After many failed attempts to reach each other, I finally got to iSight with Hina and Taro in Tokyo.

They were in the middle of watching “Dae Jang Geum (대장금)” when I called them. However, they kindly accepted the call and we started iSighting, with L and Peter also in front of the screen. Taro took his laptop and showed us their gorgeous new house. White wall, bedroom in the attic with Muji bed frame, custom-made built-in shelf in the office space, ultra-modern toilet with bidet, two handsome cats… It was all so dreamy until Taro disappeared and reappeared half-naked with a Luchador mask. It was so funny to see how L didn’t react to this surprising event. I think L will fully appreciate this look a few years later.

After we hang up on iSight, I wondered if they finished watching the whole season of Dae Jang Geum. I heard it’s very addictive, so I am afraid of getting into it.

Finally!  Click here to find out more.

Perhaps I should get one of those lip injections everybody’s talking so much about…

The guys over at Apple have managed to do something amazing. They’ve created three main brands which are all now leaders of three particular markets. Think of personal media players and a picture of an iPod pops into your head. Meanwhile, at the very mention of the word ‘laptop’, MacBooks spring to mind. And you can’t think of smartphones with thinking iPhones. But the guys over at Apple still have a lot on their plate if they wanna achieve world domination. When you hear ‘operating system’ or ‘open source’ you don’t think ‘Apple’. You think ‘Windows’ or ‘Linux’. Anyway, back in September, Apple did something that everyone expected. They took their iPod Nano and rammed a camera into its back. And the personal media player market shook in fear.

When people ask me for advice regarding which PMP theyn should get, I obviously tell them to go get an iPod, but the problem is… which one? As a rule of thumb I usually rule out the Shuffle and Classic. Unless of course they’re looking for something with a scarily small chassis or a scarily large storage capacity. I generally tell them to get a Touch or a Nano, or an Archos 5 if they’re anti-Apple.

There seems to be a pattern emerging; people keep asking over and over again, rhetorically, why a music and video player needs a camera. Wanna know my answer? If I hear someone say that I just turn to them and explain that when the first camera-cum-phone appeared, people asked the same thing; why does a phone need a camera? Now, almost a decade later, it’s bordering on illegalness not to have a camera built into your phone. In five years, PMPs with cameras will most likely be commonplace. The guys at Apple are just doing what they always do: taking an idea that’s been used elsewhere or which is totally original, and throwing it years ahead, so that all their products have some sort of futuristic new innovation. And no, it’s not just a raft of gimmicks.

But, as the title of this post suggests, I’m not gonna be talking about iPods and PMPs, I wanna talk about the likeliness of Apple making a camera. A standalone camera. Not just a camera built into one of their other products. A standalone camera. There are so many clues pointing towards this happening, as I’m just about to point out.

First, iMacs, MacBooks and Apple displays had cameras on board. These integrated eyes became known as ‘iSight’ cameras. Then Apple released a smartphone with a snapper en suite. At first it was scorned for lacking video capture abilities. The second version was ridiculed for the same reason, as well as the fact that between the original model and the 3G, Apple failed to add megapixels to the mediocre 2MP camera.  Even the third model was and still is derided for not toting above-average quality. 3 megapixels doesn’t get the iPhone out of the pit of mediocrity. At least critics could no longer gripe re no video capture abilities. Nevertheless, the iPhones camera remained poor. Only good for a quick snap for Flickr or snip for YouTube.

Considering the iPhone does practically everything else way better than ever phone out there, on such a high degree that there’s only one handset that’s actually managed to threaten Apple’s dominance atop the smartphone market (HTC Hero), this is quite odd.

Now the Nano boasts a camera. Well, not boasts. Just has. If you were a music and video player with a VGA-quality camera you’d probably be too embarrassed to boast it. This one has video straight out of the box. But worse than bad mediocre. Awful. Not even good for YouTube.

The fact that Apple’s three main products now have cameras of some sort makes me wonder whether there’s some sort of standalone iSight camera on the way. And if there is one just around the corner, will it be low quality, or will it actually qualify for a professional photographer’s toolbox?

We’ll have to wait and see…

Se siete possessori di un Mac, saprete che i computer della Mela vanno trattati come dei veri e propri gioielli. Il loro stile, la loro perfezione hardware e software li rendono inevitabilmente oggetto di invidie e desideri altrui. A volte però queste invidie sfociano in qualcosa di inlegale, e specialmente in ambienti affollati come scuole e uffici non è così remota la possibilità che qualche invidioso decida di regalarsi un bellissimo portatile della Apple, magari proprio il vostro. Come fare allora a controllare il nostro pc anche quando dobbiamo allontanarci per un attimo? Esattamente come hanno fatto le case costruttrici di automobili, mettiamo un allarme. L’applicazione si chiama iAlertU [http://sourceforge.net/projects/ialertu/]. iAlertU viene attivato dal AppleRemote (telecomando) del vostro Mac, basta tenere premuto il tasto MENU per qualche secondo ed ecco in funzione l’allarme, disattivabile solamente tenendo premuto per la seconda volta il tasto menu del vostro telecomando. iAlarmU sfrutta qualunque sensore disponibile sul vostro portatile, sensori di movimento, tastiera, mac, chiusura schermo, inserimento di cavi, qualunque cosa che possa far pensare al vostro mac di non essere nelle mani giuste. All’attivazione dell’allarme parte una sirena molto rumorosa e se volete scatterà una foto dalla iSight integrata e la manderà all’indirizzo mail da voi indicato. Scoprirete subito il vostro ladro.

Gestern erreicht mich eine Meldung. Ich sollte doch mal auf die Apple Homepage schauen. Und was sehe ich? Apple hat still und heimlich die Mac-Produktpalette runderneuert. Folgendes wurde verändert:

• Neue iMacs: Geändertes äußerliches Design und außerdem in 2 neuen Größen erhältlich: 21,5″ und 27″ (!!!). Außerdem neue Prozessoren und einen Kartenleser. Geil!
• Ein neues MacBook! Nun aus einem Polycarbonat-Unibody gefertigt, ist dies das schönste MacBook das es gibt, es liegt bei mir sogar vor den Pros. Nun gibt es ein Glas-MultiTouch-Trackpad und einen neuen Bildschirm.
• Eine neue Maus! Die sogenannte Magic Mouse ist nur noch als schnurlose Version erhältlich und hat keine Tasten mehr! Auch sie wurde mit einer MultiTouch-Technologie ausgestattet. Statt Scrollrad kann man nun einfach über die Maus wischen. Das Design ist fenomenal. Die Maus wird mit jedem neuen iMac geliefert.
• Einen neuen Mac Mini: Äußerlich unverändert, innen aber ein stärkerer Prozessor und größere Festplatten. Der Mini ist auch als Server Edition ohne SuperDrive, dafür aber mit 2 Festplatten, erhältlich.
• Eine neue Time Capsule mit 2 TB Speicher.

Sofort war klar: Morgen auf zum Apple Store! (ich korrigiere mich: Apple Premium Reseller)

Schon in der Schule war ich aufgeregt und habe wild versucht, Macs zu zeichnen

Dann war es soweit. Wir in den APR reinmarschiert, stehen da das alte MacBook, die alten iMacs und weit und breit keine Information über die neuen Geräte. Obi hat sich bei einem Verkäufer informiert, wann denn die Geräte reinkommen. Eine halbe Stunde! Wir uns erstmal eingerichtet und ein bisschen mit Photo Booth herumexperimentiert Die halbe Stunde war auch schnell vorbei und da kam der erste iMac 21,5″ aus dem Hinterzimmer. Er sieht schon fast noch besser aus als auf den Illustrationen auf der Apple Seite. Dann kam das MacBook. Obi hatte sich ja eher für den iMac interessiert, aber ich war beim Anblick dieses Gerätes hin und weg. Das Trackpad war einfach super, das Material des MacBooks an sich war sehr glatt, so dass man schon fast Angst vor Kratzern haben müsste. Die Auflösung von 1280×800 ist zwar nicht so berauschend (ich brauch eher was großes), aber dieses Book ist ja auch eher für die Mobilität gedacht, für die es wirklich ideal ist. Wenn ich es zu Hause benutzen würde, könnte ich ja noch meinen Bildschirm (oder ein Apple 30″ Cinema Display ) anhängen.

Der Hammer ist aber, dass dieses MacBook nur 900€ kostet. Leider ist der Protection Plan (!notwendig!) mit knapp 240€ etwas teuer.

Tja, wenn man Geld hätte

ManyCam Virtual Webcam 1.0.4.1 (2009-10-12) ManyCam LLC (미국)

iSight 입력을 여러 어플리케이션에서 공유하게 해 주는 유틸리티. (원래 한번에 하나의 어플리케이션에서만 사용할 수 있음)

입력받는 영상에 효과를 주거나 이미지로 대체하는 기능도 있는 거 같은데, 내 맥에서는 동작하지 않는다.

설치자가 16세 이상이어야 한다는 조건이 약관에 있다.

From the age of five to nine I lived on a council estate. These were the late seventies/early eighties. I will not allow the incident I am about to describe desecrate my memories of that place because for the most part it was pure paradise. The close in which I lived was nothing short of idyllic. I do not remember any of the adults who lived there being out of work. My own father was a factory worker and my mother was a nurse. Then a family moved into the end of the street. The mother became known throughout the neighbourhood as ‘that strange woman with the seven flea-ridden cats and her two strange, scruffily dressed children’.

I didn’t know it then but that family was going to have a profound effect on the rest of my life. The mother of the clan was, unlike the rest of the street, unemployable. The neighbours ensured her many cats, multiplying by the day, were fed. Their concern did not extend to her children who although they weren’t emaciated, were not the bonniest of creatures. More than mere neglect was happening in that house and I wish I had the wisdom to heed the warnings given by those much older and much more experienced than me never to venture across the threshold. There was no shortage of these warnings.

I chose to obey my own instincts instead. One of the biggest mistakes I have ever made. I had been told never to listen to gossip. The nuns at my Catholic primary school told me never to ‘Give a dog a bad name and hang it.’ That was an expression they used rather frequently.

So I did it. I crossed the threshold. I remember being overwhelmed by the stench of the cat faeces that were scattered across the floor. And then there were the ‘children’: Calvin and Marie. There was another boy who hovered in the background but he barely seemed to register. Calvin was not exactly a child. He was in his late teens – sixteen or seventeen I think. He invited me into his malodorous bedroom. He said that he would make sure I had a ‘good time’. Suffice to say that a ‘good time’ would be the last words I would use to describe my experiences in that room.

I can’t understand why I returned. Maybe it was the threat that if I didn’t my parents wouldn’t love me anymore or that I would be taken into care. That was what he told me and at the age of seven I believed him. My memories of this period of my life are fragmented. I can’t even remember how long it lasted. Could it have been a month? The entire summer? One memory remains intact in my head. Calvin had found a rickety old bridge. Marie and her adult boyfriend stood on one side familiarizing themselves with one another while on the other side Calvin did things to me that he should have been doing with a young woman of his own age..

Every now and then I hear his voice. But I can never see his face. It was the stench than emanated from him that remained with me – a sickly sweet scent. Overpowering. Later I was told that this was probably cannabis.

Sometimes my memories of that time will enter my head uninvited. I focus upon seeing the events of my childhood through a prism of sunlight. I cannot remember how it ended. I told no one. Except my mother. She admitted that the signs were there but she never made the connection. My parents tried their hardest. I know that now. I’m not so angry anymore. It hasn’t destroyed my life because I won’t let it.

Soon after they had moved in Calvin, his siblings and his mother were evicted from their little house at the end of the road. I hope they found every one of those cats loving homes.

Some of you may recognize these…

And this one is from my iSight, ’cause the camera is gone. We’ll see how many more I have to do this way. Maybe I’ll be creative or maybe I’ll just keep taking pictures of me. Who knows.

My new MacBook Pro came with a free iPod Touch with the academic discount. (Well, what amounts to the value of an 8GB model anyway–I had to fork out the difference to upgrade to 32GB.) The much touted unibody indeed looks sleek: the edges seem precariously razor-sharp, I get goosebumps when I run my fingers over them; the microphone and LED lights that indicate battery life are mere pinhole perforations, they’re almost invisible; the ON/OFF switch fits snug and flat in its hole, it looks like it was drawn there with a draftsman’s pencil. It looks as clean and keen as IM Pei’s National Gallery (East Wing) at Washington, DC.

Source: Ezra Stoller, The Architect’s Newspaper

This attention to design, perhaps more than its OS X operating system, is the main reason I lean towards Mac. I loved my old 12” Powerbook G4, and did not understand why Apple dropped the size, when, for a time, only 15” and 17” were offered. I did not want to lug a tray around, and almost considered getting the black MacBook. It was a good thing I hung on–the 13” MacBook Pro is exactly what I wanted: sleek, silver, and slim. For a short time, this body type and size was offered as a MacBook. Why Apple did that again boggled me; it only confused/diluted the Pro (Powerbook) brand, and would only alienate customers who bought it before it was upgraded to Pro.

Knock on wood that I don’t dent this unibody. I’m sure Apple would ask a pound of flesh for its repair. This is the problem I have with Apple: when you buy their products, you sign away your soul to the Corporation. They are fiercely proprietary and exclusive, exerting control over the product even after your purchase. I spent $400 to replace the optical drive on my G4 that can only be repaired with original parts in an Apple-certified shop. Customer service wanted me to spend “a bit more” to buy instead a new computer. (This was the time they phased out the 12” model.) No thanks. I didn’t like being bullied into buying. When I wanted to buy the iSight for the G4, they just so happen to have discontinued it to pave way for newer models with built-in camera. Customer service dismissed my complaint by saying that Apple “can’t keep on supporting older models”. My G4 was barely 2-years old at the time. There were no third-party Firewire cameras around, and the prices on used iSight cameras soared at eBay. Appealing to Apple is like talking to a brick wall, the Corporation is as veiled and draconian as a politburo, as self-contained and monolithic as the products they sell.

Take their recent row with Google, for instance, over the Google Voice app. Apple rejected the app because

[it] duplicated the core dialing functionality of the iPhone… [by appearing] to alter the iPhone’s distinctive user experience by replacing the iPhone’s core mobile telephone functionality and Apple user interface with its own user interface for telephone calls, text messaging and voicemail. (The Apple Blog, 21 Sep 2009 and Apple Answers the FCC’s Questions).

What harm is it to me as a consumer to replace the native iPhone interface for a potentially improved one, or revert back if I don’t like the Google Voice product after all? Apple does not seem to have the same problem if I run Microsoft Windows on the Mac; in fact, OS X 10.5 comes bundled with Boot Camp precisely to do this.

It is clear that Apple wants to corner the smartphone market by making their product a self-contained, self-sufficient “experience”–something as ubiquitous as Philip K. Dick’s Ubik, a metonym that stands for everything that can fulfill one’s desires, from consumer products to religious salvation. Why else would they collude with a singular service provider (AT&T, formerly Cingular) and not let different companies compete for the business? This, to me, makes them suspect, and I continue to resist getting an iPhone, buying from iTunes, and enrolling in Genius, precisely because of this. I do not want my “experience” to be governed by a single Corporation.

Friends, this is clean-up time and we’re discounting all our silent, electric Ubiks by this much money. Yes, we’re throwing away the bluebook. And remember: every Ubik on our lot has been used only as directed. (from Ubik, Ch. 1, 1969)

When I synced my spanking new iPod Touch with iTunes for the first time, the first thing it did was to tell me that the operating system needed an upgrade, and that Apple was selling it for $10. What?!? This damn thing just arrived in the mail–the wrappings are still strewn about. Customer service told me that the new OS 3 had not yet been released when my stock shipped from their warehouse (somewhere in China, from the tracking info). I hope the smart people at Apple realize how ridiculous this stock statement sounds to their customers. How in the world could I have known what version of the operating system is installed in the stocks at their warehouse? Well, according to customer service, I need not upgrade to the newer operating system, the old one would do just as well. As a customer, this only left a bad taste in the mouth. It was as if I was sold something OBSOLETE, when I was buying brand new. Apple, however, would not budge; they know they can nickle-and-dime cult members.

I was not aware of the Kindle hoo-ha until I read this piece by Nicholson Baker from the New Yorker: A New Page, Can the Kindle really improve on the book? I was dissuaded before I even considered buying one, and felt sorry for the unfortunate owners. What disturbs me most about this product is that it would put me (i.e. my reading experience) under the mercy of Amazon forever. The text format is not open and non-standard; it can’t even read pdf files–only those that one could buy from Amazon. This in itself raises a red(-white-and-blue) flag of… monopoly! No thanks. I’ve already learned my lesson in dealing with Apple. Second, because only the Kindle device can read this text format, Amazon would have absolute Stalinist control of one’s use and right to the text. This is fine for consumers of chicklit or techno-thrillers who toss the paperbacks after reading. As a true bibliophile, I love the embodiment of books on my shelf (not least because they look sumptuous together), and resist the idea of warehousing them in some virtual space to be accessed by an anemic device. But see, even those who bought the lifeless versions of their magazines and newspapers on Kindle were up in arms when they were swindled access to their purchases on the upgraded devices.

I recently discovered two apps for the iPod Touch that allows me to read books: Classics (free until recently) and Eucalyptus ($10). The latter gives you access to more than 20,000 public domain books in Project Gutenberg–that’s more books than I need for all the flights I will ever take in my lifetime. I don’t have to give Amazon a buck for Moby Dick–it’s free. I can virtually flip the pages too (Classics adds a warm rustling sound); they don’t eerily appear and disappear on me. I tested the reading experience with these apps for what Jeff Bezos’ calls the “flow state”–the ability to get lost in the text that Kindle aims to reproduce. To begin with, such turn of phrase sound like gimmicky self-help mantra than some real idea. (Hear Bezos get excited about it in Charlie Rose. Doesn’t his affected chuckle make him seem sketchy?)

The first ebooks I read were, appropriately enough, Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, the volumes being slender enough just to test “the flow”. (The metaphor of the looking-glass for the iPod’s touch-screen did not escape me either. How affected!) It was not hard to get lost in the text, owing more perhaps to Carroll’s engaging stories than the whiz-bang of the interface. What I found remarkable was that I can carry books with me in this small thing that fits in my pocket. I can thus take it to lunch, to the bus on the way to the grocery store, to the toilet break, without the extra burden of lugging a hefty tome and looking like an affected bookworm. I can even steal a few pages while waiting for the lab instrument to finish scanning a sample. What’s more–and this is what trumps Kindle–I can listen to the audiobook along with the text. This is particularly helpful with Joyce’s Ulysses, which I am reading at the moment. The rousing performance of Jim Norton makes the work come alive, and adds, not only to the meaning of the text, but to the enjoyment of the reading experience, especially to one who is unfamiliar with the twists and turns of Joyce’s Irish. Ulysses ceases to be the opaque, intimidating, “literary” text it has been made out to be.

In the war for control of the world’s Knowledge (e.g. between Amazon and Google), it is inspiriting to encounter the Eucalyptus reader. It works on the common ASCII text format–it does not claim exclusivity–but presents itself only, truly, as an e-text reader. It is truly in the spirit of the inventor of the movable type, in the way it disseminates and democratizes the text. Amazon, on the other hand, wants to enslave you to their device. (What has Bezos got in his pocketses?) I will stay away from the Kindle like it’s some baleful Elvish ring.

Display is using my Mac’s camera… not its own!

iSight Camera with MSN Messenger For Mac

isight green light keeping coming on

external iSight microphone not working with Mac Pro

It seems like a Macbook iSight doesn’t work. The green light is off. The solution to this problem is very simple.

Turn off the Macbook and remove the battery. Put the battery back and turn the Macbook on.

Once, it’s up, try to open Photo Booth. The iSight should be functioning.

Apple Inc.’s latest iPod nano has the capability to record H.264 VGA video, which is ideal for the YouTube & video on Flickr crowds. Cisco Systems, your Flip is on notice.

It appears the recent rumors proceeding today’s Rock & Roll event didn’t see this coming. Such speculation reminds me of the only time I entertained the idea of making an Apple event prediction. In February of 2006, I wrote:

But if it does turns out to be a revamped iPod then I can only hope that it’s a real Photo iPod. Think of it: iPod with a built in iSight. They’ve already made the iSight ridiculously small, the iPod can already display images, and the scroll wheel has been dying to be used for something other than simply sifting through menus. By adding iSight to the iPod you can not only carry a ton of pictures with it, you would be able to take them too. It’s a feature that most users would actually use, definitely more useful than watching a movie on a two inch screen.

At the time YouTube was only a year old & video sharing was something with which I was not interested. In hindsight, it was not such a bad forecast.