LookIt

"Grip of death" affects MacBook as well

I discovered this morning that Apple's problems with how you hold their devices goes well beyond the iPhone 4. If you hold the MacBook in one particular corner, the WiFi reception drops off significantly:

In fact, most of the features on the MacBook stop working when I grip it this way. I hope Apple addresses this by updating MacOS to prevent this from happening, or at least gives us all a free case or something.

Cloud instability

When major vendors start abandoning their cloud computing offerings, and telling their customers that they might lose the data that they paid to store there, you have to wonder about the future of hosted cloud offerings. I am a big supporter of internally-managed cloud services; that's just today's marketing term for virtualization. Outsourced data management and computation, on the other hand, seem to have a much higher risk than reward.

MaMuse: sweet vocals

While shopping today, I heard some of the nicest music I had in a long time. It sounded somewhat like the Be Good Tanyas, but even lighter and more melodic. I asked the clerk at the front who it was, and boy am I glad that I did. I had never heard of MaMuse, so I bought their first album (as MP3s) and am thoroughly loving it. They're still quite local to Northern California, and it doesn't look like they're coming to Santa Cruz any time soon, but I certainly hope to see them when they do.

Printer driver bloat

Remember when entire operating systems would fit on a CD? Apple's printer drivers for Eposn will barely fit on one.