The Tao of Mac

Eko: A Traffic Light Augmented by Progress Bars

Rui Carmo — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 14:49:12 GMT

Sheer genius.

Technobroken

Rui Carmo — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 12:11:26 GMT

This is an update to an item originally published on Tuesday, 1 December 2009.

So, Technorati are being their old obtuse selves again, e-mailing me a couple of weeks after I tried to re-claim this site’s entry there with a “claim code” of UYHRYS32T8V2 which, when I actually visit the site and hit the “check this claim” button, then asks me to put up a short post containing another code, which, for some unfathomable reason, is completely different and just happens to be 8KQH2VCGXH8H.

I could go on and on about this, I suppose (starting with the fact that the title tags on the account management part site and other formatting seems to be broken, as if it was all freshly re-painted but the workmen painted over stuff like hinges and parts of furniture), but I’ll just put this up and let it be, for ‘tis the season to be minimally jolly and, quite frankly, I’m curious as to whether this will actually work, and for how long, since:

The only external stats I (minimally) trust are Google’s, and that’s just because, well, there’s really no option.
All “blog” indexing companies seem to be focusing on selling top-billing placement for mass-market “blogs” (i.e., pseudo-news link magnets designed solely to provide minimal content and maximum banner ad income).
I really want to see for myself how bad it gets from here on, since the moment I hit Cmd+S on Textmate, this will be automagically synced via Dropbox to my server – and after that, I’ll go over and trip the manual “process, cache and publish this now” lever, and it will become instantly available on RSS feeds and all.

Let’s see where we go from here, then, shall we? 3… 2… 1…

Update:

Yep. figured as much. They can’t even deal with redirects or feed discovery properly:

Not that they’re hard to find…

a good half hour later, after going back in and manually changing the feed URL from the “complete” feed to the “blog-only” feed (just to make triple sure that they actually had valid data and that it would be the first post they’d come across), we’re back to manual mode:

Oh, and did I mention I can’t delete the old site claim at all?

☯ (comments allowed)

"Technobroken" was written by Rui Carmo for The Tao of Mac and was originally posted on Tuesday, 1 December 2009. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Rui Carmo and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.

The End Of The CrunchPad

Rui Carmo — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 19:06:09 GMT

There’s something odd here – I can’t see someone doing manufacturing would pull a stunt like this on a customer, for they’d be drummed out of the business, so either there was a bad choice of partnerships, a pretty immature decision-making process, or this isn’t the whole story… Still, the hardware shots make it seem like they got pretty far along the whole process – and regardless of legal shenanigans, something may yet be made of the whole thing… Only never in the right timing.

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How to Switch to the Mac, 2009 Edition

Rui Carmo — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 19:58:04 GMT

Not much has changed, really, except that I’ve updated (and am still updating) a number of things on both the hints and tips and replacement apps pages – I’ve been meaning to do this before Black Friday, but a bunch of things got in the way – hope it’s still useful after all of these years to all of you contemplating buying a Mac this holiday season.

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My Thanks

Rui Carmo — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 23:08:21 GMT

Although we don’t celebrate Thanksgiving over here, there are, besides the usual things people usually value this time of year (family, abundance and survival) three other things I’m particularly thankful for:

My loving friends, who are increasingly spread all over the place – which hasn’t prevented us from keeping in touch, and I give thanks for being able and cherish their company (physical or virtual) every day.
My being part of an industry that has a direct bearing on billions of people’s lives (shaping both our present and our future), and having being able to witness its birth, growth, and amazing diversity.
My inner sense of self (my spartan attitude, my ethics, my devotion to the things and people I love), which has served me well over the years whenever I had difficult decisions to make in life.

I have my own share of faults and regrets, of course (I am only human), but I’ve found a way to be thankful for them, too – they’ve made me into who I am today. Most of all, I’m grateful for having learned something from all the lives I’ve touched (or been touched by) in one way or another.

☯ (comments allowed)

A New Theory of Awesomeness and Miracles

Rui Carmo — Sat, 28 Nov 2009 10:46:49 GMT

Brilliant stuff.

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Dropbox Raises $7.25M, Crosses 3M Users

Rui Carmo — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 08:38:53 GMT

1.3 million gigabytes of data (that’s 1.3 petabytes for you geeks), 3 million users, half of which rated as active, 20 employees, good funding, a good product… Okay, who’s going to buy them in a year’s time? Apple, please?

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The mobile data apocalypse, and what it means to you

Rui Carmo — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 08:32:39 GMT

Michael Mace muses about the growth in data services and the impact on operators – it’s kind of fun to see that we’ve gone through most of those stages in terms of residential broadband growth already here in Portugal and survived them – but the US has a different market dynamic, and operators there have a lot more ground to cover…

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On Parenting, and General Relativity Thereof

Rui Carmo — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 08:00:41 GMT

For those of you who haven’t yet taken part in the glorious experience of parenthood, allow me to prepare you for one of the harsh (and, in the end, best) truths of it: There will never be enough time.

For anything egotistical, that is – for sorting out your music, your photos, for reading, for watching TV, or (as is my current case) for writing.

So there’s all this stuff I’ve been meaning to write and do that has been replaced with cradling and walking and bathing and feeding and putting to bed and telling stories and fooling around with LEGO bricks, not to mention waking up in the middle of the night and shooing off nightmares or checking the covers and pushing stray little feet back under them, and I love every minute of it (even the tantrums, which kind of remind me of someone I used to know a long time ago), except for it having squeezed my free time into a little speck sandwiched between work and resting.

That, I think, is the first stage, the one you outlive when you realize that you’ve been thinking about things the wrong way round all the time.

You know you’ve turned that corner when the kid giggles and comes running to you in a way that you cannot but realize it’s all worthwhile, because it’s not so much about having a part of yourself taken away but as giving it (in terms of time) to someone who will always need you¹.

Still, sometimes other stuff happens that makes you realize your priorities are still all screwed up despite you having already given up on having free time – like when you meet people who’ve had (or are having) a close brush with death – theirs or their families’. That is when you realize you need to stop wasting time on anything else but your family and friends.

That is the corner some people don’t (perhaps ever) turn until it’s too late, and that I may have turned a bit too early in life when my uncle was gone, before I had the maturity to take it all in and just as all the study and career and tech started encroaching on me and taking over my priorities – I’ve forgotten what it’s like to be there, live through that, watch people fight back at whatever is ailing them, serenely or resignedly, but treasuring the moments they had.

If you haven’t yet been through that (even if indirectly), you still have your priorities wrong. And only yesterday I’ve met someone who reminded me of that – a guy who had the peculiar, serene glow of someone who truly knows the value of time, because he’s going through that kind of thing right now. He has a life-threatening condition. He has kids.

And rationalizing through what it must be like for him probably scared me a lot more than anything in the past couple of years.

Ironically, he’s probably going to be my new doctor. I think I’m in excellent hands.

—

¹ Well, until he starts asking for the car keys, of course. ↩

☯ (comments allowed)

"On Parenting, and General Relativity Thereof" was written by Rui Carmo for The Tao of Mac and was originally posted on Tuesday, 24 November 2009. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Rui Carmo and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.

iPhone Now 50% of All Mobile Traffic

Rui Carmo — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 18:50:42 GMT

Makes for a pretty impressive headline, until you ask yourself what “traffic” really means. Still, it’s no surprise to have an established platform with a good browser and a huge amount of ad-sponsored apps in the lead, now is it? Yep – it’s not rocket science…

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Android is splintering, just not how you think it is...

Rui Carmo — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 08:32:38 GMT

This is an update to an item originally published on Sunday, 22 November 2009.

Russell hits all the right buttons as far as I’m concerned. With Android devices popping up in all sorts of different form factors, custom UIs and from vendors with completely different approaches regarding OS updates (or, in most cases, planned obsolescence), it’s going to get pretty ugly pretty fast – and regardless of it all saying Android, developers are going to have some serious trouble providing apps that can run across all the versions and UIs variations. For the old farts in the audience, it’s like the Linux desktop wars all over again, but in a pint.

Update: here are some stats that give you an idea of how fast things are going to the dogs already.

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Jewel Cases

Rui Carmo — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 22:40:22 GMT

A strangely wonderful and somewhat anachronistic thing happened to me the other day: I got an actual CD as a birthday gift – a tangible object that became an anchor for a dialogue of sorts a friend and I had been having.

I’ve always thought that the best dialogues are the long, oft unspoken ones that take place at the speed trees grow and seasons change without any real need for words, and that there are little enough of those for us to fully appreciate in this busy life of ours.

This dialogue turned out to be about how music – and by that I mean good music – simultaneously gives us room to think and tell us stories we relate to, becoming an emotional lodestone around which we shape our own sense of self. And over the past months I’ve come to the conclusion that this process takes far longer (and is farther reaching) than all those hours spent soaking in your friend’s albums during your teenage years.

It’s become a continuous process in this day and age, when there never was so much music readily available wherever you go, and with so many ways to bring it along, that there is simply no excuse not to take it in and make it a part of your life.

We hardly think of music as anything but a business these days, and yet it is something of profound personal significance for most of us (especially those who experience hardship or happiness and need an outlet for them).

And, going back to the little epiphany I had when I unwrapped that jewel case last Wednesday, there’s something to be said for getting it in a physical form that becomes part of your possessions, something that you can touch, put away, even lose amid your clutter and find again years later, a little time capsule of stories and feelings.

Part of the future of music has long been with us – MP3 files take up no room, indie bands fade in and out of obscurity by running the gauntlet of the traditional distribution channels, etc. But it is harder to attach emotional significance to dots on a screen or bits on a platter, because that’s simply not how our brains are wired.

We evolved to live in a world where we could touch things, hold them up for inspection, gain pleasure from their sheer physicality, from their being there for us, neatly placed where we can reach for them in a moment of need.

And yet, music is our quintessential immaterial creation – the prototype meme, burgeoning with feeling and lore, spreading across cultural barriers like water through sand, reaching us in ways that literature or cinema can’t quite match.

And then there’s the way it rewires our memories, knitting them together with the physical.

Some of us have the ability (or is it a mixed blessing?) of being able to remember every single time we heard a piece of music and what was going on in our lives at that time – but nearly all of us can remember the physical actions that listening to music – any sort music – involved.

My generation will remember switching on the turntable, carefully lowering the needle and cleaning LPs. I might be a little odd in that I recall listening to Shirley Bassey around pre-school, sometimes wearing massive headphones plugged into a TEAC tape deck – the kind with reels in it, where you had to thread the tape through the head and spindles.

I vaguely remember 8-tracks, but the slap-and-squeeze of the Walkman was a familiar gesture for years, just as the smooth sliding of a CD into a groove until the iPod click-wheel and touch screen came along.

And yet, it’s all somehow slipping away. My kid, for instance, will probably grow up with Cover Flow or some such way to find the music he wants, but I hope he can one day hold in his hands something he can attach emotional value to while listening to it.

Maybe jewel cases will one day contain memory crystals of some sort, and finally live up to their name. Or maybe the future has something altogether different in store for him – in the meantime, I’m kind of glad I finally unpacked all of my CDs after years in storage, even if they’re all stored in the house server.

Now they’re only a touch away, in more ways than one, and I can rifle through the liners at will.

☯ (comments allowed)

After Long Wait, Camino 2.0 Finally Hits The Streets

Rui Carmo — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 21:57:35 GMT

I haven’t really used Camino since Safari hit 4.x, but it’s nice to know it’s still out there (Firefox is a bovine, cantankerous beast I only use for intranet sites).

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Sony to expand PlayStation Network into Sony Online Service, sell music, books, videos

Rui Carmo — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 09:10:39 GMT

Took them long enough to figure out the potential… Still, an iTunes ecosystem clone with the PS3 taking the place of a Mac doesn’t quite seem feasible, even if the rumors are true and they are doing stuff like porting Firefox to it…

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On the shoreline

Rui Carmo — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 08:58:14 GMT

Told you the world was going to the dogs. The rest of this photo set has nothing to do with dogs, though, and is utterly brilliant.

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Google's Chrome OS revealed

Rui Carmo — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 08:50:21 GMT

I’m of two minds about this – on one hand this ticks all the boxes for network computing done “the right way” (i.e., with cheap, flexible clients that won’t be obsoleted and web standards for underlying applications), and on the other I simply don’t think it’s wise to have everything on the cloud on a personal level. Plus I see little to no mention of true mobility (i.e., again, 3G is ubiquitous around these parts, but Wi-Fi isn’t) or enough details on disconnected operation (because, after all, there always comes a time when you are not really on any network). These, and the amount of hype the thing is generating even though nobody can show a real-life use case for it other than using Google’s apps or viewing their banner ads, make me wonder about how far it will go where it’s probably the most necessary – third-world countries with little to no infrastructure and a need for cheap, flexible computing solutions.

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Watching the H1N1 flu pandemic

Rui Carmo — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 18:13:08 GMT

The whole world’s going to the dogs, it seems.

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The Change

Rui Carmo — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 00:30:23 GMT

This is going to be a fairly unusual post in that I’ll be writing about work, but besides my usual disclaimer there’s nothing in it that goes against the company’s rules regarding blogging, a copy of which landed on my desk a month or so back as I was discussing with a bunch of folk what would be the next step in my career.

The last few weeks have been a blur, but we recently launched Vodafone 360 (roughly a month after the announcement and local press conference, on schedule), and although I had to miss out on the launch party for personal reasons¹, a bunch of things began to change from that moment onwards…

In a nutshell

For those of you in a hurry, I’m now the local program manager for 360, having started to take up some of the load during the last couple of weeks. So I’ll be one of the people driving the roll-out and evolution of 360 in Vodafone Portugal at the macro level, and it already looks to be a terrific challenge.

From Small Acorns…

And that’s as far as I’ll go regarding what I’m up to – let’s take a step back and try to look at the bigger picture here.

First off, it has to be pretty obvious to anyone walking the streets, watching the TV spots or keeping track of mobile industry news that 360 is going to be a big part of Vodafone’s approach to the smartphone market for the foreseeable future.

It’s that simple – and people who’ve read this blog for a while know I steer clear of hype and industry punditry and have always been heavily critical of the use of technology for technology’s sake.

Those who know me in person have long taken the extra step into understanding that I value ubiquity, usability and making a real difference in people’s lives above just about everything else, so it shouldn’t be a complete surprise that I’ve accepted the challenge to tackle 360 and social networking on the mobile in one go.

The way I see it personally, social networking has been trying to be too many things to too many people for a good while. 360 goes back to basics and tries the only angle that makes sense to me, (again, personally) – it starts from real people and their real relationships, embodied as (and closely coupled to) the only personal device that people would (by choice) never leave home without: their mobile phone.

What it does besides that and where it will go to is not up to me to reveal – the only point I want to make right now (as I did before while musing about my own attempt at re-prioritizing my idle time) is that it is something that mobile operators need to tackle as the industry evolves.

As to my taking such a role, well… I’ve been spiraling into the project for a couple of years now, and the opportunity arose² to do what I think I do better – i.e., acting as an organizational interpreter and getting things done, but in a larger and more interesting setting.

Dilbert, Take Your Best Shot

In geek terms, I’m going meta – my job is now all about understanding how best to organize things, meeting high-level priorities, working out better ways to do things faster, and bridge the gap between several teams – as well as providing my peers at Group with insights as to what best suits our market, largely thanks to the doggedly way I’ve been keeping track of a bazillion industry trends in parallel for a good while now.

As material consequence of it all, this Monday I moved to a new desk – it’s roughly on the same place on a different floor³, but physical change is always the one thing that drives home that you’re actually doing something new.

On Impartiality and Permanence

So where does this leave my use of Apple gear? Or this site’s focus? Or even (for those of you in the tin hats) its own peculiar brand of unbiased industry critique?

Well, there are two factors at play here:

I’ve always been a strong believer in not mixing personal stuff with work (that’s one of the reasons I got a Mac in the first place), so I don’t see a problem with things staying as they are, especially since I don’t see any reason for me to stop using any sort of Apple products.
I once wrote that if a company I worked for asked me to remove my web presence (in whole or in part), I’d do it, period.

But from what I’ve since been briefed on and considering that my disclaimer has held up pretty well over the years, I don’t see any chance of this site fading away other than by sheer lack of time.

In fact, it may well be that I’ll have the opportunity to write a bit more about what I actually do, but in another context – i.e., someplace else – and, in the meantime, you’ll see zero further mention of Vodafone 360 here, at least where it regards my role in it.

Time, as always, will tell how everything turns out – even while in an industry where change (and fast-moving competition⁴) is the norm, I’ve been exceptionally lucky in a number of regards both personally and professionally, and am acutely reminded of it every day.

Which is why I’m taking today off work to enjoy my birthday by being with my kid and family, which is a lot more important than anything else I could think of right now.

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¹ Life’s true priorities have a way of becoming obvious once your kid comes up to you with a toy car the instant you step into the hallway and pulls you down to play with him. There was no way I was going out to a party and miss out on that. ↩

² My innate ability at getting along with both telco and ISP cultures and – let’s face it – my habit of getting into trouble by being parachuted into nearly every strategic project to act as a consultant have both also been a factor, of course. ↩

³ Moving to London or Düsseldorf is something I’ve opted out of years back, and I’ve never regretted electing to stay in Lisbon – as the traditional corporate pyramids broke down into a set of matrixes and increasingly flexible groups of people, the belief that you need to have everyone close to you has finally started to wane, so I don’t think anybody can say with a straight face that working for a multinational is only worth it when you’re at the physical center of things. ↩

⁴ It would be unfair of me to not give at least a tip of the hat to the Pond team for managing to put together an interesting social aggregator on such short notice (duct tape included), and launch its closed beta on the day I take office – it’s going to be fun competing with you (even though there are clearly different approaches at play), and I’m looking forward to it. ↩

☯ (comments allowed)

Technowhat?

Rui Carmo — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 09:51:45 GMT

I’ve had a long, strange (and mostly troublesome) relationship with Technorati for a good while now, so much so that I’ve had an item on my ToDo page here for years now to figure out why.

Today, I’m taking that off and giving up on it altogether. Here’s five reasons why:

When I was still running PhpWiki, they couldn’t figure out my site layout or feeds, no matter how much metadata I added (back then the requirement was, IIRC, that you added RDF in the appropriate locations so that they could figure out post boundaries and suchlike).
When they started handling RSS instead, moving to FeedBurner made my entry disappear for a couple of weeks. I’m not talking about rankings (which I find utterly meaningless), I’m talking about my blog not being listed at all.
A couple of years back, this is what my Technorati cosmos looked like. It’s well worth clicking through to see what the entire page looked like.
Soon after that, and after moving to Yaki, I stopped adding Technorati tags to my RSS feeds, since they were obviously not getting processed no matter what I tried. As an example, one of the most popular pages ever on this site is my HOWTO on writing iSync Plugins (which is always at the top of my own referrer listing), and I couldn’t find one mention of it on Technorati.
Now, thanks to their improvements, not only have I been unable to edit or delete my previous site listing there, the new claim I registered a few weeks back is still being processed:

It’s not that I particularly care about (or, for that matter, have time to follow) my site’s ranking¹. I know this is a niche site. I am perfectly aware that what I do or write about here is of interest to a minute percentage of the folk out there (if only because of my refusal to give credit to hype and non-news).

It’s just that it never seemed to work right, its stats bear no relationship whatsoever with what Google Analytics and my own referrer tracking show me, and that I see no point in trying to use stuff that is broken.

I’d like to end this on a positive note, but I can’t really add one of my own, so if you want an example of stuff that isn’t broken and actually makes the web better, pop over to Merlin Mann’s and read his piece on Marco Arment and Instapaper, which is the best thing I’ve read today.

Seriously.

—

¹ I’ve just had a look at the Alexa listing, and it’s equally fun (and another example of how bad site statistics are overall), since I have to wonder why I’m ranked in Malasyia. It’s stats also don’t match the Google ones in most points. ↩

☯ (comments allowed)

Infirmware

Rui Carmo — Sat, 14 Nov 2009 18:21:01 GMT

In days of yore, when men were real men, women were real women, and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were, well, a twinkling in Douglas Adams’ eye as he lay drunk in a field in Innsbruck, there was no such thing as firmware upgrades over the Internet.

Once you got your hands on a piece of software (or, more to the point here, to a piece of hardware), it worked as you got it from that moment onwards until you consigned it to the junk heap, and if you had any trouble with it, well, you argued with the manufacturer until you got another, which was slow, expensive and fiddly, especially when gadgetry started having more programmable logic than actual moving parts.

But it was by around that time that manufacturers started splitting into two quite clear camps: those who seized the opportunity to better support their customers by actually fixing issues customers found in the field that they could not reproduce in internal testing, and those who realized they could simply start skimping on internal testing and ship a fix later¹.

That second camp tainted firmware upgrades as the mark of the lazy, of the rushed, of the technically unfit, but, worse still, they created a whole (and, to my eyes, largely worse) new occupation – product obsolescence management, i.e., the folk who decide what will be fixed with firmware upgrades until the next product hardware revision ships.

I have, over the years, been exposed to entirely too many negative examples of these – for instance, every phone I’ve ever tested in the past few years has gone through at least four firmware versions: the one it is sent out with for initial testing, the one we get “all” our critical bugs fixed, the one where they’re really fixed, and, quite often, another, public one six months down the line where I can actually trust the things to work (any geek out there who’s bought a top-tier Nokia device in the past year or so can relate to this, and it’s not hard to find examples).

A few of those devices² reached users in little better shape than they were in beta, but what really ticks me off is when firmware upgrades break perfectly good stuff (and yes, I’m finally getting to the point of this post, bear with me).

As you may well know, Sony has recently made an epic foul-up with their 3.0/3.01 firmware upgrade for the PS3, which has, from what I’ve been able to read, rendered hundreds (thousands?) of older, pre-Slim devices unable to read discs.

A Great Customer Experience

Guess what, my PS3 broke with the 3.01 firmware upgrade as well – but, as always, that’s not the whole story.

At the time that happened, I had just sold it to a friend, who wanted it specifically due to its backward compatibility with the PS2, but also due to the fact that I used it so little it was practically new. Thanks to Sony, he upgraded a perfectly good piece of hardware to 3.01 and lost the ability to read any sort of disks – the drive just died, and a thorough exploration of the reset and service options failed to revive it.

Fortunately enough the console still had had two weeks left on its warranty period, so I undid the deal, called the local support line for an RMA number, and sent it in. A week later, the Sony support line called back and told me they not only had run out of 60GB replacement hardware, but that they had no expectations of ever getting others again – so they offered me a brand new 120GB Slim instead.

As a customer service experience, it was great – it was blindingly fast by Portuguese standards (and well above the kind of hardware support I’d get from most other companies these days). The only problem is that my friend’s chance of getting a console able to play both PS2 and PS3 games is utterly gone³.

Oh, and it nearly compensated for Sony’s lack of QA when releasing that firmware. But I won’t flog a dead horse, even if it’s trivial to do so digitally.

The Potential For Worse Ones

The thing is, even the device whose firmware I upgrade most often – i.e., the iPhone – isn’t immune to this. Not by a long shot, for although I haven’t yet had any problems myself, with every OS revision comes a new set of niggles and complaints – where I personally include the failure to fix latent issues, like the infamous “snapback slider” when trying to answer some calls that I’ve experienced since 1.x.

Such things are why I was leery of (after over a decade) buying something as simple as a new TV – all I really need is an LCD panel with the requisite amount of HDMI and SCART inputs. I don’t even need it to have a tuner, since what little TV I watch comes from an IPTV box or a media/disc player of some sort.

And yet, the likes of Samsung, Philips and LG (all of whose TV portfolios I got to know at length over the past few months) are stuffing a bazillion features into their panels that are, for the most case, upgradeable by sticking a USB stick into the requisite port.

I’m not sure why I would want a TV that runs Linux (for that is what most of them are running to some extent), but one of the reasons I made sure I didn’t get one with an Ethernet port was that I wanted to make sure there was no way for it to break in the same way my PS3 did.

Still, it could be worse. At least my kettle doesn’t take firmware upgrades…

—

¹ My personal belief here is that that bunch spent a stint in the software industry around the time Windows Update got started, but that’s besides the point right now. ↩

² Which shall, for my part, remain nameless at least for a few decades longer, until I can tell their tale by the fireside to fledgling young engineers, bright-eyed with enthusiasm at hearing first-hand tales of their equivalent of the Tin Lizzie… ↩

³ Plus, of course, my having to decide what to do about the PS3 all over again. It’s hard to get rid of a brand new piece of hardware, even considering I’m just as likely to (not) use it for gaming as the previous model – the only arguments for keeping it around are my not having another Blu-Ray player and the dodgy status of its warranty, for I can’t really go and re-sell it as one would a regularly purchased used console… ↩

☯ (comments allowed)

"Infirmware" was written by Rui Carmo for The Tao of Mac and was originally posted on Saturday, 14 November 2009. Except as noted, it's ©2009 Rui Carmo and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.