I’ve been totally digging the ISS Detector app from RunaR and wanted to give ’em a shout out. I have it set up to automatically notify me, with 15 minutes notice or so, when the ISS is going to be overhead. It has some VERY cool options whereby it only notifies me when the station will be high enough above the horizon to see (10 degrees max = no thank you) AND only when the weather is cooperating (if it’s rainy, please don’t bother me!). The app has a built-in compass to help you orient yourself, and as per the screen snap below, it’ll tell you where it’s gonna show up, when, how it’s gonna travel across the sky, how long it’ll be visible for, and how high it’ll get.

The ISS is visible with the naked eye. However, if you can scrounge up a pair of binoculars you can make out the outline of its PV wings. The ISS in toto is roughly the size of a football field. Note that the ISS moves fast. In fact, it’s orbiting Earth every 92 minutes at a speed of 17,500 MPH (more than 25X faster than the last jet you were on!). As you look up, it’ll almost certainly be the fastest moving  object in the sky.

Net-net, if you’re a space geek, this is a must-have app IMO. Enjoy!

I know the fanbois are falling all over themselves today to laud the new gadgets Apple announced. Like them, I sat in rapt attention following the streams of info coming out of SF a few hours ago. Net-net, I’m just not that impressed. I still LOVE my iPad 2 and use it all the damn time. LOVE IT! But I was hoping for more from the iPad 3.

Even the curmudgeons in the crowd (like YT) have to hand it to them re: the iPad 3 display. It truly does look like a thing of immense and impressive beauty. I doff my cap in well-earned respect. However, the thing is, there are plenty of devices that have launched over the past years that have pixel densities similar to (and greater than) the iPad 3. Check out this (incomplete) list on Wikipedia, for example. What Apple is doing with the iPad 3 retina display isn’t about pixel density – it’s about pushing the manufacturers to get larger total-usable-square-inch yields out of their glass. It’s one thing to produce 333 ppi (LG LU1400) on a 16:9 2.8″ diagonal screen that totals less than 3.5 square inches of glass. With the iPad 3 you’re now talking about that sort of level of zero-defect glass totaling nearly 42 square inches! That’s 12X (TWELVE TIMES!) larger – more than an order of magnitude! What’s impressive here is NOT the general pixel density. What’s impressive is that the supplier(s) can produce this glass at this ppi at these sizes repeatably, reliably, and (presumably) profitably. As one twitterer put it about these Apple events: it’s “fun to see what Samsung will be shipping in six months”. If supplier X can manufacture 264 ppi at 42 sq.in. as of 01/01/12, then everybody will have access to that (and better) in a matter of months.

The A5X appears to be impressive. But the Tegra 4 is already in early test runs and will probably smoke the A5X. Moore’s Law happens. Never mind the chips that N other manufacturers are working on to outperform the A5X and the Tegra 4 and so on. Apple leans on multiple global experts to innovate on displays, but Apple is assuming a huge risk in keeping its processors in-house. The competitive market is more likely to innovate faster than  Apple can internally over time. I guess they’ve “picked their poison”, perhaps?

The camera update was grossly overdue. The camera in the iPads 1 and 2 was a joke when each were respectively released. It’d be interesting to learn though why they went with this 5MP solution instead of an 8 or 10. My guess is that the camera in my HTC Amaze will out-shoot the iPad 3’s camera. And I can slot SD cards in and out when I need more space to store more pictures!

And, of course, the iPad 3 still won’t run Flash 😦 . Sigh. Dear Apple: please feel free to keep your religious beliefs out of my technology needs.

What I wanted to see was a retina display, an A5X, an SD card slot, Flash support, and an 8MP or better camera. LTE is irrelevant – I’ve been and will continue to tether my WiFi tablets to my phone(s). I came this close to buying an ASUS Transformer Prime tablet a couple months ago, but balked as they sort out some radio problems et. al. My guess is that during the summer my iPad 2 will be replaced by an Android tablet and the boss or kids will get the hand-me-down.

The Apple TV updates were purely incremental and grossly overdue to keep up with the Jones’s ($70 for an XD, delivered). The new Apple TV sell well though, since a lot of the uber-geek Apple fanbois wouldn’t buy at 720p and have been waiting patiently. Too bad Apple’s software apparently isn’t keeping up – maybe it’ll bump to iOS next cycle?

There’s always the next keynote…

This week I picked up a MacBook Air 11″ laptop. I’ve only been using it in earnest for about 24 (busy) hours, but it seems like a useful piece of kit.

In the mid 1990s, I did some damage to my back lugging a hugely-heavy Toshiba laptop (et. al.) around San Francisco, in a shoulder bag, on foot, for a month. It put me on my back, in pain for a few days afterwards, and I seem to re-injure the damage every 18 to 24 months ever since. Yup: I am a dope.

I vowed never to lug around a heavy laptop again, and proceeded to own a series of ultra-light Sony and IBM/Lenovo machines. When the original MacBook Air was announced, I was excited to pounce. As it turned out, my excitement was premature, as the machine just didn’t cut the mustard for the non-trivial computing I needed to do.

Six months ago, I made the switch from my original MacBook Air to a honkin’ MacBook Pro 15″ i7. It’s a stupendous piece of computing. It’s also really big, bulky, and not light. My operating theory was that I’d mostly use the MBP for desk-based work, haul it between home and work, and use my Samsung Galaxy Tab (which experiment is itself well overdue for its own blog post) for more portable work. That plan wasn’t per se not working out – but it wasn’t working great, either.

I type well. I type fast. In fact, these folks say I type really well really fast. A quick test there shows 90 words per minute with 98% accuracy. That’s one word every 666 milliseconds. Maybe I’m the text-entry-man-of-the-beast 🙂 . 54 baud FTW! I’ve been typing virtually every single day of my life since the early 1980s on my TRaSh-80. So the two finger, two thumb, or one finger swiping solutions – on smartphones and tablets – haven’t been affording me the efficiency I want. Keyboards work for me.

The MacBook Air 11″ is about 1 pound heavier and 2 inches longer than an iPad2. It’s freakin’ tiny.

It took me a few hours to get used to the keyboard, but I’m there: I’m creating this blog post on it, and that speed test mentioned above was done just now on it. Thus far I’ve used iWork, Microsoft Office, and Adobe CS4 apps. I also run a local mirror of the play140 database on MySQL server and have been running some gnarly analytics queries against it today. Frankly, I’ve yet to identify any task this machine will barf on. I imagine I’ll find it – but not yet. The 4GB or RAM and 128GB of flash storage seem to be haulin’ ass. It fits in my jacket pocket. Sweet! It takes up a TON less horizontal space when I whip it out at Peet’s or on the subway. It’ll fit on an airplane tray table without drama. I haven’t used it enough to judge the battery life yet – but it clearly doesn’t suck. Well over 3 hours at least. Thus far, the substantial decrease in screen real estate is the only thing that’s been truly painful. I’ll admit it: I’m a pixel slut. The screen on this little beastie has 41% fewer pixels than the screen on my 15″ MBP. Put inversely, the MBP has 68% more pixels than the MBA. Yowza.

Let the experiment continue…

Dear VerizonWireless:

I stopped by my local VerizonWireless store last night on my way home. I put my name into the queue for help and then proceeded to wait for 20 minutes or so for someone to call my name.

I was informed (finally) that the return policy on the Xoom is a $70 restocking fee; plus the cellular service fee for the period; and it’s a 14 day window. So basically it’s $100 to spend time with this thing and figure out if I want one for $800 (no contract). Maybe folks were lining up yesterday morning around the block to buy Xooms at your stores across the country – but I’d be very surprised.

There’s gotta be a better way to get people over the hump, guys.

NOT buying a Xoom,

Shawn

PS: Honeycomb is neat! Can’t wait to get it on my Samsung Galaxy Tab (officially or via cyanogen/xda).

Every once in a while when I’m researching something cooking-related I blissfully stumble upon some cool-ass geek stuff, to wit:

This snippet is from Douglas Baldwin‘s seminal A Practical Guide to Sous Vide Cooking.

Food science rocks!

I threw these together late last night on a whim. They’re 960×800 N1 sized – feel free to do whatever you like with them to make them work on your device. I’m pretty sure the first three are public domain / creative commons. If my friends at Cartoon Network / Turner / TimeWarner have a big problem with the last one, just let me know and I’ll pull it. Each thumbnail below links to the full-res file. Enjoy!

Best Fake Steve post in a while.

P.T. Barnum? David Blaine? The big J.C. himself? I have pieces of guys like that in my stool.

Be readin’ it!

I tweeted on this and came up 110% empty. Let’s see if a blog post gets us any further 🙂 .

In Windows land, there is a very useful app called Anagram. I’ve been a happy user of Anagram for probably five years or more. What Anagram basically does is allow you to select some text and then hit a key (I used to use F12) and it would automagically take that text, parse it, process it, and put it into your address book (Outlook, in my case, though I think it worked with others too). It let you do a nice pass over the data to make sure it was kosher before you hit the final commit. It’s a nice app – I highly recommend it!

On OSX I can find nothing equivalent, and not for lack of looking. Can anybody point me in some useful directions?

Most importantly, I need it to work inside Thunderbird (Thunderbird extension, anybody?!?!?) and feed AddressBook.app. However, it should also work across any application – processing any selected text, or data on the clipboard from within Pages, Word, Firefox, Safari, Evernote, TextEdit, Preview, and so on and so forth.

If nothing exists, could one of you creative folks out there please whip one up? The Anagram guys have been making money on this for a long time. LinkedIn even licensed their technology for their “grab” toolbar. There’s gotta be a Mac market for something like this, no? And of course you can charge an extra $5 to $10 over what Anagram does, just ‘cuz you’re selling to Mac users 😉 😉 .