Step 1: Launch the Apple Game Center as part of iOS 4.1

Step 2: Put iOS 4.1 on Apple TV

Step 3: Uh . . . there is no Step 3.

Okay, so it is highly unlikely that an A4-powered Apple TV (or iTV or however they brand it) is going to offer much that is desirable to the Call Of Duty-style hardcore gamer, but the Nintendo Wii and the Facebook/Farmville combo have already proven there’s a huge, under-served market of casual gamers drooling for interactive games that don’t involve getting pwned by a 14-year old with Mountain Dew-fueled catlike reflexes.

Plus, the iTunes media empire puts the media capabilities — and catalogs — of traditional gaming consoles to shame. And, if, as rumored, the price point for the new Apple TV offering is a very attractive give-away-the-razor $99, then the game console big boys might be scrambling to try to get into a new market segment they’ve ignored for decades.

And if Apple wants to really bring the unicorn tears, my secretest, bestest wish is that Apple TV bundle a TiVo app.

Anyway. Perhaps another evidence of my increasing Ben Franklinness is my newfound love of Readability, a little product from the Arc90 Labs.

Readability is a configurable bookmarklet you drop in  your browser toolbar. Say you encounter a page for a magazine article or weblog post that has a narrow column of tiny type (at least to my increasingly Franklinesque eyesight), like this:

You click the Readability bookmarklet, and it reformats the page for you, stripping out all of the cruft (headers, ads, linkrolls, etc.) providing you with a simple readable format, like so:

My eyes thank you, Arc 90.

“the submitting user grants [company] the royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable license to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, create derivative works from, distribute, perform, and display such Content (in whole or part) worldwide and/or to incorporate it in other works in any form, media, or technology now known or later developed, all subject to the terms of any applicable license.”

A good example is this comment on the Slashdot story last week about Adobe launching an online version of Photoshop Express. I’ve had to deal with these kind of complaints for the web properties I’m responsible for, but my annoyance is nothing new. The first time I remember coming across complaints about these kind of terms is almost a decade ago when Yahoo! took over Geocities. It annoyed me even back then when I was just a humble ed tech trainer, not a product manager responsible for honest-to-goodness web applications.
Although I am not a lawyer and you definitely shouldn’t take legal advice from me, let me explain to you what the heck is going on here: it’s called the Internet.

When you upload your content from your computer to [insert web-based application here] you are transferring that content from your computer to the centrally-hosted web application that, presumably, will reproduce that content when it serves it up for display to you or someone else on the web page. This is is commonly known as publishing in web parlance, a way to distribute content over the World Wide Web. Etc. etc. Terms starting to sound familiar?
The Web works by making copies of content and transmitting/distributing those copies all over hell and back anytime someone views a web page, not to mention all the caching of copies. Any company that’s going to get into the business of helping you put content of any sort on the web needs to get your permission to do fling that content all over the globe.
If the vendor didn’t explicitly make the license to do that part of the terms, then some other bozo is going to come along and say “I uploaded a photo to your photo sharing site, and you had the unmitigated gall to — horror or horrors — transmit my content to the web browser of someone, and in the process of doing so allowed them to cache a copy of that photo on their own computer! How dare you! I’m suing you for copyright infringement, Mr. Vendor!” The type of terms like those quoted above are about how the web works and making sure that some litigious jackass doesn’t sue the vendor over doing what’s necessary for a web app to exist. It’s not about “stealing copyright.”
So, you “stealing copyright” bozos, please stop getting your knickers in a twist. Put your tinfoil hat back on and wait by the front door for the black helicopters.
Oh, by the way, the quoted terms above? They’re quoted from the Slashdot Terms of Service. ;-)

Waitaminute. I’ve got a brand new portable Internet device in my pocket. Wouldn’t it be simple if I could just access the files on my home computer from the iPhone?

Waitanotherminute. I use FolderShare, a free service from Microsoft, to keep key files on my multiple computers in sync across the various machines. One of FolderShare’s other features is that you can use the FolderShare web interface to access files on any of the machines that you’ve configured with FolderShare. Maybe I could access those files via FolderShare’s web interface and Safari on the iPhone?

Holdonthereaminute! Are you sure this is secure? Well, FolderShare is a secure P2P infrastructure. All the traffic is authenticated via RSA, encrypted via AES, and delivered over SSL. Good enough for me. Let’s give it a shot.

Starting up Safari on the iPhone . . . thumbing http://www.foldershare.com into the iPhone keyboard . . . yep, there’s the site . . . logging into FolderShare . . . navigating to the FolderShare Remote Access interface . . . yep, the FolderShare client on my home computer is running . . . click on that icon for my home computer . . . zowee! there’s the Home directory . . . navigating to the Documents folder . . . scrolling down the list of files . . . bingo! there’s the file . . . opening . . .

Ta-dah! There I am sitting in the bookstore viewing a PDF pulled off my computer at home over the Internet on my iPhone.

Sometimes technology makes me really happy.

[O]ur original vision was to become an incubator and to enable our employees to work on new ideas, and let them spin those off as separate companies.. basically let our employees graduate into becoming funded entrepreneurs at a time when funding was hard to get. Our first and only attempt at this was back in 2003 when we hoped to work with Steve Chen and Mike Solomon to start Yafro.com, which was going to be a social networking site with media sharing applications built on top. [Emphasis mine. -greg]
In the end things did not work out because some members of our board were uncomfortable with the idea of giving the employees of a spinout majority share and control… so Jim and I agreed with Steve and Mike that it was a no go.

Sounds reasonable until a couple of years later when you realize you punted on funding a social media-sharing service being pushed by Steve Chen. Yes, that Steve Chen.
I’m sure the tens of millions Hong has raked in from HOTorNOT allays the pain a little, but still . . . damn, that’s gotta burn!

The Dell has been getting cantankerous for almost a year now. The original 40GB hard drive on the Inspiron gave up the ghost last fall. (Thankfully less than a week after I’d bought an external hard drive for back-up purposes — how’s that for serendipity?) Simple enough to replace it with a new 80GB hard drive. Well, simple except that the old HD must have been pneumatically screwed into the HD tray frame. I had to buy a new tray off eBay to put the new drive in, since I mangled the old frame trying to get the old drive out.
That delayed my HD upgrade by about a week while I waited for the new HD to arrive, so during that week I booted the Inspiron off a bootable Ubuntu Linux CD and saved any work to a USB key or the external HD. Craziness, but it worked just fine. Apparently, you don’t need an internal HD with an OS on it to run your computer. Its more just a convenience than anything else. :-)
Then, in the winter, one of the two fans built into the Inspiron started to fail with ear-endangering grinding noises. I considered replacing the fans, but apparently the way the Inspiron is laid out, you have to remove the entire motherboard to replace the fans. Ugh. Too much geekery even for me. Instead, in an attempt to keep the CPU cool I found a little free app for manual control of the Inspiron’s fan. That let me disable the grinding fan, and control when the remaining good one kicked in and at what speed – enough control to keep the CPU adequately cooled. I also invested about $35 in a cooling pad (which also conveniently doubled as a USB hub) to assist in the anti-heat campaign, but which unfortunately added about three-quarters of an inch to the height of the already-thick Inspiron. But I’m frugal (comes from being a teacher for years before I got into the software biz), so I made do.
This cobbled together solution kept me going for another six months, but last week the second, remaining fan started making the same grinding noises. I’d already been toying with getting a new computer, even as far as proclaiming to a co-worker a week earlier that I was going to buy one of the new Intel-based MacBook Pros over the weekend. I even went to the Apple Store that weekend, but couldn’t really justify purchasing a new computer because “the Dell was still holding its own.” (That frugality again.)
But, man, when that second fan started moaning like a horror movie monster, my ass was in the car on the way to the Apple Store in minutes. Oh, I could probably have figured out some way to keep the Dell going for another couple of months, but frankly there comes a point when enough’s enough. I’m not broke, I make a decent living — I can afford a new computer. So rather than deal with the headache of keeping the Dell on life support, I am now the owner of a brand spanking new MacBook Pro (the 15″ 2.166 Ghz model).
Up next: Why Mac?

There’s really no comparison between the handwriting recognition entry and typing. Typing is FAR easier. Lower case L’s are a bitch, too. But I am impressed with the quality of the recognition. The tablet PC is definitely is useful for taking notes in a meeting, though. Clacking away on a keyboard during a meeting is annoying, but note-taking on a tablet PC makes no more noise than on paper. And I have the advantage of (1) the notes not disappearing into the impending avalanche of paper stacked on the corner of my desk as do all my paper notes and (2) the eminently useful searchability of the notes. Still, typing wins in 90% of the use cases, but it’s nice to have the digital ink option for those last 10%.[*]
What I really like is the light weight of the tablet PC. This tablet, a two-year old hand-me-down Acer Travelmate C110, is geared towards mobility, so it’s tiny. Sure you can recline on the couch with a laptop, but it’s usually a precarious balancing act and you can only deal so long before the battery heat starts burning a hole in some body part. With the tablet, it’s not much heavier than a thick hardcover book, and I have to say — web browsing with your feet up is a really different experience. At two years old, this model is getting a little outmoded even; I can imagine that the new “Origami” ultra-mobile PC’s announced by Microsoft last month are going to generate a new form factor.
In the past, I’ve had discussions with friends and colleagues about the impending doom the publishing industry faces as books become digitized in the way music and video have. Their response has always been, “But the experience of reading a paper book is what will save it.” Balderdash, I say! It’s just a matter of the device’s form factor. Once a device capable of displaying text at a high enough resolution can be reduced to something approaching the size/weight of a trade paperback, people will just as quickly abandon the printed book as they have abandoned the cassettes, VHS, CDs, and DVDs. . . . especially if they can get fast and easy wireless access to downloadable books via the Internet. Long tail anyone?
My recent tablet PC experience convinces me that we’re getting much closer to that ideal form factor that’s going to shake up the publishing industry for good.
[*] Full disclosure: the latter half of this post — basically everything after the asterisk — was not written by hand on the tablet PC, but really for no other reason than I had saved it before I finished, forgot about it, and finished it a couple days later when I was already working on a laptop. :-)