A Whole Lotta Nothing

Crap I love: the Napoleon pocket

Love for the Napoleon jacket, originally uploaded by mathowie.

In the past few months, I've become the proud owner of two jackets with a new-to-me feature called the Napoleon pocket. Obviously, it's named after the dude and his famous pose of having one hand halfway obscured into his clothing and it's becoming more common on hiking and cycling jackets.

In traveling around I've quickly come to love my Napoleon pocket jackets to death mostly because it's the perfect place to stash an iPhone/iPod for the following reasons:

• If you stash one in the pocket and then wrap half of your headphone cord around your device, there's a perfect amount of headphone cord sticking out, but not so much that it gets stuck in everything. You can put on and take off messenger bags, you can fall asleep in an airplane seat, and you can stand in a super crowded subway car without ever getting tangled up in a huge cord.
• Stashing in a normal pant pocket risks scratches from change and keys, but up high it's usually alone
• The small chest pocket is a perfect size for an iPhone/iPod
• With the iPhone button on the cord, you can just stash the phone into your pocket and forget about it, pausing and advancing music with the cord control

I've also found the pocket handy when getting to an airport or grabbing a rental car because it's a great temporary pocket you won't forget about and that you can quickly find again without having to dig through other stuff. I don't know what I'm going to do this summer when it's too warm to wear a jacket as I'm getting daily use out of this feature.

Paying for camouflage

Apple rules. If you take a look at the new MacBook order page, you'll notice a black ibook/macbook will run you $150* over a white one with identical specs.

Apple is charging people if they want a laptop that looks like a windows PC.

 

* The black one is $200 more, but for $50 you can upgrade the middle-tier white one to a 80Gb hard drive, hence, the $150 price difference for two totally identical macbooks.

Oh shit, I just got Jobsed

From MacRumors Macworld Live Updates feed:

10:12 am First Mac with Intel processor today.
10:12 am The iMac - built in isight camera. front row. incredible reception.
10:13 am No other desktop PC can match it.
10:14 am Same sizes. 17", 20". Same design. Same features (isight, front row, apple remote), Same price. What's different.
10:14 am Intel Processor. 2-3x faster than the iMac G5.
10:14 am Intel Core Duo. an amazing chip.
10:15 am Two cores. each one faster than the G5.

CrapDamnCrap. My 20" G5 iMac is only two months old for chrissakes! And I bought it days after it was announced! Damn you Steve Jobs (*shakes fist*)!

Insanely Great

My experience with Apple products is pretty good, though not perfect. I've had a powerbook break latches before, hard drives die, and an iPod freak out. But after setting up a multi-location Airport Express network, I'm impressed.

After going through several Linksys and D-link wireless routers that lacked stability and features, I decided to go with an Apple AirPort Express, mostly due to positive reviews and the capability of sharing music and printer connections. After using it for a week I decided to get another one, so that I could stream music to my living room stereo.

The part that impressed me the most is the airport setup program. Using a wizard involving four or five steps, I set up a pretty sophisticated network that involves security across a mesh network of the base and extender, with music and printer sharing to boot. A few simple steps and now any computer running iTunes in the house can send audio to my living room stereo and any computer can print photos or documents on my inkjet printer via rendezvous. It all just worked and it's working flawlessly. These days, it's rare when products just plain work like they should.

Don't call it a revolution

A few weeks ago I read through all of Business Week's design innovations for 2005 and kept track of my favorites. One of them was a shower head that the article described as being not only nice looking and easy to use, but deeply researched before going to market and was currently the best selling shower head at Lowes.

I figured I needed a new one and design research plus design awards plus brisk sales would equal the best shower head in the world. But like Mike, I found it was fairly disappointing (my review is there as a comment).

Tiger and TiVo are friends again

I posted this on PVRblog but it's worth repeating here for my TiVo/mac owning friends that might have seen it: if you upgrade to Tiger and you lost your TiVo music and photo sharing, someone has come to the rescue and released a TiVo desktop app that works.

Dear Apple...

Now that you'll be running Apple hardware on x86 chips, please use this change to bring down the costs of your hardware significantly. The mac mini was a huge hit for one reason: price. Now that you'll be saving hundreds of dollars on chips getting them from Intel instead of Motorola (and getting them at much faster speeds), please pass the savings onto us and you'll watch your market share continue to rebound.

In other words, don't let us get into the situation where $799 Apple 20" cinema displays have the exact same hardware as Dell 20" monitors that recently sold for $398.

Also, I figure it's just a matter of hours after the first intel-mac rolls off the line before we realize exactly what keeps us from running OS X on any cheap PC. I suspect whatever hardware or software dongle limits this will be thwarted the same day.

Anyway, I think it's great news, I just hope it means cheaper, faster macs.

Hit print again! Again!

While I didn't get the obligatory video camera (yet), I did buy a modern day requirement for new parents with digital cameras. Everyone that sees my new daughter and photos I've taken asks "hey, can I have a print of that?" After spending years using Ofoto for the occasional print I finally broke down and bought a (fairly cheap, but fast and good) photo printer, the Canon Pixma iP5000.

Now that I've printed all my favorite shots from the last week and gone ahead and printed all my favorites from 2005 I realized I haven't had this much fun printing since the first time my brother and I hooked a dot matrix one up to a Commodore 64. I should have gotten one years ago.

Best Monitor Ever.

When Dell announced they'd be releasing a 24" widescreen LCD monitor for under $1200 early this year, I counted the days until it was available and bought one soon after their release. Thanks to an initial sales push, I got it for $120 off with free shipping, so $1079 total (no tax).

Since it runs at 1900x1200, you need a pretty good video card and I had to also pick up a $100 ATI card with DVI inputs, but now that I've had it running for about a month and a half, I have to say it's my favorite monitor ever, surpassing the old SGI widescreen I loved back at UCLA. 1900 pixels is a lot to work with, I keep Homesite running constantly and a firefox window or two. I usually overlap them still, but when I need to read two documents at once, I can easily do that. Photshop is also a dream to work with, as I still have a good 600 free pixels off to the side while I work on comps and photos. The color, gamma, brightness are all great though you have to use your graphics card's software controls as the monitor offers little in terms of adjustments. I no longer have any CRT on my desk, relying on the color reproduction of this monitor for graphics production. Here's a full-sized capture of my desktop, and here it is on my desk.

Soon after I bought one, they pushed the price back up to $1199, but as I was searching for something tonight I see that they have taken $200 off, selling it for $999.

It's now the same price as an Apple 20" monitor, but bigger than Apple's 23" monitor, which sells for nearly double the price. Heck if you've got the extra money around, for $1998, you can buy two dells and have FOUR FEET of screen space, still a full thousand cheaper than Apple's top flight 30" display.

Anyway, I don't get any kickback and Dell doesn't have an affiliate program, I just love this monitor and now that it's less than a thousand bucks, I can heartily recommend it to everyone. It's a tax write-off for computer business work anyway, right?

Shuffle me up some products

The other day, I caught up with an old friend that now works in the movie business. He was always a bit of a tech guy, but it still surprised me when he pulled out an ipod shuffle as we drove to brunch in his car. Then I noticed how he used it. It was hooked to a cassette adapter in his stereo, but he held it like a wired remote control, controlling volume and next/previous tracks while he drove, never letting go of (or having to look down at) the shuffle.

I've had a shuffle for a couple weeks and I hadn't thought to use the device in that way. For him, it was both a controller/UI and the actual music player. There seems like limitless possible other ways you could use a shuffle that no products exist for quite yet, so someone create these:

- create a bluetooth adapter that plugs into the headphone jack and transmits audio to a cassette adapter with bluetooth. Then you could just velcro the shuffle to your steering wheel or gear shift and change tracks that way. Also, a call on your bluetooth cellphone could mute/pause the player.

- create a usb slot in aftermarket car stereos to act as a dock. You could use the stereo's display as the shuffle's non-existant display and charge it at the same time. Also, add USB/dock functionality to factory stereos so owners can use their existing steering wheel stereo controls. If really want to do something cool, also add a hard drive to car stereos with shuffle docks. Then I could just add 1Gb of my music collection each time I dock it. Eventually, I could fill a 20, 40, or 80Gb hard drive that way.

- put a camera into the shuffle. I'm surprised it didn't come with a tiny 640x480 cameraphone-style attachment for the usb end, and I'm surprised no one has offered one for sale yet.

- Go higher capacity with the shuffle. I suspect in 2 or 3 years we'll laugh at the dinky 1Gb shuffles, as we pop our 8, 20, and 40Gb shuffles into our car stereos like cartridges.

I also went running with my new shuffle for the first time and was amazed by how small and light it was. I put on my earbuds, slid the shuffle under my shirt, dropped it into the back pocket of my running tights and I couldn't even feel it. Stashing my keys is a bigger problem while running than a shuffle -- that's how compact and light it is.

I've tested myself running with and without music and I tend to run farther and faster and I feel better afterwards with it, so my shuffle will be going along with me on every run. I might just velcro a house key to the back of it and kill two birds with one stone.