Technology

iPhone 4 and iOS 4: my point of view

Posted on by Daniele Nicolucci

I have been an Apple user since Summer 2001: after having successfully used Linux as my primary system for a while, one day I decided that there was something wrong with having to manually do many things that a “desktop” system should do on its own. Computers, I thought, were supposed to simplify tasks. While I still think that Linux is great for a server — something I have experience with —, it wasn’t and still isn’t the best choice for everyday computing. Unless you do mostly office work, in which case a distro such as Ubuntu with OpenOffice will work fine, and be entirely free.

For the sake of completeness, here are the machines by Apple I have owned over the better part of the last decade: iMac G3 “Blue Dalmatian”, iBook G3, Airport “Snow” Base Station, PowerMac Dual G4, iBook G4, iMac Intel, MacBook, MacBook Pro, iPhone 3G. What can I say, I am very satisfied with their products, even though I have nothing against alternatives: my current wireless network is provided by a Netgear router and a D-Link access point, for instance.

I didn’t get the original iPhone because it was never officially available in Italy, and I didn’t want to play the cat and mouse game of jailbreaking to make it work. I got the unlocked 3G in September 2008, and have been quite happy with it. Sure, it did have a few strange limitations (tethering, just to name one; something that any Nokia phone has been able to do for years when it was simply called “using your phone as a modem”), but I was quite happy.

Continue reading “iPhone 4 and iOS 4: my point of view” →

Apple MacOS X 10.7: code name Cougar?

Posted on by Daniele Nicolucci

Since the times of version 10.2, the internal code name of OS X major releases has become public knowledge and Apple has started using it in marketing. While there is a whole series of arguments for and against the usage of a non-sequential version numbering, I would say that in the case of operating systems it works just fine. After all, people only have to remember what the current release’s name is, and maybe the names of the two that came before it. Not a big deal.

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Considerations about Facebook

Posted on by Daniele Nicolucci

I have had a Facebook account for a couple of years now, and I am seriously considering disabling or deleting it. The reason is privacy, and not because I have anything bad to hide; I am smart enough to avoid posting things I don’t want anybody to see. The real issue for me is that I would really like to decide who should be able to see what, and I am not able to do that anymore. Believe me, even the tightest privacy settings won’t shield your data from prying eyes anymore.

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Where do you find e-books?

Posted on by Daniele Nicolucci

So you have bought a nice e-ink based e-book reader, and you need to quench your thirst for books. How do you get them? Free e-books are, well, free and without encryption; paid e-books, on the other hand, can be either encrypted or unencrypted.

For the sake of simplicity, I will assume that your reader is able to read ePub and PDF files and supports the Adobe Digital Editions DRM for both formats. Most readers can however be reprogrammed to support Mobi files, however, but I personally suggest to stick with ePub.

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Electronic ink: is it that good?

Posted on by Daniele Nicolucci

E-ink is the technology behind e-book readers such as the Opus. Some call it e-paper, but it’s essentially the same thing: a (relatively) revolutionary approach at computer-controlled displays. E-ink screens differ greatly from CRT or LCD screens, in several ways:

  1. They are not backlit, therefore you need ambient light to see what’s on them
  2. They do not require power to keep the image up
  3. Their refresh rate is abysmal
  4. They do not yet come in color, and they’re quite lame at showing gray too

So, you may wonder, why even consider buying something like this? That’s very simple: the things I mentioned above are the points of strength of these devices, not their weaknesses: it’s all about what you use these screens for. I am going to briefly go through those perveiced problems.

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Bookeen Cybook Opus review

Posted on by Daniele Nicolucci

As you may know by now (if not, see the previous post), I am the proud owner of a Bookeen Cybook Opus. My video may or may have not made sense, so here I am, giving more details about the device. If you are satisfied with a very short review: here it is: this thing rocks. If you need to know more, just read on.

If you haven’t watched the video, don’t bother doing so: anything I said in it will be covered here.

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Bookeen Cybook Opus video review

Posted on by Daniele Nicolucci

Last week I got an e-ink based e-book reader, specifically a Cybook Opus by Bookeen. I made a basic video review for those who have no idea what an e-book reader is about and why it blows away any other device, when it comes to reading books.

Head to the video page on Youtube and enjoy. If you can stand my accent, that is.

Batch-converting images for an HDTV

Posted on by Daniele Nicolucci

A couple of days ago, my parents bought their first HDTV. Since it has a USB port that can be used to show pictures stored on a flash drive, I found myself in the position of finally using an old 512 MB stick I had lying around.

I scouted my iPhoto Libraries for pictures, and simply dragged them into a folder I had created. I quickly stumbled across two problems:

  1. The Finder almost immediately reported that the drive was full, even when it still had over 350 MB available, or that one or more files couldn’t “be read or written”;
  2. 8-megapixel images are just too big for a Full HD screen, so you end up wasting a lot of space and possibly slowing down the TV.

Did I fix them? You bet I did. Read on to find how.

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Installing the MySQLdb Python module on Snow Leopard

Posted on by Daniele Nicolucci

Needing to access a MySQL database through Python, I was faced by the inability to easily install the MySQLdb module. I do use MacPorts, but after running the obvious
sudo port install py26-mysql
I realized that I would be downloading, compiling and installing a new instance of Python, a new instance of MySQL (I prefer the simplicity of MAMP), and who knows what else.

Installing the module alone doesn’t work, because MAMP installs no headers; and copying the headers from the vanilla MySQL distribution doesn’t help either, because a few of the required files are generated on the fly during the installation of MySQL itself.

The solution, it turns out, is relatively simple. Follow along. Continue reading “Installing the MySQLdb Python module on Snow Leopard” →

iPad, iTunes, iPhone OS; or: how you are not forced to use them

Posted on by Daniele Nicolucci

One day after the release of the iPad in the United States, reviews are pouring onto American and foreign websites alike. For every person who is amazed by the device, there is someone who is bothered by the Apple buzz. To these I say: what’s the big deal?

I happen to live in the Province of the Empire, in a country I oftentimes call “the third world of technology.” No way to rent movies online – or through the mail, for that matter –, no Pandora.com or Last.fm to easily find new music (the latter is available on a paid-membership basis; the former is simply forbidden), no iBooks when the iPad comes out, and so on. I live in Italy.

I am also a happy Mac and iPhone user. Not an evangelist, not anymore at least: I will praise how durable and enjoyable Apple products are, but I won’t urge anybody to buy them. I will, however, talk about them to people who ask me. After close to ten years as a Mac user (I do remember MacOS 9.2 and MacOS X 10.0) and years of previous experience with Linux systems, Apple has become an invaluable provider of my daily computing. OS X allows me tinker with the underlying UNIX system with ease while being extremely user-friendly with the rest of the user interface. As a web developer, it’s the closest thing to perfection I can think of.

When the iPad was announced, I was following Steve Jobs’s keynote through Engadget. I gradually turned from skeptic to disappointed: what, a big iPhone? A few hours later, a friend of mine summarized such feelings as: “I was hoping for a laptop replacement, and he just announced a tray. An iTray.”

A few days later, however, an article on a blog shone light on the matter: most of us computer people probably wouldn’t have much for a device like that. I’d personally much rather use my 13-inch MacBook Pro rather than an iPad, as it’s a full-fledged computer onto which I can install any program I want, with which I can multitask and that has a physical keyboard. I do sometimes use my MBP on the sofa, and while I agree that it’s not the most perfect experience, I’m willing to trade comfort for power.

People who do not have complex computing needs, though, will love the iPad. Take my father: he inherited the last PC I used, a glorious machine based on an AMD Duron 850 MHz CPU and 512 MB of memory. It runs Windows XP, and it’s far exceeded its time. Components keep breaking, and they are becoming hard to find. Every replacement has to be second-hand, and considering the higher price compared to current parts, it’s probably best to just ditch the machine entirely and build a new one. That was the plan, until the iPad was announced. Continue reading “iPad, iTunes, iPhone OS; or: how you are not forced to use them” →