The MacBook Air
Wow, did I make a good choice.
In late August I upgraded from my trusty 15″ MacBook Pro (late 2008) to a 11″ MacBook Air (mid-2011). I was pretty nervous about the switch. I’ve been the productive owner of a 17″ Power Book so this represented a fundamental change.
I fly a bit for work and play. Of all the regulations that require compliance the worst are the limitations on the use of electronics “during takeoff and landing.” When you’re flying in and out of large markets the “takeoff and landing” portion of the flight can be an hour or more.
Nick Bolton does a good job asking the question on his New York Times blog but comes up empty.
According to the post, the FAA requires airplanes be able to withstand 100 v/m (volts per meter).
From the blog post:
When EMT Labs put an Amazon Kindle through a number of tests, the company consistently found that this e-reader emitted less than 30 microvolts per meter when in use. That’s only 0.00003 of a volt.
OK. But the post goes on to ask the obvious next question: LOTS of people have Kindles and iPads. What about THAT!?
But one Kindle isn’t sending out a lot of electrical emissions. But surely a plane’s cabin with dozens or even hundreds will? That’s what both the F.A.A. and American Airlines asserted when I asked why pilots in the cockpit could use iPads, but the people back in coach could not. Yet that’s not right either.
“Electromagnetic energy doesn’t add up like that. Five Kindles will not put off five times the energy that one Kindle would,” explained Kevin Bothmann, EMT Labs testing manager. “If it added up like that, people wouldn’t be able to go into offices, where there are dozens of computers, without wearing protective gear.”
As Tom Waits (an American singer, songwriter, composer) once said, “The large print giveth, but the small print taketh away.” Truer words have not have been spoken.
From the You-Have-Got-To-Be-Sh^H^H Kidding Me Department… As reported on ReadWriteWeb on April 28, 2011 the GPS manufacturer TomTom was caught with its hand in the cookie jar. The company company sold speed data (collected while its customers were navigating with the TomTom application) to POLICE in the Netherlands!!! The fact that it was not personally identifiable means little in my opinion.
What percentage of TomTom customers actually read (and appreciated) the TomTom Terms of Service? Somewhere in those Terms of Service, TomTom asserted the right to do anything they wanted (including sell to the police) with the data their device collected while riding around in your car.
Here’s an idea for a consumer-facing startup subscription service. Consumers register and identify the products and services they use or are contemplating using. This startup (let’s call it fine-print-taketh-away.com) would legally review the licenses and highlight the issues about which you should be aware (e.g., your GPS vendor can use your navigation data in any way they like including selling it to the police). You would get notified when they changed their terms of service. I’d pay for that…
Dutch speakers can read the original article. English speakers can use a Google translation of the story to get the gist of the story.
At Zope Corporation we write a LOT of content in reStructuredText.
From the reStructuredText site:
reStructuredText is an easy-to-read, what-you-see-is-what-you-get plaintext markup syntax and parser system. It is useful for in-line program documentation (such as Python docstrings), for quickly creating simple web pages, and for standalone documents. reStructuredText is designed for extensibility for specific application domains. The reStructuredText parser is a component of Docutils. reStructuredText is a revision and reinterpretation of the StructuredText and Setext lightweight markup systems.
Many of the artifacts I create and work with use plain-text tables. Working with plain-text tables manually can be painful. The other day I stumbled on emacs’ support for text-based tables. I found it pretty useful.
ExpanDrive allows Mac users to mount remote storage as though it was local. While this alone isn’t rocket science, the variety of supported remote storages and the reliability of the software have made it a nearly indispensable tool.
I routinely use it to mount:
ExpanDrive relies on the MacFUSE kernel extension. MacFUSE is a Mac variant of the FUSE which allows programmers to implement complete filesystems as a user-space (i.e., not in the operating system kernel) application. This is a huge advantage the technical bits of which are beyond the scope of this post. Curious technical readers should check out the FUSE article at Wikipedia.
As a total bonus ExpanDrive supports and preserves OpenMeta metadata on the ssh and Amazon S3 volumes I’ve used. I’ll be writing another post on OpenMeta soon. Until then go get yourself a copy of ExpanDrive!
Every now and again you find a little piece of software that, in hindsight, you wonder how you lived without. A while ago I found just such a piece of software, MsgFiler. The developer recently released an upgrade exclusively through the Apple App Store which provoked me to purchase the upgrade and renew my appreciation for what I begun to think was a feature built-in to Apple Mail!
MsgFiler makes filing email messages as efficient as possible.
A few things make this a great match for me:
MsgFiler is invoked with a (configurable) hotkey (I used the suggested Apple-9 combination). You then get a dialog box for searching your folders (using an “incremental search” interface). When the search has narrowed your list you press your down arrow to drop into the selection box. Select the destination folder and press Enter. Message(s) is/are filed. Done. You can select multiple messages and file them. You can Copy messages (i.e., as opposed to moving them).
Highly recommended!
Sometimes it’s the small things that make a difference. In this case a friend of mine referred me to a very clever little utility called Caffeine. From the product’s webpage:
Caffeine is a tiny program that puts an icon in the right side of your menu bar. Click it to prevent your Mac from automatically going to sleep, dimming the screen or starting screen savers. Click it again to go back. Hold down the Command key while clicking to show the menu.
Run and get some.
It’s a drag to constantly watch your hard drive space and be in a constant state of housekeeping. Add to this the get-a-bigger-5400-rpm-drive-instead-of-a-smaller-7200-rpm-drive mistake I made a year ago and you have my recipe for a hard drive upgrade.
As part of my move to Leopard I wanted to take the opportunity to get a little hard drive headroom.
I found a reasonably priced and compatible model (Hitachi Travelstar™ 7K200) from macsales online store.
While the installation instructions seemed a little involved I actually have a decent set of tools. Turns out it was pretty easy. I am impressed at the assembly of the MBP. Lots of screws – all metal-on-metal.
If you’re thinking of an upgrade and have the tools and an open work area you should go for it!
Since my “clean” installation of Leopard I’ve been making a point to avoid making a mess of my “personal information space.” One area of marked progress has been my bookmarks.
A lot of my time is spent demonstrating our products. In various situations I use Safari (of course), Firefox, Opera, and Camino. I use multiple browsers in order to demonstrate application compatibility, to exercise multiple authenticated user perspectives and to take advantage of browser-specific features. My demos (and most of my routine browser use) are based on a large set of bookmarks.
Until today I tried (and mostly failed) to keep bookmarks in sync manually. Not any more!
Today I found Safari Bookmark Exporter (SBE).
SBE is a free and simple utility that exports my Safari bookmarks into mutiple formats. It is smart enough to find my Firefox profile directory and render a proper bookmarks.html. I’ve been using this just for a day and I can’t imagine not having it!
I am finally a Leopard user!
I had been holding off pending the release of what I’d hoped would be a final release of my contact manager (Daylite from Marketcircle). Unfortunately, I was faced with waiting until mid-January (the next time I’d have the time to do something like this) or use a third-beta release. I chose the beta release. :^)
