In response to Wired.com’s scoop identifying the finder of the lost iPhone prototype, many have asked me how we did it. The process of uncovering digital footprints to identify Brian Hogan was indeed challenging and enlightening, so I thought I’d tell the story here. Heck, it might even teach police officers a thing or two so they don’t have to kick down doors.

Wired certainly deserves some credit for breaking the story. Initiative in this day and age of blogs usually get you the good kind of attention. However, it doesn’t give you free license to be a jackass and make smarmy comments that make no sense.

The facts are that:

1. The police were able to search Jason Chen’s home because what they did can be considered illegal unto itself.
2. There is no data to suggest that the police seized his drives to find the iPhone finder.
3. Breaking the door down is completely justified because no one answered the door. Why? Because otherwise every two-bit cyber thug would simply ignore the police knocking on the door, delete all their data, and then let in the police. At which point, the police would be criticized and called inept for not breaking down the door. You’re naive if you believe otherwise.

Wired, kudos on your exclusive and please tone back the glib.

The Apple Design Awards 2010 recognize iPhone OS applications that demonstrate technical excellence, innovation, technology adoption, and quality.

As this is the case, the content you consume needs to match your limits. Trying to consume more than you have time for simply frustrates you and leaves you less time to consume the content you actually enjoy.

Be passionate about your content

When you’re going to invest your time into something, make sure that it’s something you truly enjoy. Watching movies because a bunch of anonymous strangers think it’s a great movie, listening to podcasts because they’re about a subject your care about, or watching TV shows because you liked precious seasons are not rules that you must obey. Those motivations are great ways to home in on content you might like, but it doesn’t mean you will like it.

Podcasts are probably one of the best examples to examine because they’re almost entirely free, serialized, in directories with ratings, on any subject you can think of, and are obtained easily. Your first motivation is to subscribe to everything popular or concerning a subject you’re passionate about. Remember though, your tastes won’t align with everyone else and podcasts can be drivel in spite of the subject matter.

You want to be passionate about the content itself and not just because of the original motivation to check it out to begin with.

Stop worrying losing content

The fact is, that unless something was created by you (your own blog, your photos, your paintings, your own podcast), you have no reason to archive it like a librarian. That content isn’t going to disappear off the face of the earth if you don’t consume right away or hold on it “for later”.

It’s the internet age! If you aren’t holding on to it, you can rest assured some geek, somewhere, with too much time on his hands is. Not only that, he’ll be willing to post it to a half dozen places at a moment’s notice. Barring that, everything is being put on DVD (Bluray) now. Podcast authors want to feel immortal, so their back archives will be available forever.

Discard piles

You ever hear the phrase “same shit, different piles”? That’s more true than you realize. If you’re amassing piles of stuff, there’s a reason for it. You don’t like the content. You think it’s shit.

Let’s just ignore edge cases where you’re saving it for someone else or you’re catching up.

Those 15 episodes of the latest season of Law and Order are telling you that you really don’t want to watch them. Those 100 podcast episodes sitting in iTunes are telling you the same thing (and for the love of everything holy, don’t manual refresh feeds when iTunes notices you’re not listening and stops downloading on its own). Heck, that Netflix disc that’s been sitting next to your TV for weeks as you watch and return disc after disc is dying to be sent home.

You can quickly sort out some of the stuff you have the least interest in while freeing up the most bandwidth in one shot. Free yourself as well as your DVR’s hard drive. Delete the stuff collecting in a clump.

This is not a job

Consuming your content is not a job. Don’t feel obligated to consume if you aren’t getting excited. Did you subscribe to a podcast because it was about something you liked but feel dread about playing that latest episode? Are you only listening because it’s filling up your iPhone/iPod? Stop listening. You should be anticipating the next episode, not dragging through it. Your doing this for enjoyment, not out of obligation (financial or otherwise).

I don’t know if I can stress this enough. Too many people continue to take in the same crap because they feel they should or because they’ll be left out if they don’t. Neither is true. Be Thomas Jefferson about it. Throw it away. If it comes back to through someone know or something you enjoy, it was important. If it didn’t, it wasn’t important to begin with. Save your time for the fun stuff.

Joel Johnson wrote an otherwise brilliant piece that says:

So what if you can’t make iPad programs on an iPad. I don’t complain I can’t make new dishwashers with my dishwasher.

Doctorow doesn’t outright call this out as an issue, but it fits with the theme of what he wrote. The problem is this is analogy is flawed. Let’s see if you can tell the problem with it if I put it in mathematical format.

iPad programs : iPad :: dishwasher : dishwasher

It becomes rather clear, doesn’t it? It’s essentially saying that iPad programs are iPads unto themselves. Let’s make it even worse.

Apologies to Dan Jalkut (I love MarsEdit; don’t hate me), but this gem is even worse.

“You can’t write apps for the device.” Yeah, and you can’t publish a book with a book. Or write a pen with a pen.

Joel’s analogy almost worked because he started talking about appliances. It goes wrong from there, but the groundwork is there. The above is just wrong from the get-go.

This isn’t to say I agree with the concept. Is it important to be able to develop iPad applications using an iPad? No. The ability to create content for a platform using the platform itself isn’t important. It’s really not. Computers are one of the few (if only?) devices that do this extensively. Let’s use some other (slightly more valid) analogies to argue against this idea.

You can’t make PS3 games using a PS3. You can’t make movies using a Bluray player. It’s easy. I’m sure you can come up with some as well.

The fact is that for consumer devices (which the iPad is), it’s not important to be able to develop content for it with the device itself. I agree with you. But I’m also begging you all to stop using bad analogies to argue this truth.

A long time ago in a computer far far away

My backup plan was once dead simple. I used CCC or Super Duper to create a clone of my boot drive whenever I thought of it. Sometimes I was good and did it weekly, sometimes I went months without.

Thankfully I had no crashes during this period. I never had to experience the frustration of losing a month of data.

Let’s do the time warp again

Time Machine! I was so excited when I finally got a drive to use with it. I turned it on and got frustrated any time it monopolized my I/O attempting to back up. Honestly I can’t tell you if specifically Snow Leopard fixed it, but I haven’t gone searching for the Time Machine menu to stop the backup for a long time.

I still did my Super Duper backups, but it became less of a priority because it wasn’t automated.

Disaster

It finally happened. I lost my boot drive (which was under warranty thankfully). I could cool off the drive and get a few minutes of work, but not enough time to do a Super Duper backup and I/O just made it die faster. I was using my Super Duper drive to temporarily back someone else up.

Luckily, I had a Time Machine backup ready to go. That was almost not the case as just weeks before I finally replaced the power supply on my Time Machine disk (thank you OWC for quick diagnosis and replacement).

It was time to see if the machine would do its job.

It just worked

Once I got my replacement boot drive, it was time to stick in the SL disk and try the restore. As you can already guess, it worked. I selected my Time Machine disk and initiated the restore.

Your mileage may vary, but Time Machine is now my preferred method for incremental and bulk backup. There are a few reasons why.

1. I don’t have to do anything to keep it up to date. Seriously, no matter how many calendar reminders or OCD you are, backup plans fail when you need to do something on a schedule rather than the machine do it for you.
2. It protects you from your own stupidity. Clones are great, but they won’t help you dig out a file you deleted three weeks ago unless you either didn’t backup since then (shame on you) or you keep a clone rotation large enough to have a backup old enough (expensive and impractical for most as well as having the problem of requiring lots or manual interaction).
3. You can do a bulk restore easily despite it not being a bootable disk. Stick in your Mac OS X install DVD and you can do it with a few clicks.

The moving target

Time Machine works great if you have a desktop or regularly connect your computer to a series of peripherals, but I haven’t chained a laptop down like that in years. Needless to say, the cloning plan I used on my MacBook wasn’t working for me.

I could in theory use a Time Capsule to use Time Machine for this situation. Problem 1 is that I’m cheap. Time Capsules are expensive. Problem 2 is that assuming I could get it accessible using Back to My Mac behind my FiOS router, it’s not really supported.

The solution was to use Crashplan. If you use their software to backup to another computer belonging to you or a friend, it’s free. I have a computer that’s on a lot with lots of storage and it’s own backup plan in place! I installed the software, told the Mac Pro to use a specific hard drive as the destination, and initiated backup from the MacBook.

Now anytime the two are on at the same time, the MacBook will back up to my Mac Pro regardless of local network or over the Internet proximity. Crashplan has fantastic in the background incremental backup. It meets the requirement of doing its work without me.

I only have it set up to back up my home directory, but I don’t store significant irreplaceable data anywhere else, so at worst I reinstall and then restore my home directory.

The Achilles heel

As written (correctly) elsewhere, my backup plan is incomplete. One fire at my house would wipe it all out. More specifically, my plan doesn’t include offsite backup.

When I finally stop being cheap (can’t help it), I will probably sign up for Crashplan’s subscription service. I have two options for that.

1. I purchase the single computer plan and backup only the Mac Pro. That actually covers both computers.
2. I buy the family plan and set both computers to use it. The MacBook would still back up to the Mac Pro as well because assuming I connect it to my network, restoration would be much faster from the Mac Pro. It also lets anyone living with me back up their computers.

I’m not saying my plan is a blue print for everyone else. I am saying that you need to consider the profound importance of a backup strategy that requires no action on your part. The biggest risk in any backup plan is always you. Backups are for the improbable situation. The most probable unfortunate event is you failing to connect your backup drive and running your backup software. Take it out of the loop, or at the very least, make it a redundant bonus.

However, their other columns present sometimes out of date, and sometimes even wrong information. For example, Charles Moore often writes about the failure of IMAP. This goes back years, but let’s check out the latest installment.

Why am I not an IMAP fan? Guess I’ve spent too many years with slow Internet access and prefer to have my email archives on my hard drive and accessible without being online. Not many wireless hot spots in this neck of the (literal) woods, and with IMAP your messages remain on the central mail server, whereas POP downloads all messages in your inbox onto your computer where you can access them for reference whether you’re online or not.

I appreciate that IMAP can be a good choice for people who need to access email from multiple computers, but for my own accounts where that is more convenient, I use Gmail with POP access configured to leave the messages on the Gmail server, which seems to me the best of both worlds.

The entire argument centers on the idea that IMAP doesn’t allow for email reading and searching when you’re not online. That would be a great argument against its use in some cases (as it is for webmail) if it were true. It’s not.

The fact is that IMAP email clients for as long as I can remember have cached the contents of your IMAP account. Mail.app does it. Entourage does it. Thunderbird does it. There may have been cases in the long past when this was turned off by default, but I can’t remember the last time I had to check the “Cache my mail” option.

If you’ve ever watched Mail.app’s Activity Viewer when working with an IMAP account, you’ll notice it making a series of connections as it traverses your folder structure, downloading headers, and the message bodies of all your email. It writes them to your disk and from that point on, if you try to look at that email and you’re offline, it simply reads it from the disk.

It seems totally obvious if you take a moment to think about it. When you do a Spotlight search, it goes through all your email trying to find that phrase. Does it really seem practical or even possible (when accounting for speed) that it would be prodding a server for all that information every time you did a search? Of course not.

The fact is that there is no good reason to use POP over IMAP anymore. None. Well, that is unless you have a hankering to use Claris Emailer again.

It’s not totally ignored no. Indeed there’s a ticket for the problem. It has a Medium priority. Medium? Not working with Firefox isn’t that important?

That got me thinking. The last time I checked, the latest Safari in Snow Leopard wasn’t supported. Still true. Also has a Medium priority.

So, it’s not supported on Safari in Snow Leopard, the latest Firefox, or Chrome for Mac OS X. That leaves… nothing. No Snow Leopard support using the latest browsers.

There’s two conclusions. First, Google Gears isn’t a priority for Google. Second, Mac OS X support isn’t a priority for Google. Take your pick.

Edit: Turns out that I missed the Google announcement that Gears was effectively dead in favor of HTML5’s storage capability. While a move to a standard is good, nowhere on Google’s Gears site does it mention this fact. Indeed this fact probably makes all non-security Gears tickets a “WONT-FIX” but it’s very poorly being communicated and does nothing to address the fact that today’s sites with offline capabilities still use Gears.

In order to get any satisfaction as a Snow Leopard user, you’ll need to download Firefox 3.5.x. That’s a little backward.

Update: Finally, some kind of acknowledgement.

I love Macs and technology in general. Combine that with my work ethic-like approach to new things, and you can see how I could burn out. It became a job. An endless job of trying to turn a few grains of actual information into an expansive network of information. At one point, the site was effective enough to give you a way to track what I did minute to minute.

I’m not by any stretch of the imagination famous and it seemed to be too much. I began to feel paranoid about who knew what. It’s not even that I necessarily did anything bad or worth being ashamed about, but being approached by people about things you didn’t even give a second though to has a strange effect on one’s psyche.

As an aside, I feel that now that I’m back on Twitter. A casual mention of a product is enough to get a response from a corporate representative. Empowering and creepy at the same time.

Backing off from this site and eventually my Mac blogging job gave me some relief. It also afforded perspective about what’s really important to me. As much as I like keeping up with the latest in the technology world, treating it like a competition wasn’t making me happy. It made me frustrated.

By treating it as I should have all along, I could start to enjoy technology once again. The thrill of poking around at software had returned. I was doing it for fun and not to write another article late at night that ultimately was filled with information to keep commenters from turning into hecklers.

Make no mistake. The internet is filled with anonymity-empowered asshats. You can’t publish something to the internet without some basement dwelling, pop-tart scarfer correcting you on some minor, inconsequential piece of information. These are people so frustrated with their own situation that they’ll do anything in their power to transfer their angst to you.

The worst part is that it works. It gets to you. You can do great work. You can do it for years. You can bring great information to the table. The moment you have a typo, you’ll get the most vicious comment. It’s enough to drive you to rage and want to forsake the whole lot of them (and by whole lot of them, that include people genuinely appreciative of what you do, but don’t want to seem like sycophants by chiming in with “Great article” comments).

There are times when rather than using reason and wit to address and embarrass a jackass, you’d rather tell them “fuck you and the horse you rode in on.” You can almost taste that anger relief. It’s so sweet. You suck it up, try to be the bigger man, and bottle it.

It’s been a while since I’ve dealt with it, but it’s not far from my mind and in my travels across the web I find instances every day. These are established people in the industry that I respect and are generally the most patient I’ve found.

I think it’s time I return to the web at large, or, more aptly, a return to small portions of it. No longer am I going to try to be part of every growing trend. If the last couple of years have taught me nothing else, web services come and go. As much as I enjoy Twitter, the people that are proclaiming that it’s taking over the web are so far up their ass that they can’t see that Twitter will have its day and fade to the background, just like every other fad.

Twitter is the new Usenet. And I mean really, who remembers Vox? Do those web “experts” that proclaimed the death of email realize that all those email killers are dead?

I’m not going to get as invested as I once did. I’ll move with software and web services as the times dictate, but never build anything up as the solution to everything. Being obsessive sucks the fun out of things.

So… I’m back.

PS You’re still a towel.

Macworld, as in Macworld Magazine and Macworld Expo, is spelled as I have it. Macworld Expo is like Mecca, but for Mac users. It’s the ultimate event in the Mac universe. Given that fact, why is it so god damned hard to spell it right?

I’ve noticed two groups are the worst offenders, or at least get under my skin the most: vendors sending out promotional emails and Mac news outlets and blogs. The two most common misspellings are MacWorld and Mac World. Let me tell you something guys, it’s your responsibility to at least be able to spell the name of the event.

The news sites/blogs are the worst because they act as authoritative sources about Mac culture and information. How am I supposed to take your predictions and prognostications seriously when you don’t even spell it right. No matter how hard I try to displace my thoughts, all those articles end up looking like:

At teh MacWorld expo I preedict the AWEsome iPhone!!11!!!!!11!!

So please, I beg of the Mac community: spell it right. Don’t look like an idiot. Don’t make us all look like idiots.

They don’t have a domain that’s dedicated to mailing lists, so the addresses are productname-talk@barebones.com. I’m also a compulsive filer, so I apply labels to these messages for quick manipulation. One label is “mailing lists”. Rather than map email “To:” each of these email addresses, I’ve been using the fact that filters work on a contains instead of match basis to simplify. For the longest time a filter that looked for “To: talk@barebones.com” worked perfectly. It’s suddenly stopped working. It’s now an exact match.

Dear Google,

Don’t change filter behavior without notifying your users and giving them an alternative method to attain the same functionality.

Thanks,
Derik

Here’s the wacky part. If you filter based upon an email string with nothing preceding the at sign, such as “@barebones.com”, the filter becomes a contain based filter. Ugh. Say it with me: inconsistent.

I was willing to cut Google some slack with their filters and the fact that it can’t filter based on arbitrary headers (like the list headers that most mailing lists slap on for easy filtering). It’s annoying, but something I could live with. Now the filters are essentially useless. Why? It’s not hard to implement powerful, flexible filters. As accurate and fast as their search is, I still want to organize my email to help prune. It makes the results more manageable. It’s almost as if Google is intentionally trying make its filters impotent to the point that users have to stop using it, at which point, Google can axe it completely.

12:11:04 AM mmskmmskmmsk: dlong
12:11:08 AM mmskmmskmmsk: get the fuck outta here
12:11:16 AM mmskmmskmmsk: posting garbage on digg
12:11:24 AM mmskmmskmmsk: trying to promote your own shitty site
12:11:44 AM mmskmmskmmsk: like you broke a story or something
12:11:48 AM mmskmmskmmsk: you didnt break shit
12:12:00 AM mmskmmskmmsk: the article on that site was not proven fake
12:12:11 AM dbasstard: oh, you’re an ewoky guy!
Changed status to Online (12:12:11 AM)
12:12:12 AM mmskmmskmmsk: so stop trying to get press off it like you owned them
12:12:15 AM mmskmmskmmsk: nope
12:12:24 AM mmskmmskmmsk: but ive followed this since last night
12:12:34 AM mmskmmskmmsk: and you’re acting like a retard trying to cash in
12:12:51 AM dbasstard: so, is it Chris? or Lethal?
12:13:00 AM dbasstard: why are you so obsessed about this?
12:13:05 AM mmskmmskmmsk: because you are
12:13:15 AM mmskmmskmmsk: because you’re trying to fuck up someones site
12:13:21 AM mmskmmskmmsk: the shit was explained
12:13:29 AM mmskmmskmmsk: but no, you had to go and fuck with them
12:13:30 AM dbasstard: no, I’m pointing out a fraudulent article
12:13:38 AM mmskmmskmmsk: no you’re not
12:13:41 AM mmskmmskmmsk: it wasnt proven
12:13:45 AM mmskmmskmmsk: its speculation
12:13:50 AM dbasstard: dude, I wrote to Apple
12:13:58 AM mmskmmskmmsk: and why are you on it anyway? bored? no real news to report?
12:13:59 AM dbasstard: it was fraudulent
12:14:03 AM mmskmmskmmsk: you suck as a reporter
12:14:09 AM mmskmmskmmsk: prove it then
12:14:15 AM mmskmmskmmsk: you suck as a journalist
12:14:27 AM mmskmmskmmsk: be a man
12:14:30 AM dbasstard: how would you like it proven?
12:14:30 AM mmskmmskmmsk: dont be a girl
12:14:38 AM mmskmmskmmsk: actual evidence
12:14:43 AM dbasstard: like what?
12:14:51 AM mmskmmskmmsk: fuck you anyway, your article will die soon
12:14:56 AM dbasstard: besides the email from Apple PR?
12:15:03 AM mmskmmskmmsk: fucking wannabe reporter
12:15:06 AM mmskmmskmmsk: watch your back
12:15:10 AM mmskmmskmmsk: dont fuck with people asshole
12:15:14 AM mmskmmskmmsk: warning u
Changed status to Offline (12:15:20 AM)

Real mature.

I don’t normally expect visitors on a Saturday unannounced. Further, I don’t get packages. When I got to my front door, it was a Comcast employee. He warmed up by asking if I had Verizon home phone service. Well, seeing as I don’t like getting taken advantage of, the answer is no. He then asked me if I had a home phone. It’s clear where he was going, so I played along. Yes, I have internet phone service (Vonage in particular). He guessed that it was Vonage.

He then told me that Comcast offered the same service, but with better quality. That could be, but I haven’t had any issues. He then told me that Vonage uses their pipes (that’s not a quote, I don’t remember the exact phrasing) and that they allowed that, but they could shut them off at any time. For $8/month more than what I’m currently paying, I’d get a phone line through them and I’d get digital cable with a free year of Starz and HBO.

If I dropped Vonage, I would save money. However, I like the portability of being able to bring my box anywhere with me. When I go to Macworld Expo in San Francisco next year, being able to bring my phone with me will be a big bonus. Plus, I plan on spending a good amount of time at my parents’ fancy new house in Maine. I can’t do that with Comcast.

I’m sure you’re brain is bubbling, or you may be even screaming. Why haven’t I said anything about Comcast basically telling me that they could shut off Vonage whenever they want? Well, that’s because I wanted to get the other stuff out of the way first.

Pay attention boys and girls: this is Net Neutrality hitting home. Comcast threatened to degrade my independent internet phone service to the point of being shutoff in order to promote their own service. That internet connection they supply is for my use and what I choose to do with it is my business. If I want to use Vonage, I can use Vonage. The day they lock me out of it is the day they lose me as a customer. It’s unacceptable.

However, I think it’s all bark. The real question is do I want to pay $8 for an extra phone line, digital cable, and some premium channels. I think I might.

Given, it’s lumped in with those mass mailers that clog my mailbox, but it’s getting sent directly to my house. They proclaim in big proud letters:

The limitless fiber-optic power of Verizon FiOS Internet is now here.

Am I interested? You bet. Inevitably, their address checker proclaims me ineligible. After getting the 20th advertisement, I decided I wanted to find out why Verizon was taunting me. I got back this response:

Thank you for contacting the Verizon eCenter. My name is [deleted], and I will be handling your request today.

This message is in response to your email dated September 20, 2006. You inquired about receiving advertisements for FiOS through the mail. I understand your concern and I will be happy to assist you.

I apologize for any misunderstanding. Unfortunately, we do not have the capability of pre-qualifying all of our customers lines for FiOS service before sending out the advertisements for our products and services. Our advertisements include the disclaimer that states that Verizon FiOS/DSL Internet Service is provided by Verizon Online and is not available in all areas. Service availability is subject to final confirmation by Verizon.

At this time we do not have a date when FiOS will be available.

Verizon continues to work to provide FiOS access to as many customers as possible. So, while you may not qualify for high-speed Internet access from Verizon today, it is possible that you could be able to receive it in the future as the technologies improve.

If you haven’t already done so, you may check the availability of Verizon Fios any time you wish at:

         http://www.verizon.net/fios

Simply enter your telephone number in the space provided. If FiOS is not available, you will have the option of requesting an email notification when it is available.

It has been my goal today to address and clarify your concerns related to Fios service availability. I hope I have succeeded in meeting that goal. In the meantime, if you have any other questions, please let us know. We look forward to serving you.

Thank you for using Verizon. We appreciate your business.

Pleasant enough, so I can’t fault them for that. However, the line “Unfortunately, we do not have the capability of pre-qualifying all of our customers lines for FiOS service before sending out the advertisements for our products and services.” is bunk. They can automatically supply that information using the database linked to their website.

Naturally, perhaps the advertising company they’ve hired just blankets areas, but that’s a problem they are completely in control of. They could market more accurately.

Could I just ignore it? Sure, but the fact is that very rarely am I interested in things I get in the mail. The one time I’m interested in buying the product I get jerked around. Bah.

Without further ado, here is the info to join up.

Go to Yahoo’s Football Pick’em page. You’ll need a Yahoo! account.

Once there, choose to join a private group.

Group ID: 31839
Password: sharpie

I hope you all join.

Hopefully I’ll come across as insightful. I’ll try to post the link once it appears on the website.

Update: The article is up. The print version lacked my picture. I don’t know why, but I’ll suggest it’s because I’m so attractive.

The Day Job

I’ve been involved in a task that’s rather new to me, high pressure, and interesting. Overall I’m enjoying it, but it’s still soaking up my free time.

Softball to the Face

I managed to take a softball to the face 2.5 weeks ago. I was wearing my glasses and as a result, I managed to shift my nose over. I didn’t feel any pain and the initial swelling hid the fact that my nose became crooked. I had a nose bleed, but it went away quickly, so I didn’t get it looked at immediately.

Once I found out if it was fractured, I signed up for surgery I underwent Wednesday. My phobia of needles nearly made me faint as they put in the IV. Luckily, I didn’t and moments after they started pumping drugs into me, I was out. They straightened my nose and now I’m in a good deal of pain. I went to work Thursday, which was a total mistake, but the new task was acting rather needy. Luckily, my real coworkers could tell I wasn’t doing well and told me to go home.

I’m taking this week off, so I should be normal again by the time I go to work.

MacUser, Gadgetbox, and iPod Case Reviews

MacUser, Gadgetbox, and iPod case reviews for Playlist Mag are fast becoming more than a part time job.

After blogging on the former two sites, it’s usually just too late for me to do it here. I miss it. I have a bit more freedom here and I’m not really obligated to find a picture to go with my posts, which takes up a surprising amount of time.

Nintendo DS Lite

I bought a Nintendo DS Lite and I love it. I got the New Super Mario Brothers, Mario Kart DS, Brain Age, and Zelda: the Minnish Cap. If you have Mario Kart DS, let me know. I want to play you.

The Future

I want to resume normal posting, but it’s all time dependent. I get a surprising number of compliments from people that I contact for MacUser on this site and it’s made me realize that I was building a readership that’s likely rather disappointed I went on such a long hiatus. It’s time I returned.

Hacking the firmware to coerce a Mac into booting Windows took a little while, but it wasn’t really all that complicated. However, putting money into a development staff for Windows drivers is quite an expensive proposition and it goes to show Apple’s commitment to leverage the move to x86 to their full benefit. They can easily scoop up fence sitters that afraid of losing the ability to run Windows.

It’s a bold move and I’m a fan.

Anywho’s, Saturday night about 3am I signed up to Vonage after my friend d00d (hi d00d!) sent me an invitation to try it out.

[Via bored. beyond. belief.]

This is just more backup that the telcos have something to fear, and it ain’t Skype.