Posts tagged: APPLE

During the same period that I thought I’d be playing a lot with an old Dell laptop running Ubuntu Linux (but haven’t), several notable Apple fans have made, or are seriously and publicly considering making, the jump from OS X to open-source operating systems like Ubuntu.

Mark Pilgrim led the way. (He does work for IBM, though he’s gotten remarkably few snide remarks about that in the comments.)

Cory Doctorow is talking like he’s about to do it as well. Cory has a Mac tattooed on his bicep, but that might not last either.

A story on Slashdot notes that Yahoo is now selling one (yes, one) MP3 without digital rights management shackles. The best comment I saw:

This isn’t a marketing ploy to pretend to be anti-DRM when they are not, and this is not being done because they “want to work on other stuff”. This is being done because DRM free music is the only way Yahoo and company can break into the monopoly iTunes has over the iPod, which itself has a near monopoly on MP3 players.

From Slate.com: textcasting.

The text is actually contained in a 15-minute audio file. (It’s 15 minutes of silence, which is how we make the file so small.) Play the file as you would any other podcast, and then hit the iPod’s center button two or three times until you reach the description field, which contains the full TP text. You can scroll through the text using the iPod’s scroll wheel.

All this for the lack of a feed reader.

The MacBook is out today. It’s a bit more than an iBook replacement; for Apple laptop fans this single detail from the tech specs page says that loud and clear:

Extended desktop and video mirroring: Simultaneously supports full native resolution on the built-in display and up to 1920 x 1200 pixels on an external display, both at millions of colors.

Finally! Goodbye, unauthorized hacks.

At 5.2 pounds it’s about the same weight as the old Titanium.

Tonight I had to get some data off a Dell Inspiron 4000 that has a totally screwed up W98ME installation. Rather than struggle again with burning CDs from the broken system, I decided to see how hard it was to get at the hard drive itself.

I didn’t have any directions or anything, I just flipped the laptop over and started unscrewing stuff (I’ve done this since I was a kid, but have gotten a little bit better at putting things back together). My first impression was, “Boy, look at this ugly design. Little bulges and seams everywhere. How inelegant.” Somewhere in the middle of that thought, having removed three likely-looking screws, I was pulling on an odd little hatch on the side and, whoosh, there’s the hard drive in my hand, mounted on its little sled. A minute later it was in my external FW enclosure and connected to my PowerBook.