LookIt

The unmanageable Airport

After upgrading to OS X 10.5, I just discovered that AirPort Utility (or at least my AirPort Utility) will no longer manage my original Airport Base Station, circa 1999. This puppy has survived many Macs and PCs passing through the house. It even has had a capacitor replacement, proving that I remember the soldering iron skills that my father and Heathkit gave me more than 40 years ago. If you want an old Airport base station for a museum (or want four spare replacement capacitors!), let me know.

In its place is a two-year-old Linksys WRT54G that I bought for the purpose of playing with the firmware. Last night, I downloaded and installed Tomato version 1.14. It was completely trivial and has proven to be quite useful. The signal from the base station (which is in the garage) is much stronger, I can do better UPnP debugging, and the bandwidth usage graphs are, well, useless and pretty.

Macworld Expo 2008 trip report

In no particular order...

• The Axiotron Modbook is real, and it looks wonderful. The interaction style is easy to get used to, and the whole package seems well put-together. The demo of using iPhoto with it was a great seller: it is much more natural to point with the pen than with a mouse. I worry that carrying this around without a really good padded sleeve is going to cause big problems for owners. The company seems to understand the market well, and the booth was constantly mobbed.
• The Macbook Air:
  • ...is impressively flat and light.
  • This picture from the Apple web site is deceptive because you can't see that the ports actually are in a pop-down flap, not always exposed. The "ports flap" is cute, and it works. That is, when it is open and you have a USB cable plugged into it, the bottom of the Macbook is still flat on the desk.
  • The Magsafe connector is a different end than what is on the current MacBooks. It, too, does not prevent the Mac from being flat on the desk.
  • I am skeptical of the battery life estimates. The screen did not seem as bright as a MacBook, and I think that you'll have to have it cranked up much brighter for equivalent use. That should hurt the battery life.
  • I felt no heat spots on the bottom when I picked it up.
  • There were a huge number on display, and the display was constantly mobbed. They're going to sell a ton.
  • I wish I brought my camera for one shot, but this one from flickr will suffice. The vertical strand of Macbook Airs was one of the most-photographed areas of the show floor. Everyone wanted a picture of them showing how thin the new computer is.

  In total, it seems like a lot of extra hundreds of dollars for a slower system with less battery life, just for the lightness and coolness factor. This seems mostly like a "coolness" buy.

• The unsung great new product of the show: Skitch. Skitch is a tiny app (currently Mac-only) that lets you grab and annotate pictures easily, then export them to the places you want even more easily. Other programs make you save a file, then say where to export it to; Skitch makes it seem like you are exporting directly without having to go through the saving step. The skitch.com web site is like flickr but with more help for making the URLs that you are about to paste in other places. This could be another low-cost, fun hit for plasq.
• There were many more older folks (> 65 years old) on the show floor than ten years ago. I think the idea of "get Mom and Dad a Mac instead of another PC that will confuse them" is working.
• Microsoft spent a zillion dollars to hype Office:Mac 2008. I'm skeptical. When I asked whether it was guaranteed to read and write Office 2003 for Windows documents without a problem, I got two replies: "try it and if it fails you can return it" and "probably not". Microsoft can't even get their current products to interoperate with themselves, as if they think everyone is going to upgrade to their new versions all at once. Sad.
• David Pogue talking in the O'Reilly Press booth was, as always, hilarious. Buy his new Leopard book.
• A friend asked me to look at OmniFocus. Yawn. Another GTD (Getting Things Done) app with nothing to make it stand out. It could be that I don't think the way that GTD people think. I still love Journler, which is really much more "Keeping Things Organized" than "Getting Things Done"
• The show owner screwed up bigtime by splitting the show into Moscone South and West instead of South and North. The booths in Moscone West were deserted.
• I grabbed a free copy of Macworld magazine. I realized that i haven't read a single issue in two years, and that one was one that I picked up at the show in 2006. If I'm at all typical, print magazines are dead.
• I was fortunate enough to see street musician Michael Masley playing outside Moscone. His ethereal playing of the cymbalom with multiple bows attached to his fingers needs to be seen and heard to be believed.
• The sunset driving down Highway 1 from San Francisco to Santa Cruz was lovely. Man, I love living here.

More ICANN follies in the Whois database

Via a Macintouch reader: The main whois registry allows people unaffiliated with a domain name to stuff their results in whois searches. Try:

 whois -h whois.internic.net apple.com

Is it really that hard for ICANN to filter out "APPLE.COM.IS.OWN3D.BY.NAKEDJER.COM"?

Wonderful way to start the new year

Our friend Thomas likes to spend Jan 1 with us, and his idea this year was to go watch the whales that are migrating through the Monterey Bay. He booked us on a three-hour tour with Monterey Bay Whale Watch, which turned out to be an excellent choice.

The weather was clear and relatively warm for January 1. We left around 1:45 past the normal contingent of sea lions hanging out near the tourists. Within half an hour, we had sighted whale spouts and were seeing a group of three whales from about 100 yards away. Every six minutes or so, we would see some spouts, followed by seeing their flukes as they went down again. On the last of our sightings, we were about 30 yards and had very clear view. Given that you are never assured of seeing any whales on such a trip, we were pretty happy.

Then the captain/naturalist did something that turned the day even more wonderful. She said she could see dolphins jumping a few miles away, and wanted to go take a look for them. We could see that the competing whale watching tour had headed in the other direction, probably to look for more whales, but dolphins sounded interesting.

As we approached the Pacific white-sided dolphins, things got pretty surreal. We could see dozens of dolphins jumping out of the water, some of them doing somersaults in the air. Further, we could see that there were hundreds of dolphins ahead of us. (Interestingly, there were also thousands of moon jellyfish under us....) As we got closer, the captain/naturalist told us that it was fine for the boat to go into group because they love to play around the bow of the boat and in the wake. Sure enough, we could see many of the dolphins racing the boat, coming up right under the bow and leaping ahead. All around us, there lots of other dolphins leaping an playing. Here estimate was that there were about 2500 in the ten square miles around us.

We hung out there for about half a hour and headed back to the wharf (which was quite far away). We had an amazingly colorful sunset behind us in the last few miles, then got back to the dock a bit before dark. It was a great start to the new year.