I have a love-hate relationship with the Apple “Magic Mouse” — the white wireless mouse that is also a trackpad.
It works great, until you jar it, and then it disconnects. It’s pretty obvious that it has something to do with the battery contacts. Maybe they should have put a strip of foam on the battery cover, or made the spring that holds the batteries against the contacts stronger. I’ve tried cleaning everything with alcohol, but I still get disconnects.
This post recommends two solutions. I’m happy to report that the second one works great! Cut a strip of paper to fit as a “blanket” over the batteries and hold them snugly in the compartment when the cover is closed. Problem solved!
“It’s called stealing or piracy, as if sharing a wealth of knowledge were the moral equivalent of plundering a ship and murdering its crew. But sharing isn’t immoral — it’s a moral imperative. Only those blinded by greed would refuse to let a friend make a copy.” — Aaron Swartz (1986-2013)
Sharing at scale is called publishing. In most media, it takes labor and capital and is quite properly a business. But on the internet, the costs are so much lower that it is difficult to make a commercial case for it. I can share an e-book to just as many people as Random House can (marketing/pr costs aside).
How do traditional, capitalized publishers fight a billion anonymous me’s? They try to pass draconian laws, they push for show prosecutions (Kim Dot Com, Aaron Swartz), and they try to sell us the idea that we are only leasing their content, not purchasing it.
In the long run, none of these strategies will work. Companies that make their money from publishing *on the internet* will need to fall back on making money from traditional media, or charge a lot less money per unit sold and hope for high volume over time. See the modern music industry, which is almost there.
We’ve come a long way since the original Napster. But e-books and movies are still at the beginning of their curves.
A recent survey gets it partially right, but just to set the record straight:
The Cloud is an army of robotic satellites that encircle the globe, 24/7. It was launched by the US Dept. of Defense between 1998 and 2003, and is jointly controlled by NASA and the FCC. Maintaining the Cloud is one of the many scientific tasks carried out by the International Space Station (ISS) crew. Facebook and Amazon.com live entirely in the Cloud, most other websites rent space on one or more of the satellites.
The Cloud provides the Internet connections between different countries using an advanced technology called DNS. DNS is a sophisticated system of fiber-optic satellite uplinks and high-power wi-fi downlinks. Sometimes, during thunderstorms, the fiber-optic cables get sheared off, and parts of the Cloud become unavailable until the astronauts in the ISS can restore the link.
Recently, Richard Branson began offering private tourist trips to the Cloud, at a cost of $1.5M per ticket. The first of these trips is scheduled for June, 2014.
Since my last post was about how to improve Bluetooth audio support in OS X Lion, I thought I’d follow up with the news that things are much improved in Mountain Lion.
My headphones are connecting and disconnecting instantly now, and I haven’t seen the dreaded audio error dialog box since upgrading.
Better yet, the Bluetooth subsystem on my iMac hasn’t crashed again. When this happened under Lion, the headphones would go out, and take down the keyboard and mouse with them. I had to physically unplug the iMac’s power in order to reset it! No more. Or at least, not yet.
Thanks, Apple! It finally just works.
I have a couple Motorola bluetooth headphones, and I love them. Life without wires is great!
But the buggy bluetooth audio support in OS X Lion has been aggravating the crap out of me. Seriously.
Fortunately, some other users have been posting tips — like this one — that may offer a solution.
#5 seems to have worked for my headphones. For now, anyway!
You subscribed to a calendar once. It has duplicates, or maybe you don’t want to see it any more. How do you delete it from iCal?
It’s not intuitive, in my opinion.
There have been problems with deleting synced calendars (like Exchange or Google calendars?) in the past. See https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3962209
Ars Technica has a feature on the latest developments in real-time applications on the web. Filed for near-future development…
Bob Cringely outs IBMs plan to slash its North American workforce by 85 percent… and no one cares. Or at least, his series hasn’t generated any interest from the business press, who are probably waiting for IBM to hand them a release rather than waste valuable time going in to dig up internal memos and such.
Why does it matter? Because for the last two decades (and more, of course!) IBM has been selling multi-million-dollar business systems to anyone who can afford them. Including your local government, hospitals, police, firefighters, utility companies, and so on. Really big, expensive, complex systems that have changed the way that cities do things. (Or so we’re told in the ads.)
Those systems are big and complex for a reason. They didn’t have to be, but you don’t get million dollar contracts by proposing simple solutions. You also don’t get decades of guaranteed support revenue by building something the client can manage themselves. Like it or not (and I hate it!) administrators have spent countless amounts of tax dollars wedding their operations to IBM systems.
So when memos leak that promise to completely gut the company, wouldn’t you think that was news? Are we going to wake up in two years to a crumbling software infrastructure, with no money left in the budget for new construction and no vendor left to honor the warranty? Probably.
Fortunately, if Cringely is right, there will be a lot of IBM-trained programming talent looking for work by next year.
