The KC Star Interviews Me On Unboxing

Today, an article on unboxing and teardown by Jonathan Bender appeared in the Kansas City Star (in the print version, it appears on page A13, at the front of the business section). It includes a couple of quotes from me, taken from a much longer email interview that I did. For the curious, I’ve posted the rest of the interview below.

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WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org

You’d think this explanation would already be written somewhere, in succinct, plain language. But it’s not. At least not that I’ve found.

People often ask me “What kind of blogging software should I use?”

My answer is usually “WordPress.”

Then they go and do a search for “wordpress.”

A few days later, they come back.

“Which version of WordPress should I use? WordPress.com or WordPress.org?”

“Well,” I say, “it depends.” Then I babble on incoherently for several minutes.

When they get bored, they ask: “But which is the free one?”

Aye, there’s the rub. Read the rest of this entry »

EEE PC Unboxing

Now you can pretend you spent the money on a new Asus Netbook without actually, you know, doing it.

This is the 1000HE, by the way.

Amazon box…

Asus box…

The computer came with a cushy shell case. Good thing I didn’t buy the one that Amazon recommended I make part of the same purchase.

This thing is so small and light that I literally wasn’t sure which piece of wrapped equipment was the actual computer.

Comes with battery, adapter in two pieces, and a wipey thing that I immediately used to clean the monitor on my Macbook.

They really keep you in suspense.

Felt like I was lifting a spiral notebook.

Yes, that’s a whiskey flask. Just for the sake of size comparison.

The power adapter came with two velcro wrappy thingies attached, to keep the cords from getting messy. Very nice detail.

This is the 2GB RAM chip I ordered with the netbook, pictured next to the box it came in. Somewhere, a tree just died needlessly.

Like unwrapping a patient’s eyes after surgery.

This thing is cuter than R2D2.

With my 13″ Macbook (1st gen Intel). So much smaller and lighter it’s ridiculous.

Other than my iPhone, this is the smallest computer I have ever had. The keyoard and the positioning of the icerink mouse will take some getting used to, as will the tiny screen. I will also probably put Linux on it.

It is very small, light, shiny, and blue, though. And supposedly has nine hours of battery life.

Dear Former AOL Users

Remember ten years ago, when I would tell you about a cool new entertainment website, and you got confused because you couldn’t get to it by clicking on the “entertainment” category button in your AOL interface?

Remember when people used to ask you for your email address, and you just wrote down the username part, because you felt that “@aol.com” should be implied?

Remember when you heard about Mozilla, and how you wanted to try it, but you got confused and nervous thinking about viewing a website through something other than the default AOL browser? That somehow that seemed “unsafe”?

Has it been long enough that you can admit that you were acting like a complete fucking moron?

What’s that? You’ve finally decided to commit ritual seppuku?

Oh, sorry. I must have misheard you.

photo by cplbasilisk

The Truth About iLife, iPhoto, and Mac’s Leopard

I had to figure this out this morning, and didn’t find a comprehensive explanation anywhere else, so I’m offering one for posterity.

If you bought your mac with a version of OSX earlier than Leopard (10.5), and then you upgraded to Leopard with a clean install (erasing your hard drive), then you erased iLife (iPhoto, Garageband, etc.) and did not get it back.

Apple likes to say that iLife “comes with every mac,” but they don’t clarify that it does not come with every mac OS upgrade. The fact that it comes with your mac does not mean that it stays with your mac, at least not without some additional work.

iLife does come on the install discs that come with your mac. That is, the install discs that you shouldn’t generally need, since all macs come with the OS already installed. But these discs are in case you need to re-install, or to install some specific component.

If you don’t have the install discs, because you lost them, or you got your mac second hand, then you may be able to use someone else’s install discs. I have read posts indicating that for this to work smoothly, the discs you borrow have to come from the same model as the mac you’re installing to. If the models are different, you can apparently still transfer the files some other way, but I don’t have the details.

If you do have the install discs, Ben Robison has a posted a nice walk-through for installing iLife from your Tiger install discs without overwriting Leopard.

However, keep in mind that, when you do this, you will be installing the Tiger version of iLife, which is to say, iLife ’06. The fact that you paid for Leopard apparently does not entitle you to have the latest version of iLife. To get that, you will either need to buy a new mac, or upgrade for $79.

This is why Apple says that iLife comes with every mac, but you don’t hear them saying that it comes with every installation of OSX. In the mac universe, software and hardware are tightly integrated. OSX comes installed on every computer, iLife comes installed on every computer, and all three elements are made by the same company, so it’s easy to assume that iLife comes with OSX.

This idea may be reinforced by the fact that iLife is itself not any one thing, but a grouping of several pieces of software. It is advertised as its own entity, and yet the usual way to obtain it is to buy a computer that comes with it. In other words, it’s distributed just like an operating system is. And it’s always distributed with the same family of operating system. So it’s not surprising that people consider it part of that operating system. Even though (sigh) it’s not.

photo by ocoolto