What is the merge between a MacBook with a busted screen and a desktop LCD panel?
I figured two names for it, a Macenstein or a FrankenBook (yeah I know, both are damn ugly, suggestions welcome!). I happened to drive over my one-week-old MacBook with my 30-minute-old Viano van as I tested the parking sensors at the dealer, and the screen cracked. Obviously, the Apple retailer refused to service it under warranty, and quoted around 700 Euro for a new LCD, when the entry-level MacBook costs 1000 Euro, it seems a pretty ridiculous price to pay.
Out of desperation, I had the idea of removing the screen entirely, and using the remaining portion of the MacBook as a desktop – after all, it still had a working hard drive, DVD drive, touchpad and keyboard, so a few dozen screws later, this was the result.
As you can see, the cables that connect to the display’s backlight and LCD circuit are still there, as are the three wires that come out of the Airport wireless card and lead to the patch antennas on the lid. I still have to put some connectors on these so I can drive external antennas.
A friend of mine just saw this thing, and wondered why they are not manufactured commercially – it’s an ideal space saver – computer, keyboard and mouse in one small piece that sits in front of a nice LCD display, and which comes with built-in UPS to save you from power failures.
Edit: Removed the Lapsktop name suggestion, it sound even more crappy than the others, and like a Finnish swear word.
Tracking the California fires
The Los Angeles Times provides a great Google Maps mashup that tracks the huge fires currently raging in southern California in almost real time. What is impressive is the amount of resources committed, with one fire pulling in almost 1800 firefighters.
Internetzugang über DSL
Ein DSL Zugang besteht aus drei grundlegenden Komponenten: DSL Anschluss, DSL Hardware und DSL Tarife. Einen DSL Anschluss bekam man bis vor einigen Jahren ausschließlich bei der Telekom oder einen ihrer DSL Reseller. Reseller heißt Wiederverkäufer, womit die Unternehmen gemeint sind, die die komplette DSL Technik der T-Com nutzen und einen Internetzugang nur unter dem eigenen Firmennamen vertreiben. DSL Kunden mussten, um die Reseller Angebote nutzen zu können, immer auch einen Telekom-Telefonanschluss haben.
Dies hat sich inzwischen geändert: Immer mehr Provider bieten einen DSL Anschluss inklusive DSL Telefonanschluss an. Der DSL Zugang läuft so völlig unabhängig vom „Rosa Riesen“ und insgesamt sind diese Komplettpakete oftmals deutlich günstiger. wer Internetanschluss und Telefonanschluss aus einer Hand bestellt nutzt einen weiteren Vorteil: Man bekommt die monatliche Abrechnung von einem Provider und spart sich sonst anfallenden Papierkram.
Ein DSL Anschluss hat immer eine bestimmte DSL Geschwindigkeit. DSL Geschwindigkeit bezeichnet die Leistungsstäke, mit der ein Internetzugang datenübertragungen durchührt. Will man beispielsweise nur Surfen und chatten ist kein DSL Anschluss mit hoher DSL Geschwindigkeit vonnöten, da die Datenrate bei diesen Anwendugen vergleichsweise niedrig ist. Anders sieht es aus, wenn mit dem DSL Zugang Multimedia-Funktionen vorgenommen werden. Um für Online-Games oder eine Übertragung live gestreamter Spielfilme eine geeignete Performance-Qualität zu erreichen bedarf es eines extrem schnellen DSL Zugang.
Bevor man sich einen DSL Anschluss zulegt sollte also auf jeden Fall eine Bestandsaufname dessen gemacht werden, was man von seinem Internetzugang erwartet. Und wenn der bestellte DSL Zugang im Nachhineien doch nicht genügend DSL Geschwindigkeit bietet lässt sich dies in der Regel schnell ausbessern; sofern man nicht bereits die höchste am Standort zu Verfügung stehende DSL Geschwindigkeit nutzt. Denn so ziemlich alle DSL Anbieter ermöglichen ein Speed-Upgrade auch nach Vertragsabschluss.
Open WebMail
Open WebMail is a webmail system based on the Neomail version 1.14 from Ernie Miller. OpenWebMail is a full-featured webmail, addressbook, calendar, and webdisk system that is designed to manage very large mail folder files in a quick and memory efficient way.
Started in 2001, it is written in Perl and available for free under an open source BSD license.
Latest Official Releass of OpenWebMail are packaged as tarballs and are available at
Bug found on the new iPod Nano
I could not resist, having video on an iPod the size of the new Nano was just too tempting…so I got one. As soon as I connected it to iTunes, it prompted me to install the software update that was made available a couple of days ago, after that it synced music & videos, and off I went.
Much to my surprise, this afternoon it started behaving erratically – whenever I pressed the fast forward or rewind buttons, the iPod would keep skipping in the same direction until either the end or the start of the song was reached respectively. One annoying thing is that the skip steps are much bigger than on the previous Nano, and so it makes the process less accurate. Combined with this bug, it’s unusable. The only way to stop it is to pause, and resume playback, and since the steps are so large, it’s a hit-and-miss proposition.
Here is a short video showing the behavior.
The E on the iPhone does not necessarily indicate EDGE coverage
It actually indicates GPRS attachment status, the capability (or lack thereof) of sending and receiving data, be it over plain old GPRS, or the faster EDGE. I was going to comment on the original Engadget blog post, but after seeing a few pages of comments already, I doubt they would have noticed it. This is where they get it wrong:
You’ll notice the iTunes WiFi Store icon, and an O2-UK network symbol up top. If you look carefully, you’ll see that the E logo for EDGE is missing: we guess that 30% network coverage on O2 don’t quite stretch inside the Apple Store.
A bit further down, they mention this again:
O2 iPhone on the left, unlocked US iPhone on the right (running on T-Mobile’s UK network). Note that the O2 iPhone doesn’t show the EDGE logo, but the unlocked phone on T-Mobile does. You can probably guess at what we’re getting at here: O2’s EDGE coverage sucks.
In this particular side-by-side photo, T-Mobile’s coverage is marginally lower than O2’s, but they should both be capable of sending GPRS traffic. Another reason they get this wrong is that the waves icon ‘overwrites’ the E symbol while the iPhone is connected to a WiFi network, so you could still have GPRS/EDGE attachment in the background, so-to-speak. In my particular case, the iPhone is happily registered on Vodafone Spain, and is attached to GPRS (no EDGE here at all), showing the E while I’m not in range of WiFi.
The iPhone also does something very clever – when you open an application that requires a data connection, it will start a GPRS attach and session, while it asks you if you want to join any of the nearby WiFi networks (if any). In case you say no, the alternative data connection is already established, cutting down on extra waiting time before you start seeing content on your screen. This may seem stupid to Europeans, by default stuck with hugely expensive pay-as-you-go data (50 Euro cents per 250kB!!), but with the original AT&T voice + data plan, it does not really matter.