Hardware hackology

The major afternoon project - I went out and upgraded my Time Capsule to take a 1TB drive.

Cost of a Time Capsule: $299

Cost of a 1TB Time Capsule: $499

Cost of a 1TB WD Caviar Green drive: $110

Leftover 500GB Caviar Blue (what was in my Time Capsule before surgery): Useful.

It was pretty easy - You do need to peel off the rubber bumper on the bottom first, but there will be enough glue left over to easily stick it back on. Then there's a host of small Philips screws to remove, and the drive swap itself is quick. There is a temperature sensor you will have to re-place, and standoffs mounted to the lower drive chassis that need to be removed and moved to the new drive. But with the Caviar Green in place, operating temperature seems significantly lower, and the box is quieter as well.

And the point is?

So Microsoft's agency (Crispin Porter) is now directly going after Apple. Great. Don't you think they could have found something better for "Lauren, who is a real person" (but is also an actress and has a union card)?

The flip side is that there's plenty of areas Apple doesn't compete well in - and the low point of the market definitely is one of those areas. Though the HP she picked is a turd. In her defense, she comes across well and is cute. She lives in the netherworld of "not cool enough for Macs, but cool enough to have a VW", and that's a good-sized market.

She is an actress, after all - I agree with the Infoworld Cringely (as opposed to the "classic" one) and think it'd be fun to check up on her in a couple of months.

Just to reinforce my smug

I was off by a week, but the iPhone software 3.0 announcement was pretty much right on track with my earlier comments. Neener.

Dumb tech quotes of 2009, part 1

From this Bloomberg article:

“Think about it -- If you bought the first iPhone, you bought it because you wanted the coolest product on the market,” said McNamee, 52. “Your two-year contract has just expired. Look around. Tell me what they’re going to buy.”

(Roger McNamee is with Elevation Partners, the major investor in Palm)

Uh, maybe another iPhone? Probably the 2009 model?

Because they like their iPhone, Roger - plus they'd have to give up/rebuy all their applications in order to switch to a Pre. It's called "lock-in. Apple has it. If you guys had done something over the last 4 years besides crappy PalmOS Treos and "me-too" Windows Mobile clones (remember? Palm gave up on their "OS of the future" strategy about a dozen times in that stretch) you could have gotten there yourselves.

Had I only known

I ordered Jane's Valentine's Day flowers through ProFlowers. Well, the price wasn't bad and they arrived in good shape. But had I realized that I'd get email from either ProFlowers or one of their affiliates virtually every day since, and that "unsubscribe" doesn't seem to get noticed by them, I might not have bothered ordering the flowers online at all. They are pains in the ass of a high order.

Just a warning...

Another shoe may be dropping soon

Apple updated almost everything this morning. New Mac Pros, new iMacs, new minis, all pretty much as expected. They also added a few other goodies. The 15" MacBook Pro had its processor speed bumped up a tiny bit in the middle configuration, 256GB SSD is now available for the MacBook and 15" MacBook Pro (it was initially only available on the 17"), and there's a new wired keyboard sans numeric keypad. No wireless keyboard with the pad yet, though. Rats.

Also added were new models of both the Time Capsule and AirPort Extreme base station, now supporting goodies like a second SSID for guests (that's firewalled off from the main network), and dual-band operation. Cool. I wonder if any of those features will make it via software to the current model (like maybe the guest network support).

They also added a trick for remote access to a Time Capsule via .Mac that looks interesting.

Now for the other shoe. A lot of whispers have been going on the last few days that Apple's planning an event for 3/24. Well, if that's true then there's something else coming out that's basically not a Mac. Because the entire line is now refreshed since October when the initial unibody laptops came out (the 17" and nVidia whitebook were in January, now everything else consumer today). Xserve wasn't updated today, but that's not a big deal. No pressing reason to move it over from Harpertown to Nehalem right now anyways - and that alone doesn't justify an Apple event.

My guesses: either an announcement that Snow Leopard has gone GM (with a release date 30-45 days later) or something iPhone-related. Either which way, if there is in fact an Apple event this'll likely be the last major thing from them before WWDC midyear.

Super Bowl sum-up

Two teams I didn't care about. Commercials that weren't that interesting. The game itself was OK, with a pretty good second half and a wild finish, but I will say that every possible call went the Steelers' way. I still would have called the INT return down at about the 1-foot line, because it seemed clear to me that his body touched before the ball crossed the line. I also think the final play was an incomplete pass (I think it wouldn't have made a difference - they needed a touchdown and had, at best, one more play after that).

The one sidenote to the INT was this: If you watch the play, Fitzgerald just sort of loafs in the end zone for a few seconds instead of trying to make a play on the defender. Finally, after he runs it out about 20 yards Fitzgerald takes off after him and makes the play in the end - had he gone right after him that play might never have gotten down to the end zone in the first place. I'm just sayin'.

It was a fun night, though - Super Bowl parties are always more entertaining as parties when teams I don't care about are in it. Our son is absolutely dragging this morning (he still made it to school, though) even though he slept in the car on our way home.

Newsflash

Downloading pirated software from a BitTorrent feed is likely to infect your system with a trojan. Even if you have a Mac. Don't do it.

Keep using your Mac for your pirated music, movies, tv, and porn, though. Media piracy is safer on a Mac. Believe it or not, though, the only thing I do that even vaguely breaks the rules is I take my legitimately purchased DVDs and rip them to .MP4 files so I can put them on my AppleTV. I don't share them, and I don't rip discs I don't own. I pay for my music, use TiVo for my TV, and, well, I've been on the Internet long enough that porn just isn't all that big a deal. So my advice to you in sentence one of this paragraph? I don't even follow it.

My main point in telling you all this is that I've never had one of my systems infected by any form of malware. PC or Mac. Ever. It's easy to do. Just use an ad-blocker on your browser (I prefer AdBlock Plus on Firefox, cross-platform - or SafariBlock on Mac), keep anti-virus software current on a PC (AVG, Trend, and Kapersky are all ones I like), and don't believe anything you get via e-mail. Then resist the temptation to click on links that offer you forbidden temptations, say "no" when something you didn't explicitly load asks you for a password (the biggest reason Macs are usually safer) and bang - you're all set and safe.

That way you don't have to pay me (or worse, Geek Squad!) to come and fix it for you. Yay!

About frakkin' time

We now officially have a non-suckass President.  It's been 8 years since we had one of those.  Boo-yah!

That, and David lost his first tooth this past Saturday.  That's got more immediate impact upon my life, but having Obama as President'll help too.

Apple TV, Day 2

So my holiday gift from Jane was an Apple TV (well, actually it was a gift card to buy the Apple TV because she thought an Apple TV was an actual TV set and figured she couldn't carry it). I set it up yesterday, immediately hacked it to add Boxee, and then I embarked on a project.

The project: take my DVD collection and put as much of it as I can on the Apple TV (I got the 160GB version). Handbrake has done a quick job of it (though the newer version isn't working right on my iMac, so I'm using the 0.92 version on my MacBook Pro for now). I've ripped four movies so far (Stop Making Sense, Monty Python & the Holy Grail, Real Genius, and Apollo 13), and will do more over the weekend. I've loaded more movies on this than I have on my DVD jukebox!

I haven't done any movie rentals yet, though. Coming soon. At some point I may try and hack a bigger drive into it, too. Nice device.