Gravitational Pull: A blog about tech and other stuff.

  • Verizon and Tivo, so greedy together

    I owe a post on Tivo, or on the Toshiba-made RS-TX20 combo Tivo DVR and DVD burner that arrived on Christmas, but that will have to wait for another day with more free time (short version – it’s awesome except for the way it changes channels on our cable box). Instead, I’ll just loudly complain…

  • Canon wisely chooses to back down megapixels

    The bane of my existence, or at least the part of my life devoted to being a gadget hound and early adopter, is feature creep — the annoying tendency of tech companies to pile on feature after feature with each new iteration of a product until the original usefulness is buried. This tendency explains why…

  • Hooking up with Spam Karma 2

    All of a sudden, the bad guys have discovered my blog, the spam bad guys that is. Everything had been hunky-dory with this blog’s administration since I switched over to WordPress just about two months ago now. I set WordPress to email me every time I received a comment so I could moderate posts. Posts…

  • iPhoto 6 speed-up is real

    So says web developer Garrett Murray on his blog. Like Garrett, I buy the iLife suite updates almost exclusively for iPhoto so this is happy news: “Application Loading (from launch until all thumbnails appear) iPhoto 5: 14.1 seconds iPhoto 6: 3.0 seconds Application Closing (from quit command until gone) iPhoto 5: 9.4 seconds iPhoto 6:…

  • Scott McNeally’s iPod bashing

    Staci at PaidContent is reporting Sun CEO Scott McNealy’s latest off-base, self-interested ranting. I guess the thin client thing has died so now Scott is taking aim at the portable music market. In Scott’s dream world, cell phones accessing music stored on central servers, Sun servers no doubt, will overtake the iPod. “It’s going to…

  • Best in show at macworld – nice gear

    Beyond the well-rehearsed revelations of his Steveness, the Macworld Expo is also an opportunity for the rest of the Mac ecosystem to show off its latest and greatest wares. I’m obviously not in SF, but I caught up with some cool-looking stuff via Macs Only and Macworld. Keep in mind that I haven’t actually touched…

  • Google Earth is on the Mac – Now update my block!

    Thanks to my old boss, John Battelle, I learned that Google has finally released a Mac version of its useful and nifty mapping program, Google Earth, that lets you zoom all around satellite photos of the world, measure distances and generally get to know any place like the birds do. Downloaded to my 17″ Powerbook…

  • MacBook Pro – it gets worse before it gets better

    As more and more becomes known about the new Intel-based MacBook Pro, there’s more and more to get worried about. Rosyna at Unsanity.com’s blog has a host of concerns beyond those that I mentioned yesterday, including the demise of dual-sided DVD writing capability and the loss of the PowerPC’s Altivec feature that speeds up multimedia.…

  • MacBook Pro – when little problems add up

    Updated 1/11 after Carl Longino commented that I incorrectly described his post Kudos to Steve Jobs and Co for pulling off the transition to Intel chips faster than most expected. At today’s MacWorld show, Jobs unveiled an iMac and a new laptop, dubbed the MacBook Pro (will iBooks soon be renamed MacBook amateur?) running with…

  • What we have here is a failure of redundancy

    I think it was scheduled maintenance or announced-in-advance downtime (or maybe it was just deja vu when I saw it), but Bloglines was offline for a while over the New Year’s weekend. I might never have known as I wasn’t online much but Monday night I fired up my trusty new feed reader,Netnewswire, and got…

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