now they can upgrade it

The new iMac is on the way! Super baby video editing coming right up!

Of course, now that I've bought one, they'll upgrade them. As long as they do within 30 days, I'm golden... that's Amazon's window of exchange.

Thanks to my wonderful wife for agreeing to this admittedly husband-centric purchase. :D

uncanny design...

What's old is new again. Gizmodo shows how 1960's designs from Braun designer Dieter Rams are almost identical to Apple's products.

the new cat is coming to the Watts house

We're getting a Leopard. Picked it up at Best Buy today (partially with a gift card, thanks team!) and with a $15 off coupon from our 2007 Citipass book (which paid for the tax, thanks, Tennessee.) Alas, no Best Buy coupons in the 2008 book.

on facebook? 5 free iTunes songs!

1. Log in to your Facebook account.
2. Search for the group Ticketmaster Live.
3. Join.
4. Claim your five free songs!

Get 'em while they're hot!

between a rock and iPod place

Apple's big iPod announcements today all seem to have a "throw them a bone" factor involved. What Apple wants is to give you a "phone-less iPhone" with a ton of storage, but flash memory prices haven't caved to the point where they can do that. So what do they do for this Christmas? Flashy shuffle colors, a pudgy little feature-laden nano, the "old" iPod with ludicrous amounts of storage, and the "phoneless" iPhone with double the flash storage of the iPhone, sure to tick off hundreds of recent iPhone purchasers who didn't really really want the phone, and are now slaves to AT&T.

Where's the "iPod Touch" with the 160GB drive? I'm sure folks wouldn't mind a slightly weightier and thicker device that could store 3400 hours of music.

the original iPod, c. 1980

This prototype music player is part of the DigiBarn Computer Museum's collection of computational artifacts.

I guess it fit the notion of a "portable music player" when the notion of a "portable stereo" was this.

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mini bootie

According to several sites, my mini can boot from an external firewire hard drive, no problem. Using SuperDuper, it was easy for me to create an image of my boot drive on my 80GB, 7200RPM firewire/USB 2.0 drive. However, that just got me a faster... not bigger boot drive.

I also have a 200GB, 5400RPM firewire/USB 2.0 drive. That would give me the space increase, but not the performance boost, especially over firewire. Plus, it's currently my backup drive for the various computers we have around the house (and then some.)

I have tried every combination... one FW, one USB, both daisy chained through FW, one in front of the other... and the mini only seems to like one combination: the internal drive and one external drive. It sees both drives and can do things to both drives... but it sometimes hangs in the middle of operations. I don't know if that's a limitation of the mini, or the interface standards, but I can't seem to get around it.

Ah well, I guess I'll just have to save up for one of these.

maxi mini

Hooah! The mini now has 2GB of RAM! I got tired of waiting... and waiting... and waiting while I was working with video or doing an iTunes rip and surfing the web. Now I've got headroom galore. I'm not sure if I should attack the hard drive first or if I should go for broke and swap the processor! Mua ha ha ha!