Mac Mini switches to Intel

It wasn’t more than a year ago when I wrote in my OSCON bio:

Terry Chay is the only Mac user at Plaxo, where he develops the web-based version of their product (they tolerate him because he stinks at CounterStrike).

A few weeks ago, IT purchased a couple of Mac Minis to ramp up Mac support now that Plaxo Mac Beta has been leaked. QA has decided to make support for Safari on peer with Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer 6+ for Windows in all future bug listings. Plaxo has gotten serious about the Mac and it looks like that part of the bio is now very, very false—well, at least the part about sucking at CounterStrike is still true.

Well when I heard they ordered it, I said, “Why not just wait until March, April at the latest, and get Intel Mac Minis? They’ll come out just after the MacBook (iBook replacement) gets announced at the end of February.”

Looks like I was wrong. Apple introduced the Mac mini replacement using the Core Solo and Core Duo.
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Back to Palm…again

Palm Treo 650

Michael at work just got a Treo 650 and because I have a Palm T|X (review roundup), he was wondering how to get up using the Palm features.

In my opinion the two are not the same product, there are a lot of cool things that I could do with a PalmOS that are too inconvenient when spread across two devices. The fact is, I bought my Palm T|X as a stop-gap measure for the stuff that I used to keep on my Palm m505 years ago. These apps are probably outdated now, but I figure I can coast a while with it until the cell-phone and PDA integration wars end.

Instead, a much better source for him will this blog series I found of a Windows Mobile user who purchased a Treo 650. It’s a fresh perspective from someone whose primary interest is having a Treo for the things the Treo does well.

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Rip Different

MacTheRipper icon

I saw on BoingBoing that Macrovision is threatening VersionTracker for listing MacTheRipper. I had forgotten what a wonderfully useful program MacTheRipper has always been mostly because I’ve taken it for granted.

Basically what it does is strip the CSS, Macrovision, region encoding and menu blocks from a DVD to allow you to create a usable VIDEO_TS file onto your hard drive suitable for burning or down sampling down to a single layer drive.

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Lunch 2.0 l(a)unches

In 1999, I used to eat lunches in Novell’s offices (now eBay’s headquarters). In 2000, Dave visited me and I showed him all the crappiest food in the valley. In 2001, Dave came to the Valley and we decided we needed to visit corporate cafeteries, because the only thing you got free in the valley, post bubble, was caffeinated beverages.

That was Lunch 1.0 and it sucked.

Then Mark got fired from Google and started inviting everyone to have lunch on Plaxo.

Lunch 2.0 was born

Lunch 2.0 @ Dot’s Café, Yahoo!

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Opera 9 preview 2

Preview 2 of Opera 9 is out. The big thing is the integrated BitTorrent client.

I’m not planning on using Opera but because Microsoft Internet Explorer for the Mac is dead, it might be fun to have it lying around to learn some AJAX quirks it might have. Besides, Opera’s rendering engine might be used in a number of handheld devices.

You can be sure if it’s Slashdot…it’s wrong

Westinghouse logo

I read this article today about Toshiba buying out Westinghouse Electric.

I shouldn’t be surprised that Slashdot gets it wrong again. Really wrong.

First of all, Westinghouse hasn’t made blenders since around the time I was born. They sold off the appliances division to a separate company, White, which renamed itself White-Westinghouse. The confusion arises because White-Westinghouse used the same W logo, but any Pittsburgher can tell you they aren’t the same. The same holds true for other “Westinghouse” brands like Westinghouse Digital Electronics, the makers of the LCD panels referred to in the article. They have nothing to do with Westinghouse or Westinghouse Electric. The brand name was licensed to them recently when the CBS/Viacom media empire realized they had a merchandisable brand name they weren’t using.

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Taking football seriously

My obligatory Superbowl blog entry:

“You can’t believe how seriously these people take their football.”
—overheard, “Gridiron City”

The quote above comes from an op-ed in today’s New York Times. The answer is, “Yes, I can believe,” because, like Holly, I grew up in Pittsburgh, and they do take their football seriously there.

The article does a great job explaining why: the rise of the perennially bad Steelers came during the middle of the decline of the Pittsburgh steel industry.Continue reading