Steve Jobs action figure (updated)

How bizarre. (article.)

Update:
Like one could have foreseen:

Apple isn’t excited about In Icon’s plans to make a 12-inch Steve Jobs doll, and is apparently threatening legal action if the company follows through. The legal team for company that Mr. Jobs co-founded sent In Icon a letter telling them to stop production or face a lawsuit.

(MacObserver)

Talking about work and Jobs, here is an interesting composite my friend Norm Nason has made:

Funny how his stare is intense in two different ways at the two ages. Seems more absolute and uncompromising in the late age. More roguish and relaxed in the younger age. 

The Verge, tech site

I found a tech site I'd not been aware of: The Verge. It seems very solid. Here's their 2011 year in review article. And another interesting one: best writing of 2011. Phew, all I needed: more reading stuff!

Apple fined by Italy over misleading product guarantees

Apple fined by Italy over misleading product guarantees, article.

Apple is selling the Applecare service, which for a nice lump of money extends the guarantee to two years. But apparently in the Eu, including UK, electronic products already per law has two years of guarantee!
Well, that's friggin good to know!

Play videos from your computer on your iPad

It seems that now it is not just updates which can be done wirelessly to the iPad, you can even play any music or video sitting on your computer! Well, sitting in iTunes, to be exact. (It works on Mac, I'm not sure about Windows.) That's amazing.
And more amazing yet, this one also works via the Internet. Although obviously if it is a long video it will take a while to download to the iPad, unless you have an exceptionally fast upload link from your computer. (Most Internet connections are much slower to upload than to download, I suspect this is to prevent too durn much file sharing using the ISP's bandwidth.)

I only found out about this because suddenly in the Video app on my iPad, a new tab appeared: "Sharing". I am not even sure if it's due to a software update very recently, or if it's due to a setting I changed somewhere. (Apple is way ahead with sharing apps, files, and streams, but the settings for this are spread over a dozen different apps and devices, very confusing.)

Digital prices

It's amazing how digital pricing shows better than ever how arbitrary prices really are. Some services charge eight dollars for a 24-hour movie rental. That's crazy when you often can buy it on disc for less. And then on the other hand, I have just signed up for a Kindle subscription (now on iOS too) for Fantasy And Science Fiction, a magazine, for 99 pence a month! Now that's what I call a reasonable price! Perhaps even too low for their own good, but we'll see how things shake out over the years.

Bender in the year 10,000

In a Futurama episode from a couple of years ago, Bender and a couple of others are stranded in the year 10,000 (the professor had the 'brilliant' idea of a time machine which only goes forwards). This future is somewhat apocalyptic, but it tickled me to see that amongst the precious books our friends are burning to keep warm is a first-generation Kindle, accurately rendered! Well done, Futurama creators, you are first class geeks. (They really are, some of them of the kind who can recite pi to the 400th decimal place.)

Good writers?

I can only come up with two names for consistently interesting writers in the tech field: Andy Ihnatko and David Pogue.

Does anybody know anybody else worth following?

Read magazines in your iPad Kindle app

For the longest time it has been an oddity that you could read Kindle subscription magazines on Kindle devices and on Android devices, but not on iPad!
I honestly suspected something "political" behind it, like related to Apple's commission policies re content bought inside an iOS app. But maybe not, because along with other interesting developments, this whole thing seems now to be fixed in the 2.9 version of the Kindle iPad app, it's a big update.

Word processor for e-text (updated)

Somebody pointed out in an article that word processors are an endangered species because they were designed for print. I hadn't thought of that, but that immediately gave me the idea; hey, isn't it time we got a Word Processor which is from the bottom up designed for e-text? Something for writing, which will give you the formatting options you need for blogs, twitter, web articles, and of course ebooks!
I would love that. I almost never write for the page anymore. It would be especially good if the thing would have the power (though it would not be easy to make) to export to multiple ebook and other formats, ePub, Kindle, and whatnot.

UPDATEs:
Will recommended Scrivener, which I have heard many good things about as a very powerful and flexible tool.

Anon said:
Not sure what you are after but, how does Apple's "Pages.app" do what you want to accomplish? It too was probably designed for print but since it's WYSIWYG isn't it suitable for e-publication as well?

Yes, actually Pages sounds like a good thing. I know that it produces ePub files which are good enough that Take Control Books use the app, and that's a strong recommendation since they do technical books (tables, links, etc) and are quite demanding.

But notice it's called "Pages"...
I was thinking a bit abstractly, rather than looking for an app for a specific purpose. Sort of wondering, when will apps start to loose the anchoring in paper and pages and fully embrace the rapidly growing age of digital publication, where printing on paper is not the first use but a rather specialized one if it's done at all.

Play with photos

About Snapseed, one of the best photo apps I've tried.

Clean Writer 2.0 for iPad

Clean Writer 2.0 for iPad. (On sale now, dirt cheap.)

Even though one might say that the Macbook Air is much better for a traveling writer, with more power and flexibility, I dunno, there's just something about 1: using something for something it was not *really* meant for and using it well, and 2: Simplicity. One app at a time and the general simplicity of the iPad interface, used powerfully with an external keyboard, just appeals to me. (Apparently many people do very well even without an external keyboard, I envy them.)

... Of course there are many factors to weigh in, such as what apps you like and need, and that a laptop is faster to pack up and away than an iPad with keyboard, etc. But I just think this has some unique charm. And you can pack away the keyboard and use the iPad as ereader and all the things it's good for.

Will E-Books Destroy the Democratizing Effects of Reading?

Will E-Books Destroy the Democratizing Effects of Reading?, article.
Imagine Abraham Lincoln, born in a log cabin, raised in poverty, self-taught from a small cache of books, being stymied in his early education by the lack of an e-reader. 

This is not an intelligent article, and not worthy of such a publication as MIT's Technology Review in my humble opinion (as humble as I can be, not much admittedly).
Obviously there will be many movements to educate children in poor areas, and of course prices will continue to fall, but even if prices did not continue to fall, even today it costs far less to provide a child with a devices which gives access to so much education from the web, free video, out-of-copyright ebooks, etc, than it would cost to provide them with even one-thousandth of such material in printed form, which has to be produced, handled, and shipped, and administrated.

UPDATE: Bruce wrote:

...in my High School people who took Math and Physics carried sliderules around with them - except for the wealthy few who had the hot new gadget of the day - The TI electronic calculator you could wear on your belt.
One morning, well before I graduated from college, I poured myself a bowl of cereal. A very small electronic calculator, sealed in plastic, came out of the box along with my cereal. It was free, and was included in many cereal boxes, not just mine.
If you can imagine Abe Lincoln, a few years from now, being able to afford cereal for breakfast, then he could still be President. 

Well said.
I didn't know that calculators became that cheap that early. But certainly the Kindle has dropped from almost $500 to $80 in four years, so a thing like that is already teetering on the edge of a throw-away object. And I can easily imagine projects like One Laptop Per Child getting donations for big productions, getting prices down to maybe $20 per child/device within a couple of years, if not now. That's the price of one hardcover book, but the device would have access to several million free ebooks just for starters.

Wireless updates without wifi?

When Apple introduced wireless updates without wifi, I didn't get all that excited, because my main Mac does not use wifi, it uses ethernet to connect to the Internet (after years of battling all the constant minor issues with wifi, I just bought a long ethernet cable, and since then, no connection problems).

But it was fun to try it once at least, so I set my iPad to sync wirelessly anyhow, and tried it, having turned on wifi on the Mac.

But I've noticed that the iPad shows up in iTunes on the Mac even when the Mac is *not* on wifi, and then I tried to click on the sync button on the Mac, and the iPad started updating! All the new apps, podcasts, etc. I went to look at the iPad and yep, they were downloading.

So I would guess that the Mac/iTunes is communicating with the iPad via Apple's server, and then tells the iPad which files to download, not from the Mac, but from Apple's server! Remarkable. I really would not have expected them to think it further than "of course both machines have to be on the same wifi network to sync".
I guess this also means that so long as both devices are on the Net, each can be anywhere in the world and they can still sync.
(Sync can also be started on the iPad, by plugging in the wall charger.)

Update: I think now instead that this has been happening when my iPad has been on the network (one of two) into which my tower Mac was plugged via Ethernet! So, probably no Internet involved.

Bearded Dragon playing Ant Crusher

Sure is fun, but there's not much taste!

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