If The News Is To Be Believed
I heard it reported that the CDMA iPhone for Verizon is coming early next year. While I have no great complaints about the AT&T service, I think the availability of the iPhone on Verizon will be dispositive. At least for me. I will probably opt for achange of carrier and a new iteration Apple's charming little device when that happens. Absent the change, I'll just keep chugging along with my already two-iterations-back unit.
There is something about a new cellie, isn't there?

The New iPhone
Helluva thing. The redesign is sleek and elegant. The feature set is decidedly improved. I'd love to have one. But I'm no where the end of my contract on the one I have. So: no. Maybe later.

Buggeration!
Placeholder post here. My little sausage fingers are busily busy in other works and days so PoW must languish a bit. This morning was already taken up with dealing with a desktop that didn't power up. Yikes! I Need this machine to do things. But a little poking and prodding (and actually swtiching power outlets once) has Corvinus (yes, I always name my machines, don't you?) up and running. So you won't see me for a couple of days but life does indeed go on. Hope y'all are well.

File In "I Love Technology"
I just downloaded a free app for the iPhone - a WiFi based remote control for iTunes. So now I can control my iTunes from anywhere in my house. Why is this such a big deal? It all comes down to my need for talk radio. Rush is broadcast locally on a station that routinely gets a rotten signal in my house. And in my kitchen, despite the nice Bose Wave radio, it doesn't come in at all. So I moved my old iMac to the kitchen to use as an iTunes "server" and to sometimes web surf. But if I boot up the 'puter, the radio goes completely fuzzed out with interference. So then I can only run either FM stations or the computer signal through the AUX jack.
There are problems. Booting up the computer takes time and not a little effort to reach the start button given that the edge behind which said button lurks is the most distant from being easily reached. And the iMac takes up not a little space. Not a lot of space but not a little either. Yet there is a work-around. I have an Airport Express unit (about 2 inches square and and inch thick) which can serve iTunes from a remote machine to, say, a stereo in a different room. So I could leave my main machine booted up and running iTunes to send the signal to the little Airport box and save myself some kitchen space.
I can see you thinking, "But how will he control iTunes if he's in the kitchen and the iMac that's sending his radio is on a whole 'nother level?" Ha ha! Apple has thought of that already. The app store has a free Apple app called "Remote" that I mentioned at the opening of this post. I downloaded it, sync'd it to my iTunes (very easy) and started controlling my musical domain. Then the sticking point hit me. I don't see any controls to run iTunes radio on the remote. Bugger. But my Google Fu is strong. It turns out (and I did not know this) that you can make a playlist of radio stations! And once I did that, I had access to the stations I needed on the remote.
Tomorrow will be the set-up of the Airport Express and then the great experiment should be finished. I love technology that does what I want.

I Love Technology
I just downloaded a free app for my iPhone that takes dictation. That's right, I said "free." I tried it last night and it's not perfect (though spelling a name in a standard way for someone who uses a variant spelling really can't be faulted). But it works pretty darn well. I can talk to the phone and then have the text sent to an e-mail or a text message.
This stuff rocks so hard. Honestly, we live in magic times.

Magic times demand a Magic Mouse of course (see how I did that oh-so-seamless segue). I'm loving the Apple device in all sorts of major ways but I have found that it just drinks battery juice like a wino with a credit line at the liquor store. I use rechargeable batteries of course but I'm wondering if Apple might consider making a recarging cradle for this wonderful rodent as Logitech does for its MX Lazer mouse. Not a necessity, but it could make life just a wee bit more smooth.

The Joy Of Techs
Hmmm. There's a book title if ever I saw one. But it'll have to be a blog post for the nonce.
Last night my starving artist friend came over so I could give him an early Christmas present. Or late birthday present. Or ... you get the idea. He has been essentially sans TV since the digital conversion after darfing the whole coupon thing and he is, I repeat, a starving artist so it's not like he has cable or sat TV. But he does have a laptop and I saw a TV tuner USB dongle on Woot the other day. That's right. We set it up last night and watched a few moments of TV on his computer. Moreover, he can use it to record shows and play them back. The antenna that came with the dongle didn't get a great signal in my kitchen but he lives in a highrise so should be able to get the local channels fairly well.
TV is not a big deal but he's been cut off from the flow of human interaction as defined by the broadcast medium for some months now. He can now participate in the culture a bit more broadly than only watching Univision and some evangelical channel that gives just a little too much Joel Osteen for comfort.
Needless to say, I wouldn't have bothered to ensure his broadcast experience save that I saw the TV tuner on Woot at a very good price. Serendipitously, I looked at Woot just before he came over and saw a laptop bag for $8.00. It was something he explicitly told me he needed. So I went ahead and snagged him one of those as well. If it only lasts a year, it's still not a bad buy. There is some serious Wootoff action going on the last couple of days. A Shun knife carving set for $185? I don't need one but that's a hell of a price for Shun.

Holy Cow!
The Apple "Magic Mouse" arrived today. Two words: A Mazing. Scrolling is like a whole 'nother world and the ability to zoom the screen by holding down the "option" key is just silly. This thing rocks. Hard. Like Metallica trying to prove they're a better band than Anthrax.
UPDATE: There is something of a learning curve in using a new mouse, tweaking the tracking settings for example, but even after this short time of using the new mouse, I have to say - this is brilliant. Guinness scientists must have invented this. Scrolling across the smooth top is going to become the new, albeit pricey, paradigm for mousing.

Trippin' With The Snow Lep
Pre-action report: Verizon is offering a "media manager" which streams iPhoto and iTunes to a FiOS DVR. I have a FiOS DVR. I've downloaded the software and later today I will hold my nose and do a tuckflip into the deep end on this one. If this can stream iTunes radio, I may have a solution for listening to my favorite AM station (Mark Levin - THANK ME!) after the signal punks down at twilight.
Technology. It can do amazing things.

Virtual Machine
Things might get interesting. Using VMWare Fusion, I just installed Windows XP on my iMac. The virtualization takes some getting used to - it's not a little strange to have a window running XP sitting on my desktop as all my other Mac-ish programs are running at the same time. But dang me if it's not a whole heap of fun!

Workin' Here Boss
This is one of those parenthetical posts - stuff that I dig that probably matters not a whit to anyone else. But I post anyway. Pbbblllttt!
A friend of mine has/had an external hard drive that went south. Opening it up seems the thing to do but the case was remarkably monolithic. At least in appearance. I did a little online research which seemed to indicate that there were clips that could be loosened with a long blade slipped down inside the case. I passed that info on. I was wrong. I really needed to see the darn thing, hold it in my moist and delicate hands. Well, I got the thing delivered to me.
I've got to say, there was some kinda main force applied to the back cover of the drive - it was all bent outta shape. But still attached. What caught my eye, though, was a little sticker on the bottom that said something on the order of "removing this sticker voids warranty." Why would that be? I mused. Followed immediately by the realization that the warranty wasn't really the problem.
So I scraped the sticker off to reveal a pair of little screw heads. Aha! indeed. Unscrewing them allowed the guts of the drive to slide right out, easy peasy. Whereupon I proceeded to take down the internals to component parts which importantly consisted of two 500GB Seagate drives.
I then ordered a couple of external drive enclosures and have tried one drive in one new enclosure but it booted neither on my iMac, nor on my friend's PC. The idea was, of course, to rescue the data on the drive/s and then set them up as a couple of external drives as needed. But my enthusiasm for the project obscured my gathering basic background info. To wit: the original problem was actually that the power supply would not plug in properly. The drive had a four-pin socket and I saw that the problem (which I could have solved before removing anything) was that one of the pins had been pushed out of position and stopped the plug from seating. I gingerly tried to move the pin to its full upright and seat back position but it had been wiggled enough that it just broke off at that point.
Sigh.
What do I do, what do I do? Go to the maker's website of course and after spending an inordinate amount of time peering at the power supplies they offer, finding what I truly believe is the right one. So, harking back to the post title, what have I been doing this afternoon? Reassembling a naked hard drive so that when I get the power supply, I can boot this sucker up and get at all the good bits. And bytes. Workin' here boss. Makin' more work for myself than I really should but, hey. Workin' here, boss.

Discovered On The Fly
I just learned through good ol' 'sperience that a Firefox tab can be dragged below the tab bar and what was formerly a tabbed window, becomes a new window atop the window the page had been in. I don't know how useful this is but since I happened upon it, I thought I'd share. 'Cause I'm that kinda guy.
By the way, this only works if there's more than one tab in the original window. Seems obvious but I thought I'd say.

C'mon C'mon C'mon!
Downloading the new iPhone OS reminds me of the impatience of modren life. A 230 MB download that will take about two minutes (somewhat less actually) and I'm sitting here twitching like the bathroom is already occupied.
Damned silly git.
It makes about as much sense as standing by the microwave when some peculiar item of advanced foodishness is cooking via the application of radiation in a minuscule fraction of the time it would otherwise take and I'm standing beside the counter doing the same pee-dance saying, "C'mon! C'mon! Cook already." Patience is a virtue. I should be more virtuous.

More Fiber In My Online Experience
I wanted to see how my FiOS service was running. (click to embiggen)


I can live with those numbers.

And So It Goes
One final post on the great iMac Migration, I promise. The good news is that the "migration assistant" finished its strange little dance and there is much new (actually old) on Corvinus. However, since I've moved from the PowerPC-based iMac to the Intel-based iMac, there will be a number of programs that will have to be updated. I do not want to spend the money to buy Photoshop though - $670 from Amazon. That's the cost of a whole new Windows computer.
But then, that's not really the point. The point is that as much as the migration moved, I have a whole shipload of data yet to get from the old onto the new. Ring out, ring in, yeah, yeah. At least Apple has a method, albeit rather a kluge in my estimation for using the iPod itself to move the iTiunes music library from on to another. And I do want Corvinus with his massive storage capacity, to be the iTunes base machine. The short of the long of it is that I'm going to have a nice, long desk session moving data and digging out passwords to get all the things I want'n'need running properly on Corvinus. Luckily for you though - this is the last I'll waste your time on it.

iMac Update
I've had a couple of people ask me about the iMac which caused the posting pause yesterday so I post briefly, not that I think this is of great general interest but ... what the heck, eh?
First, I watched a DVD on it last evening ("Carnivale" to be specific) and it is spec ... wait for it ... TACULAR. The 24" screen is bright (brighter than my PPC iMac) and crisp and huge. This would make a great TV if it weren't for all the fun computing doodadery contained within.
But the set up was interrupted. I couldn't get the "migration assistant" (which transfers all kinds of info from one's existing machine onto a new one) to operate properly over the wifi network. The cure for that is to tether the two together with a firewire cable but the firewire cables I have don't have the proper plug for the new iMac (which is named "Corvinus" for reasons of interest probably only to me). Not really a problem. I've just ordered a couple of adapters from Amazon and I'll retun the one I don't need. Those should be here either today or tomorrow and then I'll finish the Great iMac Swap Out. Yay.
As a side note, the wired mouse feels strange and too light after using a battery-filled wireless mouse for so long. Not bad per se but strange.

Fun With The iPhone
I managed to do something today that I've been wanting to do for a while. The ringtone I've always wanted for my phone is the "red phone" from James Coburn's Derek Flint movies. Now that I have an iPhone, and since I grabbed an mp3 of the sound a while back, I've made that a ringtone for myself.
It means probably nothing to anyone else but it amuses me to no end. And it was dead easy. One can take any clip from a song and with a little futzing, make a ringtone out of it without having to cough up a greenback or two to the good folks (peace be unto them!) at Apple.
I may use the opening bass line to Queen's "Under Pressure" for my next ringtone.

Bug In Your Ear
If you don't back up your hard drive, what's wrong with you? That is a prime qualification for dumbassery. But my intention is not to insult. It is to inform. To wit: if you are a Costco member, a $30 coupon discount (for which a coupon is not needed in an online purchase) is about to go into effect on a Seagate "Free Agent" 1.5 terabyte external drive. That would give you a lifetime's storage space for just about $115. That's just a sick amount of drive for not much money. I think I might get one.

And Talk Me Out of This
I've been keeping a weather eye on good quality stand mixers. With said eye peeled most for KitchenAid (I may be a little easy for a Brand Name - I said "a little," not "an appliance slut"). I'd been deeply considering this 250 watt model at Amazon but Costco is dropping one of their coupons ($40 this time) on this 475 watt model with a built-in timer. The coupon would bring the price differential to $60 which now makes me hesitate. 475 watts is a commercial grade, beefy device. I doubt a lifetime of everyday baking at home would cause it to hiccup. And I digs me a built-in timer.
So I ask you, dear reader, what you think of the comparison of the two. Does one really need more than 250 watts of spinning, whapping power at home? Is the timer like the short skirt on an otherwise average-looking streetwalker? As the Bloodhound Gang said, "I appreciate your input."

The Times They Are Achangin
The flat-screen revolution is now complete. You can get an Acer 17 inch CRT monitor for $15 (that is not a typo) in-store at Circuit City where you can find them. I remember when a 14" monitor seemed to be the standard and moving up to a 17" screen was a major investment. Now, not so much. Incredible.

Apocalyptic Speculation…End of the World..NOT!!
Scientists fired the first beam of protons around a 17-mile (27.36-kilometer) tunnel on Wednesday in science's next great step to understand the makeup of the universe.

It appears the world is still intact...

The Large Hadron Collider - built since 2003 at a cost of $3.8 billion - provides scientists with much greater power than ever before to smash the components of atoms in a bid to see how they are made.The skeptics theorize that a byproduct of the collisions could be micro black holes, subatomic versions of collapsed stars whose gravity is so strong they can suck in planets and other stars, disruption of the earths magnetic field and genetic mutations in humans.

“This is the biggest scary thing in history to protest about. These scientist freaks are threatening every single man, woman and child on the planet with death. They are threatening extinction to every life form and creature on earth. Can someone save us from these madmen please. We only have days left!The scientists should be arrested , they are terrorists threatening oblivion and mass destruction on all the worlds citizens. They are worse than Al Qaeda!” -Al Gore


"It's nonsense," said James Gillies, chief spokesman for CERN, the host European Organization for Nuclear Research, before Wednesday's start. CERN is backed by leading scientists like Britain's Stephen Hawking in dismissing the fears and declaring the experiments to be absolutely safe.

Noob!
I have a good friend who isn't particularly into technology. I don't mean that she's a Luddite - she has a computer, uses e-mail without a hiccup and generally has no problem with tech as much as she wants or needs to use it. But she recently decided it was time to get mobile with her music and of course I suggested she start running iTunes. I even dropped in on her, well, she had me to dinner as I sold her my old digital camera and brought an install disc for iTunes since she runs off a dial-up connection and doing the download would have taken ... let's just say way longer than it should.
In any event, we got her PC up and running with music. It was a lot of fun to see her getting into loading her music into the computer, setting up preferences, ripping only selected songs from a CD, enjoying the automatic track info download from the Gracenote CDDB. Those are the sort of things I've grown accustomed to but which are, in prospect, just so frickin' cool!
Now that she's got the software set up, I e-mailed her the other day to point out that the 1 GB iPod shuffle had its price knocked down to $49. She took the plunge. And today she called to say that she was doing the set up and she couldn't get the iPod to show up on the PC. I told her to try unplugging the USB plug and re-plugging it back in. Nothing. Yet I was on the right track. After starting to search the Apple knowledge database, she gives me the eureka moment. She didn't have the iPod firmly seated in its dock! Bingo.
Small victories. We take where we can. I'm delighted that another person's joined the digital music sphere.