Ramblings

April 10, 2008

Gruber Proclaims Sox "Classy" For a Day

You already know that Yankee fans are the be-all and end-all when it comes to deciding what's classy in baseball and what's not, right? Well, I'm very pleased to report that Daring Fireball tech blogger and Yankee fan John Gruber has bestowed the "classy" label to Bill Buckner's treatment on Fenway's opening day!
Classiest thing the Red Sox have ever done.
We Sox fans can now bask in warm glow of Gruber's proclamation! Ahhhhhh. This must be what it feels like to be a Yankee fan all the time...

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April 2, 2008

Drunk Jeff Goldblum

Hilarious: slow down an old Apple ad with Jeff Goldblum, and he sounds drunk as hell:



And if you like Jeff, be sure to check out the Jeff GoldBluMan Group...

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November 29, 2007

Sinko Widget for Mac

I was playing around with Dashcode and made a version 0.1 Sinko Music Podcast Dashboard widget. If you have a Mac and want to try it out, you can download it here. (Requires Mac OS 10.4.3.)

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November 2, 2007

Mac OS X Web Color Picker

This is more of a note to self: Hex Color Picker is a useful tool that adds a web color picker to the Mac's built-in color pickers. The best feature is the magnifying glass which lets you choose any color on the screen to get the hex value (very useful to find the color on a web page).

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April 6, 2007

Apple Mail and SpamSieve

I had a bizarre thing happen: the built-in junk mail filter for Apple's Mail program stopped working for me. After trying everything to get it going again, I decided to clear the spam filter and start from scratch. After training it for over a week, it's worse than ever: it never marks anything as spam except mail that I sent to myself!

Luckily, I still had my license for SpamSieve, a spam filter I bought when I used Microsoft Outlook Express. So I downloaded the latest version and installed it, "trained" it by having it look at my current batch of junk mail (took 1 minute) and already it's caught all new junk mail messages.

If you're a Mac user and have problems with junk email, try SpamSieve now! There's a 30-day free trial, it works with all major mail apps, and is well worth the $30 purchase price.

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March 9, 2007

Apple Stores

Fortune has a good article about the Apple Stores: Apple: America's best retailer

Some interesting bits:
Saks...generates sales of $362 per square foot a year. Best Buy stores turn $930 - tops for electronics retailers - while Tiffany & Co. takes in $2,666... But at $4,032, Apple is eating everyone's lunch.
It shouldn't surprise me that Apple built a prototype of a store before actually opening them. That seems like something all retailers would do.
"One of the best pieces of advice...was to go rent a warehouse and build a prototype of a store, and not, you know, just design it, go build 20 of them, then discover it didn't work," says Jobs. In other words, design it as you would a product.
And just like Apple pays attention to the details in their software and products, they do the same in their stores:
"We've gotten it down so there's only three materials we're using [in the interiors]: glass, stainless steel, and wood," says Johnson. "We spent a year and a half perfecting that steel. Stainless steel can be cold if you don't get the finish right. See the bounce? See the blues up there?" No, frankly, but Apple hunted down a Japanese supplier and pushed it to achieve the effect by blasting the metal with small beads.

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May 19, 2006

Apple's new NY store

Continuing the cool-buildings theme from yesterday, these are nice some photos of Apple's new 24-hour (!) store in New York. The coolest thing is that there's no actual storefront: the entrance is a glass cube with an Apple logo, and you go down underground into the store.

(More photos of the store here and here.)

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June 7, 2005

Apple switches to Intel

Announced earlier this week, Apple is switching from IBM PowerPC chips to Intel chips. Todd Dominey points out:
The best part about the Intel deal is that the whole silly megahertz war will finally be over. For all intents and purposes, Apple and the whole PC hardware industry will share nearly identical components. Even if Apple sold their hardware for 5-10% higher than a Dell, and used nearly the same components, that extra amount would be a bargain when factoring in Apple's product design skills, the value of the bundled operating system, and the applications contained therein. The battle will no longer be about platforms, but software.
That last sentence is pretty key, in my opinion. If people are no longer getting hung up with Apple vs. Windows computers' chip speeds and it's now down to software, that's nothing but good news for the Mac.

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January 11, 2005

New from Apple...

Fun new stuff from Apple: iPod shuffle, Mac Mini, an updated iLife suite, and iWork. I can't wait to see for myself how much easier Apple's word processor, Pages, is compared to Microsoft Word!

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July 19, 2004

New iPods out...

Apple has released the fourth generation iPods soon. I'm going to start my list of reasons to justify getting one now...

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