Update: top shelf tech journalist (stauch Apple supporter through decades) tweets: "Is it just me or does this Apple statement sound like an Onion article?" Yeah.

Update Bruce pointed to John the Fireball translating Apple's letter.
"Daring Fireball"? That's a site title so lame that it has to be "ironic". Yes, I'm putting quotes around "ironic" because I mean it ironically. Meaning I think it's one of those cases where the author claims irony to those who can see the lameness, while at the same time appeal without irony to those who think it's kewl.

More Mac/Win questions/comments

I'm used to, on the Mac, being able to "hide" an app, so all its windows disappear from the screen until you call it forth again. In Windows it seems you have to minimize or close every window manually, is this so?

---
Comment: MobileMe sucks. I have been paying for this (once called Mac.com) for ten years now, but gawd knows why!! I keep hoping that in the next year I am paying for, it will develop some useful features. And I started using the email address when it was free, so I sorta wanted to keep it when they started to charge money for it (is that even legal?).
Seriously, WTF? The free Dropbox service is way more useful than iDisk. Syncing has always been, and is still, confusing and buggy, and you risk deleting things on your computer instead of exporting them, and... what else is there? Practically fok-all, is what. I don't use the web hosting, and I don't like the comments from those who do.
This has cost me a grand now, I'm a total sucker. This is not one of the products Apple should be proud of.

Update: KC Aussie said...
I appreciate the Mobile Me may not be worth it to you Eolake, though for me it is worth the $99 per year.


I have been using MM since the beginning when it was .mac and free, just like you. I have an iMac, iPad, and iPhone, and what is invaluable to me is to be able to keep all my calendars in sync ... I see many clients every week ... sometimes I take an appt in front of my iMac, other times I am in my front hall (where my iPad lives during the day) rebooking a client, and other times I am out on the road and talking an appt on my iPhone. To have a single calendar on multiple devices which automagically syncs itself is to me, so amazing and so worth it.


Syncing of other things like Safari bookmarks and notes (with iOS 4) is helpful. Just which I could change that hard to read Markerfelt font in the notes.


I don't use the iDisk feature ... it seems clumsy and slow. I do use the mail feature and find my iPhone feature. I do use MM to host my website (which is really simple and integrated with iWeb).


I realize I could probably achieve much of the above for free using Google but I prefer to not share any data with them; I simply do not trust Google's privacy policies. So, a $99 private sync service is worth it to me.

Phone debate

Warning: lots of swear words in the video. Faintly amusing. Sort of.

It seems to me that this salesman, apart from being rude, can't distinguish between quantity of features and quality of features. For example, what matters it if a phone can do video chat over 3G if you can't get it to work most of the time and the quality is awful?



Actually I think that's the basic split between Apple lovers and Apple haters: the latter can't perceive differences in quality, they can only perceive differences in numbers.

[Updated] Windows Explorer in the nineties was good.

There's on thing I miss from when I used a Windoze machine in my day job in the nineties: Windows Explorer in Win95. It's still there, but I don't know how to make it give the view I found so very useful back then: it had two panes, each one showing a file system tree with flippy triangles, so you could easily oversee the entire file system on the left side, and also on the right side, and so you could move files from one side to the other. I think it's still the best file navigator I've tried, better than Apple's Finder (though the column view improved it).

This is shareware SpeedCommander, which approaches what I mean, even though it insists on separate panels for files, thus ending with four panels instead of two:

----
One thing though: I think that OS X has much better text rendering and anti-aliasing than Windows 7. Text generally looks better and is more readable.
(Funny enough, years ago tech guru Nicholas Negroponte migrated from Mac to Windows partly because Mac back then didn't have text anti-aliasing!)

----
On the other hand, I think the Start Button menu in Windows is immensely useful for quickly finding and launching apps and so on. I wonder why Apple never made anything similar, there simple is no simple and easy single entrance point in OS S. It's pretty stupid, to be frank. Well, you can put icons for everything in the Dock, but cripes, does that take up space. And with many, it's equally confusing; there are no sub-menus.

The iPhone is not a phone

I don't consider the iPhone a phone, I consider it a small tablet. In fact, from day one, I was wondering why Apple was calling it a phone, when phoning is clearly less than 15% of its capabilities even back then.
I guess it has to do with the popularity of telephoning, I never got that, I barely use it. But the general population surely do. In my town, the center does not have a single vidoe store, but it has six mobile phone stores next to each other!!

So anyway: for years I've been wondering: what did we do before the Internet?
Now I'm already starting to wonder: what did we do before tablets?
Example: I was talking to somebody about the speed of electric kettles.
I thought:  I'll bet anything there are several stop-watch applications for the iPhone. And what do you know, so there was. There was even a free one, which is excellent and very aesthetic.

So I could measure with ease how long it takes my electric kettle to boil two mugs of water. (1.42m.)

Obviously, the point is the bigger picture: this sort of thing will happen again and again and again, in so many areas we can't even imagine them.
(An example is an App which a friend showed me: if he hears a song, he holds his iPhone up and let it listen to it for a few seconds... and the app tells him which song it is, and where to get it!)

"What it's like to own an Apple product"

[Thanks to Jan]

"What it's like to own an Apple product", cartoon.

Quite funny.
It must be very exhausting to have that kind of attitude to your product ownership.

---

By the way, I bought an Apple "bumper" case for my iPh4. But I took it off again. It only protects the steel parts, the parts which don't need it. And it ruins the beautiful look of the phone.
But I did get a Zagg film for both sides. It protects the glass nicely against fingerprints and scratching, and gives it a bit of traction so it's less likely to slide around and fall off tables.

Windows shopping (updated)

I saw a big screenshot from a machine running Windows Seven, and I thought it looked very good, so I started considering getting an upgrade to my ol' Windows laptop I have for web site testing and occasional purposes. So I went to my friendly neighborhood PC World store, to go "Windows shopping".

On my way into the store, the Apple Laptops and other machines were closer, so I looked them over first, you just have to, it's such nice hardware.
A lot of interest in the iPad, I saw.

I got approached by a salesman, and I pulled myself away from the aluminium goodies, and asked to see a good high-end Windows machine. So we went and looked at those...

But man, the hardware, how it looked on all the Windows machines! I just couldn't bear it, they are so ugly. Even the most expensive machine they had (about £1100, $1600), a large Sony Vaio*, in its big, faux-silver-plastic majesty, just repelled me. I looked over all the various Wintel machines they had, both laptops and desktops, and none of them attracted me at all. Plasticky, button-y, thrown-together... there seemed to be no wholeness in the design considerations. (By the way, not all plastic is equally "plasticky"... Apple's entry-level MacBook (without the Pro) model is still white plastic, and it looks gorgeous. But then I'll bet that's a different grade of plastic.)

This is not an anti-Windows thing, like I said I very much liked the looks of the OS itself in most recent incarnation, and they say it's good to use. But unless I need the machine urgently, I want to find one where the hardware is equally pleasant to me.

Hmm... maybe I'll just combine 'em, and install Win7 on my iMac or get a MacBook Pro for it. Testers do say that due to the Intel chip, it runs as fast on Macs as it does on PCs.

Update: I did it. Just went to the shop and paid overprice for WinHomePremium, and installed it via the built-in "bootcamp" feature, on my iMac. (My secondary computer, I mainly use a MacPro.)  Went flawlessly, and took less than half an hour. So far I haven't used it much, but it looks very pretty on the big iMac screen, way better than olden-times Windows. And just this fact alone: the desktop is not strewn with friggin icons!! Gotta love that.  Just goes to show that they do listen... it only takes a couple of decades.

Update: I must say, the Win-terface is really improved.  It feels logical, and it's beautiful, the way the windows look and move and so on, I actually feel, for once, that Apple could learn something here, very little has changed in the OS X look at feel over these ten years.
It might be a little frivolous, but for example I like how, if I try to drag a window down so it collides with the Dock, sorry, the Task Bar, then there is a little, tastefully animated "explosion" bubble, which shows there's a conflict. And if I force the matter, I can push the window behind the Task Bar, but it gets blurry like the Task Bar is translucent. I might get tired of such cutenesses, I don't know, but right now they seem nice.
I like the way that windows corners buttons softly light up in different colors when you approach them. It's pretty and it tell you clearly what you're about to do. Apple's round buttons get a little cross in them, it's less clear, and sometimes the botton doesn't actually work even though the cross is activated, a clear flaw.
(No, I'll probably not change platform, I'm just amazed I can find so many things to like about the new Windows.)

BTW, the machine is nagging me to urgently buy some virus software. What do you recommend? 


* I can't find a picture of that model. Those I do find pictures of look better, but I'm not sure if that's just the picture.

The Scary Truth About Marriage

Joe found this amazingly cynical satire. Not sure whether to laugh or cry.

Microsoft Kills Kin

Microsoft Kills Kin, article.
(Rob Glaser commented: did they notify next of kin?)
Just six weeks after launch, Microsoft's Kin, the social phone we wanted to love, is dead. Microsoft is ending its short life, sources close to Microsoft tell us. [...]
The major reason? Sales. Microsoft never confirmed (or denied) that only 500 Kins were sold, but it's clear that the response has been completely underwhelming. 

Wow. Only six weeks after launch!  It must suck to be in the group for one of those MS (or anywhere) products which fall totally flat on their face. If it was a good product, that must be a hard blow, and if it was a bad product, the whole long experience must surely have blown.

Wow again, get a load of Kin's site. (In safari but not in firefox I get a very "MTV" intro video)  It's worse (form over content) than any of the incarnations of David Bowie's site over the years. (His site, by the way, is not loading at all for me recently... what's up with that, is he dead or what? David seemed, personally, to be the one big artist who understood really early on how important the Net is.)

Funny sidebar: Gizmodo says that MS marketed the Kin to "hipsters". This is one of those words who have major definitions which are virtually antonyms: one is a person who is very Cool and In, and another is a person with "a particularly strong sense of alienation from most established social activities and relationships." Heh. I'd like to see how Microsoft would try to market to the latter!
(By the way, I, and most of my friends I suspect, fit way better in the second definition than in the first.)

Also by the by: is the wayback machine not working anymore? I mean not actively archiving?  There doesn't seem to be any newish results.

Update: Ray said:

Here's a screen shot of Bowie's website.
The first time I tried to connect, it wouldn't load,
but a few minutes later, I got this.

(In my opinion, that text is way too small to consider well legible. His site has always been like that.) (Of course too-small text is a *very* wide-spread issue on the web. Thank goodness most of it can be enlarged.)

Pentax 645D Debuts in Japan again

So the Pentax 645D is real now.
I think it's a highly interesting camera. It seems to be really high quality, it's way cheaper than other medium format cameras, and I think it's the only of those which has been developed with landscape and art photography in mind, rather than advertising and product photography.
And from the looks of it, I have a feeling it's more ergonomic than those big pro cameras usually are.

Street photography shots

TCGirl found this collection of good street photos.

Shaving the kitty

[Thanks to Jim]