Months after the announcement that they would do so, HP has begun selling the iPod. Different faceplates can be gotten through HP (thought I believe they are actually sticker; I couldn’t get a picture of them because I refused to wade through their flash based iPod site).
This is a win-win situation for Apple and HP. Apple spreads its market dominence while increasing public visibility. HP gets to sell an existing product (meaning no reasearch and development costs) that’s already dominating the market. This allows them to sell the iPod at lower prices as well as bundle it with their own systems.
As probably nearly all readers of this site know, I am a volunteer moderator over at Macworld’s Forums. Macworld recently revamped their website and accompanying website, MacCentral, which a new design. It’s a radical change for sure, but uses CSS heavily to improve portability and loading speed.
It has also moved Macworld’s news site into the main site and pointed the comment system for those stories into Macworld’s existing forums. This had couple changes that went along with it. The first being that existing MacCentral users had to get new usernames at Macworld’s forums (resulting in 0 post counts). It also meant that existing discussions were in a different forum system.
Following a Paul Hamm’s dramatic recovery from a mistake during the overall gymnastics competition at the Olympics, we all learned of a scoring error that would have meant only second place for him, giving the bronze medalist the gold.
Naturally, it’s a sad turn of events for the South Korean, but the Federation of International Gymnasts (FIG) has refused to step up to the plate to rectify their mistake. Instead of giving Yang Tae-young another gold or telling the world that they made a mistake and that it is final, they are calling upon Paul Hamm to turn his medal in and “do the right thing.” Suddenly, the competitor who has no hand in the scoring, is being asked to rectify the situation? He is being called upon to fix things. It’s absurd!
The week after next I’ll be working in Woburn instead of Bedford. This makes for a longer commute from my home. My parents will also be selling this house and moving up to Maine.
This adds up to me needing a new apartment of my very own. I’ve never gotten an apartment before so this will be a new experience. My friends that have gotten an apartment have done so through people they knew at school.
Building up hours to prepare for some mandatory vacation time next week is sucking up my time this week. Working 10 hours a day sucks up most of my free time and drains any energy I have to post anything. Making matters worse, today was a slow news day in the Mac world. We probably won’t see anything too major until September when the new iMac is introduced.
.Mac users get Virex 7.5: “Following McAfee Inc.’s July announcement that its Macintosh anti-virus software utility Virex would be updated to version 7.5 and released in August, the new version of the software is now available for download for subscribers of Apple’s .Mac online service. .Mac has offered previous versions of Virex as part of its basic service. Virex 7.5 incorporates new features including a background scanner, an “active” scanner that maintains connections to the local network and the Internet, new tracking and reporting capabilities, a schedule editor that lets you automate scans and updates and more.” (Via MacCentral.)
I’m feeling particularly saucy today, so I thought I’d start in on a series of entries about how to do things with OS X’s Terminal application. This is the first lesson.
Many Mac users are familiar with Omniweb, the web browser. When I first started using OS X, Omniweb was the best game in town. Looking back, that was a rather sad state of affairs, but then again, Mac OS X 10.0 was pretty sad in terms of software support.
Soon Mozilla’s browser started shaping up as it approached 1.0. IE got a little better when it hit 5.2. Then Apple released Safari. We finally had a full array of viable alternatives. Mozilla lured me away from Omniweb’s substandard javascript support. Apple lured me away from Mozilla’s non-standard interface.
My work requires me to work on a Unix box for a good part of my time. For some of you, that may sound daunting, hard, or archaic, but really it isn’t. It sure beats trying to develop things on Windows every hour of every day.
It actually makes working with others exceedingly easy. We all look at essentially the same filesystem thanks to the wonders of NFS. One can log into another machine if their machine is loaded, or even into much larger computers that have no physical terminal. Very handy.
For some time now, I was using Watson to look through TV listings, look at show descriptions, change the channel on my EyeTV, and schedule recordings.
Due to changes at TVGuide.com, all those features have been lost. I originally bought Watson solely for those features. I’ll be surprised if the EyeTV support is kept for the product that is succeeding Watson due to its cross-platform and Java nature.
I know the changes to TVGuide.com are outside of Mr. Wood’s hands, but the sudden disappearance of the EyeTV features just smacks of the lack of support that I expected to come after he announced the end of support in October.