ZogBlog

"sa" writes in about my Scoblephone:

Then why has every one quit selling the 5600 saying it was made for AT&T technology, and that it has been taken off the market temporarily till they can make some adjustments?

That's a good question. From what I've been able to gather... after the merger between Cingular and AT&T, Cingular never approved the scoblephone. I'm sure I could come up with a conspiracy theory since there is an unlock program out there to "unlock" the phone's SIM from AT&T. In fact, Rory Blyth did just that when he recently picked one up on Amazon. He got his setup to work with T-Mobile! [Insert jealous comment here]... However, according to my $200 Amazon rebate I have to be an AT&T customer (even if they screwed up and never setup the account) for two months to get the rebate.

As for being pulled off the market, that's partially true. If you call around, some old AT&T stores may still have the phones in stock - and they will sell them to you. Otherwise Amazon has a sweet deal (as they are trying to unload the phone) which amounts to them paying you to take the phone.

"sa", I hope that helps.

In regards to my new Apple product post "Dork" writes:

Please, don't buy a mini, iMac or eMac. Thank you.

If I were to buy a mini it would be to replace the G4 cube I tricked out to run on my HDTV through the DVI port with a wireless keyboard/mouse. Slow? The cube is a 4 year old 800 mhz machine and it does just fine running safari, iPhoto and iTunes which is about all I ask of it (plus Indigo, my home automation server.)

It doesn't run photoshop. It doesn't get 180 fps in quake 6.

When you say slow, I assume you used one of the machines?

I have a powerbook with the same processor and I would consider myself a very demanding user. What is the basis for your slow claim? I have somwhere in the neighborhood of 20 Firefox tabs open at the moment, I'm listening to internet radio on iTunes, office, dreamweaver, FTP and photoshop in the background.

Slow is not an option for me.

Slow... as in slower than my PowerMac G5(dual 2Ghz). No I of course didn't use it - it wasn't on the market at the time. However, by comparison - my PowerMac's bus is 1Ghz (backside at 2Ghz) where as the Mac Mini bus hovers at 333Mhz. Slow. Will it run the latest games? I don't care. I don't play games on my PC or my Macs... that's what my XBox is for. To be clear, my computers are used mostly for web surfing (usually 2 windows with around 15 tabs open), email reading (lately gmail, but I have used both Mail and Entourage), music playing (and downloading from AllOfMp3.com!), podcast downloading and playing, iPod sync, chatting, and Scoblephone sync via bluetooth. I see the spinning beachball of death quite often with 512Mb. Granted if I bumped my PowerMac G5 to 2GB's I'd probably see better performance. I certainly wouldn't see better performance if I cut the bus speed dramatically, and lowered the CPU count/speed as well!

Shuffle is perfect? That's quite a strong opinion.

On one count you slam me for not giving Apple credit, now you slam me for giving them credit? I'll qualify any way. As I said, Shuffle is perfect as a thumbdrive that you want to be able to drop a few podcasts on for a workout or morning commute. Too many songs/podcasts though and I would want my normal iPod.

As far as not being able to create DVDs with iMovie, I'm not sure what you're saying. You should be using it to edit video. You don't use iMovie to "suck in" dvds. You would need a dvd ripping tool which apple will never make because it would be illegal.

I have several tools to "suck in" dvds. You are really a coder and you can't rip a dvd?

Ouch. I have Mac the ripper. I know they exist, and I've run them. But I simply don't have time to record to DVD, play with a ripper to rip to some intermediate format (assuming that my Mac or PC would read the disc from my DVD recorder) only to do yet another import to iMovie. Trust me, I played with it for hours and came up with bupkis. I even bought an encoder to pull the bits in first and do a conversion to get it back to uncompressed DV (with my Mac choking constantly on the large files). I was so frustrated with the experience that I pretty much gave up. Isn't the Mac supposed to be easier? If I can record from broadcast TV - I should be able to archive it in whatever format I want.. and I should be able to edit it the way I want. As long as I'm not selling the end product (it's just for personal use) Apple should help me - not hinder me!

If you can't get your powerbook to make a cd then there is either a problem with the book or the operator, not iDVD.

Ouch again. I can't refute that logic, but let me pose an alternate way of looking at this problem (and then I'll provide some mitigating factors on why I failed). The Mac is widely heralded as being easier than the PC right? Any idiot can hook up a Mac, and instantly be productive right? It's so elegantly simple right? If this is all true how could you run into a problem burning a CD? If even a monkey could do it... why couldn't I? Assume for a moment that I'm smarter than a monkey (I know - it's a stretch, but work with me here). Shouldn't it "just work"? Isn't that also the Apple propaganda -- that It just works^TM?

In my case, I stuck in an ordinary blank CDR into my PowerBook G4's (1.5/15") SuperDrive (4X), told iTunes to burn my play list.. It churned along, provide a progress indicator if I remember correctly. After 15minutes or so, it said it was finished... and ejected the CDR. I immediately tried to play it in a CD player and got nothing. I stuck it back in the PowerBook and it didn't recognize the disk. I figured it had something to do with the Apple Audio codec writing bogus tracks do to some RIAA stranglehold, so I picked pure MP3s. I waited for it to finish and eject and began testing it again. Again, I encountered failure. Since I was on vacation with my son at my parents' house that was the end of the story. I put it away as a task to figure out later. Well, later never came around. ;)