This will comprise pretty much of a list. They’re essentially things that would be silly if they had their own post. Something like Twitter would probably be better for this… Oops! Enjoy.

-The Eels are pretty awesome music to listen to. Mildly depressing at times, but I’ll get over it. I currently have Beautiful Freak (a steal at £4 no?), Shootenanny and Electro-Shock Blues! All pretty awesome to be honest.

-The VOIP app for iPhone/iPod Touch is awesome - if only the mic worked with the iPhone! Not entirely sure that I understand the whole SIP thing… isn’t Skype good enough for everyone? Somehow though I managed to make calls through this SIP service (OMG, it works!) but all the other person gets is some silence, a nasty shock. I’ll just have to wait and see how it goes!

-The Bedlam In Goliath (The Mars Volta) is rather heavy, though Thomas Pridgen is a very very good drummer so it seems.

-Massive Attack are also very good. It took me quite a while to get into them, starting with Mezzanine, which was described somewhere as a rock album - thus a good place to start. But now I’m so into all of the trippy stuff, woooooh!

-People love Coda, I see why it’s so good, but the Tramsmitting/FTPing of files is annoying with only one window pane thing. Ideally it needs a split pane for local and remote files (like the proper Transmit).

-The Core Image memory leak is so tedious. I really do enjoy Pixelmator, but it working properly would be nice. If you haven’t a clue about this leak, then you’re probably best off not knowing about it or Googling it. I gather that it’s some system thing that isn’t specific to Pixelmator, it’s just that Pixelmator has used CoreImage like no other app before. The result of this leak, in usability terms, is that when working with larger images (e.g. 8 megapixel jpgs), when you try and do some alterations to it (such as Blur) then it is incredibly slow - and rather unproductive and irritating.

-iPhysics is easily one of the best iPhone games! So I’ve read it’s a iPhone clone of the game Crayon Physics, but I don’t see how such a program could function any better on any other platform except the iPhone (or at least another touchscreen platform with accelerometer capabilities). So far I really like the included level - Crayon Physics. I find some of the other so called ’similar’ level packs take it too far with the complicatedness of their level design, almost removing the fun element!

-Apparently the charging of an iPhone through anything other than an USB 2.0 cable is bad. That means that I’ll have to stop using my Firewire cable… especially so because I doubt I have any warranty on my phone! It’s just annoying that USB only charges when the computer is on and Firewire is fine when it is sleeping… Grrrr!

Once upon a time I used to go ecstatically crazy over a Macworld launch and write all sorts of stuff about it and so on and so forth. These days I find it easier just to sit back and look at all of the cool things unfurl.

If you’re very new to the internet, or never really look at newspapers or take part in any other forms of communication between people, then you might not be aware that firstly, Apple has launched a new laptop (or notebook (which I believe is the more generally accepted term (at least in the US) these days)) and secondly, it has received lots of criticism.

Fair enough some of this criticism is probably due, for it has one USB port and no media drive. You can make up your own opinions about what you think of this, personally though, I don’t really mind these things. The one USB port seems limiting in most ways, is it really though? How often do you have more than one peripheral connected (AND IN USE) when you’re out and about. Most likely you’ll have a USB key, a printer, an external mouse, or an iPod connected. These wouldn’t all be at the same time though. You might want to use a USB key and a mouse at the same time, which is understandable given the frustation of most trackpads… (AAAGH eeePC!) As we are told though, the MacBook Air’s trackpad is a) multitouch and b) larger. This should hopefully make it more tempting to stick with the trackpad instead of changing to an external mouse. I say ‘might be’ in this case because to be honest I haven’t a clue what the trackpad is like on these things, but if the iPhone is anything to go by, then I’ll probably be impressed. With printers, enough of them are WiFi enabled, or connected to a WiFi network so that the need for a USB cable with a printer these days (unless it’s some huge image files…) is waning. That said, you would only use a printer to print off a document and then most likely unplug the cable and walk away, so having one usb port would not be too annoying. Same goes for an iPod, you’d only sync it on there (that would take a comparitively small amount of time), the charging could be done at the wall. The only usb object left would be the usb drive, something that might be useful, but not always used. So I come to the conclusion that only one USB port might just be bearable and usable!

The DVD drive (or lack thereof) is a different case altogether… But it does resolve itself in a similar way to the USB issue. Apple probably have thought (and fought) long and hard about this and have come to the conclusion that it is not necessary to have one. That is, assuming you follow their way or living (in reference to digital media that is). As explained in the keynote, there are a few things that you would commonly use CDs and DVDs for. In my case these would be…
-Installing BIG new programs (like Leopard, and someone raised the case of Windows w/ Boot Camp)
-Adding CDs to iTunes (I despise the iTMS in terms of listening to music and the culture surronding it as it kills the album, which is an entity in my opinion)
-Watching DVDs
-Converting DVDs to iPhone format.
If this MacBook is not your primary computer, then there’s no real need to do most of these things on it except the installations. You might want to watch DVDs, but you may have a DVD player and a widescreen TV for that, or there’s the iTunes Movie Store, or even you could convert it to a suitable format before you leave home and stick it on your HD. In any case, you could probably manage without it.

Though the MacBook Air has been receiving lots of criticism about it’s revolutionary new features/things that it doesn’t have, most of them are not particularly well deserved. The obvious drawbacks all have reasons behind them, most of these are pretty legit given a fairly normal scenario. So in essence, I think it’s a great little product, with some excellent engineering behind it all, even if I wouldn’t buy myself one in the near future…

There was recently a big deal made of the whole OLPC program, which produced a sub $100 laptop to help children (aswell as adults actually, should have thought about that Negroponte! Oh wait, the keyboard is too small and rubbery for adults to use…) learn and play and so on and so forth and do what ever they want to do with computers. Yes, this is probably a good idea, I’m not going into the ethics at all behind it, but in general, education (if these laptops help promote such a thing) is good. As Sir Francis Bacon once said, ‘Knowledge is power.’

But surely in this day and age, with the threat of global warming and rising seas and adverse weather conditions, not to mention other such non related things like terrorism and coups, a laptop is not sufficient to solve these problems. True, it wasn’t designed to do such things, it is around to promote education for children and adults alike, be that in Africa or Alabama. What is really needed, is something that may well stand a better chance of solving these problems, something that may have an effect on carbon emissions, or the rising seas…

Well, at CES, or most likely before that (the exact date is largely irrelevant!) the people’s car was launched. I’m not referring to any VW (VolksWagen -> Folk’s Wagon -> People’s Car), I’m talking about Tata Motors’s $2500 ‘1-Lakh’ Nano. A car made with the intent and purpose that everyone is now able to afford a car. While that’s good, looking at the specs in more detail make it clear that this runs on petrol… a product of a fossil fuel and thus produces Carbon emissions and uses oil. Wouldn’t some renewable energy, or hydrogen fuel cells (granted they are more expensive) work miles better? If they plan to do what they say and make it so everyone can afford to buy it, then surely they don’t want it relying on such a thing as petrol! That age is surely over - at least when developing something that will be widely used in a country such as India!

Thus some project, along the lines of OLPC, yet maybe backed (and financed too anyone?) with some good industrial support that doesn’t leave halfway through and make a competing product would be suitable. Hence the OCPF - One Car Per Family. Yes, it sounds like some smalltown anti-(multiple) car association, but only in the same way that the OLPC programme could be a similar group lobbying to decrease the number of laptops children have! The aim of such a program would be to create and manufacture a cheap automobile, suitable for ‘everyone’ and running on ‘as environmentally friendly as possible’ sources. It probably is a hard thing to sort out, taking time, money and effort that people can’t necessarily spare, but something like this is needed! The technology exists and is all the time getting faster, more efficient and people are coming up with new designs - take, for example the Automotive X Prize. One competitor has a vehicle - the Aptera Typ-1, that does a good 340mpg. Now something of that magnitude would be good for a potential OCPF program.

All that is needed is someone to lead the project…