Recently in Tech Category

The blogosphere and twitterverse have been dominated today by Steve Job's Macworld Keynote. Lots of speculation and anticipation beforehand, including several versions of the leaked speech. The event itself was more notable (to me anyway) for the traffic it generated, causing several well known blogs to creak and splutter under the load, and Twitter essentially went down for a few hours as it failed to cope with the pressure.

Anyhoo - the big news for me was the announcement of the Macbook Air - a lovely and incredibly thin laptop. Unfortunately, with tech hotness comes an associated price - starting at $1799 in the US and £1199 inc VAT here in the UK. Sharp intakes of breath as Macheads struggled to reconcile tech-lust with a price that was several hundred of dollars higher than the pre-keynote rumours. The pricing differential between the US and UK also came up in quite a few conversations - so I decided to work out what the cost difference really was.

Google Spreadsheets came to my aid - so here's a table showing the true cost difference - which for me means stripping out UK VAT - in the US sales tax is never mentioned or shown - it's like the dirty secret of American retail that only bites you when you come to pay at the cash till !

So - as can be seen - there isn't actually that much of a difference - if, and it's a big if, you're VAT registered. Add in the US sales tax, and the chances are that you'd actually pay more in the US than you would in the UK.

Hmm...just as I'm about to buy my own Macbook, a lazy Sunday trawl through the interwebs shows some rumours of a new thinner, shinier Macbook that may or may not be announced sometime in the near future, or next year, or never.

Now normally I'm pragmatic about this kind of stuff and generally resistant to buyer's remorse. If the only change was a faster processor or more hard disk, then I wouldn't have a problem, but boy would I be completely gutted if I bought a Macbook next week and watch Apple launch a complete replacement.

The problem is, of course not helped by the fact that I'm currently without a laptop (well a proper one - I've got a 5 year old Dell ultraportable that only works when plugged into the mains, but that doesn't really count).

So, really struggling with what to do - probably wait until OS X 10.5 (leopard) is released and see if anything is announced.

[tags]Mac, Apple, Macbook, laptop, hardware[/tags]

I've recently started to get a lot of comment spam forwarded to me for moderation, which means that Akismet can't decide what to do. This might be because I've recently posted here again, after an over-long break from blogging.

Rather than continue to plough through hundreds of spam comments a week, I'm taking the simpler path and have installed the rather wonderful Comment Timeout plugin. Essentially this closes comments on old posts, but generally does so relative to the last approved comment - so old posts that are still generating some worthwhile conversation won't get shut down.

We'll see how it goes, but I think this will help a lot.

[tags]spam, comments, wordpress, blogging, plugins [/tags]

BlackBuried : adjective : The act of instantaneously andsuperficially reading the content of recently arrived email on aBlackBerry or other type of handheld email device while engaged in someother activity, and thereafter neglecting to go back to read the emailmore fully at a more conventient time, rendering the email threadotherwise lost.

ex "Yeah, I think I remember seeing that email, mate, but I think I may have I BlackBuried it, sorry!"[memoria technica via Euan Semple]

I've had to train myself to mark anything important / interesting as unread so that I don't lose it. Missing the ability to flag emails for follow-up.

Be have opened up their 24Mbps/1Mbps ADSL service for pilot users. I've just signed up, and requested my MAC code from my existing provider, Nildram. Nildram have done nothing wrong, the service quality has been consistent, but they've capped downloads recently, and show no signs of progressing above 2Mbps any time soon, whereas Be are actually delivering this service now. 24Mbps…yum.

More details at the Be web site.

[Update 20th Sept. Hmm. Hadn't heard anything so I emailed Be to get an update on my order. Nothing back. Phoned them, and was told that my exchange was going to be enabled in January !! Bit aggravated that was the case after initially being told a few days on the website. Also, I've given 30 days notice to my existing ISP. So I've cancelled the order with Be and would now advise other people not to order until there is some proof of Be delivering a service - especially if you need to transfer from another ISP]