Apple Answers Part of My Concerns About Apple TV
Apple answered part of my concerns about the Apple TV today with the announcement that they’ll now sell a CTO (configure to order) version of the device with a 160 GB hard drive installed. According to Apple, this model (slated to cost $399) has Apple has the capacity to store up to 200 hours of video, 36,000 songs, or 25,000 photos.
You’ll be able to order the 160 GB model starting tomorrow (5/31) from the Apple Store online. I’d still like to be able to add my own external hard drive to my Apple TV…
Technorati Tags: Apple, AppleTV, HDTV
No Big Deal - It’s Only a Palm Foleo
Once again, we have a device with hype exceeding the reality - the Palm Foleo. Billed as a Mobile Companion, it’s a 2.5 lb. wireless (Bluetooth, WiFi) net device. Think of it as a laptop that has limited functionality and you’re there. From the article on the Palm website, it appears that they think of this device as an accessory ($499) to a Treo. It will use the Treo to access email and the web from a “remote” location, while it uses WiFi when the user is sitting in an Internet caf
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You’ll notice that we have yet another theme this week. This one may stick for a while!
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iTunes 7.2 - New, Higher Quality DRM-free Music Downloads!
Mac owners had a nice gift this morning, which was a Software Update for iTunes that allows us to preview and purchase iTunes Plus music. This is the new higher quality and DRM-free (yayyyy!) music from our buddies at Apple and “participating music labels”. Now, if they would just provide a way to hook a 750 GB HD up to my Apple TV…
Press Release: VITO AudioNotes 1.3 with even more functionality
Compromise for Pocket PC Phone Edition recording
30 May, 2007
Palm Speculation
Tomorrow, Jeff Hawkins of Palm is expected to announce a new product line. The first generation devices included the original Palm Pilot and really ran through the unsuccessful LifeDrive. The second generation devices from Palm were the Treos, which have been very popular but are getting very dated with the “old” Palm OS and Windows Mobile operating systems. So there is a lot of speculation as to what this new device could possibly be…
Some people believe that the new device will be some sort of “
Apple TV Unboxing and First Impressions
Of course I bought an Apple TV! And so far, I’m pretty happy with it with one exception - the internal 40 GB hard drive is just too damned small. Well, let’s get on with the show.
It actually took me over a month to get this thing unboxed. I had purchased it at the opening of the Park Meadows Apple Store and literally didn’t have any time to do anything with it until this Memorial Day weekend. I also needed to buy an HDMI cable to connect the Apple TV to my 50″ Panasonic Plasma HDTV, and that took a while… But everything finally came together and with box and cable in hand, I got to work. (More after the break - be sure to click on pictures for high-res versions!)
Technorati Tags: Apple, AppleTV, Displays, HDTV, WiFi
Cool Stuff Du Jour - Sony’s Paper-Thin Flexible Display
The holy grail of displays has always been to create something as thin as a piece of paper, as bright as a backlit LCD display, and flexible so that it can be folded or wrapped. Sony has developed a new display that will hopefully be making its way to products in the near future - it’s .01 inches thick and can be bent, as you can see in the video below:
Sony and Apple have worked together on other projects. Maybe it’s time to think about making John Sculley’s Knowledge Navigator!
Technorati Tags: puppy
Another iPhone in the wild
This sighting is from GeekNUZ - the author saw one at a restaurant “somewhere in Silicon Valley” and passed along his commentary that he was hoping the iPhone would support 3rd-party apps. We can only hope that someone listens…
Technorati Tags: Apple, iPhone
Review: Test Driving the Sprint Moto Q
First, let me get one thing off my chest… Sprint, could you please shorten the name of your devices a bit? This review is about the Sprint Mobile Broadband Smart Device MOTO QTM by Motorola
Apple Has Apple Stores, Dell Has Wal-Mart
Need I say more? Apple has nice stores with well-trained employees selling their great products, and the word on the street is that Dell will be selling some of their desktop computers at Wal-Mart stores. Oh, yeah - there’s a shopping experience for you….
Press Release: VITO AstroNavigator II updated
Touching the Sky is Easy!
May 21, 2007
Ch..Ch..Ch..Changes
With apologies to David Bowie for that headline, I decided to make some more changes to the site. That’s both the curse and blessing of Content Management Systems such as WordPress - they’re so easy to tweak that it’s difficult to resist the temptation.
The license plate in the upper right hand corner of this page is mine - if you live in Colorado and you see the plate, I’m probably the person driving so be sure to say hi!
There are some other changes that I’m going to make soon, or I’m going to quit blogging altogether. I had a rude awakening the other day when I installed the new version of WordPress and saw how low my readership has dropped. Well, I’m going to start podcasting again and trying to post a lot more often. If that doesn’t start getting the hits back up, I guess I’ll just stop… I’ve been doing this since 1994 in one way or another, and it would be difficult to stop.
MacBook Boot Race
OK, I’m in Indianapolis, it’s late, I’m bored. So what do I do? Time how long it takes to boot my MacBook into Mac OS X 10.4.9 or Windows Vista Ultimate. In each case, I started the MacBook and chose the OS from the Boot Camp “menu” (i.e., I held down the Option key as the MacBook was powering up). I then timed how long it took for the login screen to appear. Once I had entered my user name and password, I then timed how long it took for the system to go from login to “usable” (i.e., can start other applications, all gadgets/widgets/garbage is loaded and I can actually get to work).
The results were as follows:
Windows Vista Ultimate
Boot to Login 40.16 seconds
Login to Usable 32.33 seconds
Mac OS X 10.4.9
Boot to Login 24.12 seconds
Login to Usable 28.17 seconds
It’s not very scientific, but it does show that here’s a lot less bulk behind Mac OS X, since it basically took about 52 seconds to get up and running while Vista was about 20 seconds slower.
If anyone else has done “boot races” or other Vista/Boot Camp vs. Mac OS X benchmarks on Intel Macs, I’d love to hear about your results.
Quick Note: Vista Doesn’t Suck As Much…
Thanks to the Mobile Devices folks at Microsoft and the Vista team, I recently got a NFR copy of Windows Vista Ultimate. While I had played with the release candidate back in September of 2006, I hadn’t had a chance to really see what the new version was like. Well, I have to say that although it’s still Windows, it IS much better than any previous version I’ve used.
I installed it under Parallels on my MacBook first, and it dragged… God, did it run slow! When I erased it and then installed Vista on my iMac under a beta of VMWare Fusion, it ran a bit faster but was still very slow. Finally, I decided to bite the bullet and install it under Boot Camp on my MacBook.
The installation was fast and painless compared to older versions of Windows including Vista. Other than asking me a question or two, the installation was up and running quickly. Of course, I then had to wait for it to install a handful of security fixes and updates, but you get that with any new load of any OS, including Mac OS X. Much to my surprise, when running on Boot Camp the Vista Aero Glass UI is supported, so all of the really cool features (transparency in the window frames, etc…) run very well.
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Joy of Tech!
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MacLevelTen
