Okay, not really at all but I couldn’t think of a better title.
While I was lounging on the beach in Hawaii recently, two separate articles in which I was interviewed for appeared online (and possibly in dead tree form too - I actually don’t know).
The first one was for the UBC Thunderbird Newspaper and was about the environmental impacts of all the technology being consumed by folks like yours truly. I guess I come across as a big Apple fanboy (big surprise) that recycles my gadgets but I’m not 42 (37 as of this moment) and I don’t claim to be the first in Canada with an iPhone - just one of the first to bring one into Canada (within days of it’s release in the US) as well as one of the first to unlock it to use as a phone in Canada on Rogers. UPDATE: Allison updated the article.
The second one was about waiting for the iPhone in Canada and hacking it written by fellow geek and iPhone hacker, Warren Frey that appeared in Mac|Life.
I’ll leave it to you decide how I come across in these kinds of things but they are fun to do and I’m honored people are interested in my thoughts on stuff.
I really wanted to do a proper, long and detailed wrapup post for SXSWi but I’m not going to because there was just so much going on and it’s still digesting in my mind what transpired in Austin. That and I’m really tired due to a day at the airport, flight delays and BBQ withdrawal.
So in no particular order, here’s some thoughts on what happened in Austin over the past week:
- this year was way bigger than last year - lots of people guessing on the numbers so take this with a grain of salt but it’s ’supposably’ 50% bigger than last year. So that puts it somewhere between 5000 and 10000 geeks in one place. This was especially evident since previously, you’d always run into people you know but this year, I know there were people I knew in Austin and yet I never managed to see them in the halls/panels
- I wished I made it to the I Can Haz Cheeseburger panel - they were actually giving out hamburgers to the audience
- 12 sessions per time slot does not work
- 10am panels are very hard to attend
- there needs to be more technical panels. Of all the ones I attended, only two could be considered (by me) technical and they were incredibly well attended - as in standing-room-only-geeks-sitting-in-the-aisles-fire-hazard kind of well attended. Of course since there was 12 sessions in every timeslot (plus other stuff in and around the convention center), it’s entirely possible there were more technical sessions.
- the panel rooms need to be reworked (again). Nothing sucks more than having to go from room 18ABCD to Room C - it’s like walking to Surrey from North Vancouver. I’m all for the walking but when you consider that a panel ends at say 11am and the next one starts at 11:30am, it doesn’t give you much time to actually talk to the panelists afterword, or with friends about the panel before you have to start hoofing it to the other end of the convention center to get a decent seat for the next session
- Twitter stayed up during the whole conference which is a huge deal since it was probably the number one web site talked about (yes, even more than Facebook and the infamous interview). Impromptu ‘Tweetups’ happened everywhere and were awesome. Your twitter name should be printed on the badge next year (everyone just wrote it on theirs this year)
- Internet access generally seemed better this year…except at my hotel which crawled. The convention center’s wifi was much more robust this year and they had a 802.11n access point which was great. Also more and more venues had free wifi so it made using Twitter and checking Google maps a breeze. My prepaid AT&T sim also got a good workout and thanks to some flaky hotel access, ended up costing more than it should have - see my $12 flickr photo for one example:
- Apple should have sponsored a shuttle to the Apple Store…there was a convoy of cabs there from the convention center on a daily basis.
- Canadians showed up in force this year. Not just the 20-30 Vancouverites I knew were going either….great folks from across this great land came down and had a great time
- Once again, the Raincity Studios crew had the best, most coveted t-shirts (read about it in the L.A. Times) and hosted the best party at the Iron Cactus. My second favorite shirt (after the Space Invaders RCS shirt) is the “Hacking is not a crime” shirt I picked up from the MAKE booth
- in Austin (and probably just for SXSW) the term ‘Ranch’ can mean many things. What I didn’t expect it to mean at the Pure Volume Ranch (home of the huge Digg party among others) is dirt floors covered in wood chips and port-o-lets. Moby and Kevin Rose didn’t seem to mind.
- Finally had a chance to visit the Salt Lick BBQ in Driftwood, Texas (outside of Austin)…been coming to SXSW for three years and always heard about it but never had the chance to make it out there. It lives up to the hype
- you can buy iPods at the Houston Airport from a vending machine
- iPhones were everywhere and mine at least was indispensable during the trip. From the wifi that was available everywhere, to the Google Maps locate me feature, it was easily the most used item I brought. Using the sched.org tool to make a customized calendar of sessions/events/parties to attend, it was easy to see where to go next or what our options were if we decided to change our minds.
- I was able to get a tag for my camera that I should have exploited more. Strangely, I saw all kinds of cameras (not just DSLRs) with the tag, including a tiny little lipstick-sized webcam. There also seemed to be some discrepancy as to who should get a tag as Peter was denied just minutes after I got mine.
- If you don’t like Rockband, be glad you weren’t at SXSWi….every second booth in the Trade Show had it setup and many events used it as a focal point
- Adobe had a sneak peak of their new Adobe Media Player in a bar with a live band and a skateboard halfpipe. Nothing kills a party faster than trying to demo your software on a projector in the middle of a bar AFTER a decent local band played while skateboarders used the halfpipe in front of the stage. Still surprised about the presentation’s inappropriateness and the fact they thought they had to explain RSS feeds to a room full of geeks. The Media player actually looks decent (if not a little iTunes-ish) but they really need to work on the promotion side of things and figure out who the people that attend Southby are
- Most heard/overused word/phrase I heard this year: ‘Fail!’ or used in a sentence: ‘Epic Fail!’. #2 was ‘iPhone’. #3 was “I’ll have another Shiner Bock”.
- There wasn’t as many MacBook Air’s there as I would have expected. Consensus from those I talked to about it was they were hoping for more from Apple - or technically less as they wanted a true replacement for the 12″ Powerbook in screen size (or even smaller). It definitely got a lot of looks and was asked to hold it many times. There were a ton of eeePC’s in attendence which was cool to see.
- I managed to head over to BarCamp Austin between sessions at the convention center and sit in (briefly) on the iPhone DevCamp. As if the fact there was too much concurrent content at SXSWi, the fact that an awesome BarCamp AND iPhone camp was going on at the same time. Too much to do, not enough time to take it all in.
- As if you aren’t already tired of me talking about the BBQ, all the food was amazing…well except maybe not that late night pizza from 6th street
- as I write this post, there are over 12,000 SXSW related photos on Flickr. I have about 200 in there.
That’s pretty much it for me and this post…as I said at the beginning, there is still a lot of digesting to do (bbq and otherwise) so I may add to this once I’ve had time to take it all in.
See you next year, Austin!
Last night, Duane came over and we decided to test out the new HD Movie rental options on my new AppleTV. We choose Michael Clayton as neither of us had seen it and figured it was a good choice because we didn’t really know much about the story. Note: the HD movie rentals are currently only available from the US iTunes store (so you need a US iTunes account). Canada is due to get them “by the end of 2008″.
I wasn’t sure how this would work since presumably the HD movie file is ginormous and perhaps we should have ordered it earlier so that more of it would be downloaded. Fortunately, it only took a few minutes before it was ready to begin watching and it was streaming the rest down in the background. So we settled in and started watching the movie.
Initially there was a little stutter but that was only during the studio intros and then once the movie got going it was playing back like normal. The picture quality was pretty decent and the sound was Dolby 5.1. I might need to have Mr. Bollwitt over soon to help me rewire things to get rid of the ground hum I have.
Anytime you have compressed video playing back on a high definition monitor (I have a 37″ HDTV that tops out at 1080i), you’ll notice any imperfections in the source video. I wasn’t expecting HD-DVD quality from a downloaded source but it was pretty decent….as good as my Shaw HDTV receiver.
Until the movie got dark that is. At first we noticed some heavy compression artifacts in some of the opening outdoor scenes. These scenes seem to take place in the early morning but I’m pretty sure they weren’t meant to look like they had been rotoscoped (ala A Scanner Darkly). See for yourself in these shots I took below….keep in mind the blacks around the movie are in fact true and my camera was just blowing them out…you should still see the effect I’m talking about.
You can also see some of the artifacts around George here:
While this wasn’t quite what I was expecting from a quality standpoint, it was really only an issue during very low light scenes. All the other scenes seemed fine and since I’ve never seen the movie another way, I can only assume this ‘look’ isn’t something the director was going after and was in fact a byproduct of the digital download. Still it was pretty slick to have Duane come over and within minutes we were watching a big Hollywood movie in HD with no media involved.
This also didn’t seem to deter Duane from picking up his own Apple TV today as well. Stay tuned for future rental reports from both of us.
As in I’ve had it for 12 hours….not a 12 hour long review….although there are a lot of pictures.
Obviously I haven’t had it long enough to really put it through it’s paces but here’s a bunch of photos and a few thoughts.
As with all Apple products, the packaging alone is a fantastic customer experience. The MBA comes in a box that reminds you of a board game….I’m not talking something from Parker Bros, but something more elegant. The box is sturdy dark cardboard. The lid has foam glued inside that at first glance looks like velvet. It’s always the little things that make it that much better.
Once you take the lid off, you’re greeted with the MBA in a black plastic tray with a little “Designed by Apple in California” tab that you use to lift the laptop out of the tray and access the other items hidden below. Despite this packaging and computer being Apple’s greenest device yet, the plastic tray has a recycling number 6 which at least around here, isn’t recyclable - maybe it is in California.
It’s deceiving at first how thin it is because you assume the plastic tray is deeper than it really is. You can see in the picture above, the MBA isn’t much thicker than the iPhone. Here’s the MBA snuggled up to the eeePC (both are flat on the table and flush with each other):
Of course since I had the MBA delivered to my office, there was a crowd of people anxious to see it. Some wondered why I didn’t just open it and why was I stopping to take pictures of the box. They now know why.
Once you pick it up, you immediately realize that it’s more solid than you’d expect and does have some weight to it. One big concern many have with the MBA is how fragile it might be because it’s so thin. It feels just as solid as my Powerbook G4 every did while at the same time being light as a feather. It feels well crafted, not unlike a high quality kitchen knife does.
Unlike other Apple laptops, there is not much to the underside of the MBA. There is no battery indicator light which is disappointing nor is there any way to lock up the laptop via lock port. I guess there was no secure place inside to make a lock point. The port door is also much more solid than I was expecting and definitely doesn’t feel like it would break off or stay open - it’s very solid.
The backlit keyboard is fantastic and just like the new keyboards that come with iMac’s and similar to what you find on a MacBook.
Once I got it home, the first thing I did was do a clean install of Leopard with the included install DVDs. The stock Leopard install on any new Mac actually has a lot of wasted stuff including 3.4gb of unneeded printer drivers, 1.8gb of language files. It also has 240mb of space wasted by iWeb. This gives me just about 63gb free with nothing else on it yet. Leopard and iLife take up a fair amount of space and removing those unnecessary files will help once I start using the MBA.
Since my MBA Superdrive hasn’t arrived yet (expecting it tomorrow), I had to use my ‘full size’ external DVD burner which worked no problem over USB.
Now that the install is complete and the Apple pr0n has been uploaded to Flickr, I’m going to go play with it.
Leave a comment if there is anything you want to know about it.
A friend sent word that you can now put a full linux desktop (KDE) on the Nokia N810 tablet. This was in an effort to convince me to buy an N810.
Check out the video and screenshots and the how to.
This is already a pretty sweet little device and this just makes it even more interesting.
I’ve dabbled with Linux for a long time and only recently started using it semi-full time on my eeePC.
Now while this IS pretty cool, I think I’ve spent my gadget money for awhile. Maybe Nokia’s Blogger Relations can hook me as I’d love to check one out.
So yesterday, I said to not buy anything from Apple because today they’d be possibly announcing some new products. Well they did indeed announce a few new things and I bought one of them, the MacBook Air:
It had been long rumoured that Apple would release a sub-notebook and I had guessed that it would fall (pricewise) between the MacBook and the MacBook Pro which it did. My guess was actually $1800 and it lists for $1799US. Strangely it’s STILL more in Canada despite the strong dollar (although slipping a little lately) coming in at $1899.
One of the expected rumours would be that it had a solid state drive (SSD) which means a flash memory based hard drive with no moving parts. It can come with that as an option (over $1000) which is pretty much in line with a similar drive Dell sells as an addon to one of their sub notebooks (the Apple tax in effect). I declined that option as it’s just not worth that much to me and would be cheaper to replace the moving-parts hard drive many times over instead. Plus, it’s a sure thing that SSD’s will drop in price as they become more mainstream and could potentially be swapped into the Air at a later point in time.
My ship date is February 6th with expected delivery by the 18th (just in time for Northern Voice and SXSW!) although past experience with Apple shipping is that these dates are always very conservative and it will most likely arrive much sooner. I also didn’t pay for the expedited shipping (an extra $23) since in the past, new products tended to ship as soon as they were ready so I may end up getting it as soon as a friend that paid for the faster shipping.
Let the MacBook Air race from China begin!
Expect more updates once I get it and some comparisions to current MacBook, Powerbooks and my (potentially for sale) eeePC.
Shane and I seem to live in parallel worlds with a few differences.
We both are pretty hard core nerd/geek types that like our gadgets.
We both have blogs.
In Shane’s world, he has a cute pug named Serendipity.
Sadly, I do not have a dog (but would like one).
In my world, I have an iPhone.
Sadly, Shane does not (but would like one).
We both have a Google Reader Shared feed thingy (yes, that it is it’s official title) that we each call it a different name. Shane’s is called a Link Blog and mine is called a Link Feed. There are a couple of ways you can ‘consume’ these nuggets of wisdom. Either by following those links or subscribing to them in your feed reader of choice (we both appear to <3 Google Reader).
Both of these things are basically links to stuff we find on the internets that interest us that may or may not be worthy of a full blog post, is something that someone we know may find of interest but we're too lazy to email it to them since they block our emails or just a sort of bookmark so we can find it easily again at a later point in time. This is all possible by the power of greyskull RSS…is there anything the little orange icon can’t do?
Sure, Robert Scoble has one too (maybe even before us)….but think of ours like taking a sip from a drinking fountain versus Scoble’s firehose-at-your-face volume of links. Actually his is good too…you should subscribe.
Shane’s world is slightly ahead of my world’s time and space as he managed to beat me to posting a reminder about the Google Reader Shared Feed thingy.
Strangely neither one of us has a goatee…at least not yet. But he might have a Trans AM or a big rig …I don’t know since I’ve never seen his ride.
Last night I was fortunate enough to be invited to talk with Robert Sanzalone on his live pacificIT Radio show in Japan. He’s currently living in Japan and is a technologist from the Vancouver area with his finger firmly on the pulse of everything in this Web 2.0 world.
There is still something cool to me about being able to have a chat about technology with someone in Japan in real time over the internet. It may be a trivial thing nowadays but I’m old enough to know a time when the thought of doing something like this was science fiction and that still makes me giddy.
We mostly talked about my experiences with the iPhone in Canada and a few other things like the Lab with Leo event from the other night and the SXSW panel submission. When you get two people that are passionate about their technology talking, it’s hard to stop but the show is only an hour long but we could have easily gone on for a few more.
I’m looking forward to more chats with Robert in the future. Thanks for having me, Robert!
Here’s the direct link to my episode with Robert where you can listen right on the page itself or grab the mp3 for later listening.
There was lots of things to talk about during the event - too many to blog about. I particularly liked John Boxall’s session on 