Status-Q

This should be good news for us at CamVine, because we buy quite a few of these - we take them apart and do nefarious things with them.

But there's no price drop in the UK market - in fact, they're still selling at £199. Now that's not a bad price overall, and you have to remember that UK prices include 17.5% tax, but it's still nearly $400 - substantially more even than the old price.

The price drop in the US, of course, coincided with the availability of movie rentals from the iTunes Music Store - something not available in other parts of the world yet. I wonder if the US hardware is being subsidised at all by the rental business?

They're very nice devices, but I don't have one at home because, some time ago, I bought a Mac Mini to go beside my TV, and an Elgato EyeTV box to capture digital broadcasts. It does everything the AppleTV does and a lot more - playing DVDs, for one thing. At the time, it seemed like quite an extravagance. But I've never regretted it for a moment. The vast majority of our TV watching is done this way now, and the recent release of a new version of the EyeTV software just makes it better.

The acquisition of XenSource by Citrix a few months ago was a powerful example, and yesterday Sun announced that they will be paying $1B for MySQL, which many people thought might have an IPO this year.

It's a surprise, but I think Sun will probably be good guardians of what has become one of the most important Open Source projects.

There are some quite surreal images in this set on Flickr.

I don't know how he does them, whether they are mid-jump, or clever photoshopping, or airbrushed-out supports, or a combination of these, but they're remarkably haunting...

The most pessimistic official estimate for the total number of deaths that might have resulted from the Chernobyl disaster, both directly (56) and indirectly through the fallout in the surrounding area, is about 9000. That's very large.

It's also about the same as the number of people who die in Chinese coal mines every 18 months.

Here's a new feature in Apple's Leopard OS that's quite easy to miss:

In the File > Open dialog box on most apps, the left-hand side of the dialog shows your disks, your favourite places etc. What I hadn't noticed until I heard about it on the Inside Aperture podcast was that in many cases there will also be a 'Media' section below these, which lets you browse and search your music from iTunes, your photos from iPhoto and Aperture etc.

Here, I'm browsing my Aperture library from Word's Insert > Picture > From file... menu.

No need to know the directory in which an image lives before inserting it into your document, if you prefer to think in terms of albums. No need to start up your photo-management software in order to find it.

I write this blog in Wordpress using Safari, and when I came to upload the image above I noticed that the upload dialog box has the same Media Browser section too. And because this is part of the OS, not the application, it's also there in Firefox.

Just to repeat the point, here I'm in Sound Studio opening tracks from iTunes:

I have a cat, which I think I can now let out of the bag.

I've been using it for a few months, and while the performance isn't up to that of the Windows drivers yet, it's quite usable. Here's a photo I took in September of my 4-screen MacBook Pro setup.

You'll notice that the DVI connector is not in use in this shot. Normally, at present, I'm using one DVI screen and one USB screen, giving three screens in all.

As we've always said, pixels are like broadband - they're addictive. Once you've had them, you don't want to give them up. A friend pointed out that this makes complete sense - displays are the network between your computer and your brain, so having a lot more of them really is like upgrading to a broadband connection.

And no, before anyone asks, I'm not sure when the Mac drivers will be generally available!

Harry Lamin, a British soldier in WW1, wrote letters back to his family at home. Now, exactly 90 years on, his grandson is publishing them as a blog, in real time. It's been quiet for a couple of weeks because letters only come occasionally and the last one was on Dec 30th, 1917.

Now... as then, of course... nobody knows if he's still alive.

It's a brilliant idea. More information on CNN.

Staying at my in-laws' over Christmas, there weren't enough computers to go round, so I had to share my laptop with other members of the family.

Ah, that's nice... a Google search for 'quentin' has me back on page one again. Something that hasn't happened for some time, mostly since that Tarantino fellow became rather popular.

It just goes to show that the level of ability one needs to achieve fame these days is just proportional to the popularity of one's name!

:-)

It was a bit milder today, with glorious winter sunshine.

More photos from around Great Chishill, Crishall and Heydon here.