Published on January 24, 2008
Ars Technica is reporting on (what I think is) a pretty exciting event for OS X software development. Apple has provided software developers with access to the Calendar Store, the system that manages the database of events, todos, and alarms in OS X. This type of access has been possible for the Address Book since 10.2. For instance, you can associate a screen name in Adium with an Address Book entry, and information is populated automatically. Now that same type of interaction can happen between third-party applications and the Calendar database.
I am going to guess that this is going to have an immediately HUGE effect on GTD type applications. The Mac has already seen this market of software grow very quickly. Now these systems will be able to tie into the same database, a database that is also integrated into first-party Apple apps like iCal and Mail.
The area I’m very excited about is calendar synchronization. There are a few tools out already that synchronize online calendars with iCal. Spanning Sync and Plaxo will both sync Google Calendar to iCal, however these require periodic updates and dealing with duplicates can get messy and scary if you make the wrong move in resolving a conflict. Now, I hope we will see instant two-way synchronization that works completely behind the scenes. The Calendar Store access allows applications listen for changes in the Calendar database, and act on them immediately, so I believe that duplicates and other issues related to periodic syncing can be minimized, or in an app to app situation, completely eliminated.
One of the primary reasons I switched my day-to-day computer from Windows to Mac was for the cleanly integrated PIM applications, and I’m ecstatic to see continued and increasing support to make things work together even better.
Via: Ars Technica
Published on January 22, 2008
Digg’s official Google Gadget has been broken for the last day or so, but now it’s back with a new layout, and much more functionality. It has tabs for different categories, and now includes the thumbnails that are submitted with story submissions.
The Digg Google Gadget is the main way I stay up to date with Digg Top Stories, so the new functionality is great to see.
Published on January 22, 2008
National Geographic has posted a story about the environmental impact of all of our technological waste. My initial reaction was, ‘Yeah, I understand that this is a problem,’ but I was not ready for the vivid accounts of exactly how this problem affects lives and environments around the world.
June is the wet season in Ghana, but here in Accra, the capital, the morning rain has ceased. As the sun heats the humid air, pillars of black smoke begin to rise above the vast Agbogbloshie Market. I follow one plume toward its source, past lettuce and plantain vendors, past stalls of used tires, and through a clanging scrap market where hunched men bash on old alternators and engine blocks. Soon the muddy track is flanked by piles of old TVs, gutted computer cases, and smashed monitors heaped ten feet (three meters) high. Beyond lies a field of fine ash speckled with glints of amber and green—the sharp broken bits of circuit boards. I can see now that the smoke issues not from one fire, but from many small blazes. Dozens of indistinct figures move among the acrid haze, some stirring flames with sticks, others carrying armfuls of brightly colored computer wire. Most are children.
Choking, I pull my shirt over my nose and approach a boy of about 15, his thin frame wreathed in smoke. Karim says he has been tending such fires for two years. He pokes at one meditatively, and then his top half disappears as he bends into the billowing soot. He hoists a tangle of copper wire off the old tire he’s using for fuel and douses the hissing mass in a puddle. With the flame retardant insulation burned away—a process that has released a bouquet of carcinogens and other toxics—the wire may fetch a dollar from a scrap-metal buyer….
There’s MUCH more to the article at the National Geographic website.
Published on January 8, 2008
Erica (you may see her posts over at The Unofficial Apple Weblog) is at it again… she has hacked together Listen, a native app that records a snippet of audio from the iPhone’s built-in speaker, and then goes online to identify the song. It’s in early development, but so far it has given me perfect results, and I’m subjecting it to more than Top 40. I’d LOVE to see Sam Steele integrate this into his MobileScrobbler app, so that you could grab a sample of a song around you and be at the song’s Last.fm page in seconds. Here’s a quick video I did to show the application in action.
[youtube BHK3OGrQ1Kc]
There are quite a few other phones that have been able to do this for a while, I’m sure you’ve seen the Verizon commercials. However, I’m completely impressed by the community of developers hacking away at the iPhone and iPod Touch. They have been the only reason that the extremely bland (when stock) iPhone has become such an interesting device. I hope the official Apple Mobile OSX SDK gives developers easy access to the hardware. I know they’ve stated that it will be limited, but I’m hoping the limits aren’t too tight to allow this type of development.
[Update]: A couple Digg users have taken a look inside the application and found that it’s piggy-backing on Sony’s sound identification service for its own cell phones. It will be interesting to see how long the app can stay alive.
godling72 says, “Did a quick look at the app. The magic is done by impersonating a Sony EricssonK810i phone (”SonyEricssonK810i/R6BC Profile/MIDP-2.0 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 UNTRUSTED/1.0″), and using sony’s service: http://wap.sonyericsson.com/recognize/query (which uses Gracenote MusicID technology) .”
Via: The Unofficial Apple Weblog
Published on January 2, 2008
We could be on the verge of an energy crisis… Oil just hit $100 a barrel (a combination of increased world-wide demand, and the declining value of the US Dollar I believe) so alternative energy sources are becoming more and more important. Solar seems like a no-brainer to me. We have all of this energy bombarding us every day, and it’s a shame that we don’t capture more of it. The SunTable looks like a cool concept for a small patio or deck.
There’s certainly no shortage of solar panels of various shapes and sizes that’ll let you charge and use your various gadgets outdoors, but those looking for a slightly more permanent solution now have a new option to consider courtesy of the folks at Sudia Design Labs, which recently introduced its appropriately-named SunTable. In addition to comfortably sitting six people, it’s able to provide up to 150 watts of power and recharge fully in just three hours of direct sunlight. To make use of all that juice, the table also comes with an inverter to let you plug in a laptop or other device and, naturally, it includes some LEDs to inform you of its status. As you might have guessed, however, that convenience comes at quite a cost ($3,600), and you’ll have to act fast, as there’s only fifty of the tables up for grabs, with ‘em set to start shipping on March 15th.
- Engadget
Price is a bit prohibitive for all but the wealthy right now, but solar panel efficiency and product is getting better all the time, so I hope that some day soon this concept will be only marginally more expensive than a standard table.
To move the discussion a bit broader, I have been wondering about solar power generation a lot lately. The sun sends this energy to the planet constantly, and a solar panel can grab some of it and turn it into power. However, considering the law of conservation of energy, would this affect the environment at all? It seems that less energy would be reflected back into our atmosphere, into space, or into the ground. Are solar panels just at a scale small enough that the environment would never be affected?
