blogs

Seriously. Check it out. Be sure to click on the image to see a close-up detail.

The story comes courtesy of "Steve Jobs." His blog and The COW are all the internet you need.

This is an edit of my post yesterday, noting the newest new interface. We think we're getting warmer. As The Cow's major redesign continues, there will be another tweak or two along the way.

One more update: following your requests, we're definitely working on adding support for YouTube, SWF, and more.

Note for you text entry folks: that box very slightly overlaps with the right nav, but you'll see that it doesn't get in the way of actually entering the text.

As always, comment away! 

I've made no secret that I think Fake Steve Jobs has the funniest blog on the web, and that he's also a consistently outstanding (and entertaining) source of Apple news and commentary, and uncannily accurate predictions.

Today, he unmasked himself as Dan Lyons, a senior editor at Forbes who lives in the Boston area. As that article notes, he was contacted by the New York Times' Brad Stone, who'd noted strong similarities with the blog Lyons keeps at Forbes.

And WHERE did Brad unmask Steve? Why, at the NYT's Bits blog of course.

Needless to say, Fake Steve's response is hilarious.

Forbes says FSJ will be relocated to Forbes.com starting today, but it's not there yet.  Anyway, they tell a great story about the story

The real Steve Jobs and Bill Gates (who publicly denied being Fake Steve) are among FSJ's readers.

Even knowing who Fake Steve is, this is still absolutely essential reading, no matter how you feel about Apple. Other than The COW, and emusic.com, this is the site I check most often. Check it out yourself if you haven't. To make it easy, you don't even have to scroll up: here's the link again for your convenience.

From Fake Steve Jobs, who remains the absolute best resource for Apple information, and by far the funniest blog on the web:

The nice folks at Sugarcat Cakes sent along this photo of their latest cake creation. They call it the Jesus Cake. Feeds a whole party of hungry geeks, but alas, you can't remove the battery.

You know that you can't remove and replace the iPhone battery yourself, right? Just like the iPod, you have to send it to Apple, and pay $79 plus $6.95 for shipping for them to ship it yourself.

On top of wiping off the fingerprints, they throw in erasing everything stored in your phone for free. Classy.

You're probably a couple hundred charge cycles away from need to replace the batter, but seriously, back your stuff up before you do.

I'm SURE I read that headline somewhere else, but I can't for the life of me remember where. Anyway, this is a very cool Google service that Nora pointed me to. They've just launched in beta form what I think is their very coolest search tool yet: Google Translate. As they say in their offical blog, Now, you can search for something in your own language (for example, English) and search the web in another language (for example, French). Or Russian. Or Chinese. Or Arabic.

This is so cool! As the authors of this blog entry (there are 3 of 'em) also note, although the majority of Internet users out there are non English speakers, a majority of the content on the internet is still in English. We've been aware of this for some time at The COW, The numbers can shift quite a bit, but it's been a long time since we saw all English-language countries COMBINED equal more than about half of The COW's traffic. It's currently at about 54%, which is quite a remarkable testament to the "world" part of the COW's name.

Equally cool to me is how useful this is for English speakers who want to reach out a little.  I mentioned Russian, Chinese and Arabic above, because those are the examples you can find at the actual Google Translate page.

Again quoting Google's blog, While machine translation is not perfect, it's usually good enough for you to obtain the gist of information in a language you might otherwise be unable to access.

Yep, it's true. Take it for a spin and see for yourself.

Google's official blog is a must read. Period. I say that Google is on its way to becoming the most important software company on the planet. Even if they turn out not to win every fight, they're setting the terms of the fight. Making every game a home game tilts the odds in your favor. So if you want to see what's coming, here's where you look.

Another of the very many blog entries I'm behind on is this one from May 23, on taking control, specifically, of your health records. Do you know what's in yours? I go to a doctor pretty regularly, I see him writing stuff down...but I have no idea what it actually says. I have no idea who else has seen what's there.

More important to my long-term care, I have no real way to connect my needs to the best people to address them. I have no way to evaluate the assumptions my doctor has made for my treatment. And, as a big fan of community-based problem solving, I don't have easy access to the best communities for addressing my conditions or concerns.

Google's idea is to, first, give me access to my own records in standardized, meaningful fashion. How else can we evaluate the care we receive and its alternatives?

Now, Google gets slammed for peering into everybody's business, but that's beside the point. They're the first ones to lay this out as part of their goals. Here's a fantastic place to start checking that out, actually a link to an editorial their Global Privacy Counsel wrote in the Financial Times. There are a bunch of other interesting links on that page, including one that looks at the role of personalized search in the enterprise. Most of them are, of course, links to blogs, by far the best source of news on the internet.

 I think the arguments for personalizing online information around medicine in particulare are extremely compelling.

Here are "the three core principles of a future health care system:

(Not exactly related to this, but sorta, is that I think Google's computers are more reliable than my own for securing those records. Ever lost a hard drive and all the info on it? I thought so. Ever lost anything in your Google apps -- gmail, calendar, etc.? Didn't think so.)

Anyway, if you care about your health (sorry, the marketeer in me says stuff like this), you should check this out. These are the notes from Google VP Adam Bosworth's address to a medical information society. I found 'em downright inspirational:

It is Google’s vision that these two core capabilities, reliable unambiguous computable medical data and safe systems for trust and authentication and controlled access will dovetail with the consumer needs for discovery about everything in their health arena. As this rolls out and consumers truly can discover what is the state of the art and what they should know about their treatments, where they are being treated, how they are being treated, and how they will mange their diseases or recovery, this consumer awareness will lead to far greater consumer control, far better health data, and inevitably, to a very different health world than the current one.

A very different health world than the current one? I'm in.

Check this out: The Unofficial Apple Weblog features an AppleScript for opening major WWDC news sites!!! 

Anyway, I've been meaning to get to this for-freakin-ever, but here we are. It's the morning of Apple's Worldwide Developer's Conference. There was a time when this was nothing but code geeks and the like, getting their dev ducks in a row. It has since become a key venue for rolling out products and announcements. Some of these have been development-related (move to Intel), some not (iSight, new flat panels), but increasingly, a good time will be had by all.

(Hey, Macworld is a show named for a magazine. No way is Apple going to save all their good stuff for them.)

There are acres and acres of WWDC predictions out there -- look it up, you'll be amazed. You might also be amazed at how many of them are from blogs, but not me. Blogs are the number 1 source of news on the web, by a long long long shot. Seriously. Long shot. What surprised me, though, was how many, uhm, no-name blogs ranked higher at the google than name-brand blogs.

Still, here are some sources of note to check and score against as the week goes on.

Fake Steve Jobs, in classic fashion, begins with Steve at a meditation center getting a high colonic, and getting accused of smoking cannabis, which he denies. Unusual, since he's quite explicit recommending it elsewhere. (I'm not encouraging this sort of thing, but a truly hilarious entry.)

Anyway, he talks about his prep for WWDC, and concludes "this one is going to be the most awesome WWDC we've ever had. Seriously."

Jason O'Grady is another of my daily reads at zdnet. He's been making WWDC predictions for weeks. One of those, new MacBook Pros, has already come to pass. How's he do with the rest? We'll see in a few hours.  He begins with a tantalizing come-on: Apple has publicly stated that Steve will demo a “feature complete” version of Mac OS 10.5/Leopard, so that’s a given. But if you remember back to the Stevenote at Macworld Expo in January Jobs mentioned that many of the features in Leopard were “top secret.” Presumably WWDC is where SJ will produce the proverbial rabbit from the hat.

He also reposts Apple Gazette's predictions:

1. Multi-Touch in Leopard
2. New GUI for OS X
3. New iLife w/iTunes HD
4. Blu-Ray Support
5. Leopard/iPhone integration
6. New Mac Minis and MacBook Pros,

and one more thing…

7. Ultra Portable iMac w/Multi touch screen

Some other notables:

MacNN has been a premiere site for Mac headlines for over a decade. They quote analyst Shaw Wu (please tell me he's a doctor) who mentions a recurring wish, a true Apple virtual machine for Windows. Interesting to me if only because it allows Apple to more explicitly go after Dell and the like for Windows computing market share. I'm not convinced, but hey, we'll know soon.

Apple Insider is another venerable news site, although unlike MacNN, there's some hardcore reporting here, consistently the best I see. They make several common observations, but here's one bit of hardcore reporting, this one razor-sharp:

A new track, named Content and Media, is tailored just to those developers who need to focus on getting their media to the Internet. Though offline production will be covered, most tracks will focus on blending Apple's latest software with the web -- ranging from web-only AJAX and WebObjects code to the mixed-media Dashboard in Mac OS X or even crafting websites made just for the iPhone.

Finally, you're going to want to get your WWDC Keynote Bingo card from Ars Technica.

If you're going to the keynote in person, print out the bingo card and play along live. The first person in the audience to win the game is expected to yell "BINGO!" loud enough so that the rest of us can hear it when we watch the keynote webcast video later. If we can't actually hear you, it's also acceptable if Steve Jobs hears you on stage and indicates this in some way...perhaps, by having you thrown out or "disappeared." Hey, no guts, no glory!

Fun for all.

There were a couple of (wholly legitimate) nits I had to pick with Apple's green announcement, but here's something I totally missed until Jason O'Grady pointed it out: Apple also divulged a technology advancement currently in development – LED backlight technology. (His emphasis.)

He continues:

Backlit LEDs provide higher brightness, significantly larger color gamut (greater than NTSC and EBU) – expanding the range of reproducible hues by as much as 45 percent, lower voltage and emissions. LED backlighting technology is currently integrated in Sony's 40" and 46" QUALIA series televisions. The technology, also called "Lumileds," is also known to reduce motion artifacts without a brightness or lifetime penalty.

He points out that Apple says very plainly We plan to introduce our first Macs with LED backlight technology in 2007. Not displays, but Macs. That means that we'll be seeing LED iMacs or notebooks by December 31, 2007, folks.

(BTW, Jason is one of the net's very first bloggers, with the O'Grady Power Page. Both this and his blog at cnet (linked above) are two of my daily stops.)

It could well be iMacs first. I might be remembering wrong, but isn't that where the Intel chips showed up first? I think so, because I remember a bunch of Avid engineers with iMacs on their desks saying yeah, it's crazy fast, but the screen is too small to do any real work. (I don't think that part was coincidental either, but that's a discussion for another day.)

Now here's the thing: I don't think Apple let that in "accidentally." Since nobody I know, or have seen in print, has been demanding that Apple hop on the LED bandwagon...because there's not one. So who's the announcement for? And seriously, make no mistake. This is an announcement. My guess is that it's aimed squarely at other developers: we may be behind you in greeny-ness for the next few years, but we're firing a technological shot over your bow as of today.

Of course, another side effect, maybe even the primary effect, was to make people start salivating for a new machine already. It worked for me.

Hacking was a term originally coined at MIT to descrive such classic pranks as emptying the deans office and reassembling it -- complete with rug -- in the middle of the frozen Charles River. (That illegal software thing is more properly called "cracking.") Hacking Apple TV is an entirely legal activity that makes it truly useful, starting with a bigger hard drive -- child's play for anyone reading this. A blog by the fine folks at makezine.com offer a fully illustrated tutorial called "Violating my Apple TV warranty in 4 easy steps."

Legal yes, warranty-voiding, yes, but seriously, dude. If you can find your way around a ribbon cable, you can do this. You should do this.

If you want to get really serious about hacking, like adding other applications (start with Firefox for browsing, Joost for free TV, and Quartz for added performance), the fine folks at the Tutorial Ninjas blog will happily help you out. Not child's play for everyone...but definitely a breeze for anyone who can use a command line in OS X.

This is just the very, very beginning of what's available from Apple TV hacks, with many more coming I'm sure. One of many blogs to keep up with Apple TV Hacks is (naturally enough) Apple TV Hacks. Another good one is AwkwardTV.

Note that ALL of these are blogs. When I tell people that virtually all of my time online NOT in The COW forums is at blogs, this kind of information is one of gazillions of reasons why. Blogs are where you'll find the best information breaking fastest -- one of gazillions of reasons why I'm so happy to see blogs at The COW.

Okay, final example of brilliant hacks presented via blogs, this time the Hack A Day blog. Decide in advance what you want to be drinking when you visit this page, because when you play the movie, you're going to laugh so hard that you'll eject said liquid through your nose. Appropriately enough, this hack is the robotic beer launching refrigerator. The movie takes a while to get interesting, but the accuracy tests will blow you away. THIS, friends, is a useful hack!

PS. re: MIT: you can get MIT's ENTIRE CURRICULUM, both undergrad and graduate, onine for free. It's the whole magilla: required reading lists, examples of student work, some (not all) classroom lectures, and more. Here's my pass/fail grading: the curriculum is awesome, but because MIT FAILS by only offering lectures in Real Media, you should PASS on those. But the curriculum is way cool.