— unpredictable thoughts

So, I really had to buy a new com­puter. I was with­out another machine if my Mac­Book Pro needed to visit the apple hos­pi­tal so I bought another portable. A shiny, tiny Mac mini. What a sweet lit­tle box. I needed to give it a bit more zoom though. I started by upgrad­ing it to the new spot­ted cat OS. It makes the lit­tle block zoom. But to make it scream I needed processes to have all the help they needed to be efficient.

I headed over to other world com­put­ing.
Mem­ory upgrades. YES. The 3 gig upgrade looked very good and only 79 bucks. That will help feed the OS beast. Next step, look­ing to replace the 5400 rpm hard drive with a speed­ier 7200 and more gigs to store all those pho­tos and mp3’s. Hitachi Trav­el­star 200 gb is look­ing very good — 200 bucks.

Every­thing arrived and I took out my tools to begin open­ing the lit­tle chick­let. Pry­ing it open care­fully took a bit of patience. I didn’t want to scratch or break any of the plas­tic pieces. I took out my putty knife and a few old plas­tic mem­ber­ship cards. The mini is an amaz­ingly tight piece of tech­nol­ogy. Get­ting to every­thing I needed to how­ever only took care and patience. Now that the new RAM is in place and the new hard drive my mini screams. Adding a wire­less mouse and key­board com­pleted the workstation.

Yip­pie.

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Tags: apple, mini, com­puter, upgrade, hack, mor­eis­more, tech

I read an arti­cle this morn­ing at AppleIn­sider about Apple devel­op­ing a mini disk adapter. I see the need for sav­ing money. I actu­ally see the rea­son for skip­ping using a CD at all. The story goes around in a cir­cle and never really answers any ques­tions. If you are going to ship an adapter with every disk; why not just send the big­ger disk? The real ques­tion that needs to be answered is : How do you make an adapter avail­able that you don’t have to send with each disc?

Sounds like Apple needs some design help here. What is your idea?

Here’s some excerpts from this silly mess.

“In such sit­u­a­tions it would be advan­ta­geous to use a reduced diam­e­ter (lower stor­age capac­ity) disc,” Fadell explained. “Such advan­tages include reduced ship­ping costs, reduced pro­duc­tion costs, etc.”

The iPod chief pointed out that one cur­rently avail­able solu­tion to using reduced diam­e­ter discs in slot dri­ves is that of a rigid adapter that when used in con­junc­tion with the reduced diam­e­ter disc enables a disc player to accept and play the reduced diam­e­ter disc.

“How­ever, this solu­tion does noth­ing to reduce ship­ping costs since the rigid adapter (with its larger foot­print) must be shipped with the reduced diam­e­ter disc and there­fore a stan­dard sized ship­ping con­tainer must be used to accom­mo­date both the rigid adapter and reduced diam­e­ter disc,” he wrote. “What is needes is a cost effec­tive method and appa­ra­tus for ship­ping reduced diam­e­ter discs that assures the end user will be able to use the reduced diam­e­ter disc in a slot drive designed exclu­sively for a stan­dard diam­e­ter disc.”

There­fore, Fadell’s inven­tion calls for a “com­pactable mem­ory disc adapter” that can be shipped in a com­pact form and expanded by the cus­tomer once extracted from the retail pack­ag­ing. It could then be fit­ted around the edges of a 8cm mini-disc, effec­tively allow­ing for the reduced diam­e­ter disc to play in a slot inter­face designed exclu­sively for stan­dard 12cm diam­e­ter discs.

AppleIn­sider | Apple devel­op­ing mini-disc adapter for slot-loading drives

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Tags: apple, cd, adapter, design, green, sus­tain­able, technology

Amazon.com: Kin­dle: Amazon’s New Wire­less Read­ing Device: Kin­dle Store

Rea­son one. Excuse me but why would I want some­thing that looks like a cal­cu­la­tor to read a book instead of a book? Can’t think of a rea­son why. I also think that the folks Ama­zon seeded these devices to won­dered why too. (Although it appears they put all the pos­i­tive reviews up first) If you look at their web­site there are 505 cus­tomer reviews and the device has barely crept above 2 and, is that a half, stars. Only 97 peo­ple give it 5 stars. That’s the peo­ple that were inter­ested enough to beta test.

Rea­son two. Just because you sell books doesn’t mean you under­stand books. Ama­zon isn’t a book­store they are a dis­tri­b­u­tion center.

Rea­son three. Phys­i­cal­ity mat­ters. You can’t pass a book you read on to some­one else. You can’t take it to a book trader or used book­store. You can’t use it to hold your ticket on the train while you wait for the conductor.

Rea­son four. Peo­ple that pro­vide read­ing mate­r­ial call them­selves con­tent part­ners.

Rea­son five. Dumb name. Ever heard of kin­dling? Do you want to start a fire with an e-book? Wrong metaphor.

Rea­son six. Why pay for access to things you already get for free or through your cur­rent isp?

Rea­son seven. A book is about its cover, paper, type­face, and illus­tra­tions — they are part of the expe­ri­ence. If not all books could have a black cover and be the same text face using the same illustrator.

Rea­son eight. How many books could you buy for 400 dollars?

Rea­son nine. I own my books and I have access to them indefinitely.

Rea­son ten. The elec­tronic prod­uct isn’t cheaper than the phys­i­cal product.

Rea­son eleven. The old­style books were wire­less from the begininng and still are.

Rea­son twelve. UGLY.

I love good tech­nol­ogy. I love good design. I think that the need for devices that allow the reader to change the con­trast of the page and the size of the type are needed. I’m wait­ing for some­one smarter to make a smarter device. This isn’t the device to make me an early adopter and I love the bleed­ing edge.

I’m going to head over to Joseph Fox Book­sellers and buy a real book.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: kin­dle, books, read­ing, tech­nol­ogy, ama­zon, e-books,

I have been fol­low­ing the trip of two friends at their web­site : seek­ing texas. Shortly into the trip they men­tioned a land­ing spot Marfa, TX. I decided to take a vir­tual voy­age there. First, I went to google maps and searched for the city.  You can check it out here: google map. This is what my first view of Marfa looked like:

Not much con­text eh? Ok lets step back a bit and look again.

Does that give you a bet­ter idea? I also searched for the town on the web. I found this web­site which enlight­ened my per­spec­tive even more.  From the website:

Where is Marfa?

Marfa, Texas is a small town in the moun­tain­ous Trans-Pecos region of South­west Texas. The Trans-Pecos is con­sid­ered all ter­ri­tory lying west of the Pecos River and east from the bor­der of New Mex­ico down to the con­flu­ence of the Pecos and Rio Grande River. Located equal dis­tance from the major cities of El Paso (189 miles to the north­west) and Mid­land (188 miles to the north­east), Marfa is an incor­po­rated town in the county of Pre­sidio, edg­ing the Mex­i­can Bor­der by the town of Oji­naga 60 miles to the south­east, Jeff Davis County on the north and Brew­ster County on the east.

Now I know a lit­tle bit more. It’s near Big Bend. I’ve always wanted to take a camp­ing trip there. But I would actu­ally have to go back to Texas. Hmm. I’ll be check­ing out their next land­ing pad soon.

Marfa
now has a pop­u­la­tion of around 2400. The largest employ­ers are the
Bor­der Patrol, the U.S. Depart­ment of Immi­gra­tion and Nat­u­ral­iza­tion
and U.S. Cus­toms. As Marfa is the seat of gov­ern­ment for Pre­sidio
County, a sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of res­i­dents are employed through the
county offices.

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Tags: texas, travel, voyeur, Marfa, friends on the road, roadtrip