New stuff!

Anyone who uses iTunes and the social music site last.fm will need to know that ScrobblePod is my find of the day. At last a replacement for the crashy/CPU looping iScrobbler which was abandoned by the developer.

This reminds me: abandonware on the iTunes Store. Your Articles Today - Daily Google Reader News was a great RSS reader with the most elegant black and white GUI. The latest version I downloaded (before it disappeared from the app Store) no longer links to Safari or Instapaper so I'm thinking about removing it from my iPad. All it will do is pull down new stuff from Google Reader. What to do? The developer is on LinkedIn and Facebook so I could bug the guy but I think not. I've seen many shareware apps abandoned and the fact that I've made a payment has never cut much ice with developers — other projects become more important or they will plead poverty. The only solution I can see is sharing the love: get on the App Store and rate and review the apps that I like, thereby spreading the news and increasing the popularity of the app while it's still supported.

PS I've abandoned the last post (below) about iPod/iPhone apps. There are too many of them now. I must add that the Defender game has now arrived! Defender! is a reasonable copy of the original and Planet Defence is older but looks better.

Programmable computing devices

Backpack for your mobile.

GeekBrief TV is a tech news podcast presented by "Cali Lewis". She's cute and informative.

The Amiga is back! This article is old and a bit of a tease but brings us more-or-less up-to-date with the Amiga computer. For more info see amiga.org, amigaweb.net, amigaos.dk, wiki.aminet.net, www.amigafuture.de, www.amiga-hardware.com... in these days of Mac and Windows it might seem an anachronism but imagine how its virtual memory multitasking OS would fly on modern hardware.

For both Mac and Windows: Subway maps for your iPod. Or for webmasters, how about a portable CSS guide: just copy the westciv Style Master CSS podGuide to the Notes folder on your iPod.

Rather than packing an obliterator ray in your holiday luggage, you can remove unsightly people from your snaps with Tourist Remover, a free online photo tool.

PC myths: IBM's BIOS.

macbillboard has smashing desktop wallpaper, especially some beautiful isometric artwork.

Get free PowerPoint templates from A PowerPoint Blog.

Persuasive game: Disaffected! sounds a bit depressing to me. It puts the player in the role of a copy shop employee.

Disaffected! gives the player the chance to step into the demotivated position of real FedEx Kinkos employees. Feel the indifference of these purple-shirted malcontents first-hand, and consider the possible reasons behind their malaise -- is it mere incompetence? Managerial affliction?

For Mac only: free games. Actually, most games are free for people like me who seldom get to level 3, thanks to demo mode. macgamefiles.com

David Weiss works at Microsoft as a software design engineer in the Mac Business Unit. A programmer, in other words?

todo.txt is a way of maintaining a to do list with text and scripts from the command line, on Unix or Mac OS X.

Julian Wright is doing superb work on mobile.feisar.com to make sure iSync works with all the latest Sony Ericsson mobile phones via Bluetooth and he also provides icons and themes. Makes me wanna trade-in my old Alcatel.

Mac Webdesign Workflow recommends some great software for making web sites - will he ever use Dreamweaver? Oh, the tension.

For all you presentation fiends, Les Posen's CyberPsych Blog is strong on Keynote. Al Gore and Steve Jobs do not use PowerPoint!

Hello Mac - the lost 1984 video clip collection. Steve Jobs spoke faster then.

I reboot my Mac at home every five or six weeks, when Apple sends me a system upgrade, otherwise I would never need to. Windows machines, on the other hand, need frequent rebooting. Crash Test.

The workaround is to reboot them periodically, and savvy Windows sysadmins typically do this as a matter of routine every month. If they fail to do this, their servers will progressively slow down, choking on their own detritus. Eventually, after a tad under 50 days, they'll automatically shut down, even if they're managing one of the most safety-critical tasks in the world.

Announcing the Apple iProduct. The riposte: Apple Haters Unite!

Dashboard Widgets Showcase.

Take a virtual tour around Apple Store Fifth Avenue.

Realize your strange ideas and creative desires with Apple's iLife Tutorials for iPhoto, iMovie HD, Garageband, iTunes, iDVD and iWeb.

Naughty. HandBrake copies DVD films to iPod or PSP format. Update thanks to Technorati Profile I know this now called MediaFork.

A new use for old Macs: MacQuarium.

Hrmpf! is a good Apple blog.

295 different Apple Mail icons. I use the Boris Karloff icon.

I have dreams about taking this to concerts. iTalk is a high quality stereo microphone for the iPod. In the seventies I took a big cassette recorder with me to lots of concerts and no-one seemed to mind. It's tremendously evocative listening to Hawkwind occasionally filtered by the unique acoustics of the toilets in the Hammersmith Odeon.

Apple Mac stuff

The iPod microphone iTalk has many possibilities:

When you've got a really fat teacher that mumbles during your lessons at college, but your parents don't believe you, record the fat teacher on your iPod. Its the only way to sort the problem out.

Wow, a whistleblower that didn't get in trouble.

You can unstall Linux on the iPod and then record for free or play Doom on an iPod.

One reason to look in at an Apple Store are the thirty inch Cinema HD Displays. These unfeasibly huge screens need two special new Geforce cards to drive their 4.1M pixels.

Apple at MoMA photoset

Newsfire is a very sexy RSS aggregator.

Audion is now free. 1. install. 2. register with free password. You can then copy playlists to it or access iPod files directly. And the story of why Audion is now free is fascinating.

iTunes LAME encoder. Many people prefer the sound quality of this mp3 encoder to the new m4a encoder in QuickTime/iTunes.

Game: Homeworld 2. Looks like it's time to upgrade my iMac. This is apparently like an interactive Chris Foss painting. Chris illustrated many sf book covers in the 1970s.

Keys:

CMD Shift I = inspector
ALT ESC = complete the word
CTRL EJECT = Shutdown
CMD OPT CTRL 8 = White on black

Problems logging in? Run Diablotin to check startup items.

Network problems? In system prefs, try setting Network, Ethernet, manual, MTU to 1458 because 1500 is too big for some ISPs. Restart to make sure the value has changed.

From MacFormat, October 2004:

If you can toggle Caps Lock, then it's a 'hang' not a 'freeze'. Hang is software (usually), freeze is hardware.

Browser Chrome

Will you look at the size of the chrome on this browser! This is Firefox using tabs with the Web Developer XPI. It's great, you can edit the style sheet en vivo.

New Apple Store on Regent Street

reflective windows of the new Apple Store

Originally uploaded by Tom Coates.

Apple's new shop on Regent Street opens in 53 minutes. People from all over the world have been queuing outside (around the block) for 36 hours.

More Apple Store photos and video at ifoAppleStore from an Apple Store chaser. Meanwhile the BBC's angle is negative in one way, that the shop will not have enough iPods. The Beeb has a video report by Rory-Cellan Jones. The Sunday Times journalist had a tour and decided all the staff are fascists.

What I want to know is: why does this shop have a longer Genius Bar (14 metres!) than their 98 other shops? Do they think we are fick or wot!

Also in town today is MacExpo!

I'm not going to either because I will spend lots of money if I do, not only on the Lucky Bag but also on a PowerBook to replace my old iMac and iBook. I really do want to sell the old ones first this time and not end up with old computers around the place. I can see the great architecture and design of "the most exciting retail experience in Europe" next time I am up west. As the Guardian says: "The shop, with its acres of pale grey Italian stone flooring and soaring glass staircase, has all the scale and splendour of a modern cathedral".

There were 400 people in the queue at 03:00 this morning, according to Stormy's live blog:

8 hours before the opening and I don't feel a bit tired at all. Every couple of minutes I get introduced to a few more people that I don't want to stop talking to, not to mention the passerbys that are awestruck at the sight. The above pretty much sums up why I haven't updated: no time to do it all! I can only imagine how juggling taking pictures and uploading them to the site would be.

To drive this weblog when it is occasionally in motion, I collect scribble on bits of paper, like my old Irish granny, so I need this modeless notes program with great search: Notational Velocity.

Some random Apple links: The Seed of Apple's Innovation.

The True Story of Audion.

New hip Windows PC! ha ha ha

So, a few windows open on the screen. Ever wanted to scribble on the back of them?

Missing Deluxe Paint on the Amiga? Try Pixen 2.

Delicious Library is a good-looking cataloguing application that doesn't require you to buy a barcode scanner - just use your webcam! I wish I'd thought of that. Also Booxter, another stylish cataloguer for books, uses the same idea and claims to be the first so to do.

Clean your speckly pix: Noise Ninja. It prefers uncompressed TIFFs.

HyperEdit is a live HTML/CSS/JavaScript/PHP editor.

An alternative to iMic: UA-20 a USB audio/MIDI interface.

For recording vinyl: Ray Gun. There is also a Pro version.

For backing-up DVDs: Mac the Ripper.

MoreInternet can change helper apps for Internet links.