Retrophisch

Macally items

Post date January 15, 2003

Between the new PowerBooks, Safari, and Keynote, amongst other news out of Macworld Expo SF, I failed to notice some of the latest gadgets from Macally.

Now every peripheral manufacturer and their cousin’s mother’s brother’s aunt’s dog’s sister has produced a 4-port USB hub, with a nuclear-arms-size race to build the smallest one. My Dr. Bott gHub is pretty small, and unobtrusive behind my Apple 15″ LCD. Macally tops it though, with this minihub that features a built-in USB cable. Twenty bucks U.S.

It was really nice of Apple to include a FireWire cable with my iPod, but it’s kind of a pain to schlepp that cable around in my bag. Macally comes to the rescue with a 5-foot retractable FireWire cable. Like the minihub, twenty bucks U.S.

Tags Mac

How small is the 12″ PowerBook G4?

Post date January 15, 2003

PowerBook Central answers that question with this handy chart of small Apple portables. While it’s technically not the smallest when certain individual measurements are compared, the 12″ PowerBook G4 is the smallest Mac portable ever by volume. In my technolust over the new ‘Book offerings, I’m still waffling over the 12″ PowerBook G4 versus its 17″ big brother.

Tags Mac

iConquer

Post date January 15, 2003

If you love(d) Risk, then you have to get iConquer. Sorry, Mac OS X only.

Tags Mac

40 GB iPod?!?

Post date January 15, 2003

As crazy as it sounds now, a 40 GB iPod could be a reality later this year, thanks to 40 GB 1.8-inch drives from Hitachi. (from MacRumors)

Tags Mac

More Vindigo city facts

Post date January 14, 2003

From back at the end of October, when Vindigo added Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, and more coverage for Chicago and Washington, DC:

During the 1850s and ’60s many inventors tried to produce a workable typewriter, but none succeeded until 1867, when Milwaukee’s Christopher Latham Sholes and inventors Carlos Glidden and Samuel W. Soul patented a writing machine. The machine held a sheet of paper between a rubber platen and smaller rubber cylinder, with a carriage that moved from left to right as the keys, each with a separate mark, number or letter, were struck. Their invention didn’t take off until 1873, when the trio contracted with E. Remington & Sons of Ilion, New York, which until then just made rifles and sewing machines, to produce it.
Baseball’s First World Series Game occured in Pittsburgh: A 1903 showdown between the Pirates and the Boston Red Sox. The Pirates eventually lost the series in nine games.
Chicago-style, or deep dish, pizza was created in 1943 by Ike Sewell and Ric Riccardo of Pizzeria Uno.
Prince George’s County is the home to the world’s oldest continuously operating airport, College Park Airport. The Wright Brothers taught flying lessons there in 1909.
The name for Reston, in Northern Virginia, comes from the initials of Robert E. Simon, who developed the new “town” in the 1960s.

Tags fun

Safari first look

Post date January 14, 2003

If you’re still waffling over whether or not to try Safari, Wei-Meng Lee has a good overview over on O’Reilly’s MacDevCenter.

Tags Mac

How true

Post date January 14, 2003

“It is almost pathetic to see the emerging lineup of Democratic presidential hopefuls slobbering all over themselves in search of a defining issue —anything—to justify their pursuit of the land’s highest office. When you watch these guys explaining their decisions to run you can’t help but get the impression they are trying to convince themselves they have a legitimate reason to displace an exceedingly popular president during wartime.

“…Unless things go way south with the war and the economy, Democrats will be in trouble because they have no constructive solutions. So they’ll fall back on their tired strategy of demonizing Republicans and scaring and dividing voters, along economic, race, gender and religious lines. The more bereft they are of ideas, the nastier they will get. Which means it’s not going to be pretty.” —David Limbaugh

Tags liberty, quote

Sharing the sacrifice

Post date January 14, 2003

“The first thing to keep in mind is that it is almost impossible to cut any tax without making the people who pay that tax richer. And, rich people pay a lot more taxes than poor people do.

“According to the Tax Foundation, more than five out of every six dollars collected by the federal government were paid by the top 25 percent of taxpayers. You need a gross adjusted income of $55,225 to qualify as a member of the top quarter. Now, if all these people qualify as ‘rich,’ so be it. If cutting their taxes makes them richer, so be that, too.

“The top 1 percent, by the way, pay 37 percent of the total income taxes collected by the federal government. Democrats keep talking about how little poor people will get from an income tax cut. That’s true—because poor people pay so little in income taxes.

“How about creating a tax system in this country that makes everybody feel like they’re paying their fair share? I don’t want to raise taxes on anybody—I want to cut them for everybody. But having a system where vast segments of the working population are clients of the government and a small number are funders of it is not only institutionalized class warfare, it’s the exact opposite of shared sacrifice.” —Jonah Goldberg [emphasis added]