Twitter for those who don’t get it

Much as I had vainly cast aside the notion that I just didn’t get it the whole while, everything finally clicked for me when I started following people who were referred to by others I was following. @bynkii posted a tweet for the benefit of @flargh, so I followed @flargh and so on. Before long I was watching a little network of people commenting about their day, and about each others’ days. People weren’t casting their 140 characters into the void without reason after all, there was interaction!

With hindsight, my problem was that I had been thinking of Twitter as blogging in the small. But with no followers, there was no-one to read what I was writing, and thus nothing to engage me to take part in it actively. Twitter isn’t like blogging at all it’s more like instant messaging… if I had set the @Replies setting in my twitter profile to “show me all @replies” sooner, I would have certainly noticed these little pockets of conversation and started following the people being addressed. And some of them would have reciprocated. And I would have being taking part instead of watching, bemused.

Twitter for those who do get it

And now that I have some followers to read my tweets, and occasionally tweet back at me about them, I not only mention the minutiae of my day to the annoyance of everyone else who doesn’t get it yet, but I take part in conversations with other people who are following me. It’s kinda neat!

Now that’s all very well, but I want to incorporate my part of the twitterverse into my online life. I want to build my blog readership by tweeting when I put up a new blog post. I want to build my twitter followers by engaging my blog readers enough to be interested in what I’m comment about with other like-minded people at twitter.

I thought I’d found a great way to do all of that (and more!) with [Alex King]‘s WordPress [Twitter Tools]. I have it set up to automatically tweet new blog posts on my behalf, and to collect summaries of my tweets into daily posts. Except that having my blog posts drowned out incessant trivia and my half of various out of context conversations is more likely to drive you, gentle reader, away from my blog that to turn you from a twitter don’t get it into get it over a few days.

The problem is that twitter conversations are essentially throw away, and don’t generally have enough substance to generate further blog comments. Essentially they don’t belong in a post. I think what I really need is a way to show my last handful of tweets in the sidebar. Any pointers much appreciated!

Over the next few days, I’ll delete the Twitter daily summaries, and search for a wordpress rss widget to integrate into azazil, so as to try to pique your interest in Twitter. I might even write a post to try and persuade you to sign up for a free account and follow me at twitter. I’m one of the many people who will reciprocate the follow bit on anyone that follows me, especially as I’m now painfully aware that twitter just doesn’t click until you reach a critical mass of followers to pull you into the never-ending twitterverse conversation…

Imagine [...] an Apple-designed next-generation [...] embedded runtime for net-based apps that “kills” Flash [...] by out-classing it[;] enabling Mac OS X- and iPhone-quality user experiences in apps that reside on a server, not the client.

There are two things that split applications between those that work well in the browser, and those that work better as native desktop applications:

1. The richness of the interface a developer can provide;
2. Whether network access is an integral part of the application.

John’s next-gen net application runtime certainly solves the first, and if it can truly provide an equivalent user experience to the same application running natively, then what would be the point of writing Cocoa applications in the first place? Network access. I don’t care how well written google mail is, if I can’t search my mail archives or queue a draft email for later delivery while I’m away from a network connection, then I’ll stick with Apple Mail!

I’m sure that we’re only a decade (or two at the most) away from always-on high-speed mobile network access (probably from telcos whose current business model is falling apart slowly as the population discovers internet telephony), and all Apple needs to do is have a great web-app SDK in place well before then. Perhaps that’s what they were trying to do by not releasing a Cocoa SDK for the iPhone, but until those two things that prevent certain web-apps from working as well as an equivalent native application are solved, few users will want to forego their native applications.

Unfortunately, the browser market is still splintered enough that simply providing John’s next-gen net-app runtime isn’t enough to win mass user mind-set. Apple is, however, ideally placed to do so. In addition to providing a rich user experience and clean development environment, Apple can showcase their runtime by using it to host the applications on some future revision of the iPhone, along with an reimplementation of the dotMac web interface, and some of their key software. Say, iTunes and iCal? You can bet that FireFox will follow suit with their own implementation, and if Microsoft doesn’t want to miss out on the party altogether, they had better follow suit before all their users migrate away from Internet Explorer to either FireFox or Safari.

Long before all the parts of this future come together, we have the promise of Google Gears to make running web-apps without net access less painful, and Web 2.0 technologies to make our user experience a lot nicer while we are online. The rest is just a simple matter of programming :-)

The back to my mac feature looks like something I’ll be able to make great use of on the road, but I’m also pretty excited about:

1. the new scripting bridge that will allow me to write Cocoa applications with Python (which I know), Applescript (which I should know) and Ruby (which I’d like to learn);
2. the new Automator watch-me feature that will record and play back UI interactions with an application;
3. lots more stuff being synced over .mac to make keeping my desktop and laptop in step even easier;
4. live document previews in finder icons, so that converting an image from tiff to png won’t leave an anonymous image icon anymore;
5. Dtrace instrumenting in the libraries and kernel (I know, I’m a geek);
6. Time Machine for automated backups.

There’s lots more goodness in apples 300+ features page, but these are the ones that really make me want to upgrade.

Note that if you bought a new machine this month, Apple’s Up-To-Date Programme will send you a copy of Leopard for just $9.95 (£5.95 if you’re in the UK) saving you $119 (£79)!

Apple are taking preorders already, but I will be waiting until I visit Dallas in a few weeks before I get mine. Let’s see, US$129 + 6.25% Texas sales tax comes to $137.07 in Dallas, compared to £85 or $172.55 (at todays rate of US$2.03)… that’s more than a 25% discount if I wait! Actually, since I am paid in US$, my bank charges me closer to US$2.20 for every UK£ I buy (after commission and wire transfer fees at each end of the transaction), so in real terms it would take around US$187 from my US salary to buy a copy of Leopard in England, costing me 36% more than the US price in real terms. Actually, I’ll probably buy the family version for US$199, and split the cost with my Dad, since there are now 4 macs in my family!

UPDATE: Amazon is taking orders for Leopard with a $20 discount and free shipping, making the real cost of buying in the UK a whopping 47% more expensive!

On the bright side, the cost of living will return to affordable levels when I leave England again in a little over a month :-)

24 minutes later, after weaving hurriedly in and out of the busy Saturday traffic on my MT01, I arrived at the store :-) The assistant brought a box in a bag from the storeroom, and informed me in hushed tones that I should put it in my pocket inconspicuously as there had been a spate of muggings outside the centre that ended with newly purchased iPods being liberated from their owners :-( I guess I was sufficiently inconspicuous to stay under the Birmingham iPod Liberation Front reconnaissance radar. Or being 6′ tall in biker leathers made me a high risk target… either way, I am now the proud owner of a rather fabulous 16GB iPod Touch.

The net is already awash with glowing reviews, so I needn’t labour that point here, except to say that I keep finding more neat little things in the interface that show how attention to detail can make a huge difference to the user experience. My latest revelation, and something I haven’t seen mention of elsewhere, was discovering that repositioning the cursor in a line of text is not the horror story one would imagine (remember that your finger obscures the text you are gesturing over), because a helpful magnifying glass element pops up above the insertion point showing the very thing that your finger is covering, and tracks back and forth as you slide your finger across the text. Pretty cool, huh?

Anyway, iPod salivation aside, I was in two minds about whether to try to put together an iPhone (and by implication iPod Touch) style theme for azazil.net; on the one hand, a major feature of Safari Mobile is the ability to browse the actual websites you can see on a full-size computer, and not some dumbed down subset of the real internet like WAP; on the other hand, sites that have an iPhone optimised view to serve their full content genuinely are more pleasant to use on the iPod. So, for now at least, I’ve installed Content Robot’s iWPhone plugin to make azazil render as shown in the headline screenshot for iPhone users…

Having been on the road for almost a year now, I haven’t been able to keep up with my favourite shows which run on different schedules in different timezones, and neither have I been able to get at my DVD collection which is in storage somewhere in Herefordshire. Worse, I let myself start watching some new shows in America that won’t make it to air in the UK for a few months at least.

Thankfully, there is some excellent software for the Mac to help me get my fix of the movies and television shows I’d like to see — and better yet, I don’t have to sit through 3 minutes of commercials for every 7 minutes of actual programming. For a few months now, I’ve gone without a television altogether or rather, when I have had access to a television I’ve only used it as a giant monitor:

1. Handbrake

Before galavanting off around the world, I ripped thirty of my DVDs to disk in iPod video friendly resolutions. Some were old favourites that I hadn’t watched for a long time, and the rest were from DVDs I had bought but not watched yet. At this resolution, a 90 minute movie takes up about 500Mb on disk. Because I keep my iMac in England set for region 2 disks, and take my macbook on the road set to region 1, the ripping process makes it easier to manage my movie collection and play the movies back on either machine regardless of whether the region of the DVD matches the region setting of the machine I’m watching on.

I was thinking of adding the new 160Gb AppleTV to my travel gear as a mobile repository for movies and tv shows I wanted to take with me, and to add to as I moved around. But, it needs an HDTV to play back on… a luxury not yet present in many furnished apartments or hotel rooms. I got by perfectly well using my video iPod with a TV lead for the last year though, so I’m happy to wait another few years until HDTVs are more widely available.

Price: $0

2. iTunes Store

The selection of movies and TV shows in the UK iTunes Store still pretty much sucks, but the American store is packed with great shows that, in some cases, will never even make it over here. Season premiers are often free, to entice you in to buy the rest of the season, and of course there’s a whole slew of video podcasts to download. The iTunes store makes it easy to watch what I want to watch, and when I want to watch it, without the annoying commercial breaks, and all at a pretty reasonable cost in the US (or a more expensive but affordable cost in the UK store).

I’m currently watching LA Ink and Human Weapon from the US store.

Price: $0 to $9.99 for a full movie

3. XTorrent

By now, there are plenty of BitTorrent clients for the mac, but this was the first good one that came along, and has lots of cool functionality like bandwidth throttling, torrentcast subscription and downloading only some of the files from a torrent. This is the best way to get a hold of TV shows from studios that refuse to provide digital content to their customers.

Price: $24

4. TVShows

This little application allows you to subscribe to your favourite shows, and then runs quietly in the background waiting for episodes to show up on BitTorrent. When they do arrive, it tells XTorrent in my case (or whatever client you are using) to queue it up for download. Having left my DVDs of Alias in storage without the foresight to rip the unwatched episodes of the final season before leaving the country, this application was a lifesaver in locating and downloading them in the background for me so that I could still watch them. It might also be useful to you if your rips are not in the resolution you wanted, or you simply don’t want to leave your computer running at full pelt for days on end to do the rips in the first place.

Price: $0

5. Visual Hub

It’s a sad fact that many of the torrents I want to watch will arrive on my computer in a non-iTunes compatible format, which makes transferring it to my iPod for watching with the TV Out cable a no-no :-( That’s where Visual Hub comes in as a one-stop transcoder, that will convert from pretty much any format to just about any other format. The latest version even has an output mode optimised for the iPhone. I’ve also used it to convert my old mpeg rips to the smaller and better looking H264 format.

Price: $23.32

6. Flip4Mac

Pretty much everyone should know about this codec by now. Again, it’s a sad fact that many of the videos I find on the internet are in the awful windows media format, wmv. Rather than contaminating my gorgeous Mac with Microsofts third-rate media player, which can’t handle skimming through a video at speed without stuttering or crashing, Flip4Mac installs a wmv codec into the Quicktime player. So all those wmv’s on the ‘net will play through the Quicktime browser plugin too!

Price: $0

7. DivX CODEC

There are hordes of different codecs to download and install if you have the time to track them down. In practice, with the Flip4Mac wmv codec and this DivX codec, I rarely bump into a file that won’t play in Quicktime, and when I do I can almost always convert it into something that will play using Visual Hub.

Price: $0

8. VLC

VLC, however, is my plan B. When all else fails, the surprisingly mac-like VLC will play almost any video format you’re ever likely to meet. For a long time VLC was the only way to play QuickTime movies in full screen without ponying up $40 for a QT-Pro license, though Apple haven’t done that for a long time now.

VLC also plays DVDs from either a disk image or the optical drive itself, and best of all it’s entirely Open Source!

Price: $0

9. Realplayer

I admit it. I’m an American Football nut. I’ll even admit that I’ve been supporting the ailing Oakland Raiders for the last 15 years. For some reason (probably an expensive licensing deal), all the free game highlights at NFL.com as well as the downloadable games for subscribers come in RealPlayer format, which is so proprietary that not even VLC can play it. This is the last line of defence for when there is absolutely no other way to watch a video on my mac.

Price: $0

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• the edges of the top case are splitting under the weight of my wrists at either side of the track pad;
• my tab key only works 90% of the time; the whole thing often sleeps spontaneously when I’m pressing the left command or option keys;
• about half the time, when I eject a DVD it pokes out by a centimeter for a fraction of a second and sucks back in again;
• just before losing all power when the battery is completely drained it still reports 13% charge;
• my logfile is filling up with disk IO errors;
• and worst of all, the frequency of kernel panics requiring a cold reboot is increasing… currently at about once a week.

While I was living in Gloucester this Spring (before the floods), I arranged a repair with Equinox Computers (an authorised apple repair centre), who kept the machine for almost a month until I collected it the day before we flew to Florida. They had allegedly replaced the optical drive and the logic board, and indeed the machine was relatively well behaved for a short time, but soon degraded back to the condition I’ve described above. And they plainly hadn’t fixed the cracked top case, which was only split on the right side at that time. They were pleasant enough, and I had no trouble getting through on the phone, but they just plain sucked at turning around the repair. Don’t use them.

New macbook

Armed with my shiny new Apple Procare and Extended Warranty certificates that I bought in America in anticipation of needing more surgery, I took the machine to the Genius Bar at the Birmingham Apple Store this morning. If only I’d done that last time. The resident Genius spent 15 or 20 minutes looking at the machine right there, and then told me he wanted to replace… (take a deep breath):

• the entire case
• the optical drive
• the hard drive
• the logic board
• the battery
• the battery connector and sleep switch

Which, when it comes back in a few days, by my reckoning leaves me with just the memory, screen and wireless card from the original machine! Thanks to my Apple Care Certificate, all at no charge. And thanks to the Pro Care Certificate, I move right to the head of the queue as soon as the parts come in on Monday, and should have the machine back on Tuesday or Wednesday with any luck. Better yet, by my understanding the logic board will be the latest revision, eliminating all the rev. a related problems that have plagued me for the last year. Hurray for Apple customer care!

New iPod

Talking of bad luck with expensive gadgetry… Rather stupidly, I left my 5G iPod in my shirt pocket while I was putting the Harley’s into storage in Orlando a week or so back, and as I leant over to unstrap some boxes from the rack, the iPod fell to its death on the concrete floor :-( Since I was at the Apple Store already today, I spent a happy half an hour with an iPod Touch they had on display. Feeling light headed after the excellent treatment from the Genius Bar, the temptation to buy one was too much. Undeterred that they had sold out, I ordered one anyway to collect when I go back for my new macbook next week.

Effectively you earn “syndication credits” based on the traffic at your blog, and those credits are used to put links to your blog in the BlogRush widget displayed by other blogs related to your own, where related is determined by a broad category you choose when you sign up, and by some magic formula applied by the BlogRush folks.

It’s a great way to advertise your blog without spending actual money, and judging by the number of blogs that have adopted it already it will be a huge success.

In addition to the syndication credits you earn from your own page views, you also get bonus syndication credits from the traffic of anyone you refer using a direct referral link you are given when you sign up yourself, and another bonus from the traffic of anyone they refer and so on for up to 10 levels! To take full advantage of this, you’ll want to sign up as soon as possible so that you have more chance that other bloggers who visit your site won’t have already signed up through someone else’s referral link. So, what are you waiting for? Sign up already!

When it comes to the new iLife ’08, there is a strange anomaly between the prices at the UK Apple Store and the US Apple Store — about 23% infact: before we left Florida, I picked up a copy for $85 (after tax), and yet if I’d waited until I got back to Blighty the very same box would have cost me £55, or around $110 at the current exchange rates. I concede that it is more expensive to do business from a brick-and-mortar store here in England, but I was also thinking about purchasing an activation key from the online Apple Store for the iWork ’08 30 day trial disk in my iLife box. The cost for a 16 character string? £55. And yet, if I buy the very same activation key from the US Store: $79 (+ $6 tax)… since I’m lucky enough to do my banking in America, I’ll take that 23% discount thank you very much!

But, I digress… I hadn’t really had the chance to spend any time with the new iLife apps until I started transferring the files from my macBook to my iMac in preparation for sending my ailing laptop in for more surgery. The new iPhoto really is mightily impressive! As it upgraded my previously unbrowsable 2400 photo library (partially categorised into manual folders), everything was automatically sorted into “events” by date. It took me another half-an-hour to go through 100 resulting events and add titles (Padmanabhapuram Palace, Kovalam Beach, Kanyakumari… I have a lot of pictures from India!), splitting or merging some of the automatic events as I went. And now, browsing through my photo library is a breeze!

Now that it was so easy to find my way around my pictures, I decided to clean some of them up, and another hour later, with some help from iPhoto, I’d reduced the number of pictures to 2104. Duplicates were easy to find, and there is as nice feature to hide the photographs I don’t want to see most of the time (for those that were too similar to others, or would require a lot of touchup work to be pretty again). Here is the raw image from my camera, taken from a houseboat on the backwaters of Kerala a few years ago. With the much improved photo editing tools I was able to fix the contrast, straighten the horizon, remove an unwanted piece of hemp in the forground, and reframe the picture in literally just a minute… the difference is HUGE!

Another fabulous new feature is the ability to upload directly from iPhoto into my very own Web Gallery hosted on .Mac, which is much easier than the fuss of scaling, uploading and captioning I have to go through to get those very same pictures into Flickr. The interface of the Web Gallery is very slick too, take a look at my test gallery here for a live preview. I’m considering migrating the photo section of azazil over from Flickr, since updating directly from iPhoto is easy enough that I’ll be able to stay on top of it.

If the enhancements to the other applications are even half as good as this (and I’m only really scratching the surface of iPhoto here), then iLife ’08 is a bargain even with the 23% rip-off-Britain tax ;-) I can’t wait to sink my teeth into GarageBand now.

It did, however, get me thinking about what I’d like to see in the ultimate convergence device to replace all the electronics I carry with me around the world at the moment:

1. Laptop

This one is a given, as without it I’m unable to earn a living. In addition to the obvious uses for internet and email access, I use it as an ssh client to reach work. I need a Unix environment for my software development (primarily for the FSF these days). Tave and I left an enormous CD collection behind when I started traveling, as several hundred discs takes up a lot of luggage room. Instead, around 70Gig of my drive is filled with all of our ripped music. The laptop also serves as a television for me to watch DVDs or downloaded shows at times, since I lack the patience to sit through all of the commercials on regular television.

2. Video iPod

In an effort to reduce the amount of stuff I travel with, I nearly got rid of my iPod. However, I left my library of a few hundred DVDs behind, and since a ripped movie takes up around a gigabyte of disk space there isn’t enough room left on my laptop to keep even a few movies as well as all our music, so my iPod actually holds around 100 of my favourite movies and TV shows (as ripped from my DVD collection). With a special cable I often watch them on a hotel TV set. I’m also a member of audible.com which only supports playback on a few select devices, one of them being the iPod. The last bit of space on my iPod contains almost 100 audio books that I can listen to if the whim takes me.

3. Cell Phone

At the moment I have a Sony Ericsson w810i, which aside from being a great phone is actually a pretty good MP3 player. Unfortunately it doesn’t support audible.com content nor music bought from the iTunes store, but I can easily burn and re-rip content if I need to remove the copy protection in order to listen to it from my phone. Ericsson phones are very well supported by Apple, so I also sync my address books between this phone and my laptop, as well as keeping a paper copy in my Moleskine Planner. I don’t use the calendar or todo list synchronisation though, since I run my GTD system on paper.

The w810 also makes a halfway decent camera outdoors during the day, and iPhoto recognises when I attach the phone and automatically offers to move any new pictures I’ve taken onto my laptop, which is kinda nice.

4. External Drives

Although the internal memory of my phone is ample for a couple of days worth of photography, the 1Gig memory stick doesn’t hold a great deal of music. I bought an additional 4Gig stick with the intention to collect several more over time and put different moods of music on each. The idea was that I could still have access to everything I used to store on my iPod, without having to carry my iPod everywhere too. The phone actually becomes quite flakey with such a large card in it though, so that didn’t really work out.

In addition to the memory sticks I also have a 1Gig thumb drive with an encrypted partition containing backups of my ssh keys and the like. It’s also the easiest way to move files between machines when I don’t want to take my laptop with me.

Although iTunes forms the hub for transferring movies and music between various devices, I don’t have enough drive space for all these DVDs and CDs inside the laptop. Ever since my horrible backup recovery experience, I carefully keep all my ripped movies and TV shows on an 80Gig external 2.5″ drive (which are effectively backed up to the iPod), and use a similar 160Gig drive as a bootable backup of my laptop drive.

5. Wireless Access Point

I carry an airport express on the road with me, in case I find myself at a hotel that only supplies wired access to the internet. I don’t especially like to be tethered to the wall, and Tave likes it even less if she has to wait for me to finish work before she can access the internet. As a matter of fact, our current apartment only has a cable modem with a single ethernet port, so the AP has been invaluable throughout our stay in Orlando.

6. Digital Camera

Actually, since mine fell to its death from Tave’s pocket on I-17 last year, I’ve been getting by with just my phone camera. That said, if Tave didn’t have a decent digital camera of her own to lend me occasionally, I’d still need a quality camera of my own to add to the electronic gubbins that travels most everywhere with me :-)

7. Satellite Navigation

Actually, since mine fell to its death from my Harley on I-75 last week, I’ve been getting lost quite frequently. Before that, my GPS was a vital piece of kit that came everywhere with me, and made traveling through foreign parts completely stress free. I suppose I will need another one before we travel out of England again…

Convergence Device

For quite some time I’ve fantasized about a single device to replace most of the gubbins, and the biggest reason I’m resisting the iPhone is because it doesn’t allow me to ditch any of the devices I already have to carry around — except my w810 of course, but that is smaller than the iPhone anyway, so I don’t gain anything :-(

Realistically, I think I’d still need three devices, but even that would drastically cut down on the amount of chargers, plug socket adaptors and interface leads I have to lug around with me, especially if everything is well integrated…

1. The Brain

I’d be happy for something in the form-factor of the iPhone here, or even as large as my poor neglected Zaurus SL-C1000, but with the nice iPhone multi-touch interface so I don’t have to scramble around for a stylus to use it effectively. I’m conceding the extra size and weight because it is effectively an ultra-portable laptop in a tiny case without the laptop keyboard and screen. That is, it should at least have:

• a low-end laptop-class processor
• a GPS transceiver and decent mapping data & software
• a quality iSight class or better webcam and a reasonable quality camera (they may use the same lens, or not)
• GSM and/or 3G phone cell network capability
• Gigabit Ethernet socket
• 802.11n wifi capability with VOIP
• stereo bluetooth headset support
• a USB 2 or Firewire socket
• a good amount of solid state disk (let’s say 8Gig)
• a multi-format memory card slot that will take at least UMD movies and micro-SD cards
• a headphone socket that doubles as a TV-Out like the video iPod
• Unix underpinnings (ideally OSX, but linux would do)
• at least enough battery power to go 24 hours between charges if used to: make and receive a few short calls; take a couple of dozen photos; and check email a few times throughout the day.

The idea is that when I have this in my pocket, I can use it to listen to music, conduct phone-calls, or listen to directions from the GPS software through a stereo bluetooth headset. I can use the small screen to watch movies stored on the internal memory or on a small library of memory cards I carry in my pocket. I can also take good enough photos and home movies that I don’t need a separate camera.

When I get back to my apartment, I can plug it into the TV and watch movies on the large screen, or take a better look at the day’s photos, or stream music into the hi-fi.

When I’m at home or in range of public wifi I can make phonecalls using VOIP, and failing that I can fall back to the local GSM or 3G network.

When I’m out on my bike, or in the car, the brain operates as a GPS that can speak directions to me even if it is in my jacket pocket. I can always pull over if I need to reprogram it to take me to the nearest gas station before continuing the original journey. Since it is also connected to the cell network, it automatically routes me around traffic jams or road-works detours, and can be set to report slow progress back to the network to help other road users.

2. The Base

This is just a smart port replicator to make picking up the brain on my way out, or reconnecting it when I get home, as easy as possible. Imagine it as an oversized iPod dock with extra ports on the back. The base is connected to the mains, and recharges the brain while it is docked. I also connect the ports in the back of the base to my router or modem with an ethernet cable, and to my TV’s video-in sockets so that I don’t need to be constantly unplugging and replugging several leads every time I move the brain. There is also a USB socket on the back of the base which I can use to connect a printer, a scanner, a networked hard-drive, or even a USB hub in turn connected to all of the above!

For long vacations, the base and the brain can be clipped together securely and the pair carried around as an oversized single unit until I land in one location for long enough to make it worthwhile separating them for a time.

3. The Face

I do travel with the face and take it to the coffee shop to work occasionally, but usually just leave it in the safe at my apartment when I go out. It effectively turns the brain into a fully fledged laptop when it is docked. Since 802.11n has ample bandwidth for streaming HD movies, I see no reason to require physical docking with the brain. In fact, that would be a disadvantage, because when I get home I just slot the brain into the base and it joins my wireless network to talk to other devices in my house (or hotel room), including the face itself. If I want to sit and type on the porch, then I leave the brain inside, and take the face outside to interact with.

Effectively the face actually looks like a regular laptop, with a nice full-sized keyboard and a 13″ or so widescreen LCD display. It has an optical drive, and it’s own battery plus wifi capability to talk to the brain where all the processing is done before the screen images are streamed back to the face for my viewing pleasure. There is no real processor in the face except some minimal electronics to allow me to play DVDs in the optical drive directly without using the brain to decode them. Without a hard drive and a processor, the face doesn’t even get warm when in heavy use so I can use it on my lap for hours.

There is no need for internal speakers since the face can either send the sound over bluetooth to my headset, or back to the brain for streaming to the hi-fi or television connected to it directly or via the dock. In fact when I’ve finished work and come in off the porch to relax with a beer and watch the shows I downloaded last night I can either use the the face as a giant remote control, or connect it to the dock with a spare USB cable for recharging and sit on the coach with the brain to control what I’m watching on the television.

Traveling Light

Thanks to the revolution of hardware convergence I can take just one of each of the above, plus a backup drive for my data with me from hotel to hotel, and either connect the dock to the hotel television or just use the face as a portable TV if necessary.

When I go out on for the day (or indeed on a 5 day road trip!), the brain acts as my sat nav, my camera, my cell phone, my video iPod and my mp3 player. If I’m not going to use it heavily, that’s all I need! I might also take a charger if I want to use it a lot before I get back, and I can also take the face with me if I might want to do a lot of typing or need a bigger screen to watch in my tent at night.

All of this is perfectly feasible using today’s technology with good design and clever software, and I imagine things could be made considerably smaller and lighter than I have described. If you want to launch a start-up off the back of this idea, my only request is that you put me in the beta-testing programme with the prototypes, and give me the final retail versions…

Over to You!

First up, if you’re a whizz with photoshop, I’d love to see mockups of what this kit could actually look like. Especially if it were designed by Jonathan Ive ;-)

Something like this is exactly what I need to minimise my own electronic gubbins. What would need to be added or changed to meet your needs?

Unquestionably, TextMate is Emacs reimagined for the Mac, and it’s about time I stopped chickening out and running for Emacs when I can’t quite bend TextMate to my will. So, I plan to write the missing modes and distribute and maintain them from here. I picked on what looked to be an easy start with a Texinfo mode, although it turns out to have such a huge number of directives (each with slightly different syntax from the others) that it became a much larger project than I had anticipated.

I see that the TextMate wiki have an outstanding request for implementation of a texinfo mode, and I hope this goes some way towards filling that need. Please bear in mind, gentle reader, that this is my first TextMate mode, and as such is certainly rough around the edges. I would, however, be delighted to receive contributions to improve it in the form of patches and/or constructive criticism. At the moment it provides (very comprehensive) syntax highlighting, a template document and support for the symbol list to jump directly to any node in the current file. There are not yet any commands or macros.

Download the Texinfo bundle here

Unless I am very much mistaken, you simply unpack the archive and then double click on the icon install it into your personal TextMate bundle library.