Category: Tech

What’s that, you say? You want to hear all that great music at the SXSW music festival, but want to avoid going to Texas because it’s a horrible horrible place akin to the most hellish version of Hell-on-Earth imaginable?

I sympathize. And, apparently, so do the organizers of the SXSW festival. Because, according to Wired magazine, the organizers have made available more than 2.6 GB of songs from artists performing this year. For free.

And, even better, they’re using the open source free-speech software BitTorrent to do it.

Only something free-as-in-both-beer-and-speech like using BitTorrent to share free music could make Texas palatable.

I’m downloading the music even as we speak. Not getting good bandwidth yet (a paltry 4-5 kilobit per second) but it will increase as I get more pieces of the file.

Jef Raskin, interface super genius and the man most responsible for the original Macintosh (yes, even more than Steve Jobs), has passed away of pancreatic cancer.

Another intellectual hero of mine is gone. The world will be the poorer for it.

I GOT MY MAC MINI TODAY!! And as much as it pains me to say it, Apple is sometimes (how shall I say this?) somewhat less than perfect. Their setup wizard allows me to transfer over my home directory, applications, and OS settings from a previous computer — like, say, my iBook.

But the wizard transfered over ALL my laptop settings; like the Airport card, which doesn’t exist on my MM, but now I have a non-functional icon on the toolbar which I’m not sure how to remove. Or the fact that my desktop computer thinks it has a battery that doesn’t exist. But I could live with those things.

It’s just… frustrating

Argh. Brand-new computer and I have to reinstall the OS. I got it at 9 AM and I broke it before lunch.

I guess on the bright side I get to fire off some rant-y email to Apple. “Fix your damn wizard! It’s supposed to JUST WORK — PROPERLY!”

I went to the Apple Store out in Washington Square and they actually had floor models of the Mac Minis. I played with them for a bit to compare their performance to the Dual 2.5 GHz PowerMacs and the iMacs. The Mac Mini is, um, slower.

They really really are just a bit bigger than 5 or 6 CD jewel cases stacked up. TINY. In fact, when I walked up, I thought it was the power brick for the 23″ Apple Cinema Display it was connected to!

If I wasn’t jonesing for a DVD burner, I’d have cancelled my order and bought one on the spot. (SuperDrive is a build-to-order option only, more’s the pity).

I made sure and asked every sales person I saw if they had any iPod Shuffles in stock. The looks I got from the staff were priceless.

My combined Federal and State income tax refunds will cover the cost of an iPod Shuffle and a Mac Mini. Whoo-hoo!

…and even as I type this, they’ve been ordered. I’m getting the 1 GB Shuffle, and the faster Mac Mini. I paid Apple to upgrade to the SuperDrive (DVD-burner) and double the standard memory (for a total of 512 MB of RAM). Don’t need wireless and I’ve got a Bluetooth adapter for the Mini.

Also ponied up the $79 for Apple’s new iWork suite (can you call two programs a “suite”? More like a “bundle”), mainly for Pages. From the reviews I’ve seen, Pages is more like a page-layout program like Adobe’s InDesign, than it is a word-processor. Coolio.

Sadly, the Apple Store is quoting a ship time of “3-4 weeks” for the two hardware items. I’m likely to get the actual refund (thanks to the miracle of electronic deposit) before the items that it’s paying for show up. Ain’t that a stinker?

At least I’ll have the iPod Shuffle in time for the Shamrock Run in mid-March. If there’s no delays, at any rate.

OK, I called the Apple Store in Washington Square today, the actual retail location, not the online store, and asked them if they’ve received any iPod Shuffles from Apple yet. They were supposed to have shipped out on Saturday. I’d been reading reports on the internets that some stores had gotten some in and promptly sold out. I didn’t expect the store to have any in stock, I just wanted to know if they were arriving now.

The salesman who answered the phone said, yes, they’d got them in and sold them out almost immediately. He didn’t remember how many they got, he just said, “a LOT” and he seemed pretty impressed with it all.

(As a side note, they also got some of the Mac Minis in, and sold most of them; he said they had some of the lower-end model in stock. When I get one, I’m getting the one with the SuperDrive DVD-burning monster, so that was less important to me.)

I did, however, forget to ask him if they’d gotten both the 512 MB and 1 GB models in. I’m 87.73% sure I’m getting the 1 GB model, just ’cause it’s only $49 more for double the space. I’ve checked my favorite playlists, and they’re all more than a gig, though, so I’ll still have to cut down what I listen to.

So… the online Apple Store is showing a 4- to 6-week shipping time for orders placed today for the iPod Shuffle. On the other hand, how long will I have to wait for the demand to die down at the retail locations before I can walk in and pick one up… without having to camp out at the door?

Decisions… decisions… I’d prefer to have my “Must! Have! One! NOW!” impulse satisfied quickly, by plunking down the benjamins and walking away with one in my hot grasp… but there’s also something to be said for not having to stalk the poor Apple retail salesfolk until I can get one.

Still not sure which path to take… but the pressure of consumerism, combined with the nice weather and my new expectation of being able to run with music, will probably force my hand into ordering one online this week. We’ll see if I can hold out longer than that.

But signs, as they say, don’t look good.

OH! And, get this: my old iBook has the old, slow, USB, not the super-fast USB 2.0 that the iPod Shuffle uses. So, when I get it, it’s going to take frickin’ for-ever to fill it up. So, until I get that Mac Mini, I’m not going to be changing the playlist on my Shuffle very often. Do you see just how insidious Apple and Steve Jobs are? It’s like they’re forcing me to upgrade!

Curse you, Steve Jobs!!

I’d make a comment about Apple owning my soul, but I don’t believe I have one in the first place, so, y’know, it’s all good.

Update:

My previous post originally contained a link to a lyrics website. I found the site through a quick Google search and it seemed inoffensive enough.

However, I have been informed by one of the six or seven readers of my site that the link led to a bunch of nasty spyware-installing and popup-producing windows.

Since I use a Mac as my primary machine, and use Firefox when I’m forced to use a Windows machine, I didn’t even notice that my browser had blocked a bunch of nasty probably-virus-installing-but-definitely-deserving-of-hyphentation malware from ever appearing.

I tested the link by loading it up in Insecure Exploiter (a.k.a. Internet Explorer), and, sure enough, managed to get infected with lots of stuff that my virus scanning software didn’t like.

So I have changed the link in the original post to Blues Traveler’s official lyrics page. I would have linked there originally but this morning the Blues Traveler site was tremendously sloooooooooooow and I had better things to surf for.

My apologies to the other readers of my site who are stuck using insecure operating systems and haven’t seen the light. My sincere apologies. I’ll be more careful next time. Probably. But if I’m not, it’s not my fault.

More Apple news:

Apple posted its best quarter results EVAR on Wednesday.

Net profit $295 million, on revenues of $3.49 billion. More than a million Macs sold last quarter — and 4.85 million iPods!

The bestbestbest part is that the good news pushed Apple’s stock up over $72 per share in after-hours trading. Which makes the one share of Apple stock I purchased several years ago at $15.50 seem like an actual wise investment. Yay, me!

I do some side work as a computer technician/consultant. But lately, with the massive proliferation of spyware and other malware for Windows, I’ve been turning down work, work for which I could be paid pretty well on an hourly basis but a fight that is, essentially, unwinnable. The spyware and adware is so malignant that it can infect a computer almost faster than it can be patched… so I can spend hours on a PC, trying to clean it off, only to have it remain infected.

It looks bad, even though I’m using all the skills I’ve learned over the years, to have the customer’s PC still get pop-up ads and have it’s home page set to porn. Lately when I’m asked, I give a couple of pointers on programs that will do a decent job of removing the spyware, and then tell them that Windows is rapidly becoming unusable because of spyware.

But now… because the Mac mini is so damned cheap… I’ve got a new recommendation.

Just buy a Mac if you want to surf in peace.

If you want to deal with Windows… then you’ll need to learn how to remove spyware on a regular basis.

Macs — easy to use, and now just as cheap (cheaper, even, if you consider all the excellent software it comes with)than a Dell. And a hell of a lot more stable and secure.

Yay, Apple! They’re gonna sell a freakin’ metric tonne of these…