Year: 2006

Weird Wii Stories

Wow, am I the only one who managed to buy a Wii without any drama? Kotaku has a bit on a CNN reporter who supposedly had a bit of a problem getting a Wii, and the comments on Kotaku would indicate that a number of other people are still jumping through hoops and going a bit nuts about the whole thing. Honestly, when I bought mine a couple of weeks ago, I just walked into the Times Square Toys R Us, picked up a Wii, waited in line, paid for it, and walked out of the store, no problem. Everyone in line was civilized. It didn’t take more that a half-hour.

MacHeist thoughts

Here are a few random thoughts on the applications that are part of the MacHeist bundle (still on sale for another two days!):

  • Delicious Library: I’ve actually started using this to catalog my stuff. I’ve got about 100 CDs in there, plus around 25 books, 25 DVDs, and a handful of video games. (I have *much more* to enter, if I want to catalog my entire collection(s).) It works reasonably well. I’ve found that, with CDs, if you want to get specific about which version of a given CD you have (original, import, reissue, etc), you need to go back and forth a bit to find the right one. And the right cover art isn’t always pulled down from Amazon. Still, it’s right a lot of the time, and it’s not real hard to correct stuff that’s wrong. I find that I can enter maybe one CD per minute. Books (so far) have been a bit more straightforward. I’ve just been typing in the ISBN numbers, and I usually get a correct match, with cover art.
  • DevonThink Personal: I’d like to say that I’m finding this to be really useful, but I’m not. I’m still using an old version of iOrganize for keeping track of stuff. I don’t see too much of an advantage to DevonThink. Maybe I need to play around with it some more.
  • RapidWeaver looks interesting, but I don’t have much use for it right now. I’ll probably play around with it at some point to work on some web site ideas, but I don’t really need it now.
  • I’m hoping to use NewsFire to replace Juice, which I’ve been using for awhile now. Juice works fine, but it’s a bit slow, probably because it’s a cross-platform app that’s not really optimized for the Mac. I’m hoping NewsFire will be better, though I haven’t had a chance to try it yet.
  • I’m not sure what I’m going to do with TextMate. I’ve been using TextWrangler recently, and I’m pretty happy with it.
  • I haven’t really played with any of the other apps in the bundle. A couple of them might be useful.

Overall, I have no problem with the $49 price on the bundle. I’m definitely getting my money’s worth out of Delicious Library, and I’ll hopefully get some use out of NewsFire, DevonThink, Disco, or one of the other apps. There’s been a lot of talk in the blogs this week about whether or not the MacHeist bundle was a good thing for Mac developers or not. Personally, I wasn’t planning on spending any money on Mac shareware any time soon, so right there that’s $49 into the Mac shareware “economy” that wouldn’t have been there otherwise. I imagine a lot of other buyers fit into the same category. In terms of this thing driving upgrade sales, or sales of other products from the participating developers, I can certainly see that happening. I’ll likely buy the upgrade to the next version of Delicious when it comes out. And I may upgrade to the next verison of DevonThink when it comes out, and/or switch to DevonThink Pro.

cataloging stuff

I just bought a license for Delicious Library, as part of a bundle of Mac apps from MacHeist. I haven’t really tried to catalog my CDs, DVDs and/or books at any time in the last twenty years, but I’m always at least slightly tempted to give it a go. If I did, I’d want to be able to sync my library to LibraryThing.com, so it’d all be out there on the internet too.

Cornelius – Sensuous

Some nifty videos from the new Cornelius album can be found here. I really enjoyed Point, and this stuff sounds pretty good too. Point came out in the US on Matador, but I don’t see any indication that Sensuous will be coming out in the US any time soon. I do see it available as an import on Amazon.com, at a variety of price points, the cheapest being a little over $20, available in early January.

The Small Street Journal

BusinessWeek has an article about the changes coming to the Wall Street Journal in 2007. I had a suspicion that something was changing, since I got a letter in the mail today offering a year’s print *and* online subscription for only $99. Usually, the online subscription alone is $99. I’ve had an online subscription for a few years, but I let it lapse a couple of months ago. I may sign up for the new deal. It’s been a while since I subscribed to an old-fashioned daily paper. Not that I’ll have time to read it.

ACM

I’ve been playing around today with the online book access I can get through ACM. You can get access to about 500 books from Safari and 400 from Books 24×7. Mind you, there are thousands of books on the main Safari site, and thousands more on the main Books 24×7 site. A regular Safari subscription is $20 per month, and Books 24×7 is about $450 per year, so both those options are a bit expensive. There are some useful titles among the limited library of books available through ACM, but not too many recent ones. For instance, there’s a good bit of stuff on .Net 1.1, but very little on .Net 2.0. I don’t think I could just stop buying computer books, based on the selection available through ACM, but there is some good reference stuff there. There’s also not much you can do in the way of printing from either service, within the ACM section. Still, I’m going to try to keep this stuff in mind before running out and buying any more computer books, and I’m going to try to remember to seach these services the next time I’m trying to solve a programming problem.

more Christmas music

And just to get carried away with the whole Christmas music thing, I also just downloaded the bonus tracks from A Charlie Brown Christmas that are available on eMusic. (I downloaded the original album from them a couple of years ago.) And A Bing Crosby Christmas, just to use up my remaining credits for the month. Boy howdy, I’m in a Christmas mood now!