Category Archives: Technology

Snow Leopard: Why Ship a Physical Disk?

Posted on

The ‘I upgraded to Snow Leopard’stories are coming thick and fast and for the record this is mine. Here are the facts: It took about 55 minutes and there were two reboots, one half way through and one at the end. That’s it. This was a very easy upgrade with no human intervention beyond a couple of clicks to get it started. Since I have a Time Machine backup and keep my work in progress in on a synced Dropbox volume I didn’t worry about a clean install. It just wasn’t necessary.

Snow Leopard seems fine, but what I don’t understand is why I had to wait for the postman to deliver a CD. Why doesn’t Apple deliver OS upgrades like this using iTunes or even the regular Software Update tool? Most Linux systems deliver major upgrades that way using package management tools such as Synaptic and it works very well. The Ubuntu desktop I’m using to type this has had two Snow Leopard-equivalent upgrades now, both delivered in the same way as regular bugfixes and security updates, through Synaptic. If Apple has now caught up with Linux and Mac users no longer need to do clean installs it seems crazy for Apple to keep shipping actual physical media. We don’t buy iPhone OS upgrades on a disk after all.

Incidentally since I was installing Snow Leopard on my Mac I took the opportunity to upgrade my wife’s iBook G4 to Leopard. I kept the old Tiger install disk handy in case performance was poor, but actually this six year-old machine runs very well. Of course it will never be able to run Snow Leopard, but it will at least continue to receive updates until Mac OS X 10.7 “Hepcat” renders 10.5 obsolete. By then it will be around nine years old. She’ll have to manage with only 12GB of free disk space though.

Coronet Midget: Tiny and Shiny in the 1930s

Posted on

Coronet MidgetManufacturers of electronic gadgets know only too well that small and shiny sells and that bright colours mesmerise the ape brain. Modern electronics and plastics make wondrous things easier to achieve in miniature, but in fact not much is new.

Dropping in after a picnic lunch at the rather lovely Angus Folk Museum a couple of weeks back I found this little beauty in a glass case. It’s difficult to appreciate how small this camera is from the picture–since it’s behind glass I couldn’t slip a ten pence piece in alongside it–but that thing just in front of it is a roll of 16mm film, so just over 1.5cm tall. The camera itself is about the size of my thumb.

According to this article at ephotozine.com the Coronet Midget was in production from 1935 and was advertised as ‘the world’s smallest camera’. While it’s a long way from that now it is still a lot smaller than most current ‘point and shoot’cameras. Like many current cameras it also came in a range of colours, including blue, red, and black. The down side of course is that the standard prints that came from the six-exposure film were so small they had to be viewed with an accessory magnifying glass–just one of a range of accessories available apparently. It seems that the Coronet company, which was founded in 1926, ceased production in 1967, but with marketing ideas like these it might have done well today.

In terms of practicality Ephotozine has this to say:

Picture taking with a Midget was a straightforward affair as there are no camera adjustments available. In fact apart from the shutter release, the only control is a lock to prevent the camera being fired accidentally. The photographer’s only real choice is whether to take the picture in landscape or portrait format. The claimed shutter speed is 1/30 of a second and the lens has an effective aperture of f/10.

The Coronet Midget was discussed on the Instructables forum earlier this year and there are some good pictures showing the camera alongside familiar objects, including the obligatory coin. Still more pictures of Coronet Midgets here.

iPhone eReader Options

Posted on

The Apple rumour mill is working away at the moment on the subject of Apple’s upcoming announcements. Is the company planning a netbook or an eBook reader, or both? Meanwhile last week Karen Templer at Readerville (where I had a piece in the Evidence series entitled ‘Second Empire Soda’) did a magnificent job rounding up the software possibilities for using an iPhone/iPod Touch as an eReader. This is a must-read if you are looking into using one of these wonderful devices this way:

Happy Read an Ebook Week! If you’re new to ebooks, there’s a very good chance it’s because you’ve got an iPhone or iPod Touch and have come to the realization that it’s an electronic reading device. (If you’re still wondering why anyone would read a book on an iPhone, click here.)

While the iPhone is far from the only mobile device available for the consumption of ebooks, it is where the vast majority of the action is taking place—not surprising, given that it is by far the device with the broadest ownership. Lately, there’s been a new purveyor of ebooks for the iPhone every week, and we’re talking about some major players. With Amazon having opened the Kindle store to iPhone users just last week, the number of ebooks now available to iPhone (and iPod Touch) owners is rapidly approaching 2 million. It’s a messy marketplace, though, so here’s a rundown of your app options as of today, March 8, 2009—though this is not an exhaustive list. [Here's the link]

Facebook, Public Protest and the Open Web

Posted on

Liverpool University, where I currently do a couple of hours’teaching each week, is going through a ‘restructuring’process. This appears to involve closing down any departments the Vice Chancellor Sir Howard “Jobs for the Boys Wife” Newby doesn’t like the look of. We know what’s coming, because he tried it before. Michael Carr, former Registrar at Liverpool said this when interviewed by The Guardian in 2007, on the subject of Newby’s appointment:

“I can’t imagine he would think he could apply what he did at UWE to another institution anyway.”

I hope those words taste good. The Senate votes on proposals today and given the historic antipathy of the British professoriat to anything that might be seen as making trouble, the likelihood is that the turkeys will vote for Christmas. I hope they prove me wrong.

An interesting side issue in this though is related to the way the students have reacted. Feelings are running high and a protest is planned outside the Senate meeting. The way they have organised the protest is, inevitably, through Facebook. Unfortunately, while many students use Facebook, many of their tutors avoid it for the very reason that their students use it. There are already lots of ways students can contact tutors out of hours–email from students is a frequent intrusion on my family weekends, though it generally goes ignored until Monday–and Facebook looks like just another way to remove the boundary between work and private life. This forum thread at the American Chronicle of Higher Education (hat tip to The Rumpus for the link) shows what a vexed issue this. Many avoid the issue by avoiding Facebook.

What this means for the current protest of course is that many of the people the students might like to know about their activities simply can’t get access to the site. Facebook’s walled garden prevents anyone without an account from looking in. I take two things away from this. That the current generation of students use Facebook as a matter of course and don’t imagine that anyone might not. And secondly, that Facebook has an extremely firm grip on the browsing habits of millions of well-educated, soon to be affluent web users. Once the distinction between open web and Facebook is gone–and it looks like it has for these students–the web as a free and open environment is at risk. As some of the commenters in the Chronicle thread note, joining Facebook eventually becomes unavoidable.

I have asked the protest group to post the information openly online and have offered to do so for them. I’ll link to it from here if that happens. In the meantime, here’s the Facebook page, which I haven’t seen.

Foxmarks for Safari (and Internet Explorer)

Posted on

Over the last couple of years one of the things that has kept me a devotee of the Firefox web browser is the Foxmarks extension. This is an addon that enables you to synchronize bookmarks across different copies of Firefox on different platforms. There are three computers that I use regularly: a MacBook, a PC running Linux, and a PC running Windows XP in an office I share at the University of Liverpool. It is very useful indeed to have the exact same bookmarks on all of these machines. There are lots of other good reasons for using Firefox, but there are times on the Mac when Safari just works better. It’s definitely faster and is much better integrated with key Mac applications such as Scrivener. Safari is a fairly limited browser in terms of features though and up to now using it has also meant keeping track of bookmarks manually. No longer. Foxmarks is now available for Safari on the Mac, on the iPhone/iPod Touch, and for Internet Explorer. I haven’t yet tried it on IE7, but it appears to work perfectly in Safari. Get Foxmarks, for Firefox, Safari, and IE here.