MacBigot Cached Glances

This is what I’ve set up at http://twtbizcard.com/macbigot . The service is free and simple to use: Just add the hashtag ‘#twtbizcard’ to a @reply to any Twitter user, and they will receive a link directly to your card, with as much information as you can cram into it.

Then, the site keeps track of which cards you have received, and who you’ve sent cards to.

Why is this so attractive to busy networking people? It’s a lot easier to exchange Twitter handles than phone numbers or even email addresses… so if you’re not active on Twitter yet, it’s likely time to at least set up an account: http://Twitter.com .

TwtBizCard Demo from Felipe on Vimeo.

(This in response to the ZDNet article, ‘Report: Apple prepping 11.6-in. MacBook Air, new iPod touch‘…)

I’ve been on this rampage for a while now (http://macbigot.com/?p=911 – to catch you up, I believe the market wanted smaller not thinner — or, I’d rather have something that is easily carried vs. one that is easily mailed).

For those who have seen HP’s mini 210 HD (10.1″ display at 1366×768), it’s clear the notion of all netbooks being too much compromise and too little value is fading fast. On HP’s build-to-order site, I got mine with the upgraded video card, added bluetooth, and left everything else standard — and now carry a $409 netbook (sporting an Apple sticker) that I wish had come not from HP, but the company known for leading industrial design and refining ideas left to wither due to poor quality. Netbooks would have been a perfect area for Apple to say, “HERE — THIS is what all those other companies would have created if they’d had Jonathan Ives…”

Instead, they created a whole new space in the market (which Microsoft had failed at, though they’d tried) with the iPad — and I think that’s great, for consumers. But for Creators, it would be much more of a tool if it ran Adobe Illustrator, and could connect to FTP sites, and standardized ports, and (you get the idea).

The Air getting ‘downsized’ may be a step in the right direction for people like me — so it would increase my optimism in the platform. But with only one USB port and no ethernet, it might still be seen as an executive toy.

What about those of us ‘in the trenches’? The netbook format has many features stripped already (horsepower, optical drives, screen real estate); Apple should be looking to improve upon that — not simple remove MORE. To me, the whole concept of the Air was a lame attempt at getting maybe two people in the enterprise to notice the Apple brand. Now that we’ve done that (or not), let’s move on…

My HP mini 210 HD arrived the other day, and I am slowly migrating my life onto it from backup disks, etc. I haven’t repartitioned it yet for multiple operating systems; but that can wait, since I now know how to do that with GParted which was included, gratis, on my Ubuntu-based bootable thumb drive.

I’ve also learned (the hard way, over the last few years) to keep important documents backed up by saving them ‘in the cloud’, or to multiple drives, before risking any change to my main system. [Get the t-shirt! Live The Agony!]

So for now, I’m starting out with just the basics — Skype, DropBox, OpenOffice, GIMPshop, ClamWin, PDFCreator, VLC, VNC, iTunes, Firefox (with TinEye, DownloadHelper, and other favorite plugins); all at a cost of… zero dollars.

If you do a little digging around the ‘net, you can easily find dozens of fan sites devoted to showing off a plethora of diverse personal customizations — little 14-year-old Japanese schoolgirls are making the rest of us look bad.

But most corporations look poorly on employees who ‘decorate’ their corporate-provided laptops — and most corporate drones don’t buy (or carry in public) their own personal equipment if they’re already outfitted with some portable horsepower by The Man. So we don’t see much customization outside of college campuses.

But now that an Acer Aspire One (8.9″ 1024×600 1Gb/120Gb mini-notebook with WinXP for $348 at Wal-Mart) can be had so easily, consumer electronics and computing have met at that sweet spot where they can be an impulse buy — and it’s silly to not get one to throw at the kids, have in the car, bring along to stave off boredom on the train, or drag along to visit friends. Computing is finally personal.

Well, it will be. When you make your technology look like it belongs only to you.

SkinIt.com makes a custom cover for hundreds of devices, of course including laptops and mini-notebooks (we also found GelaSkins.com and GamerGraffix.com) with any of dozens of premade designs (or almost anything you can create or upload) — so I stepped through the online design wizard to create this little number for the HP 2133 mini-note that I’d love to have:

[This mockup is the letter 'z' from the Wingdings
font shown on an HP 2133 Mini-Note]
Since I most likely can’t have an Apple logo on it (many custom-print vendors have a policies against using corporate logos without permission; although most will be happy to provide your company with matching skins for your entire fleet if the request is submitted on your corporate letterhead) — I thought why not the ‘double-infinity’ that all Mac users will know? After I saw it mocked up, I decided I like it even better than the Apple.

As configured, $35.00. Merry Christmas.

(The following in response to a TUAW article on the disappearance of our beloved FireWire interface from the new notebooks announced the other day by Steve Jobs…)

I waited — for years — before buying my first Mac laptop, because although I really liked all the things I could co with SCSI, I understood the benefits of having a truly *intelligent* interface like FireWire; and so when the Pismo hit the streets, I finally put my life in hock and had one mailed to me.

(Never mind the fact that within a couple of years, the first all-white iBook had better specs, and cost more than a thousand dollars less… those monthly payments on my Apple Loan over the next four years didn’t hurt a bit.)

Target disk mode is indeed one of the most ‘Apple-like’ advantages of FireWire; but it is also what made shopping for a camcorder such a joy for Mac users — and is still the best reason for iMovie (which, by the way, we are still angry at Apple for since they actually REDUCED functionality in since previous versions in an obvious attempt to get users to upgrade to Final Cut Express).

What major Apple feature will be next to go?

- QuickTime? No, they already did that when the company started to charge $30 just for the capability to cut/copy/paste and export segments of video (which we used to be able to do with the free version).

- iMovie? No, but they have cut out the bulk of it’s editing tools that older versions included — likely in the hope that you will upgrade (not free) to Final Cut Express?

- Online services? No, they already did that when they told Apple customers that they could have a free .Mac email address for life, and then began charging $100/year for it.

- Modems? No, they already took that away with the last generation of MacBook/Pro/Air.

- Ethernet? No, that’s already gone from the Air; and probably won’t be present if Apple ever gets around to a subnotebook.

It’s nice that the new laptops are USB-bootable; but I haven’t seen Apple release a special version of the MacOS that is optimized for use this way (which isn’t a big deal, except that I know I will be out of license compliance every time I build one). So this isn’t advertised/recommended aggressively on their web site.

Now that there is no compelling reason to do video editting on a Mac laptop (that WAS iMovie until they castrated it, and then it WAS FireWire until they removed it), my next mobile workstation may turn out to run on Linux.

Damn — I’ll even have to change my domain. Again. Grrr.