Oh this is precious. John Hobbs over at Cinema Volta has concocted a Dashboard widget that gives you the GPS-derived ETA, in minutes, for the next blue bus at your local stop, much in the same way Stockholm’s high-tech busstops do. I took his widget and chose my own two stops, using the codes in the html of this page. (You might need a free trial version of BBEdit 8 to do this.) So here is my very own first (entirely plagiarized) widget. If they’re that easy to make, I take everything back I said about Dashboard yesterday, and I think I have just put another project on my to-do list.
Blog archive 2001-2013
The road less traveled by.
Dear Aunty Stefan. A dilemma: My iMac is at least a trillion years old and has been begging to be replaced for a couple of epochs now. But now my options are constrained. I can feed my child or buy a new computer. Given that I’m not interested in jail time, this is the problem: do I buy Desert Storm, or whatever it’s called, even though I’m thinking of getting a new computer, or do I struggle along with 10.3 in the knowledge that I’m technologically deficient until the point at which I get my act together?
Try and answer the question with some cosideration of financial limits (meaning, don’t say ‘buy it all’). I also desperately need a new camera or the universe might explode.
Regards, Bewildered on the Bowery
Yes, is this a must-have or should I wait on the off chance Cupertino squeezes a G5 processor into the Powerbook by xmas?
Dear Bowery Bhoy,
10.3.9 is fine. Use it and you don’t know what you are missing, as is the case with all Windows people all the time regarding OS X to begin with. But if you use your mac more than a few hours a day, then the advantages of 10.4 quickly add up. If you wait until Christmas 2005 to upgrade with the purchase of a new Mac, you may have waited for half of 10.4’s life.
Instead, I suggest a slightly novel approach to purchasing Macs. I think you should seriously consider buying a new Mac mini now, and then a replacement every year (but not the monitor, keyboard, external drive, etc.) much in the same vein that it pays to buy the cheapest DVD player every year, instead of a hideously expensive one every four years that is obsolete after two.
There are two added advantages to this strategy.
First, for a $500 base price, you get a $130 operating system thrown in free (not to mention iLife, worth $80.) That makes the Mac mini $290, sort of.
Second, because of the cluster computing technology built into OS X (called Xgrid) you will be able to network consecutive purchases to build a mini-cluster to use with tasks that most require this kind of muscle, such as video rendering your next documentary. Not all software is ready made to use Xgrid just now, but it’s definitely where things are going. These mac minis will also function as excellent backup drives, servers, home entertainment nodes.. you name it. So collect yours today!
Dear Marc,
Same applies to you. You already have the gorgeous monitor, just add a mini a year and keep your powerbook for the road, until you lose it or drop it. Writing copy hardly requires a G5. Granted, no top-notch gaming experiences, but have you see what 1.42Ghz G4 does to Myth II recently?
Hmmm, I was already bah-humbuging by the second graf, but by the end I was sort of intrigued. I’m so easily impressed by terms like “mini-cluster” and so. Especially since I want to get an external backup drive anyway. However, a Mac mini would give me only a tiny 40 or 80 gig hard drive.
I don’t know how large your music collection is, but mine’s 65GB, which would fit perfectly on one Mac Mini, which would be used as the iTunes server and nothing else when it is replaced in a year. All the macs (and PCs) on your network would be able to access the one central iTunes library through streaming. You could even do the Airport Express/stereo trick.