Category: news

Posted on

Mac mini is dead, well possibly not, okay no it isn’t…

Rumours of the death of the Mac mini have been greatly exaggerated as various rumour sites backpedal on their missives of doom on the Mac mini.

Mac mini

Applesinsider say:

Last Memorial Day, AppleInsider cited sources in reporting that it appeared to be the end of the line for the itsy-bitsy Mac, which had seen limited adoption and an uncertain role during the first 24 months on the market.

They then say

For the first time in nearly a year, however, people familiar with the matter tell AppleInsider there’s new life in the Mac mini department, where a small team of engineers have recently been tasked with gutting the diminutive desktop and applying fresh internals.

So it is looking like that we may well see a new faster, better Mac mini.

I do like the Mac mini, it works well as a little Mac for testing and trying things out as well as introducing people to the Mac. I also have used it in the past as a server for various web services and for limited use it works really well – probably would not be too happy if it was a production server.

I did try it as a TV computer, in other words connected to my TV, but I never really used it, in the main as it was an old G4 PPC model and was rather slow for recording and capturing video from an EyeTV USB device. The newer Intel models have the advantage of remote control and faster processors and graphics better suited to video.

I am interested to see where Apple goes with a new model and I may just have to get one.

Posted on

I’M ON THE PLANE!

BBC reports on the first “officially allowed” mobile phone call from a commercial airliner.

Dubai-based airline Emirates has become the first commercial airline to allow passengers to make mobile phone calls during flights.

Emirates said the first permitted mobile phone call was made on a flight between Dubai and Casablanca.

The aircraft, an Airbus A340, is fitted with a system which stops mobiles from interfering with a plane’s electronics.

I’M ON THE PLANE!

Posted on

The end of an Odyssey

British-born science fiction author Arthur C Clarke has died in hospital in Sri Lanka at the age of 90.Clarke had been in and out of hospital since his 90th birthday in December and had breathing difficulties, his aide Rohan de Silva said.“Sir Arthur passed away a short while ago at the Apollo Hospital,” Mr de Silva said.

Clarke, who foresaw communication satellites in 1945, wrote more than 80 books.

He was most famous for his novel 2001: A Space Odyssey, which was made in to a film by controversial director Stanley Kubrick.

Clarke was Sri Lanka’s best-known resident guest and has a scientific academy named after him.

AFP

Though I believe that 2001: A Space Odyssey was first a film collaboration with Kubrick, for which he wrote the book as an exercise in working out the storyline for the screenplay.

Sad news indeed.

Posted on

Microsoft licenses Flash Lite and Adobe Reader LE for Windows Mobile Devices

Adobe have announced that:

Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq: ADBE) today announced that Microsoft has licensed Adobe® Flash® Lite™ software, Adobe’s award-winning Flash Player runtime specifically designed for mobile devices, to enable web browsing of Flash Player compatible content within the Internet Explorer Mobile browser in future versions of Microsoft Windows Mobile phones. Microsoft has also licensed Adobe Reader® LE software for viewing Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) documents including email attachments and web content. Both Adobe products will be made available to Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) worldwide, who license Windows Mobile software.

Read the full press release here.

This is interesting when you consider the Nokia – Silverlight deal and the lack of Flash on the iPhone.

Posted on

New 802.11n Airport Express “on Tuesday”

If the rumour sites are to be believed there will be a new 802.11n capable Airport Express from Apple released on Tuesday.

We had heard reliable reports that Apple will be launching a new version of their Airport Express next week, likely on Tuesday. Apple Retail stores should have stock of the new Airport Express by mid week. The new model will be priced at the same price as the current model ($99). Though details have not been confirmed, it appears the upgrade will most likely include support for 802.11n wireless networking.

One of the downsides of the 802.11n Airport Extreme was that if you wanted to stream iTunes through AirTunes you had to downgrade your network to 802.11g compatability as the current Airport Express is 802.11g only.

A new 802.11n Airport Extreme would allow you to have a pure 802.11n wireless network and stream AirTunes as well.

I suspect it won’t support video, well that’s what the Apple TV is for.

According to the rumour images the form factor hasn’t changed, so it still looks like a MacBook power brick.

Not long till Tuesday now.

Posted on

Phone Tossing Pictures

You know that annoying delay when you try and take your picture with a mobile phone camera, well you can use it to good effect.

Update: image removed from remote server…

Posted on

UX1XN Typing

I have always liked the Sony VAIO UX1XN.

UX1XN

I have always been disappointed with the battery life. My original intention was to use the UX1XN as my main conference computer, it’s small enough to be unintrusive, unlike a laptop which can be a bit of a barrier, it has two cameras which enable me to send images to Flickr or take short video clips, and the keyboard is usable unlike the fiddly mobile phone type split keyboard of the Q1 Ultra. You can also use it without needing to put it on the table or on your lap which makes it ideal in the conference hall or break-out room environment.

However as I said at the beginning the battery life is the downer, I only really get about an hour and half from it, and this means that it won’t last the day at a conference.

So recently I ordered the extended battery for it, which should make it usable and hopefully last the day at a meeting or a conference.

I have therefore been practicing using the keyboard, which is quite thumbs orientated, and have managed to get a reasonable speed using it.

I wouldn’t want to write a long blog entry (like this one) on it, but for entering URLs or posting tweets or jaiku postings, I think it will work just fine.

Posted on

ALT-C Submission

Am I going to jinx my ALT-C submission by stating on this blog that I have submitted a workshop for ALT-C entitled Hood 2.0.

It’s as you might expect a workshop on Web 2.0 and hopefully (if accepted) be a lot of fun as well as illuminating.

Watch this space.

Posted on

Ouch, it’s hot!

After not using it for a while, I decided that I would move my Mac mini from under the TV and move it to another room and use it as a web server.

I never really got round to using it as a TV computer, or media centre or anything really. An old CRT television is never much cop for showing a computer screen so was always using VNC to control it and if I am doing that I might as well use the laptop I am using to control the mini to do my computer stuff.

As a media centre it failed, as the Mac mini could not cope with the streams that the USB EyeTV device provided. The EyeTV relied on the mini for encoding and could it do it, no, not very well.

I also found that I rarely watched TV which I wanted to pause if I got interrupted, for things I did care about I had already recorded it already on the iMac and was watching it through the EyeHome.

However after I moved it I realised I must have turned the Airport off, so I connected it back to the 802.11n Airport Extreme by ethernet and VNC’d back in.

Now here’s my advice, if you leave a Mac mini on top of an 802.11n Airport Extreme, be aware that both will get too hot to handle! The Mac mini’s fans were going like they were going to take off.

It’s incredible how hot the 802.11n Airport Extreme gets, what does it do which means it get’s so hot?

Well the Mac mini is now in a cooler place acting as a temporary web server.