EGOPOLY

KAYAK, the greatest travel app of all time.

Another in a series of megalomaniacal self aggrandizement.

How awesome would this be?

http://www.forsyth.co.nz/index.html

“Totally awesome” is the correct answer.

Maybe in 10 years or so…

All the professional writers are making their predictions and/or wish lists for what Apple tablet/iSlate/iPad/Magic Muffin will be and do. So here are my amateur guesses:

1. It will essentially be a larger iPod touch: mostly a large glass multi-touch screen running multi-touch OS, the same OS as the iPod and iPhone. Not Mac OS X, nor something in between that and the iPhone OS. CORRECT

2. It will have a single camera, mounted on the front/screen side. For video iChat. It will not have a camera on the back of the device. Something that is 4X larger than an iPod would be an awkward camera. WRONG

3. It will have Wifi, bluetooth and some kind of 3G support. The 3G vendor will not be ATT. It will be Sprint or Verizon. You’ll need to sign up for a contract to get the discounted price. Right on 3G, wrong on ATT

4. The discounted price will be $499. The full price with no contract will be $799. NAILED IT

5. I wish, wish, wish it would have an OLED screen. But I don’t think it will. Update 2010-01-11: so I got a Nexus One. The OLED screen on that is so beautiful, it makes the iPhone screen look very rusty by comparison. Clearly, it’s also economically viable since the Nexus One price isn’t too far off the iPhone price. So I’m thinking OLED is a real possibility on the table, especially given the battery life benefit. WRONG

6. It will be about the thickness of the current iPhone 3gs. WRONG

7. It will have a brushed aluminum metal back, like the new iMac. The apple logo on the back will be plastic, and will be the antennae location (like new iMacs). This is a completely random guess, and I’d be just as happy with a black plastic back like the iPhone. YES NAILED IT!

8. It will have an integrated speaker, and microphone. The only inputs/outputs will be dual headphone jacks (so you can watch a movie with your friend on a plane) and an iPod dock connector. 1/2 WRONG No dual jacks

9. It will have the same physical buttons as the iPod: power/sleep; home button; volume NAILED IT

10. There will be two models: 64GB and 128GB. The 128GB unit will be $649/$949. WRONG: models are 16/32/64

11. It will have an ARM processor, not a netbook-style x86 chip. Battery life, people. WRONG: Apple processor

12. It will have a fixed, non-user-replaceable battery. Of course, duh. EASY

13. software: will include iChat, so you can video chat with your friends who are on macs or on other apply tablets.WRONG, given lack of camera

14. software: there will be some kind of Apple ereader with itunes store support for buying content. Amazon will also offer a scaled-up version of kindle reader for the larger screen.CORRECT; amazon kindle app already works on iPhone, so will work on iPad

15. size: about the same total dimensions as the Kindle, but it will be almost all screen. I guess that makes the screen about 9″ to 10″. CORRECT

It took me a long time to figure out why anyone would really want a giant iPod like this. But watching how people consume applications in the App Store, I think I’ve figured it out. People, normal people, not nerds like me, hate computers. HATE them. They are mystified by basic concepts like files and applications and processes.

The dead-simple iPhone model is this: your magic candy bar does one thing at a time, whatever it is you want it to do. You can add more things to it for one or two dollars, sometimes more. You don’t have to install backup software, anti-virus. You don’t have to decide which mail program to use. It does what you want it to do, and you don’t need any of that nerdy computer bullshit to use it.

A large iPod, then, does all those ‘computer’ tasks that work better on a larger screen, but don’t require a mouse and keyboard. Essentially, many small information and entertainment ‘tasks’ that you don’t do all day long. Computers as we use them and think of them today are destined to be work devices, used by programmers, scientists, financial workers, artists, designers, architects, doctors, accountants, lawyers to do their actual work. When they go home, when they want to check the weather, watch a movie, read a book, play a game, they will pull out their little magic mirror. The conventional computer as an entertainment platform, as a budding replacement for TV, as a mass-market consumer electronics item will have been a short-lived phenomenon, from the 1990s to the 2010s.

I’ll update this post later with my score. If I get over 50%, I should be a professional.

Update: here is what John Gruber thinks, and John Siracusa. They are both very clever fellows, and it seems to me that their predictions mostly match mine. Which makes me say: woo hoo! yeah, baby, we’re on to something!

Update: more rumours that support my guessing: http://gizmodo.com/5437479/google-china-ex+president-says-apple-tablet-is-a-101+inch-iphone-with-webcam

Update (Jan 11, 2010): Orange exec giving more weight to my front-video camera prediction.

Update (Jan 21, 2010)): More intelligent analysis that totally supports my ideas. From Gizmodo.

Where I was, August 8, 1985. My freshman dorm room. Golly, it looks exactly the same today.

oh yes.

http://videogum.com/archives/the-ultimate-argument-settler/lightsaber_010339.html

If you’re a fan of The Sopranos, and you’re still puzzling about the series finale, read this article. It’s fascinating. Spoilers galore, of course.

I had forgotten about this until Kristin reminded me of it.

LOLTrek

Every now and then, I re-evaluate and switch up the emacs version that I use. Often this is driven by a major OS upgrade, like Panther->Tiger or Tiger->Leopard. Sometimes it’s just because it’s been a while, or something that has been bugging me, and I’ve reached the breaking point. Or I want to avoid real work for an hour.

In the version of Carbon Emacs I used for Tiger (which I had built myself from GNU sources), I had some emacs lisp that would set the default font on startup. The built in default font was too big for my tastes, and it was consequently anti-aliased. I really don’t like anti-aliased fonts in my editors and terminals.

For some reason, this lisp no longer worked in the Carbon Emacs I had to start using for Leopard. In fact the little dialog box that you could pop up a standard Mac font selector window didn’t even work, so I couldn’t change the font from the default Monaco 12-point anti-aliased font. I’ve been suffering this cruelty for over 6 months.

Today I tried a number of recipes for getting a newer emacs (I wanted to try 22.2), but they failed. I ended up using this hack:

First, download emacs 22.2 sources from GNU.


cd emacs-22.2
sudo cp -R mac/Emacs.app /Applications/Emacs.app
sudo cp /usr/bin/emacs /Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS


My old lisp still didn’t work the way it used to, but part of it did:

(global-set-key "\C-x\C-t" 'mac-font-panel-mode)

This allows me to bring up the little Mac font selector window. Then some apropos work turned up “set-default-font.” Mac fonts on Emacs have seriously inscrutable names. But if you interactive run M-x set-default-font and then hit ? when it asks which font, you get a nice listing of ALL the crazy Emacs-ized mac font names.

The font I wanted was:


(set-default-font "-apple-monaco-medium-r-normal--10-90-72-72-m-90-mac-roman")


That’s Monaco 10 point. So I just stuff that in my emacs lisp initialization file along with:


(global-font-lock-mode 1)
(set-frame-width (selected-frame) 90)
(set-frame-height (selected-frame) 80)
(set-frame-position (selected-frame) 1 6)


And my Emacs is ready to use when it starts up. Just like back in 1991 on my SPARCstation 2.

Largest Raisin Bran Raisin Blob of All Time

I don’t think there’s really anything to add.

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