Tech Blort: In The Future, Things Will Occur Tomorrow!

Friends,

It’s time to throw a bunch of random bits together and call it a legitimate post. I know you’re excited about this, so let’s not delay one more second…

• Stuntbook! – A couple of years ago, my dear friend was told by the geniuses at the Apple Store Genius Bar that the hard drive in her Powerbook was toast. Beyond repair. Nothing they could do but try to salvage as much data off of the thing as possible. “Horrors!” she thought, and wondered what to do. The geniuses suggested that the best course of action would be to buy a new, faster Macbook. So she did.

  Fast forward to a couple weeks ago. She offered the dead computer to me. “If you can fix it, it’s yours.” I issued two commands (guess what they were for ten bonus points and a chance at the lightning round!) and restored the existing hard drive in about an hour. Didn’t really matter though, since I’d already purchased a great big new hard drive. Installation took an hour or so, migrating the everything from the poor little iBook took half the night, sharing a year of photographs with the big machine took half a day. This brings us much closer to podcastville.

• Entourage stinks – Let’s say that you were going to use Microsoft Entourage 2008 to read your mail on an Exchange server. And let’s also assume that had to synchronize somewhere around 8,000 messages over a T1 line. How long should that take? A half hour? Maybe one whole hour? Try twenty hours. Cripes.

• Too bright! – Some people say that staring at a bright screen late at night disrupts your sleep rhythms and causes other weird health problems, like vampirism and unnatural attraction to exposed lightbulbs. F.Lux is a little utility for Mac, Windows and Linux to automatically dim and change the color temperature of your display during evening hours. I’ve installed it, but I haven’t had it running long enough to see if it works. If you have, please drop a note in the comments.

• Google Maps for Android now includes transit times – Why do I care? I’m going on a little vacation this weekend and have opted to not rent a car. This very act makes me kinda nervous (because, you know, no car), but I’m going to try to rely on public transportation. Maybe Google can help me get around. Maybe it’s all still in beta. Sigh.

Back in a couple days,

– bob