Thu
Oct 16
1:13pm
http://twitter.com/turnbullmalcolm
Someone beat him to his name (unless it’s his alter ego)
http://twitter.com/malcolmturnbull
Also, he has a Dog Blog. I had to look very closely at that before I accepted it was real.
Thu
Oct 16
12:52pm
Yesterday I tweeted that I thought dropping the FireWire port from the new MacBooks was an odd decision by Apple. I dabble with SD and HD video, and to my knowledge the only way to get content from video cameras to laptops is via the FireWire port, so I couldn’t understand why Apple would drop the FireWire.
A quick conversation with the staff in Michael’s Camera and Video changed that. They told me that SD and HD camcorders that record to tape require FireWire, but camcorders that record to hard disk use USB.
Aha.
I don’t have any stats to back this up, but I’d hazard a guess that the majority of camcorders sold to consumers are hard disk, not tape. Pros use tape because it’s higher quality, but consumers aren’t so fussy about quality, they just want convenience.
The MacBook market is consumers. Ergo, they don’t need a FireWire port.
The MacBook Pro market is pros. They do.
Voila.
Unfortunately, anyone who wants high quality video and can put up with slower processing times on cheaper laptops like the MacBook no longer have an option. We probably fall into the “prosumer” segment, but this decision by Apple puts paid to that. We have to buy the MacBook Pro.
(Note: there are other reasons for requiring a FireWire port, e.g. external devices and Target Disk Mode, but none of them impact me so I can’t comment on them)
Tue
Oct 14
7:39pm
So. I’ve fiddled around with the layout, content and design a few times in the last few months, but I can’t seem to settle on anything.
Right now I’m on the lazy option - i.e. I’ve set it up to create blog posts directly from my Flickr submissions, my Twitter tweets (which I usually SMS directly from my phone) and my delicious links. Makes it pretty easy for me to add content without adding content, if you know what I mean.
But I hardly ever seem to actually write anything on here. I just can’t find the time to sit down and think.
I guess I could write something about how I caught an amazing wave at 13th Beach on Saturday, probably my best ride ever. Lovely 4 footer, clean face, long long ride, beautiful day, just fantastic. Or how I’m off to the Caulfield Guineas tomorrow with work. Or how I’m looking forward to seeing what Apple deliver tomorrow.
Maybe I should try harder. But maybe that’s the point - I shouldn’t have to try hard. I think I’ll change things around a bit to keep the moblogging/Flickr/tweeting/linking going, but I’ll let the blog lie for now……
Tue
Oct 7
3:49pm
… it’s broken. This is what I get when I input some criteria and ask it to suggest me some surfaris.
Shame, I was looking forward to being told how to spend $4k getting me and some mates to the Mentawais next April.
Maybe it’ll be fixed soon. http://worldsurfaris.com.
Mon
Oct 6
2:49pm
When you have a spare 20 minutes, read this series of blog posts about Las Vegas from randsinrepose.
Hilarious. Makes me wanna go.
When I have a spare $5k to drop, maybe I will.
Sat
Oct 4
6:09pm
Absolutely magical watching it develop. I’m hooked.
I’ll be flat broke in 6 months with film at $43 for 20 shots but the joy is worth the spend.
Thu
Oct 2
9:10pm
One day I’ll dream up a crazy scheme like this - two Aussie blokes spent most of 2007 filming themselves surfing all 50 states of the USA.
Presumably they carved it up in Hawaii, California and Florida, but obviously most of the other states are landlocked (although if you’ve seen Step Into Liquid you’ll know that it’s possible to surf the Great Lakes), so they decided that for the purposes of this trip “surfing” only had to involve standing on a surfboard with some kind of momentum.
According to them, they slid down a 15ft pile of potatoes in Idaho, got towed by a cowboy and his horse in Texas, and dropped over an 8ft waterfall in Massachusetts. I imagine the water was pretty cold in Alaska and Washington, and who knows what they did in the deserts of Phoenix and Nevada…? Sounds like the crazy bits from a Warren Miller movie. Could be good.
The film’s called Surfing 50 States, it premieres in Sydney in mid-October and there’s a showing at Surfworld in Torquay on the 18th. They have a trailer on YouTube - I’m off to watch it!
Sun
Sep 28
6:25pm
My positive review of the Nike+ SportBand the other day must have offended the karma police for some reason, as halfway through today’s 14km run the display carked it.
Can’t read that display? No, nor can I.
And a quick Google search for “nike sportband display broken” takes me to the Nike+ forums, where there’s a thread titled “Sportband Display gone bad” with 9 pages of bad experiences.
It seems that sweat and/or condensation is the culprit in most cases. I can vouch for that - I have to unhook the device from the band and wipe the sweat off it when I’m done running. Some forum posters have reported that wearing it backwards (difficult to explain, but trust me) seems to help. My opinion is that it’s the small hole on the underside that’s presumably there to let sweat and moisture out actually lets it in instead.
Certainly there’s a design flaw there somewhere.
Strangely, the rest of it still seems to work. It recorded all 14km of my run. Hmmmm.
I bought mine at Foot Locker Geelong, so I’ll be back there next weekend for a replacement, I think. Fingers crossed that they come to the party.
Wed
Sep 24
8:34pm
I’ve just successfully set up Gmail on my martinyoung.com.au domain. That’s not particularly relevant to the person emailing me, but it’s definitely better for me: I get all the benefits of Gmail (7gb of storage in the cloud, great spam filtering, IMAP etc etc) but with an @martinyoung.com.au address instead of an @gmail address.
If you want to have a crack yourself the instructions are here. I’ll be recommending it to my web clients - it renders the crappy webmail that you get via your hosting provider almost completely redundant.
On the web it’s the same as Gmail, but I can (and am about to) set up the account in Mac Mail to sit alongside my other email accounts. It’s just as easy to do that in Outlook.
The key is Google Apps. Read more about that here.
Wed
Sep 24
9:17am
Interesting piece by David Braue on one of the zdnet blogs last week about Internode’s decision to set up its South Australian Wi-Fi hotspot network to give free access to iPhone users.
Unlike Telstra and Optus, (Internode) doesn’t actually sell the iPhone, or any phone. So while those two carriers have big Wi-Fi networks just crying out for users, Internode actually has no incentive to provide free access to its Wi-Fi networks for any reason at all.
Telstra and Optus already offer their iPhone customers free access to their own Wi-Fi hotspots (I didn’t know that before I read the piece), and the phone supposedly switches automatically to use them. I’m not sure if that same Wi-Fi is also available to customers who want to use their laptop/iPod Touch, but throw in the freebie hotspots around town and there’s free Wi-Fi all over the place.
But, as Braue points out, seamless Wi-Fi nirvana is still a bit of a pipedream at the moment:
There is, of course, a major issue of geography — a customer of one telco could hardly expect to seamlessly roam onto another telco’s Wi-Fi network. Yet, with the right peering agreements, it could.
Something like the 3 / Telstra arrangement could work. That lets 3 customers use 3’s 3G network when in range and Telstra’s 2.5G network when not. Maybe a monthly plan that includes 1gb of home carrier data and 500mb of roaming data?
I’m interested to see what’s going to happen in this space in the next 6 months. If the telcos start bundling in Wi-Fi peering with their phone plans, then the free Wi-Fi in cafes and bars from start-ups like Cafescreen might not survive. Their business model is advertising-driven, so they might be OK, but if they die I’ll be looking to my current telco 3 to be one of those offering Wi-Fi peering so that I can continue to use my iPod Touch and my laptop when I’m out and about. If they don’t, or can’t, it’s bye-bye 3.
(This post published courtesy of the free Cafescreen Wi-Fi in Cafe on Collins, 303 Collins St!) :-)
Mon
Sep 22
10:00pm
I can’t find too many positive posts about the Nike+ SportBand on the web, so I’m here to tell you that I like mine.
Sure, every now and again it thinks I’m running some sort of fast/slow/fast/fast/slow tempo on my runs (although it’s been better since I calibrated it), but it still gets the distance and time right, so if all you’re after is a simple distance/time recorder and some motivation to keep running, it’s ideal.
You could buy a fancy Garmin thing with the optional shoe pod, but you’d be spending at least twice as much of your hard-earned on it. There are other distance recorders out there, but they’re pricey too. I’m not a serious runner and I don’t want to spend too much cash on running gear. The SportBand’s cheap and it works OK, so I don’t see why there are so many knockers out there. Is it a Nike hate thing?
Mine’s fine, I trust it to record my distances and speed as accurately as can be expected from an AUD$70 device, and I’d recommend it as a good motivational tool to recreational runners who don’t already own a Nano or 2G Touch (’cos they should buy the SportKit).
So there.
Sun
Sep 21
3:17pm
Last week I had a couple of ordinary training runs and was starting to get anxious about my ability to complete the Half in a few weeks time.
But on Friday morning I ran 13km, the furthest I’d ever run, and felt good afterwards. Then today I ran 16km in 1hr 31, and this arvo I also feel pretty good.
The confidence is building that I’ll make it.
Mon
Sep 15
10:22am
In your face, Sydneysiders
You always knew it, but now your own paper is reporting it.
Sat
Sep 13
3:41pm
I’m sitting in my sunny back garden, listening to iTunes play through my loungeroom stereo courtesy of Airport, controlling the songs via the iPod Touch & Remote, and writing this post on Wordpress.
Isn’t technology great?
Wed
Sep 10
7:04pm
Check out this visual representation of today’s run from the Nike+ web site.
I run at an even pace. What the hell are all those peaks and troughs? Is my sensor faulty? I’m off to the forums to check if others are having the same problem.