To get to this nirvana of quick-posting, we’ve moved over to Posterous from WordPress. Posterous is a simple blogging platform that uses email instead of web-based editors, and I love it. Instead of opening a browser window, loading a New Post editor, and uploading images and crap, I could just open Mail.app, hit Cmd-N for a new message, drag any images from a browser, and hit send. It takes a lot less time, plus I don’t have to futz with the images to make them fit, as Posterous does this for me. We’ve been cranking out posts on Intrepid Mac for a couple of weeks now, and we’re up to about 2,000 site views and 108 posts.

I’ve been toying with the idea of inviting other people to contribute to the site. If you’re interested in joining Intrepid Mac, email me at fakejournalist [at] gmail.com and we’ll get talkin’.

Using Google’s new Search Story feature, we made a short video for Daily Blogged. When you watch the video, notice that it tells a story of a user installing Leopard and upgrading through to Snow Leopard. It also helps that Daily Blogged is the #1 search result for all of these fairly generic searches (with the exception of Mast Drivers Guide, of course). So give it  a watch, vote, and even leave a comment if you feel so inclined.

This is a response to the article “10 reasons I’ll be passing on the iPad,” where Debra Shinder details how the iPad isn’t for her. I’ve criticized Deb before. I read her blog and I’m subscribed to her Win7 News mailing list, and I’ve noticed that whenever she talks about Apple, she somehow gets in several jibes. This article was basically a whole list of them, and most are the result of a lack of research and are easily refuted.

1. No physical keyboard

Deb argues that the iPad is inferior because it lacks a physical keyboard. Well, we all knew it would. But Deb must not’ve known about the keyboard dock accessory and the fact that the iPad will be able to pair with any Bluetooth keyboard.

2. One size doesn’t fit all

“If the tablet is going to fit into some gap between the phone and the netbook, the size should be somewhere in between, too. The iPad’s screen is about 10 inches, the same as most netbooks. It won’t fit into your pocket. It’s thin and light, but so are many of the netbooks on the market now. For example, the Sony VAIO X series laptop/netbooks are the same half-inch thick and virtually the same weight (1.5 lbs. vs. 1.6 lbs.). And we’re also starting to see netbooks in the convertible tablet form factor, which is really exciting.”

Deb says the iPad should be somewhere in between the size of a phone and a netbook, which is not how Steve Jobs positioned it in the iPad keynote: as a middle ground between a 13” laptop and an iPhone, which the iPad is with its 9.7” screen. An iPad that’s slightly bigger than an iPod Touch but still fits in your pocket? What would be the point of that?

3. It runs a phone OS

“I would have been more tempted by the iPad if it ran OS X instead of the iPhone operating system.”

This just shows how unfamiliar Deb is with the technological underpinnings of the iPhone, because it does run OS X. It’s still Unix, still the same kernel, the same file system, etc. The big difference is the interface, which is designed to be used on a touchscreen with new graphical toolkits and APIs. When Microsoft tried to enter the tablet market, they just slapped some touchscreen controls on Windows and called it good. We all know how that turned out. Apple’s approach is far better.

4. There’s not enough storage

“From my experiences with the early netbooks, I learned that 16 or 32 GB of storage isn’t enough for me. Granted, my needs may be greater than that of the average user. But by the time I install all the programs I want to use and put my music, photos, and a few videos on there, what once upon a time seemed like a lot of space really isn’t.”

Your experiences with early netbooks? I assume you mean the ones running Windows XP. iPhone OS is not Windows XP. The whole OS takes up a little more than 1GB of space. Applications don’t take up as much, either. I have about 70 installed, and they only total about 1GB. You must have a lot of photos and music.

5. No HDMI or camera

“Today, computing is all about multimedia — both consuming it and creating it. You can watch HD movies on the iPad (although it doesn’t have the 16:9 standard aspect ratio), but you can’t output them to your HDTV because there’s no HDMI connector.”

Why would you want to hook up your iPad to an HDTV when you could just watch a movie in your lap? As for the aspect ratio, Apple made the most logical decision by going with 3:4 instead of 16:9, as the 3:4 ratio is perfect for everything else you could do on the iPad except video. Why would Apple make everything else suck just for the sake of video?

“One handy use for a device of this size and form factor would be video conferencing… except Apple forgot to include a camera and microphone. Most new laptops and netbooks have a built-in Web cam. Even the iPhone has a camera, albeit not a particularly good one.”

The iPad does come with a microphone. Did you not even bother watching the iPad event? And a camera will probably either be included with the next version of the iPad, or Apple will surprise everyone by announcing it just before it ships.

6/7. No USB/SD slot

Most normal users probably won’t notice or care that the iPad lacks these. Deb really should’ve combined these two. I think she didn’t just because she couldn’t think of a tenth complaint. Are most users going to use a USB or SD slot? Not really. If I needed it for syncing, I could just use Dropbox or Mobile Me, both of which have their own app.

8. The price isn’t right

“The iPad is being touted as a better ebook reader, but it costs twice as much as the Kindle and other ebook readers.”

This is just false. While the baseline iPad costs almost twice as much as the standard Kindle ($259 vs. $499), the iPad offers more than twice the features, with a 9.7” color touchscreen, apps, email, music, 802.11n, and so on. The deal gets even better when you consider the $489 Kindle DX, which has the same limitations as the standard Kindle in comparison to the iPad.

9. It’s locked in

“You have to buy your apps from the App Store[.]”

Yes, you have to buy your apps from an App Store that currently has 140,000 apps, most of which are free. Oh, the horror. Even if you had some pathological need to not use the App Store, you can always jailbreak, and anyone who hates the App Store probably knows how. However, the closed nature of the App Store is an asset and not a detriment. It protects the user from viruses and keeps crappy apps from getting in. Being a Droid user, I can attest to the general bad quality of Android apps from the market. There’s not a single third-party Android app I’ve found that does a better job than its iPhone counterpart, and in many cases, it does a worse one. Yes, sometimes the app approval process can be a huge pain on the iPhone, but app approvals are going through faster and Apple is starting to loosen it’s grip on what should be allowed.

Many companies are actually more closed than Apple. I know that Deb is a Microsoft fan, so let’s use Microsoft as an example: the Zune HD and Xbox 360, two of Microsoft’s most successful products, are both locked in, and in many ways, they’re locked in tighter than the iPad. Microsoft has shut off Live service to Xbox modders before, and the Zune HD not only has an anemic app selection, but that selection is only available through Microsoft. Imagine if Apple shut off wireless service for jailbreakers. The outrage would be tremendous, and rightfully so.

“The 10-hour battery life is impressive (although some netbooks offer comparable times), but if you were flying to Australia and wanted to bring along an extra battery for the extra-long flight, forget about it.”

Again, a serious lack of research. There are external batteries for the iPhone, and there’ll definitely be some for the iPad. Plus, you’re seriously going to use an iPad for the entire flight? I don’t think so.

“[Y]ou can’t run Skype to make phone calls with it, either. We wouldn’t want to cut into the iPhone market, after all. Nor can you download Flash to install on the browser, which means you won’t be watching those YouTube videos.”

Here’s where Deb’s lack of research really shines through. You will definitely be able to make Skype calls with the iPad, since it has both a speaker and microphone, and Apple has lifted its restrictions on VoIP over 3G. And YouTube? Deb, you do realize that there’s an entire app dedicated to YouTube, right? As for Flash, it’s a good thing it’s not going to be on the iPad. It’s performance would be horrible, and that’s Adobe’s fault, not Apple’s.

10. It’s all about the network

“And you’ll have to pay another $30/month for unlimited data for your iPad (or $20 for 250MB), on top of what you’re already paying for your cell phone. Or do they expect people to give up their phone data plans and just use the iPad for data? I don’t see all those iPhone users doing that. This thing is looking more expensive by the minute.”

Deb really needs to learn how to fact-check; the 250MB plan is $14.99, not the $20 she claims. Deb also forgets to mention that the data plans are contract-free and can be canceled at any time. If you don’t need 3G, you can just buy an iPad without it.

“Here’s wishing you good luck on finding those wi-fi hot spots.”

Really? It’s hard to find WiFi hotspots in the US? Even with every McDonald’s offering free WiFi? How about every Barnes and Noble, too? Most colleges, cafes, and libraries also have free WiFi. I don’t think those people will need luck.

Deb seems to have fundamentally misunderstood what the iPad is supposed to be. It’s not a replacement for a netbook or a laptop, and it’s not just a giant iPod Touch. It’s the ultimate couch computer, giving you access to the web with the portability of a netbook, and that’s awesome.

That’s the end of Deb’s ten (but really nine) points. I look forward to arguing with her more in the future.

[via Toni Nikkanen] ]]> http://www.dailyblogged.com/a-great-moment-in-hackintosh-history-running-os-x-on-a-phone/feed/ 1 http://www.dailyblogged.com/snow-leopard-to-support-32-bit/ http://www.dailyblogged.com/snow-leopard-to-support-32-bit/#comments Wed, 12 Aug 2009 04:00:33 +0000 Thomas http://www.dailyblogged.com/?p=1431 There’s been some skepticism about whether or not Apple’s next Operating System, Snow Leopard, will support 32-bit. Many believe Snow Leopard will be 64-bit exclusive and with what’s rumored to be less than a month ’till release, only time can truly tell. While this may be true, some pretty convincing information has been released on Amazon.com that leads me to believe otherwise.

On Amazon’s Pre-Order page for the Snow Leopard $29 Upgrade, it clearly lists the System Requirements. The System Requirements are split into two sections and it’s these two sections that give me what I believe to be the convincing information that I need to believe Snow Leopard will support 32-bit. If you look at the second section, Feature-Specific requirements (Read: Optional Requirements), you will see listed “64-bit support requires a Mac with a 64-bit processor.” In other words, 64-Bit support is Feature-Specific/Optional and only needed for certain features (such as the 64-bit kernel). Everything listed in the “Feature-Specific requirements” is optional as can be seen by the other items listed in this section including Boot Camp, Time Machine, and Photo Booth, all of which are optional. If all of these are optional then there’s no reason why if 64-Bit Support, which is listed under this same section, wouldn’t also be optional. Screenshots of the page are below, just in case Amazon tries to change their page. By the way, if the image looks a little funky its because I put together two screenshot to make one panoramic image.

So what do you think? Is this evidence enough? Drop a comment below and let me know.

The girl had dropped her iPod in the street and was hit by the pickup when she tried to retrieve it. Thankfully, she only suffered a broken leg.

No word yet on whether her iPod is OK, and that’s the only thing we really care about, right?

[via WESH]

If you found this guide useful then feel free to make a donation by clicking the link at the end of the Author’s Mini-Biography. Any amount truly does help.

While you’re busy with that, you can probably expect a public beta of Chrome for the Mac in Fall.

Gutenprint Project

Yeah… Plug your Hack into most any printer and should be off and printing without issue. However, if like me, all your printers live out there somewhere on the network; you’ll need to connect to them via Bonjour (most new Enterprise-class printers have this protocol built-in), or via Samba/CIFs, etc.  When doing this, since you’re using the network, the OS can’t readily identify the device that it’s connected to, therefore auto-installing/using the proper driver for it.

In cases like this, you need to tell OS X what printer driver to use.  Now while Apple provides a nice selection of drivers, it’s a bit limited in contrast to those provided by the outstanding project known as Gutenprint. This project has been creating drivers for the Mac/Linux world since 2003. There’s support for over ~1400 printers at this point, using PostScript and/or CUPS, and they continue to add more all the time. The project was originally established to provide printer drivers that could work in conjunction with GIMP. It has since grown so large, that it’s become its own entity.

You might think that being 3rd party that the drivers would not be as good as those provided by the manufacturer, however, for most that I’ve used, I’ve found Gutenprint gives me much more granularity in the settings available and the number of print options I can take advantage of. Prints via the drivers are fantastic!

I was just updating to release 5.2.3 today, so I thought I’d let you all know of the project.

Hope some of you that print via the network (or local for that matter) find the software both helpful and/or an improvement from what you might have currently installed.

Please post comments and feedback on your experience with it (that is, should you even install it — but, I’m telling you, it’s essential stuff if you print a lot).

He met Woz at Dancing With The Stars and showed him his hackintosh:

He said, “Oh my god, that is so COOL!”

And: “Is that really the color you wanted?”

Then he graciously signed it. I then ran away and giggled for about 45 minutes.

I want a Dell Mini 9 now.

[Flickr via Boing Boing Gadgets]

His bike was also a victim of the carnage, but who cares about that?

Ever have one of your laptops get destroyed? Tell us about it in the comments.

[Flickr via Gizmodo]

Meebo: They’ve avoided making an iPhone app because they felt it needed push notification. Meebo will connect to various social networks and do basically everything the webapp does.

EA: Showed off the Sims 3. The Sims will let you buy things from the app store from within the app for $0.99 each.

Oracle: The Oracle app goes out and pulls data from their backend CRM (Customer Relationship Management) server, which you can use to contact your account rep via email, phone or SMS. Boring, I know.

ESPN: They’re moving their webapp to a native one. The app will alert you with sounds. It also streams video, and scales the quality based on your connection.

LifeScan, a johnson&johnson company: Their app is for diabetes management. They used a little girl as an example. She pricks herself six times a day and injects insulin as well. Her meter sends the readings to her iPhone over bluetooth or 30-pin connector. She can send a message to her parents with her readings so they know she’s ok. She can also track what kind of food she’s eating and how much of it, the app can then calculate how much insulin she needs.

Ngmoco:): They’re demoing two new games, Touch Pets, a social pet simulator, and LiveFire, a multiplayer first person shooter. Touch Pets uses push notifications for things such as a play-date with another dog. You can buy clothes, toys and other crap for your dog as well. In LiveFire, you hold down anywhere on the left side of the screen and shoot by tapping on the right side. You can buy new weapons in-app, and send requests to play with your friends via notifications.

Smule: Leaf Trombone (World Stage) is their new app. Similar to their other app, Ocarina, you can play music by blowing into the phone’s microphone. There are sliders for pitch and such.

That’s all. You can look forward to seeing these apps this summer with the release of 3.0.

I downloaded the Mac version of Boxee just for this. The Mac and Linux versions are currently still in alpha, which borked my experience a little (Boxee crashed whenever I tried to play music), but the remote still worked for navigation. It even let me input text with my iPod’s virtual keyboard. Very nice. Typing things into on-screen keyboards can be a pain with regular remotes.

The remote has two modes: gesture and buttons. The gesture mode is nice; the Boxee icon serves as a sort of joystick and turns red when dragged, with a tap on the icon making selections. The buttons mode, while not as cool as gesture, is a little more usable. The gesture mode could be a bit picky about clicks, whereas the big “OK” button on the buttons mode wasn’t finicky at all.

When you start the app you’ll get a screen that explains the different modes. It’ll show up every time you start it unless you tell it not to. After you exit out of the welcome screen the app will start looking for hosts to connect to, which crashed it, but when I restarted it worked.

Team Boxee are making a good start with this app. It’s a free download from the iTunes Store (link opens iTunes), and you can watch it in action here.

[via Boxee Blog]

In the world of mega websites with stupid names like Twitter, Flickr and Facebook, it’s easy to forget that there was once a time when these ultra popular staples of an Internet generation didn’t exist. Before torrents, before MySpace, and long before an iPhone, you could still get your free music, catch some free flicks (Not flickrs!), and chat it up with your buddies. Only, the Internet was a lot different on dial-up and a lot less crowded. Let’s take a look back at some of my favorite websites from a decade ago. What they were, what they became, and what they helped launch shaped the Internet and let you become the porn downloading, Flickr uploading, tweeting mofo you are today.

HEAT.net was an online PC gaming website rolled out by Sega which hosted both Sega-published and third party games of that time. Mega hits such as Quake and Baldur’s Gate were available to play online in a multiplayer gaming world. HEAT.net was also the home of tournament play-offs with big cash prices and even its own website currency called “Degrees.” Being cheap and broke at the time, I played a lot of Death Drone, a widely popular free racing shoot ‘em up game set in a futuristic world.

As HEAT.net users cheated the system to rack up “Degrees,” Sega started to feel the pinch and ended up owing players more than they paid in monthly subscription fees. HEAT.net shut down on October 31st, 2000 — almost a decade ago as I write this, mainly due to the fact that they were flat ass broke and it was figured that HEAT.net was in debt two fold to every player verses their monthly fees they paid into the website. This did however open the doors to a lot of popular online gaming systems and I still miss the free online games to this day.

Funny thing is, Sega never got the math right!

Whitehouse.com was an adult (porn) site and dabbled in political entertainment to pair with its great name and first appeared online in 1997. The website was originally created so that uncensored discussion of government and politics could occur, and then they moved in the boobies to pay the bills. And the rest is history. Part of the controversy and popularity of whitehouse.com was that the typical Internet surfer stumbling upon the site was expecting the official White House website. Instead they got tits and ass.

Many web browsers tagged “.com” to the end of everything back in those days, and they still do. If an Internet surfer typed “whitehouse” instead of “whitehouse.gov” they were whisked away to blowjobs and orgies instead of the political powerhouse with that infamous seal. The site drew so much attention that the Clinton administration sent the website owner a letter of cease and desist, citing not the fact that he’s using the name — First Amendment rights do apply, but that he was improperly using names like “White House,” and “The President,” and “The First Lady” in the political gang bang dot-com.

Unfortunately that didn’t work since Internet inventor Al Gore wasn’t involved, the power of the Internet remained supreme and the site stayed online. It was recently re-opened into a real political site. No more “fake” Monica and Bill photos going around on the site these days.

Before “All Your Base” belonged to me and a long time before you were “Rick Rolled,” there were rumors going around that one of the most beloved Children’s TV stars, Bert from Sesame Street was up to some real bad shit. From doing lines of coke to getting down with Osama, Bert was out of control and off the chain. And there was a website that showcased his antics: Bert Is Evil.

The “Evil Bert” phenomenon was picked up by other humorists, who created their own images linking Bert to current and historical events. From the JFK assassination to talking strategies with Adolf Hitler, Bert was indeed evil. The site grew so popular that soon after, the website owner offered anyone to create their own Bert Is Evil images for him to host on the site. After one of the Bert photos appeared on a sign in a protest rally in Bangladesh showing a pro-Osama bin Laden Bert, the website was later shut down after getting way too out of hand.

Goes to show you the power of the internet. From a joke image to a terrorist protest rally. Bert is still evil though.

Move over Big Brother, and look out Survivor. There’s a new reality TV star in town, only she’s not on TV. And those shows don’t exist yet. Meet Jennifer K. Ringley, a then 19-year-old college student who decided to put a webcam in her dorm and post it for all of the Internet to see, which weren’t that many people back in 1996. When she turned on that webcam, she turned into history, becoming basically the first reality show the world had ever seen.

JenniCam soon fell victim to some “hackers” (crackers) who compromised her website after she refused to do a nude show for them after often teasing her audience with stripteases for the webcam. Her first webcam only shot in black and white and only when she was in her computer room. A year later she moved to D.C. and added more webcams, to cover different angles of her new place in full color. She started to charge a membership fee and her webcams updated more frequently. Being a web designer student, she whipped up a brand new snazzy layout and she started bringing in big bucks.

She shut her site down on December 31st, 2003, citing PayPal’s new anti-nudity policy, despite the fact that there were several other methods to accept payment for the site. Some critics theorized the real reason was due to dropping subscription rates caused by less time on cam and her new love interest’s refusal to appear on cam when they fucked. You can still catch almost every Jenni moment from over a decade ago online by searching through Google.

Bill Gates sells Microsoft to the United Negro College Fund for $1.00? You’re not dreaming, you’re probably reading Segfault.org, the legendary fake geek news website that was picked up by the “Slashdotter” masses. Started in 1998, Segfault was a very popular humor site that posted fake news reports on geek/hacker-related topics almost every single day. It followed closely to what was fresh and hot on Slashdot, only funny and twisted. Even the name of the site, “Segfault” refers to a fatal computer error.

Stories came in by way of the website owner and by the site’s readers. One of the more famous stories out of the Segfault site was written by Peter Norvig, who is currently Director of Research at Google, Inc. who writes a witty piece poking fun at all the lawsuits for copyrights and trademarks: “Songwriters, Publishers Sue Themselves.”

Ironically, Segfault’s demise was somewhat related to their catchy computer error name. In late 2001, the website shut down for good after losing its web hosting server. When they went to move the site to a new location, it came to light that their database containing all of their stories and user comments — the whole shabang — was corrupted and they were too stupid to make a backup. You can now find the creator and some of its contributors working at McDonalds (probably). Idiots.