Hold the front page! Google News is coming out of beta!
Meanwhile, Google Maps has dramatically improved the quality of its satellite images for Melbourne, much of which formerly looked really fuzzy. Though the south-eastern bit (further out than about North Road and Warrigal Road) is still very fuzzy.
Reviews of the Intel Core Duo iMac are starting to come in. Engadget has a roundup.
Ars Technica has had a go at trying to get Windows working on one. No luck so far.
Gmail has finally got a Delete button.
And they’ve launched Gmail mobile.
Here’s a handy thing: portable applications (that is, those that can live happily on a removable disk, without having to be installed to run properly), and portableapps.com is has them categorised and available for download. They include dev tools like NVU and FileZilla, all the way up to portable versions of OpenOffice.
If you haven’t totally banned purchases from Sony due to the rootkits, you can at least now buy Sony BMG music tracks via the iTunes store; they’ve backed-down on refusing to have their artists available there.
Meanwhile Apple is under fire for including a “phone home” feature that’s turned on by default in the latest version of iTunes (the Mac version only so far?).
Update Friday 7am: EFF: Apple backs down on the “phone home” feature.
Australian Personal Computer: Will Intel-based Apple Macs be able to run Windows? Apple says they’re not doing anything to prevent it. Their Macs will use an Extensible Firmware Interface, which replaces the BIOS, and Windows Vista will support EFI.
Would be pretty cool to have the lovely Apple design for your hardware, plus the lovely Apple OS, but be able to boot into Windows when compatibility was needed.
As part of my revamp of the house (and in particular the home office) I’m looking around at LCD monitors. They’ll be good for saving space on the new desks, making the computers less obtrusive.
LCDs used to be incredibly expensive. The reviews on sites like Dan’s Data show that just a couple of years ago, you could pay well over A$1000 for a 17 inch LCD. Thankfully they’ve fallen below the $400 mark now, which seems much more reasonable. They’ve also got much faster, with 4 or 8ms response times being very common. This is the good thing about being several steps behind the early adopters.
I could go more expensive for bigger, but I’ve been living with 15 and 17 inch CRTs so long that I don’t see the need to go bigger, since that would make the computers more obtrusive, I’ll gain in viewable area anyway, and I’d prefer two monitors an identical size to avoid the kids squabbling over who gets to use which.
Asking around, it would seem two good brands to look at are Samsung and BenQ, in part for their value for money, but also things like clearly defined dead pixel policies.
Samsung’s policy: any dead pixels in the first 7 days, they’ll swap for a new monitor at place of purchase. After that, any dead pixels in the 8cm x 8cm square in the middle warrants replacement, or 3 or more dead elsewhere. (The policies are different for bigger screens).
BenQ’s policy: any dead pixels in the first 7 days warrants replacement. Beyond that, anything in the middle 9th of the screen, and more than 2 bright dots and 3 dark dots elsewhere will trigger replacement.
Digital input, which neither of my computers are currently equipped for, appears to cost about $20 extra. Might as well get it for future use.
And of course there’s the vital question: silver, or black? (Not as obvious as for something like TV gear, where as far as I’m concerned, it’s black all the way.)
Next pay day, it’ll be time to go shopping.
Doctor Who Restoration Team member and professional TV/film/multimedia composer Mark Ayres has a comprehensive history of how the original Doctor Who theme music was done.
There being no “synthesisers” [in 1963], the Workshop needed a source of electronic sound. They found this in a bank of twelve high-quality test tone generators, the usual function of which was to output various tones (square waves, sine waves) for passing through electronic circuits for testing gain, distortion and so on. They also had a couple of high-quality equalisers (again, test equipment – equalisers, or “tone controls”, were not that easy to come by at the time) and a few other gadgets including a “wobbulator” (a low frequency oscillator) and a white noise generator.
My keyboard has a Web button on it, which as you’d expect opens up my web browser.
Like all right-minded people, I have this set up in Windows’ “Set program access and defaults” screen to go to Firefox.
But if I press the button when a Windows Explorer window is open (eg browsing a directory) it goes to IE in that window, instead. Hmmm.
The otherwise very fine Bloglines RSS aggregator isn’t liking this site very much, reporting errors when trying to add the Geekrant RSS feed which works so well for most other people.
Uh, yes the feed does exist. Those who like XML can look at it raw.
It’s doing the same for some other blogs, including my personal one, having rejected it since late December. Very odd. And I’m not the only one.
I’ve contacted Bloglines support, so hopefully they’ll be looking into it.
Mrs Scoble on ten reasons you should date a geek.
An old tip, but a goodie… if you don’t like working with popup blockers (or they’re not doing the job for you) grab hold of a hosts file that stops ads displaying, by fooling your computer about where the ad servers are.