Originally uploaded by ceaabe.

Such teases…

Look like we’ll finally have A2DP support in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard (coming soon?).

To the uninformed, this means you can buy a set of pretty stereo Bluetooth headphones and listen to music wirelessly from your Mac without using any ugly external transmitters.

In the techno version of russian roulette, where we all get laptop batteries and some of those can explode, you don’t want to win… you want to lose. This entitles you to a free new non-exploding battery that should hold more charge than my 94 week old Powerbook battery that has gone through 233 load cycles and can now only hold 62% of its full charge (according to Coconut Battery). No new battery for me, this time – not for free. Have you checked yours?

Any thoughts?

Photos by rheauchyr and gladiolaroot

Up until today, my Powerbook was a fairly new, up-to-date, mostly current computer. Sadly, today I saw a very critical piece of software come out for the new MacBook and MacBook Pro that does not work on my Powerbook and has rendered it completely obsolete and useless to me. And no, it’s not the Parallels Desktop for Mac.
Meet: MacSaber

[Update 5/25/2006] On Tuesday I went to the local Apple Store. They were sold out of MacBooks (but they had black demo units!).
In any case, it turns out I may not have to buy a MacBook right away, after all. I’ll try to test it tonight, even though I’m running against the clock on a small personal project.

Yesterday, I went to take a swim at Barton Springs. Since it’s so close to the local Apple Store (gotta love Google Maps), I went ahead to check out the new MacBooks.

And then I saw the MacBook… and that background video-game music that I haven’t been able to purge out of my head completely since 1983 started playing in my brain over and over and over again in and endless loop… Pooyan.

Yeah… you guessed it (actually I’m quite sure you have no clue on what I’m talking about). The Tomy Tutor, (that little blue Japanese computer my brother got in the early eighties) and the MacBook have strikingly similar keyboards. Except the keys on the MacBook you can actually type on and are not made out of soft, squishy, eraser-like rubber. See the comparison:

Pretty cool, huh?

(By the way, I’m not that old, and yet somehow I recall the Tomy Tutor’s keyboard and the song for the one game we had, Pooyan… this is before the Commodore 64!)

All in all: a very nice machine. I’m terribly tempted to put the machine I’m typing this on right now on eBay and get my first computer enver that runs on an Intel chip.

MacBook photo by cdevroe

Tomy Tutor photo by oldbits.de

Ah, the purple horizon… the yellow cubic obstacles… the green bullets… the red enemy tanks.

This is Spectre VR, a game I used to play in the early 90’s on my Macintosh LC. I was good at it too. I found me a copy and it turns out I can still run it on my Powerbook.

I wonder if I can find someone to play me over the network (AppleTalk anyone?).

And to all those women who will find me even more attractive after reading this entry about my tank maneuvering skills: Yes, I will let you win. Once.

I stopped by at Fry’s Electronics tonight, and they had one of the new iMacs in there… the ones with the built is camera and the little Photobooth application. I played with it for a couple of minutes. Results below.

If you think that the introduction of iTunes for Windows was a big deal, or that the switch to Intel was earth-shattering, think again.
Apple has done the unthinkable: they released a computer mouse with more than one button. And it’s very, very nice. The scroll wheel looks very handy, and you can configure it as a one-button mouse if you want to.

What will they think of next? A small cube-shaped computer? A color iPod?