uninteresting :: nerd

today was Apple’s last keynote speech at Macworld (it’s withdrawing from the conference). Phil Schiller, head of marketing, did the presentation (here’s the video). there were 3 announcements:

1. iLife ‘09
2. iWork ‘09
3. the 17″ Macbook Pro

nothing earth shattering, and the media is all over that fact. here’s why it makes sense, though:

1. the whole reason for divorcing itself from Macworld is to eliminate unrealistic expectations and an arbitrary deadline for launching products. why wasn’t there a new Mac Mini or iPhone Nano? because, if such products are in the pipeline, they’re not ready. yet people are disappointed because Macworld happens every January and they expect something like a new iPhone every time.

   how about this instead: when products are ready, a small event is held and it’s available immediately.

2. the financial markets are a wreck and the country is in a recession. is now the time to launch a hot new device? no. is now the time to buckle down and refine products in development in the labs, for launch when the turnaround happens? yes.

steve jobs on managing through the economic downturn:

“We’ve had one of these before, when the dot-com bubble burst. What I told our company was that we were just going to invest our way through the downturn, that we weren’t going to lay off people, that we’d taken a tremendous amount of effort to get them into Apple in the first place — the last thing we were going to do is lay them off. And we were going to keep funding. In fact we were going to up our R&D budget so that we would be ahead of our competitors when the downturn was over. And that’s exactly what we did. And it worked. And that’s exactly what we’ll do this time.”

3 big iTunes Store announcements today:

• all the major labels agreed to DRM-free music
• new song price tiers of .69, .99 and 1.29 (previously everything was .99)
• you can buy music from iTunes Store on the iPhone over 3G cellular (previously only over wifi)

remember: it’s been the labels all along that have insisted on DRM. recall Steve’s Thoughts on Music from last year. it’s pretty clear horsetrading: in exchange for DRM-free music, Apple had to agree to tiered pricing. the labels want to charge you 1.29 for that hit single and .69 for that old catalog song. i think it makes sense.

there goes the main advantage that amazon had (being DRM-free). not that they were gaining any marketshare.

Press Release Source: Apple

Letter From Apple CEO Steve Jobs

Monday January 5, 8:30 am ET

Dear Apple Community,

For the first time in a decade, I’m getting to spend the holiday season with my family, rather than intensely preparing for a Macworld keynote.

Unfortunately, my decision to have Phil deliver the Macworld keynote set off another flurry of rumors about my health, with some even publishing stories of me on my deathbed.

I’ve decided to share something very personal with the Apple community so that we can all relax and enjoy the show tomorrow.

As many of you know, I have been losing weight throughout 2008. The reason has been a mystery to me and my doctors. A few weeks ago, I decided that getting to the root cause of this and reversing it needed to become my #1 priority.

Fortunately, after further testing, my doctors think they have found the cause — a hormone imbalance that has been “robbing” me of the proteins my body needs to be healthy. Sophisticated blood tests have confirmed this diagnosis.

The remedy for this nutritional problem is relatively simple and straightforward, and I’ve already begun treatment. But, just like I didn’t lose this much weight and body mass in a week or a month, my doctors expect it will take me until late this Spring to regain it. I will continue as Apple’s CEO during my recovery.

I have given more than my all to Apple for the past 11 years now. I will be the first one to step up and tell our Board of Directors if I can no longer continue to fulfill my duties as Apple’s CEO. I hope the Apple community will support me in my recovery and know that I will always put what is best for Apple first.

So now I’ve said more than I wanted to say, and all that I am going to say, about this.

via Letter From Apple CEO Steve Jobs: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance.

Hard drives don’t crash that often in my experience, but there’s a certain immutable fact that we all need to take as fact: any hard drive can die at any moment.

Combine that with fact #2: we are in the digital age (and forever will be), so you likely have valuable information that you don’t want to lose. for me, that’s my iPhoto and iTunes library. So you have to backup - or else don’t complain when all your stuff goes up in smoke.

Option 1: Time Machine: Leopard users have it easy - Time Machine is built in. Just plug in an external hard drive, enable Time Machine, and everything will be backed up. A few caveats about TM:

• It will use up all the space in the external drive (unless you partition it), so it’s best to have a dedicated drive for it.
• It’s not a bootable copy. If your drive dies, you have to boot from the Leopard DVD and restore from Time Machine, which could take a few hours.
• On the other hand, it keeps a history of every single file, so you can restore an old file from any time in the past.

That said, this is the easiest no brainer solution that most folks should use at a minimum.

Option 2: SuperDuper: Use SuperDuper to create a bootable clone. Plug in an external drive and SD will create an exact copy. Think of it as a snapshot of your computer at that moment. The benefit is that if your Mac’s hard drive dies, you just plug in the copy and you can boot right up from it right away.

Option 3: Drobo: The expensive option is to just get a Drobo, and then you don’t even need to backup because it automagically takes care of replicating things behind the scenes. If any one drive dies, the light turns red and you swap in a new drive and all your data is still there. The chances of more than 1 drive failing at a time are really low. Another benefit is that you can start out with just a few cheap drives (e.g. 4 x 250gb drives) and add larger drives whenever you want (as costs go down) to expand your storage space.

Plan B: Offsite backup: All the options above are for local backup. So if your house burns down or someone steals all your shit, it’s gone.

1. Online backups: Mozy is $5 for unlimited backup space. It runs in the background automatically. I don’t know much about it, but I suspect it would take forever to restore your data.
2. Offsite copies: Keep your backup drives at say, your office.

Personally, I use #2 and #3. I don’t have anything offsite, but plan to - probably by buying a portable drive and keeping it at work.

at every social gathering for the past few months, at some point the discussion turns to cool iPhone apps. and apps have only been around for 6 months. the Times writes about it:

It heralds a new era in the allure of a mobile device — the phone is no longer a fashion statement but a digital bag of tricks.
[Play Flute, Fling a Monkey? Make Phone Calls, Too. - NYTimes.com]

all Zune 30’s died last night. ahahahahaha……

TUAW had this nice tip: Use ‘Company’ field in iPhone’s Contacts app for tagging

1. Use a keyword (tag) in the Company field of several contacts.
2. When searching from the iPhone contacts app, typing that keyword will filter the list and show you only those contacts.

Another tip: trim your contacts list so it loads faster. I have 505 contacts in Address Book that sync wirelessly over MobileMe to my iPhone, and the contacts app is a little sluggish. Many of the contacts are just ‘reference’ contacts that I rarely use. You can trim your contacts in Address Book without losing any of their info by

1. Create a new Address Book group called “Archive”
2. Drag all the contacts you want to remove into that group
3. After all the contacts are added, click on the Archive group, then File: Export: Export vCard. All of the contacts will be exported to a single vCard file which you can then store for safekeeping (sent it to your Gmail, too). The vCard file is also searched by Spotlight, so you can still find contacts that way.
4. Select all the contacts in the group, then click Delete. When prompted, select Delete to really remove the cards from Address Book.

My Safari homepage, originally uploaded by richlin71.

My Safari homepage is a local html file with the sites I frequent the most. It’s sort of a command-line launcher. E.g. to go to Gmail, I type "gm + enter" (requires Saft ‘type ahead support’ turned on).

The page is bookmarked on the far left of my Bookmarks Bar, so I can quickly access it with CMD+1. I can’t believe Safari still doesn’t have a "open new tab with homepage" option.

I’ve embedded my nikeplus.com goal right on top, so it’s front & center. I’ve set goals for myself several times and have never met them. This time around I will. (requires Nike+iPod kit)

Let’s say you’re watching a video of a lecture, and the video is just of some dude standing there talking. So you just wanna listen to the audio.

If you press the sleep button to lock the screen, the audio & video completely stops playing.

But there are 2 ways to get the audio to start playing while the phone is locked:

1. Using your headset, press the clicker once. OR
2. Double-press Home and then click play.

Now you can continue listening to the audio without draining your battery to display the video.

Here’s a bunch of other tips from taptaptap.com.