Brain Drippings

OK, the rumor mill on the upcoming (for 5 years now) Apple Tablet device is kicking into high gear. High-enough gear that it’s becoming more and more likely that people are right and a tablet-like device is finally coming from Apple. (continue reading…)

I’ve been using pureFTPd on my Mac at least since OS X 10.4. I chose it primarily for two reasons. First, it has a large following, is actively developed, and is free; second, PureFTPd Manager was a very nice GUI for OS X that allowed you to very easily setup your server with a lot of options, manage it, and even watch it.
Unfortunately, this GUI no longer works with 10.6. At all.

Well, I thought, I can do this manually. And I could, but it was a long and sometimes hairy trip which took many wrong turns before leaving me at a working configuration.

Warning: there is a lot of bare-bones command-line compiling and Unix below. If the terminal shell scares you, stop reading now.
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Mr Kissell’s Take Control of Passwords is the latest in the Take Control series, and it is a well written and well researched ebook that is going to give you a lot of information that you need, even if you’re not sure you need it; a lot of very good advice; and a coupon for a discount on 1Password. The coupon is worth almost the entire price of the book, so go buy it and read it. You’ll educate yourself and get a price-break on an excellent software product in the bargain.

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I’ve been using Safari off and on since it first came out in parallel or in place of Firefox. I used it exclusively for quite some time because Firefox did not support the OS X keychain, but now I have 1Password, so that is not an issue.

Well, the 4.0 version of Safari has finally been released and it features a lot of improvements. In fact, with the addition of Glims and Adblock and ClicktoFlash it is a worthy replacement for Firefox in nearly every regard. However, there is one thing that I really hate in Safari, and that is how it handles typing in the address field. (continue reading…)

Over the last decade the average person’s need for passwords has increased at a phenomenal rate. It’s quite possible that in 1999 you didn’t need a password at all, or you just had a password for your email account. Today, most people online have at least a couple of email accounts, a Myspace page and/or Facebook page, a Paypal account, an ebay page, and maybe as many as a couple of dozen websites where they login. Add online banking to this mix and  maybe a twitter account and most people with much of an online life are juggling at least a dozen and maybe up to a hundred logins. (continue reading…)

Due to a series of complex circumstances, revival efforts continued for longer than usual for a patient whose heart was not responding to treatment, until doctors started preparations to remove organs.

It was at that point that the astonished surgeons noticed the man was beginning to breathe unaided again, his pupils were active, he was giving signs that he could feel pain – and finally, his heart started beating again.

Let me get this right.  He was breathing.  His pupils where active, and then his heart started beating?

Maybe I’ve seen too many movies, but I think I would have been quite tempted to reach for the nearest Mr Pointy.

Read about it yourself.

A fascinating movie showing global temperature averages over the last 130 years or so.

Jared posted about this “Scottish Delicacy“.  Ah yes, Glascow salad!  Near enough a reason all on its own to visit Scotland.

Solar, with lyrics. from flight404 on Vimeo.

A new online visual dictionary called visuwords.com is quite interesting to look at, and especially fun to watch it draw out its related words.  More general and generic terms like “religion” are more interesting than specific words like “Methodist”. 

Not the TV Show, but a very interesting virtual network.

So, Reuters and Wired, at least, are reporting the story of a French Civil Servant who went into hospital and was found to have nearly no brain at all. (continue reading…)

Apple, as you no doubt heard, introduced their long-rumored iPhone yesterday at MacWorld. I won’t bore you with the details, just click the links if you need more info, but a few things stand out.

First of all, the iPhone has no keypad. There is one single button named “Home” that takes you back to the initial screen. The entire UI is integrated into a high resolution 3.5″ touch screen. Interaction with the iphone is simply a matter of touching the screen, and there are even multi-touch features where you can, for example, shrink and grow displayed information by squeezing two fingers together or spreading the fingers apart. The days of T9 or multitap text input are over as the iPhone will pop up a keyboard on the screen when you need to type text.

This, alone, is a stunning feature that would be worthy of a major announcement, but as is usual with Apple, this is just the beginning. A accelerometer is included, so the iPhone knows when you turn it sideways (landscape mode) and will dynamically change the display when you do so. there is a proximity sensor, so when you hold the phone up to your ear it disables the speaker phone, turns off the display, and disables the touch-screen. There’s even an ambient light sensor that controls the brightness of the display. The bluetooth headset (about the size of the cap off a ball-point pen) turns itself off and on automatically when needed, and the phone itself switches from mobile phone to Wifi internet access dynamically.

But back to this touch screen, Apple has really done something remarkable here as they have, in one short hour, completely redesigned the mobile phone. Say what you will, no future mobile will be free of the effects of yesterday’s announcement. How long will it take before other mobile phone companies are going to try and create copies of this phone? Not long, but fortunately it looks like Apple has a firm hold on a couple hundred patents, so clones will not be possible.
The iPhone is also an iPod nano, with the familiar iPod features one would expect, including a standard dock connector. It also has come features you might not expect, turn the iPhone sideways when you’re in iPod mode, for example, and the disaply changes to a CoverFlow display, showing all your album artworks. The Coverflow on the iPhone is actually better than even in iTunes, as it allows you to select tracks directly from the covers.

But that’s all just frosting. The real advance is in the basic ‘phone’ portion of the iPhone, and those advances are quite simply stunning. The iPhone has been rumored for years, but no one ever dared expect so much. It has every feature you could want in a high-end phone (GMS+EDGE, Quad band, BlueTooth, Wifi, email, etc) but it has it all in a gorgeous package that doesn’t take a CIS degree to figure out. With typical Apple aplomb the thing just does what it should do and, since it is not tied to buttons, it shows you exactly what you need to see on any screen you happen to be on.

The phone will not be available until June as it needs to be submitted to the FCC for certification, and will be out in the Fall in Europe. I will be interested to see how it is marketed in Europe and how much it costs. The US version is a Cingular exclusive, so T-Mobile customers are left out. The other US carriers are not GSM, so they couldn’t use the phone anyway. In Europe, however, mobiles are not sold locked to a single provider like they are in the US. If the price is right, I forsee a lot of t-mobile customers int eh US getting grey-market imports from Europe. I also forsee a lot of T-Mobile customers jumping ship. This is, hands down, the best mobile phone ever, and it’s only going to get better.

Oh, and the “one more thing”? It runs on OS X.

APPL is up about $10 since the start of the Keynote, and is still rising (up over $2 in after-hours trading)