Check it out in its (almost) original size. Blasted Flickr photo size limit. Not my best stitch so far, but for 3 hours of work, I think it’s pretty good.
That’s Sinbad in the back. Seems like he’s a pretty big Apple fan.
The Airbook’s flaws, in my eyes are…
- They should have just gone with 12″, it would have made it that much more appealing.
- One USB port is just retarded. I remember how much of a pain that was when I was using my ThinkPad 570.
- 1.8″ drives wear out faster, my opinion.
- The keyboard is fantastic, the best ever, if you’re comparing it to other Mac portables.
- Aluminum case? What do you care for more, your machine not taking damage and lasting for a long time, or the environment?
- Multi touch crap, driver updates shouldn’t be bullet points for the same hardware. I should point out that some Powerbooks very much support multi touch scroll if you upgrade to Leopard.
In the end, especially when looking at the price, I’m not all that impressed. Though I’m probably more annoyed that they didn’t announce anything interestingly newer (larger Nanos?) and haven’t really dropped the price in anything I care about.
There wasn’t much else interesting at the show. I thanked the folks at 1Password for making one of the few bits of software I actually have paid for, caught up with the EyeFi group. Half the vendors were selling iPod and iPhone accessories. I got to see a great demo of this neat thing called Neat Receipts. Some interesting GPS stuff.
Karen showed up and started freaking out about the Airbook. She was looking forward to having Mac aerobic work outs next to one of the Apple displays. Sadly I got hungry before I could see that idea bloom.
All in all, it was an ok time for $10.
A week ago I signed up for Meraki’s Free The Net San Francisco project. I noticed that when I stuck my Macbook against my office window in my 3rd floor flat, I could connect to another AP called Free The Net. I sent them my address and stated that I’d be willing to mount one of their out door repeaters here.
For the past few years Google and Earthlink have been knocking on city hall’s door, telling them they’re ready to install wifi access points with fast internet everywhere in the city, giving anyone with a computer and a wifi card costless internet access. All of this for free, the governing forces of this city simply have to say yes. If you’re not a native here in the bay, I’m sure you can already guess that the answer thus far has been no.
What Meraki is doing is creating a city wide mesh network of open wifi access points. The difference here is instead of asking the government running the city, it’s asking the residents of the city. Access points are all hosted/housed by people who want to expand the mesh. Some folks are (from my understanding) being paid to host a main node plus internet access for it, while others setup repeaters to hit the main node or others part of the mesh.
Today I got a package from them in the mail. It contained an outdoor repeater, a long antenna, power and ethernet, plus various mounting brackets. Setup was extremely easy. Since I wasn’t too keen with hanging out of my window mounting something to the outside of the building in the pouring rain, I opted to use suction cups and stick the repeater to my window facing the street. The device can draw power over ethernet, which is rather rad as the AC/DC adapter’s cord wasn’t all that long. In addition the thing draws less power then my Linksys router, but at the same time getting way better range. The ports on the back of the thing are covered up with a weatherproof plate and gaskets.
After feeding it some power, it took about a minute to find the other Free The Net access point down the street and connect to it. No more configuration. DSLreports tells me the connection is coming from someone on Speakeasy, my speeds are about 83.2kbyts down 4.5kbyts up. For free, that’s not half bad. Overall I’m fairly impressed.
So far the mesh spans most of The Mission, Castro at Market, The Lower Haight and parts of The Panhandle. Check out their map to see live usage, right now there are three people using the repeater stuck to my window. If you look like you’re in an area close by to another repeater but there isn’t a marker for you on the map, take your laptop to a window and see what you get. If you can connect to a network, I implore you to sign up and stick some pretty white plastic electronics to the outside of your home. They have a smaller indoor repeater if you’re not too keen on mounting anything to your exterior.
Free The Net indeed.
And at last, all my photos from when the event was actually open! Half of these were touched up in Aperture, the other half I just did under Lightroom in the past two days. I must say I’ll be sticking with Lightroom from this point onward. None of these photos have actually made it out onto the net yet, so for most of you these will be brand spanking new.
Now that these are up I can allow myself to take more photographs, yay!
Finally, after a long long long wait, here are my photos from before the event ever opened, high rez and cleaned up, tagged for the most part. All done under Aperture. While on the playa I uploaded a large number of these photos in a very very small rez. Those will remain on my Flickr stream but I think I’ll be killing off the sets they’re in.
Computer screens don’t look the same. Different manufacturers, types of displays, etc. Printers also don’t print out identically colored things. This is why color management options were created. A means to allow users to fine tune how a computer should interpret color on the display and print out. This information gets trickled down from the OS to individual applications, such as, let’s say Photoshop. At the same time photos can be saved with color management settings, thusly making this whole thing fairly more complex.
What I’m getting to is Firefox, IE and mostly everything else that isn’t Safari, at this point in time doesn’t display many photos at their true color. As an example, if you’re on the Mac load up this photo I have of myself on Flickr in both Firefox 2 and Safari. If your on a PC, load this photo up in whatever browser, and also save locally then open up in something like Photoshop or irfanview. Notice a difference? Firefox and IE default to some whack ass color profile, while Safari and Photoshop are are to display this correctly.
Firefox 3 should offer the option to display things true, but may not be enabled by default. For the moment if you’d like to view photos off of my Flickr stream, try running Safari. I know that sounds stupid, but boy do my photos look better.
Whenever I get a friends request over a social networking site, the first thing I ask is, “Do I actually know this person outside of the context of the internet?” Most of the time the answer will be yes, I met this person while hanging out with so and so, or at some party, or through a mean trick I played an another friend. When that question gets properly satisfied I’ll go ahead and friend this person back. Most of the times it’s from folks that we’ve met in passing in real life, who found me interesting and want to create a stronger connection, which I think is great.
I started doing this over 5 or 6 years ago. Before then my ICQ buddy list was over 300 contacts deep. Most I had some contact with, about something, maybe due to a Team Fortress clan or web design of some sort. But there was no sort of connection, just a passing of sorts. Around 10 to 20 of those 300 I actually got to know in real life, not behind the glowing box.
Since then I elected to do what I described initially. Ask myself if I know this person. And so far it’s worked well. As it turns out for me, people I meet in real life I have a better, longer lasting bond with, then folks online that show up in passing. To sum it up, I use social networks of different flavors to socialize with others I know, not to find those I don’t.
All this brings me to a short communication I had over Facebook in the past week. This chap friended me, and the name nor the user icon of a face drawn out with chalk looked anywhere near familiar…
Me: Do I know you, if not I don’t friend people I don’t know.
Chap: i dont think so. thats kinda sad though…how do you make new friends?
Me: I leave my computer to go outside and live my life.
I don’t know why I found this interacting so interestingly odd. As I sit here, reading his words, I’m only able to think of how sad his perspective on socializing is to me.
I should eat some food then go outside to play.
Just got around to spending some time putting both of these together. Flickr is annoying, I’m rather not pleased with its 10 meg per file upload limit. Nor am I pleased with the fact that Lightroom wont take anything with more then 10,000 pixels. Other then that, these look pretty neat. Both images have a link to the full sized version (which is actually a smaller version of the original that fits within the 10 meg limit), check them out if you want to see some detail. The 2nd one wasn’t meant to be a panaroma, but worked, sort of. I would have cropped it better, except I wanted to keep “THING” in the bottom within frame.
Page 42 of 43