Got a bit of bad news today - Arthur C. Clarke has died. I was never much of a fan of Isaac Asimov, but Clarke really spoke to me as a young, geeky kid. He had a terrific imagination and a gift for storytelling. He’s also the source of one of my all-time favorite quotes on technology (one of his Three Laws):

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Thanks, Sir Arthur, and rest in peace.

As previously mentioned, I had trouble getting my head around the concept of Twitter. While I’m still of the same general opinion (Do I really need to know you’re craving anchovies?), I’ve since come around a bit.

While I don’t contribute much (although I suppose I’ve been ramping up as of late), I find it extremely interesting to follow what others send out into the ether. There’s certainly a fair share of boring stuff to sift through, but the gems tend to be quite interesting (for instance, watching John Gruber collecting info before posting to Daring Fireball). It appears as though I can count on one hand the number of people I actually know on Twitter (most of whom don’t seem to be using it as of late), so there’s a vaguely voyeuristic feeling of following the people I don’t personally know. Curiously, of those, the most prolific are in the web design and Mac development crowds.

On a side note, it seems as though there’s a bit of a waning of interest in online personas among the people I personally know (exception: LinkedIn). Methinks it might be just another effect of getting older. All the social networking sites that promised so much ~4 years ago (Friendster, Orkut, etc.) haven’t delivered a compelling reason to stay active on them - from my demographic’s point of view, I suppose, as Brazil seemingly has taken over Orkut. (Disclosure: I’ve deleted my Orkut account out of frustration from getting friend requests in Portuguese and I’m not sure why I haven’t done the same with Friendster, other than “out of sight, out of mind”.) The second wave, MySpace and Facebook, don’t offer much of a compelling argument to join for me - they’re overcrowded with the generation after my own and still don’t deliver a compelling selling point. I remain perplexed when people older than me by at least a decade have official representation on MySpace (1970’s-era rockstars who probably exist in a void of ignorance on behalf of the general membership).

Personal blogs have been withering on the vine as well (yes - I freely point out my own). I know my own reasoning had everything to do with shrinking free time, not out of disinterest. I’ve since purchased a new domain and have ideas for facelifting this blog before moving it to the new domain. I’ve started the 365 project (despite it being on hiatus currently) and continue to come across things that I’d like to share.

I guess where I’m meandering off to with this post is that I do want to follow through on my original plans, but I think I’ll probably augment it with Twitter - I haven’t raided the WordPress plug-ins lately, but I would certainly guess there’s one that will pipe your “tweets” straight to your blog (this will kill the “Random Bits” category of this blog due to the redundancy). I’ve got some free time on my hands now, so I’m hoping to press forward with these changes soon. Stay tuned!

Well, that was a disaster - tried updating the WP install, but it just went sideways somehow. Dealing with the actual WP update was fine (although tedious going back and forth), but ripping out the database and reinstalling from last Sunday’s backup was a real pain. Fortunately, I managed to undo everything from the update and got back to square one with only one comment casualty. Not sure when I’m going to try this again…

Came across the coolest trick for the iPhone today - basically a way to use the new Web Clip feature in the latest firmware to have speed-dial icons on the home screen. There actually looks to be two different approaches - the one as described in the body of the post actually isn’t the method I’m using. Scroll down to the comments and check out the contribution from “xfrosh”. Simply download his script (”Save link as…” or similar) and follow the instructions in his comments.

I’m a little apprehensive about referring to it as a “hack”, as that implies you need to jailbreak your phone to do this. Refreshingly, it’s just a bookmarklet that tricks Mobile Safari on the iPhone to dial the number. No risk of bricking or voiding your warranty!

I’ve just started playing around with it, so I’ll post a screenshot when there’s something decent to look at.

Just read this morning on Daring Fireball that Universal has decided to go DRM-free in its online distribution - with the exception of iTunes. Real, Walmart, Amazon and Google will have exclusivity over Apple. To which, Gruber retorts:

Um, Universal won’t sell DRM-free music through iTunes because they don’t like Apple’s DRM? WTF? Am I even supposed to pretend this makes sense?

As I see it, there are two reasons behind this decision:

First, as spelled out in the article, it’s a (weak) attempt by Universal to break Apple’s position with iTunes. Further, we already are well aware of the immaturity of the people in power of the recording industry. They can’t take all their “toys” (regular music downloads) away from Apple (as it would be a catastrophic negative impact on their total sales), but they can certainly choose to not share their newest, shiniest “toy” (DRM-free downloads) - the “toy” that they know Apple wants.

But another thing that struck me in the article was:

The offer of Universal’s music under the new terms is being framed as a test, to run into January, allowing executives to study consumer demand and any effect on online piracy.

If they’re just running the test on the laggards of the music digital sales venues (e-tailers), they’ve got a great opportunity to fix the results as a disappointment and reason to not go further with offering DRM-free downloads. If, say, 20% of your total download sales comes from Real, Walmart, Amazon and Google combined and you know that only a fraction of that 20% will jump at the opportunity to go DRM-free for whatever reason (ignorance, potential price difference, poor positioning by the e-tailers, whatever), then you are guaranteed a poor percentage result of your total digital music sales and an easy out in declining to continue DRM-free sales.

But, if something happens and a good portion of the 80% sales on iTunes shifts to these other e-tailers, well hey - added bonus of breaking Apple’s dominance! Too bad that the industry has such a bad track-record on foresight…

Count me among the many who just don’t get Twitter - and it’s not like I’m not one who isn’t a likely candidate either. I mean, hey, I blog, so already I’m comfortable with the idea that I’m uselessly shouting my thoughts out into the ether. There’s been a WSJ article that’s been making the rounds that pretty much sums up my feelings about Twitter - I don’t care what other people are eating for dinner, and why should I presume that they care about my dinner choice?

That said, there have been some Twitter-related bits & pieces that have been floating around lately of which I could easily see myself taking advantage. Jacqui at Ars points to an O’Reilly Mac DevCenter article (without actually putting in the link) that explains a method of using Twitter in automating your home. As home automation is something I want to play with (once I have a home), this looks pretty interesting.

In other related news, while I can’t just see the point of Twitter (yes, there is such a thing as too much information), Dodgeball.com seems to make more sense to me - if you’re out barhopping or whatever, send up the flag for your friends to find you. Not that I do that much anymore, but it certainly makes more sense to me…

OK, even I have to admit that it’s starting to look like a “self-help” blog around here (or, a critic thereof). Kind of an interesting coincidence, especially when tripping across the following two blog articles (postings? entries? anyone?) on self-branding and logo design. While the latter post’s author’s focus on Christianity might take you by surprise (and you folks know that I’m the last person to be linking to a deeply religious site), it doesn’t change the fact that his tips are good (not to mention the logo he created is well-designed given the requirements) and both articles are well worth the read.

Some jerk actually paid attention to that idiot (you know, remember him?) and is suing Apple over potential hearing loss from using an iPod.

So we’ve discussed in the past different ways to branch out the online representation of yourself & your interests - usually with results somewhere between “complete success” and “utter failure” (with some ending up on the latter end and very few on the former). Sometimes, companies (or individuals) will come up with an interesting idea that in some way spawns off the original lofty goals these experiments. For instance, Flickr.

Hat tip to Dan: A really funny take-off on Bill Gates’ CES keynote talking about Windows Vista.

With all the blogging, Friendstering (or, if you’re in the know, Orkuting) and other online exhibitionistic tendencies, people seem to be drawn to coming up with new ways of representing themselves. And for those non-Bobcats who read this blog (all two of you): Just when you think you’ve seen it all, Sean manages to point me to yet another way: iTunes Signature Maker.

I had some issues but came up with an interesting mix all the same:

One thing that was added to the latest (last) revision of PowerBooks just two months after I bought mine was “Safe Sleep” functionality (at least it wasn’t as significant as the first SuperDrive, which happened the last time around). While the Mac has always was first place in the wake-from-sleep speed race over Windows, Windows did have the added bonus of its “Hibernation” feature that writes your computer session to your hard drive before turning off. No power, but your computer state ready to be restarted (albeit slower than the Mac’s traditional “I’ll keep everything but the RAM and VRAM off” Sleep).

I promise. This one is just too good (painful?) not to share. The geekier among us may or may not have heard of a new technology in disk drives, called perpendicular storage. For the uninitiated, it’s a new way of designing hard drive platters that manages to squeeze even more data on to the platter(s) while reducing the potential of data loss due to the superparamagnetic effect (if the bits are positioned too close together, the charge from a bit could “flip” the charge on a neighboring bit).

Need a little more background? OK good, because that’s the point of this post. For some strange reason Hitachi actually paid someone to produce a little musical Flash number loosely based on the classic Schoolhouse Rock’s “I’m Just a Bill” cartoon. While I will warn you that it might make you cry, at least you’ll have a better understanding about where the disk drive industry is headed. (Via)

USB floppy drive-based striped RAID. I’d write something, but (a) I’m still laughing and (b) what could I possibly say about this? (Via)

So I was bumming around the job postings on Craigslist, only to be confronted with a listing including a reference to a rather bizarre site called “GirlfriendX.com”. Not quite sure how low online portals have gotten, I figured “what the heck?” and pointed Safari at it.

While I have to admit that I was half-expecting a porn site (it seems like 80% of all sites have something to do with porn now, right?), I was decidedly not expecting a virtual “black book” that acts as a (and I quote) “dedicated accountant who constantly evaluates your Booty Yield so you can determine whether any particular woman is worth the time, effort and money that you’ve invested.”

I know I shouldn’t be surprised at this stage, but I have to confess that its completely unapologetic stance straight from the macho days from which I thought we evolved a decade or so ago just caught me unprepared.