...more recent posts
The NY Times has a nice preview review of Mac OS X 10.3 (a.k.a. Panther) which is due out tomorrow night.
New mobile phone from LG Electronics. On sale in Korea by the end of the year. No word on a U.S. release, but the specs are interesting enough to note. 1.1 megapixel camera, 192MB memory, 2.8 inch 262,000 color TFT LCD, USB, IrDA, and a nice looking design to boot. Runs Microsoft's Pocket PC OS.
Two issues: where's the bluetooth? And when is someone going to put jpeg compression software into these camera phones? To belabor this point yet again: I want to take high res pictures with my camera phone, but I want to download them over USB to my computer at my leisure. When I'm in the field I want the phone to make a second, reduced size image, suitable for sending over slow cellular data connections. Come on! That should be easy. One click produces a full size 1 meg image, and a user defined scaled down image (say 100k.)
Apple has quietly updated it's iBook line from G3 to G4 processors at 800 mhz., 933 mhz., and 1 Ghz. Also added an option for 802.11g. Everything else stays pretty much the same, including the price.
Number of spam emails I have received in the last month with the word 'vicodin' spelled correctly in the subject line: 106.
Kevin Werbach's positive comments after two days with a Treo 600.
Joel on Software explains Unicode and character sets. There is something about his tone that usually turns me off (probably it's that he knows more than I do!) but he also writes some really informative articles. I've been wanting someone to explain this whole mess, and he has done a great job. Thanks!
Sort of geeky programmer stuff, but might be interesting to others as well. How exactly is text stored in a computer?
But still, most people just pretended that a byte was a character and a character was 8 bits and as long as you never moved a string from one computer to another, or spoke more than one language, it would sort of always work. But of course, as soon as the Internet happened, it became quite commonplace to move strings from one computer to another, and the whole mess came tumbling down. Luckily, Unicode had been invented....His insistence that "There Ain't No Such Thing As Plain Text" is a real mind blower. I mean, of course, but it had never really sunk in before.
Unicode was a brave effort to create a single character set that included every reasonable writing system on the planet and some make-believe ones like Klingon, too.
SMS Sender is a web app that lets you send SMS messages to most North American cellphones.
Two good articles linked from boingboing this morning:
Distributed web hosting system for spammers using cracked computers:
One group in Poland is currently advertising "invisible bulletproof hosting" in online forums for spammers. For $1,500 per month, the group says it can protect a site from network sleuthing tools used by spam opponents, such as traceroute and whois.
And Simson Garfinkle has an article explaining how peer to peer (P2P) technology can build a better internet.
I wish I could set Safari to open all links (single click) in a new tab, and use command-click to open links in the current window.
Is there a hack to do this?
Panther - Mac OS X 10.3 - will be available at 8 pm on October 24th in Apple Stores.