Status-Q

You probably thought your monitor/TV was pretty cool. But I think you'll agree that it was only because you hadn't seen these...

What's this?

It's the entrance to a shop. Seen from below. It's part of an nice set of photos of Apple's new retail outlet on 5th Avenue, taken by Neil Epstein.

I also went to a Mac store today, in Palo Alto, to have a look at the new MacBook.

Much to my surprise, I found myself definitely drawn towards the black version, though not, I think, enough that I would pay the extra $150 Apple charges for black. I heard Tom Standage comment a couple of days ago that only Apple could charge for the colour that everyone else was using anyway!

The case has a slightly matt finish, so it's probably a different material designed not to show the scratches in the way that the black iPods did, and it may cost a bit more. Probably about $2 more.

But if the case is now matt, the screens are now glossy, in the style beloved of Sony and others. They make photos look very nice (unless you have fingerprints on your screen) but in general I'm not a fan because they reflect too much. Remember the old days of CRT screens when you had to position your computer so your back wasn't towards a window?

Otherwise, I think this is a lovely design at a reasonable price and deserves to do well. Anyone who's had to replace the hard disk inside one of Apple's other recent laptops will also really appreciate how easy it is on these in comparison.

I saw my first 100 Mpixel display today, on a visit to Calit2 at UCSD.

It's 55 standard displays, with a bank of Linux machines to drive them. So the pixels are the same size as on your normal display, but you need to walk around to examine the whole image. Very cool.

Click the picture for a couple more images.

I keep some of my notes in electronic form, and some on paper. This is a pain. I'd prefer to have everything electronic, but there are three situations where paper wins out:

• When I'm on a phone call, at least without a headset. I need one hand to hold the phone, and writing is much more effective than typing single-handed!
• When I'm in a meeting, if it's a small group or a one-on-one chat. I think it's most uncivilised to be typing and looking at a screen while someone's talking to you.
• When I want to draw anything. Keyboards are good for text. Mice are awful for sketching.

So I think I'm going to be using my Moleskine notebook for a while, but I'd love to be able to keep an archive of it on my laptop, even if only as a sequence of images. However, I really don't want to have to scan one page at a time. I could use an Anoto digital pen, but I'd be bound to lose the pen, and anyway it doesn't work with a Mac. It does now work with a Blackberry but only via a paid subscription service. Not for me. "Aha!", I thought recently, "I could go back to my old Filofax." It's loose-leaf and so I could take the pages out every couple of weeks and put them through the sheet feeder on my scanner. But it turns out that they're too small, and the feeder doesn't really like them. Surely there's a market here? There's no shortage of Filoxfaxes and similar 'personal organiser' systems in the world. Does anybody make a scanner that can cope with them? Or, come to that, with index cards? That would be invaluable for many academics, as well as for devotees of the Hipster PDA. If nobody else makes one, watch this space, and I'll let you know when mine goes into production.... :-)

The time has come. My old and beautiful DVD player - a Pioneer DV-717 for which I paid £600 a long time ago - is starting to fade. It lost the ability to play CDs some years back, and it's now regularly having problems with the scratches on rental DVDs as well, while other drives play them just fine. It was time to replace it. I could, of course, have bought a replacement at the supermarket for half the price I once paid for a region-free mod for my Pioneer. But they don't make them like they used to - anything looks like a piece of junk when placed next to the 717. And, anyway, DVD's are so last-decade....

So yesterday I went off to the Apple store to get a Mac Mini for use as a DVD/PVR/jukebox/digibox.

I already had one of Elgato's splendid firewire TV tuners, but I needed to buy a DVI-to-S-video adapter to connect the Mini to my TV, and I also got an external DVD writer. Why bother, you may ask, when the Mini has its own superdrive? Because I have a lot of DVDs from the US as well as the UK. When I started collecting, the choice was much greater on the other side of the pond. Now, sadly, getting firmware patches to remove the region lock on DVD drives ain't as easy as it used to be. But if you have two drives, you can use one for each region. The LaCie is also a more capable drive, and the package is a reasonably cost-effective way of purchasing Roxio Toast, which integrates nicely with the Elgato software. But I do hope those nice people who came up with the region-coding system will burn in hell for all eternity, or come to some other suitably sticky end...

In general, my first impressions are good. This is a 1.66GHz Core Duo machine, and it's very speedy. Apple's Front Row software is very slick, and Equinux's MediaCentral is a good clone with some extra features for those of you who don't have Front Row. It now also works with the Apple remote control if you have one.

It's a pity that Elgato's EyeTV software isn't integrated in some way with Front Row. This is Apple's fault, not theirs, I'm sure. But at present it means that I need two remotes for the one machine.

The other thing I'm finding is that packages which, unlike Front Row and MediaCentral, aren't really intended for viewing from the other side of the room, can be quite challenging on a TV. I don't have any reason to get rid of my perfectly functional old TV at present, and it may last for several more years. Which means that for a while I'll be using a conventional GUI at a resolution just below 800x600 on a screen which was never designed to display crisp text. This won't be an issue for those with new flat panel TVs connected via DVI or VGA, but it's a bit of a challenge for me.

There are starting to be some alternative programs which interface with EyeTV, and I can always VNC in and control it from another machine, but in the meantime I'm finding the keyboard-controlled zoom feature quite useful!

Otherwise, things are looking good so far. I'll keep you informed...

My friends at Newnham Research have started to get some news coverage, from PCW and from ExtremeTech.

Their problem is that you really don't get a feel for how well this stuff works until you see it in action - it's hard to do it justice on paper. But it's good to see that Newnham is coming out of stealth mode at last...

Thanks to Seb for the links.

I was at John's a couple of nights ago, and we both happened to check our Blackberrys at the same time. Tom, John's son, laughed and grabbed a camera...

Yesterday I updated my Blackberry 7100t to v 4.1 of the OS. I also updated the OS on my TomTom Go 500. One, or other, or the combination, means that I can now use the TomTom as a hands-free kit for the Blackberry, something which wasn't possible before. This posting will probably be of very little interest to anybody not Googling for 'TomTom Blackberry'!

The Blackberry update is not generally available yet, but one provider, Hong Kong CSL, had a version for the 71xx series. You can find links here. Note the bit about deleting vendor.xml . There are few obvious benefits on the surface, but quite a few under the skin. One thing I haven't yet managed, though, is to use the BB as a modem for my Mac :-(

The NYT reports that the iPod accessory market is a $1bn business. And that's without counting the ultimate iPod accessory...

Is this, perhaps, the most stylish way to carry your files around? Well, it would certainly go nicely with my riding crop and hip flask...

Available from Red Envelope. Thanks to Adam for the link.