For me as a european consumer, the low Dollar (or: high Euro) is a good thing. Particularly when travelling to the U.S., or buying American consumer electronics.
For Apple, as a big company with complete control over it’s retail prices, the low Dollar (or: high Euro) is a good thing. Particularly when the conversion rates sneak up on the consumers and you “forget” to adjust your 1-to-1 Euro-to-Dollar conversion in your stores. Time to wake up the European Apple consumers.
Last week I’ve been complaining about the capped volume on the iPod nano and the inability to circumvent it. At the end of that very week, the iPod earbuds solved the problem for me by breaking down. The rubber rings started comming off, and the right speaker produced only 10% of the sound the left speaker was producing.
I decided that this was enough reason to go looking for a nice set of in-ear headphones (earbuds) which would sound nice, and also improve on produced volume.
A while ago the drives in my fileserver (PPC Mac Mini) began dying on me, one after one. The disks were somewhat old (approx. 4 years) so I replaced them with 2 new Maxtor 500GB USB drives, and restored all data from my backups. The server came up and looked and worked like it had never died, but now had more diskspace.
After a few months of trouble free operation, one of the Maxtor disks seemed to have died this morning. I had kept the receipt, so I thought I’d get the drive and bring it in for repairs, because after all, this is well within the warranty period. While disconnecting the drive, it occured to me that I could never bring that harddisk in for repairs, particularly if I was not able to access it.
I know you’ve been playing with your ultra-cool iPhones, but did you realize that it only is 6 years ago that Apple showed is the first iPod? It’s amazing how fast technology advances nowadays. Today I read that 128GB flashdrives are not far away, so how about an 128GB iPhone, or even a MacBook with a solid state disk? We’ve got a nice future ahead…
Since Sony invented the walkman, the trains, trams and busses have been flooding with people wearing earphones. At first, they irritated everybody with the “ts…ts…ts…ts…ts…ts…ts…” sound comming out of their ears, and now, many early walkman owners are starting to show hearing problems. The European Union has stepped in to protect our ears, and have set some limits to how much sound a personal music device can produce.
In theory this is a terrific idea, but in practice, it doesn’t work. Most manufacturers, like Apple are simply limiting the absolute maximum the device can use by measuring how loud a very loud mp3 plays at max volume. Then, they apply a software cap on the volume slider and that’s that. As a side effect, people who like to listen to inheritly low-volume music (classical music or some talkshow podcasts) are very limited in where they can use this device.
Finally, the word is out. Apple (Steve) has announced at the “hot news feed” that the iPhone (and iPod touch) will be opened up to developers in February 2008. I think this is a wise decision. In stead of fighting developers, bricking phones and constantly being at the defense, the effort of Apple is much better put to use by working together with the (free, unpayed, expert-level, hours-on-end-concentrating, 24/7) programmers out there.
For those people out there designing user interfaces, web frontends or anything else displayed on a screen: About 8% of all males are color blind. This could mean that because of a simple color choice, 8% of your target audience (customers) could have serious difficulty in using your design. 5% of all males can’t distinguish green from red, although they are regarded as high contrast to eachother.
Do you want to test how your design looks to colorblind people? Now you can, with Color Oracle, a tool for Mac OSX and Windows which transposes the colors of your screen to reflect what it would look like if you were color blind. In fact, it can simulate 3 different kinds of color blindness.
From the site: “Color Oracle takes the guesswork out of designing for color blindness by showing you in real time what people with common color vision impairments will see. Color Oracle applies a full screen color filter to art you are designing – independently of the software that you are using. Eight percent of all males are affected by color vision impairement – make sure that your graphical work is readable by the widest possible audience.”
Since WordPress has a 50MB space limit for images uploaded to the blog, I was looking for a place to host my galleries. Some friends of mine have Flickr accounts but I really hate it’s cluttered and non-intuitive user interface.
Yesterday evening I found a very good alternative to Flickr, which actually is much cooler. It has all the features Flickr has, but it’s user interface is much, much more intuitive, and less cluttered. It’s fast, free and has a very cool upload feature which lets you edit the photo’s as they’re uploading! It’s an amaing feature you’d have to see for yourself.
And where can you find all this wonderfull stuff? It’s at www.23hq.com. Try it out, it’s completely free, has no userspace or download limitation, and no spam is sent to you. The only limitation to free accounts is that you can upload maximum 30 photo’s per month. But don’t worry, you can upload 300 photo’s the first week to get your account started.
Leave that Flickr account and join 
!
Hello reader,
Welcome to the new location of my weblog. The old data is not completely transferred yet, I’ll be doing that from newest to oldest post by hand, because there is no way to do that in the old blog software. This is one of the reasons I am moving away from that blog. I may be running into all kinds of problems, and it may take a while, so if you are looking for existing information, bare with me.
If you can’t find the content and tips you are looking for, please check out the location of my old blog at http://blogger.xs4all.nl/rrolfje.
Hi, just a quick reminder to myself and users of the AFP protocol (Apple File Protocol) who are wondering why it is not working. For some strange reason, if you start messing (deleting) the “Public” folder of any user which is on the system providing the AFP share, you will break the AFP protocol.
Read More “AFP breaks when messing with your Public folder!” »
