iBook vs. PowerBook

My Titanium PowerBook has a problem with white blotches on the screen – or behind the screen to be more precise. That means that it’s out for repair now and I’m using a relatively new 14-inch iBook. It’s a neat machine and it’s made me realize how the designs of the PowerBook and iBook differ. The very first thing that I noticed was that I’ve become accustomed to the wider screen of the PowerBook. The aspect ratio of the PowerBook is wider, which means that I work differently with that screen. The reason I can see such a direct contrast was that I synchronized everything using iSync and Backup which meant that all of my preferences were moved over along with all of my Address Book and iCal information and my very important Safari bookmarks. It’s one of the easiest moves that I’ve made from one machine to another. (I’m writing this now in BBEdit which has all of my preferences so I can upload the entry via ftp within BBEdit.) The biggest difference though is the temperature and noise. The iBook is dramatically quieter in terms of the hard drive and fan and a lot cooler. My Titanium PowerBook gets warm very quickly and the fan can come on often, but the iBook stays relatively cool and I have yet to hear the fan come on. The quality of the sound from the speakers is better on the PowerBook, but a laptop isn’t I’ll be glad when I get my PowerBook back, but I wouldn’t mind having an iBook which surprises me. I guess that it’s similar to the difference between an iMac and a G4 – it all depends what you are doing with it. The iBook is a great laptop.

June 19, 2004 , , , ,

Wikipedia

Wikis are very neat. They are Web sites that are easily editable by anyone. It’s kind of like a public binder where anyone can add pages and anyone can edit the pages. A wiki provides a fairly intuitive way to start creating pages and links between the pages. It’s the ultimate user-supported community. The first Wiki was created by Ward Cunningham at the Portland Pattern Repository. There are many wikis and many implementations of wikis around the Web. One simple and fast one that I really like is Brian Ingerson‘s Kwiki, which is actually a Perl module. I’ve got Kwiki running at home to play with. I just haven’t figured out what to do with it out in the wild yet.
An amazing project that has figured out what to do with a wiki is Wikipedia which is an incredible resource that is filled with user-contributed information about just about everything. It’s a massive (hundreds of thousands of entries) encyclopedia that can let you quickly find out about things that have happened and even current events. A wiki is a leap of faith and a vote of confidence in the goodness of humanity. In a world and a time when there are many large corporations trying to restrict freedom through copyright it’s amazing and encouraging to see something like Wikipedia work so well. Online pioneer and documentor Howard Rheingold recently spoke about the Wikipedia in a speech to graduates of Stanford’s Communication Department that David Weinberger pointed at today. One thing that caught my mind in Rheingold’s speech was that the mean time to fix some vandalism on Wikipedia is 4 minutes! The argument made against setting up a wiki almost reflexively is that you can’t let anyone edit a site as it will be vandalized. With a community people will take care of it. You just need to have faith.

June 13, 2004 ,

ZeD

I’ve been a member of ZeD for while and have been watching and lurking without uploading anything. In the past the only thing that I’ve uploaded has been a tiny thumbnail image for my profile page which is called bitdepth. ZeD is a great project initiated by the CBC who have some talented, creative people working on digital media stuff. ZeD is a tv show on the CBC and a web site that shows and collects content as well as discussions. It’s a community of creators and viewers and they give you a space to upload and share your work. They also broadcast uploaded work on tv and tv work on the Web. The name of the community is phonetically how the last letter of the English alphabet should be pronounced, which is a point of pride for some Canadians.
Today I uploaded video that I made last summer. It’s called Truro Loop and it is only 3 1/2 seconds long, but it loops so it can be just about however long you want it to be. I’ll be uploading more stuff soon.

June 12, 2004 , , , ,

Hand Processing Workshop Photos

I put some of the photos that I took during the recent hand processing film workshop at the NB Filmmakers Co-op up on my Mac.com site. They are in the Hand Processing Workshop Gallery. I had a great time and the images give a bit of a glimpse of things that I noticed during the workshop.

June 11, 2004 , , , ,

PDA Memories

Steven Frank is one of the co-founders of Panic (makers of essential software such as Transmit, as well as Audion, Desktastic, Unison and Statoo. He also writes about Mac and geeky stuff. I stumbled onto his site a while ago when I was trying to get my email organized and I looked at his application Emila. Today he wrote a bunch of stuff, but a small mention of the lack of a Mac PDA made me think about PDAs.

I always wanted to have a PDA. I think from the first time I saw a computer I wanted one and a personal computer in the form of one on your wrist or arm or held in your hand was amazing to me. Finally I won a Newton MessagePad 2000 in an Apple contest and I had a PDA. The MessagePad was (and still is) amazing as it is a powerful computer with a great design that is just a bit too big. I synced it with my PowerBook 1400 and could print via infrared at work! But I found it a bit of a pain to carry around the PowerBook and the Newton and the PowerBook won out. Unfortunately a while after I got the MessagePad it was discontinued. Then I purchased my first PDA which was a PalmPilot from US Robotics (which went from Asimov‘s fiction to a real company and back to fiction). I patiently learned the simple, stylized handwriting known as Graffiti and have been taking a lot of my notes that way since then.

Now my PDA is a Handspring Visor Neo which I bought because I love the size and functionality of my original PalmPilot. It works great with iSync so I can use iCal and all of the other goodness in OS X and have everything all synchronized. I don’t want a tiny keyboard and I like Grafitti for writing. Now I’m afraid that I may shift away from my Visor as I will probably be getting an iPod soon and the newer PDAs just don’t turn my crank. I want to simplify things and I can have my calendar, address book, music, and files all together… but I won’t be able to take notes, which makes me wonder about how I will replace that. I do carry around a paper notebook that I use occasionally and a cell phone, but I can’t take notes with the phone (at least with the phone I have now). So maybe I’ll end up simplifying things with an iPod and a pen and paper.

June 10, 2004 , , , ,

Why Live Things Are Cool

Right now as I’m typing this I’m listening to Vicki Bennett’s radio show “Do or DIY with People Like Us” streaming over the Web from WFMU. She’s speaking right now, but that’s from a file. She’s updating the playlist via the internet so the text that shows up is live, but the words are from back in time. It’s the last show of the season and as usual it’s a good one. The shows are archived, but I wanted to make sure that I listened to it live. I was thinking why I liked listening to it live since she records it earlier and it streams out from a file. Then I remembered why live things are cool – it’s not the technological part, but the human part. It’s a shared experience. I know that other people are listening at the same time and I also know that Vicki is typing right now as well. Years ago I helped out with some Webcasts and even more years before I had some radio shows. It’s a strange thing to speak into a microphone knowing that strangers are listening. A fascinating, intimate, yet distant thing. Kind of like a shy exhibitionist.
So while I’ll still be able to listen to older shows, I know that the experience will be a bit different as there won’t be as much simultaneity. Thanks Vicki!

June 9, 2004 , , ,

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