A friend suggested that someone should make “an ‘eyedropper’ style tool so I can click to select a location and drag the lat/long onto one of my photos to geocode it with the location information.” (In Flickr, please).

I pointed out LazyWeb exists to help dreams like this come true!

The contrast between my experiences of owning a Mac for the last five months and recent PC experiences has been instructive.

I recently visited a friend whose PC had become all-but-unusable because of spyware and viruses (not a problem on Macs – at least not for the moment). Now we just acquired a Dell laptop and we’re finding getting it set up to be something of a hassle.

While Bluetooth just works on my Mac, configuring it is a mess on the Dell. XP insists on sticking icons on the desktop that we don’t want, and several of the games I had hoped to run on the Dell (Battlefield 2 and Doom 3 for example) don’t work either, so I’m not even able to profit from the advantage the PC has in availability of games.

And the way XP handles multiple users on the same machine is weirdly inconsistent – sometimes programs are installed for all users – other times they only seem to install for the user who is logged in at the time. Not that I haven’t had a few problems getting to grips with the way Mac users and permissions work, but at least it has seemed more logical in the way it functions.

A ‘smart bag’ that tells you when you’ve forgotten something. It’s one of several ‘smart fabric’ applications that have been explored in the bYOB (build your own bag) project at the Media Lab. This kind of thing has been discussed for many years now. I hope they stop talking about them and start marketing them soon – I’m always worrying I’ve left stuff behind when I’m packing.

The hard drive on my lashed-together several-years-old PC desktop has failed for the second time in a year so I have decided to stop trying to revive it and plan to replace it with a laptop that my wife can use commuting as well.

Priorities:
1 Durability
2 Good support (mainly good repair and overall customer service but
telephone tech support might help). Good coverage in Europe/US a plus.
3 light/small and acceptable battery life (3 hrs?)
4 acceptable games performance (don’t tell the wife!). Otherwise will just
get used for word processing etc so don’t need lots of processor power.
5 Not too expensive (< 1000 quid) Mainly on the basis of 1 and 2 I limited myself to Toshiba or IBM and have more or less narrowed down to: Thinkpad T41 or a Portege A200

Should I be considering an HP or other brand as well – if so which? Which
of Tosh and IBM deliver better support these days? Any “gotchas”/tech dead
ends I should look out for when making my decision?

My prejudice tells me the IBM will be the sturdier choice…

I just installed more iBook RAM (bought it from the US for half the Apple preinstall price) and managed not to break the machine (thanks to Apple’s commendably detailed instructions).

P.S. If you don’t know what 31337 meant check out “The Jargon Lexicon”:http://jargon.watson-net.com/jargon.asp?w=elite and browse around…

• On the good side – it looks lovely (both the hardware and the OS) and was really straightforward to set up – particularly the networking bits. However…
• Providing the iBook with a base 256Mb of RAM is ridiculous – it isn’t enough to do any real multitasking. Running Firefox, Fire (for instant messaging), OpenOffice and “Blinkx”:http://www.blinkx.com/content/mac.php (a new hard disk indexing program) slows the machine to a crawl. It surely wouldn’t have added that much to the cost to ship with 512Mb as standard, especially since there is only one spare memory slot.
• OpenOffice for the Mac is a dog – and to be fair the OO team almost admit as much. Unfortunately progress towards a proper OSX version appears to have “slowed dramatically”:http://porting.openoffice.org/mac/.
• AppleWorks is similarly irritating. It is at least MacOS look and feel compliant but if you want to use it to work with Office files you have to open AppleWorks, change the open file dialogue to allow you to open non-Appleworks files, then work on the file and “save as” back into the file’s original format – every single time. And I don’t trust it not to mess up my formatting.
• If I can mount an FTP server and I give myself full rights why does the Apple network software insist that the server be read-only? Is there any way around this? For some reason I can’t mount my Windows PC using the normal Windows file and print sharing.
• Whose bright idea was it not to include a “forward” delete key on Mac notebooks?

I don’t want to leave things on a sour note – I am pretty hopeful that once I receive the additional 512Mb of RAM I ordered and I get ahold of MS Office my user experience will improve dramatically…

My new iBook arrived around 13:00 – it is already up and running and connected to the Internet and I’ve installed and configured all the apps I need for the moment. The whole process has been pretty painless (as one might expect from an Apple product).

I can hardly wait to bring it in to the LSE and show it off…

I feel like “Mark”:http://home.btconnect.com/glottalstop/blog/2004/11/shanghai-not-that-im-going-on-too-much.html as I wait increasingly impatiently for my iBook to arrive (especially after reading Mark’s “glowing review”:http://home.btconnect.com/glottalstop/blog/2004/12/powerbook-i-thought-id-give-quick.html of his Powerbook. I know my machine has this morning arrived in Holland from the Far East – I hope it hops the channel soon – I’ve been waiting since forever (well since the 14th anyway).

Or has this been festering behind the scenes for months and only recently become public? (Or has there been argument somewhere I just haven’t been noticing?) It’s becoming clear that “Chris Anderson”:http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/bios/andersonw.html – the Editor in Chief of Wired – has views on copyright that differ somewhat from the ‘bits want to be free’ ideology that the magazine has tended to espouse.

I noticed “last month”:https://blog.org/archives/cat_ecommerce.html#001325 that Chris A (as befits an ex-Economist writer) is keen to encourage commercial companies to sueeze every last penny of value out of their intellectual property while people like “Cory Doctorow”:http://www.craphound.com/ and “Lawrence Lessig”:http://www.lessig.org/ would rather copyright protection was somewhat loosened to make it easier for people to exercise their existing rights and to encourage more theoretically-marketable but marginal content to enter the public domain.

Now Cory and Chris have “locked horns on digital rights management”:http://www.boingboing.net/2004/12/29/cory_responds_to_wir.html. Cory it seems never saw a DRM implementation he liked – Chris is a little more open to persuasion. Certainly both Cory and Larry have been able to dig up plenty of examples of how stupid DRM software rules sometimes mess up consumers’ rights and how it is always possible to circumvent DRM if you try hard enough. But my guess is that even the clumsy DRM implemented today seldom inconveniences most consumers much and most consumers don’t bother trying to get around it, unless they are trying to do something they shouldn’t like giving away copyrighted content to their friends.

If companies managed to develop sophisticated DRM that didn’t significantly impede people’s legitimate desires to share media with their friends and their other devices I wouldn’t be against it if it encouraged companies to make more of their back catalogues available more inexpensively and conveniently online. At the moment the absence of a convenient and comprehensive commercial alternative naturally drives people to the free P2P networks (particularly for more obscure fare) and this just makes the ultimate day of digital convergence further away.

The EFF and others should be encouraging responsible DRM development not just slamming it. How about a code of conduct for responsible DRM coding?

Thanks to the publicity provided by Google’s move, lots of applications are coming out of the woodwork. Here’s the latest news in brief. I just learned about three more products:
* “ISYS”:http://www.isys-search.com/products/desktop/index.html (free to try but they don’t tell the price up front)
* “Filehand”:http://www.filehand.com/ (now free – has the embarassing motto, ‘It’s like Google for your computer’)
* “x-friend”:http://www.x-friend.de/en/start/introduction/ (written in Java and runs on ‘any operating system’ – produced in Germany)
I also just learned about two reviews:
* “PC World just reviewed ten desktop search applications”:http://www.pcworld.com/reviews/article/0,aid,117809,pg,4,00.asp not including Google Desktop Search and
* “CNet”:http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-3684_7-5536376.html has just reviewed six desktop search apps (rather briefly) including Google Desktop, though they concluded “Copernic is best”:http://reviews.cnet.com/Copernic_Desktop_Search/4505-3684_7-31087427-2.html?tag=tab.

For more on this stuff see “earlier”:https://blog.org/?cat=29&submit=view (and scroll down that page to see more search related stuff).