RockMelt logo looks like evil dotMac

There's only so much you can do with drawing lines around a globe to represent how the Internet connects us. Marc Andreessen's new RockMelt project takes that logo meme to the hyperbolic superlative: apparently, this browser will liquefy the earth with its blazing innovation. Literally making the world a smaller place.

I guess I can get on board with that, though I still have this nagging feeling that RockMelt's designers just looked at Apple's old .Mac logo and said, "Let's corrupt that." Like they took the .Mac sphere, with it's hopeful points of light, and said, "Let's turn those into lacerations, where evil spirits are escaping the bowels of hell." You can actually count about four exact paths they've ripped off from the .Mac logo, all to build the hype that RockMelt will destroy the geophysics we rely on to hold the planet together.

Fair enough. If once we complained about an Internet Explorer monopoly, we've now got Firefox, Safari, Flock, Opera, Chrome and others. Segmentation seems to be the theme for advanced commercial civilization, and we all know competition is good for a rational marketplace. So if IE is still Rome, maybe RockMelt will destroy the empire in a way we can all get behind.

But we'll know their designers were probably using Safari.

Read more: Mashable | New York Times | TechCrunch

Leave Steve Jobs Alone! (UPDATE)

Here's a piece I co-wrote with my buddy Kris — it took commenters over at Dan Lyon's blog (the erstwhile Fake Steve Jobs) about half a day to get around to pointing out that it's knocking off Chris Crocker, which still gives me the heebie-jeebies to watch. The blog-o-zone is getting so much mileage out of the last three paragraphs of Joe Nocera's article in the NY Times, we thought we'd pile on too. Surprise and delight!

Cheers to Mario, who wanted a "Leave Jerry Yang Alone!" video, but had to settle for Jobs.

UPDATE: With the video at 4,500 views, somebody made the investment to jump-start steveisfine.com. So that's an Internet startup drafting off a YouTube mini-meme riding the coattails of a NY Times buzzquote that leeched off health speculations about the Apple CEO. Now if some sites poach misspellings like steveifsine.com and steveisfnie.com, we'll have a complete scale model of Web economics.

UPDATE: And Valleywag has posted on it.

UPDATE: And Gizmodo.

Get a free college education at iTunes U?

Moments ago I just received an email from iTunes, which like most, I was about to delete as typical bacn. But I hesitated just long enough to let the news they were sharing pique my interest:

After going to the iTunes U store, I saw immediately the incredible utility that they were offering: a wealth of multimedia content that could essentially supplant a paid college education. Given, not all topics are covered, and not all covered topics will be in-depth, but the wealth of knowledge there is considerable. And most amazing, it's all free.

I went looking for fine arts, thinking I'd fill in the gaps of my art history knowledge, but the first thing I saw was Steve Martin above "Funny People / 92nd Street Y". Clicking through brought me to three one-hour segments featuring Martin, George Carlin and Carl Reiner talking about their crafts. For a first impression, wow. 

The only drawback I can see is becoming overwhelmed by the scope of options to feed your head. In fact, it's kind of like standing in the New York library without knowing a good book. This might be viewed as the kind of public service that the FCC used to require of television for renting our airwaves. This is truly an important moment in digital distribution: the first real global library of digital content. Thanks Apple. You had me at "Get". 

Liveblogging: the upgrade to OS X Leopard

I always like to think that upgrading one's system software is a piece of cake, but invariably it takes up 8-10 hours at least, and continues to gnaw away your time once you actually get using it. There's a lot that goes into a proper upgrade, mostly because you never really want to upgrade a pro system, you want to start over with a completely fresh install, backing up your vital data and erasing yourself a fresh clean slate to install your latest OS on. With this in mind, here's a summarized version of my upgrade to OS X Leopard, released late October 2007.

Setup: PowerMac G5, dual 1.8 GHz PowerPC processor (late 2003)
2 GB RAM, 2 x 250 GB internal HDs, 1 x 500 GB external HD

Step 1: Download one of the most beautifully simple freeware apps, Carbon Copy Cloner. For a failsafe backup, clone my entire 10.4 Tiger drive to a blank partition of my external HD. The other partition still has the Panther drive I cloned when I upgraded to Tiger in 2005. This HD arrangement is a virtual time machine, enabling me to boot to Panther, Tiger, or Leopard at will, while also using said drives for external storage.

Step 2: Reboot from the cloned external drive to verify it works and data is intact. Launch Disk Utility to erase the internal destination HD. Launch Drive Genius to verify the drive's integrity and defragment it if needed.

Step 3: Reboot from the Leopard install disk. Uncheck all the printer drivers, extra fonts, language translations and X11 to save a good 5 GB. Install to the internal Leopard HD partition.

Step 4: Reboot to the purple nebulaic Leopard Startup Assistant. Start totally fresh, importing no data to avoid software conflicts. Test network connectivity - note that accessing even simple html websites takes agonizingly long. This is a concern, as my laptop had terrible Web connectivity after upgrading to Leopard and I had to downgrade. Apple forums are full of this complaint. Hope a Software Update will resolve.

Step 5: Sync .Mac to get all my calendars, contacts, email accounts and bookmarks.

Step 6: Run Software Update to bring up system software to 10.5.2. Here the problems begin. System hangs after update is downloaded and the "Restart" prompt is approved. Left alone, it doesn't resolve for over and hour. Force shutdown.

Step 7: Boot to setup assistant, which was already completed once. This usually happens only if there is no user account established, which shouldn't be the case. Go through the Setup Assistant three times, each time resulting in it relaunching. Attempt to reboot to external drives - none but the faulty Leopard HD are recognized at the option-boot screen. Unplug all firewire devices - external HD and Digi 003 rack.

Step 8: Reboot from Leopard install disk. Launch Disk Utility. Out of curiosity, repair permissions on internal Leopard drive; process hangs for 5-10 minutes before finishing. Erase Leopard drive. Reinstall Leopard with same specs as before.

Step 9: Reboot to reformatted Leopard HD. Dance to Setup Assistant theme again. Launch Software Update. Click to only update Quicktime and Mac OS X. The 10.5.2 update alone is 341 MB. The update downloads, prompts to reboot and installs normally this time. The machine reboots, then reboots again. The update takes this time.

Step 10: Run Software Update again and there is an additional Mac OS X Graphics Update, plus Front Row and iTunes updates. Run those, reboot. Hook up external drive, it takes minutes to recognize in the FW800 port. Run Disk Utility to find the Tiger HD has an "Incorrect number of Access Control Lists (It should be 0 instead of 1)." Disk Utility fixes it. With the system software up to date, now begins the arduous task of putting the pro software on.

Step 11: There's a full list of downloadable software to run Mac OS X intelligently, and it looks something like this:

Coda (a great HTML editor and FTP software together)
Digi CoreAudio Manager (to power sound through the Digi 003)
Firefox 3.0 beta (for all the sites Safari can't handle)
Flash Player (to enable the wonderful world of Flash content)
Flip4Mac (to watch Windows Media Video files through Quicktime)
iScrobbler (to report iTunes rotation to last.fm)
Opera & Camino (for multi-browser testing/multi-user login)
Skype (for free Web-based phone calls)
Simplify Media (makes your iTunes a server that you can listen to remotely)
StuffIt Expander (do we actually need this anymore? it seems like every once in awhile)
Todos (may be redundant with the Applications folder in the dock, but handy)

There are many others, but they seem to come at you as you browse the web. Gotta have RealPlayer for this. DivX converter for that. Oh, and I just remembered the drivers for my HP laserjet and Epson inkjet/scanner. And of course, you've gotta have RockNES or Nestopia for your Nintendo fix. SnapzProX for good screen recording, Switch for converting all manners of audio formats, and all your widgets...

Step 12: As I get all into softwarin' up the system, the thought occurs to me that I'm still on Adobe CS1, c. 2003. After some investigatin' I say, screw it, let's download CS3 Web Premium. I don't have Flash, and now that it's integrated into the Creative Suite, I feel like it's fine time. It's only a 3 GB download, and they have a neat upgrade assistant that figures out what you can get with what you got. This leads to a two-hour support call to Time-Warner and Apple when I switch from wireless to ethernet for a more reliable connection and the ISP keeps populating with an invalid IP address. After being transferred to tier 3, they offer a solution I tried before calling, and it works.

Step 13: Research informs me that only Pro Tools HD is ready for Leopard, not Pro Tools LE. It's only four months since Leopard was released, so, no rush DigiDesign. I'm also only on Final Cut Studio 1 — is it time for FCP Studio 2?


I think that's just about enough of the liveblogging feature. The upgrade is up and running, though now I've got to figure out how soon to upgrade my old flatscreen iMac and the MacBook. Oddly enough, the real impetus to upgrade to Leopard was the new Back To My Mac feature of .Mac that lets you remotely control your home desktop from your laptop. And I haven't really thought much about that yet. But now when I'm fiending for something on the road that I know is on my home computer, it's on like Tron.

Apple's new Feist: Yael Naim

In the event that anyone is wondering who that earnest, hopeful voice is on the new MacBook Air ads, here's the artist herself. I see Apple seeking to duplicate their success with Feist, not so much on behalf of the artist, but to maintain their own ouevre as cultural même providers beyond the tech industry. I'd say they did a bang-up job in selecting Yael Naim's "New Soul".

(via ChannelKris)

Retro tech lust: unopened Apple //c

Via BoingBoing, here's a Flickr set of a guy opening an unopened Apple //c he won off eBay. This was my first computer too, so I can't help but have a retro tech lust for this pristine bit of computing history. We played everything from Tapper and Lady Tut to Castle Wolfenstein, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and the text-based Hitchhikers Guide To the Galaxy on that machine. To say nothing of writing innovative BASIC scripts like:

10 HOME
20 PRINT "ROB IS THE BEST!!!!!!"
30 FLASH
40 GOTO 10

Looking at the list of games, I'm kind of impressed that all of that was available for those old machines. Look at that brilliant packaging. The polychrome Apple logo. It'd still be as sexy now if they offered it as a brand new product. Over a MacBook Air? Maybe.

Probably not. But maybe.

'Kernel panic' is fun to say.

I had the honor of my first Mac OS X kernel panic yesterday. This screen strikes fear into the technologically faint of heart (and those on deadline), but it was more of a curiosity to me. In four years on this G5 PowerMac, I don't think I've had a kernel panic myself, but I dealt with hundreds when I worked as a Mac Genius.

You need to restart your computer. Hold down the Power button for several seconds or press the Restart button.

When my computer tells me "You need to restart your computer," I like to fire back at it, "No, you need to restart your computer!!!" The circumstances were innocuous at best with one app open, Mail. It panicked when I quit. Seeing it freeze was a small thrill. It's almost a challenge to kp Mac OS X. It's like a rush, like when Jay yells "yeeeeeaaaaah!" in Clerks.

Kernel panics aren't the end of your computer, but it probably means your software needs some cleanup. Worst case scenario, you have to boot from your restore disk by holding down the C key at startup and do an archive and install. Or actually, worst case scenario is that your processor needs replacing. But that would only be the case if this was happening again and again after your computer heated up. Which means essentially, ha ha, a new computer. When in doubt, hit up apple.com/support.

It hasn't happened since. It's probably just that the system is over two years old and runs some heavy-duty apps. Most heavy Windows users I know say they have to reinstall every six months, so I'd say one kernel panic in four years isn't so bad. And really, I like saying "kernel panic". I picture popcorn having a neurotic episode.

Eight days til Macworld

And I hope they'll be announcing this rumored product: an iMac display that is actually a docking station for an ultra-slim MacBook Pro.

Wow. Sometimes Apple's innovations are so simple, they could be the work of a child. And by the look of the patent drawings, maybe this one was:

Figure 1B features a liger pawing fancifully at it. Maybe this is just a cleverly crafted rumor — it wouldn't be too hard to have faked a patent application to build some buzz. But I have to say, if this is a hoax, it's a seductive one.