Universal Home Entertainment Remote for the iPhone

New Kinetix Rē IR based Universal Home Entertainment Remote for the iPhone
http://www.newkinetix.com/

My family is so sick of me praying out loud for a real, good, easy, cheap(ish) programmable universal remote for the iPhone. I knew the wait couldn’t be that long, and in fact, I told my friend Tom that 2010 would be the year that the Logitech Harmony and its ilk become dinosaurs.

Well, hey hey, here it is! Due for 1st quarter ‘010. I’m psyched!

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type management input needed

From: Marina
Date: January 12, 2010

We are trying to get industry feedback on why type management is an essential tool in the day-to-day business and production of graphic design. Why is type management important to your business? What type management tool do you use? We need validation for our argument that type management should be incorporated into any graphic design curriculum.

Well, I can't begin to imagine why someone would pose an argument against font management (I'll point out that "type management" doesn't google well in place of "font management"). How could one possibly deal with, evaluate, and compare thousands of fonts without management software? If you load them all into your Mac's font library all at once, you'll crash your user account — hard. OS X's built-in Font Book lets you turn fonts off and on, but they sit in your Library, clogging up your system. 

For a couple of years now, designers have been able to by pass the roughly $100 expense of the well known Suitcase and FontAgent with the free FontExplorerX by Linotype. It worked very very well, all the way through OS X 10.5, but last year, Linotype released FontExplorer Pro and announced discontinued support for the free version, left without OS X 10.6 or Adobe CS4 compatibility at v1.2.3. Ah well, all things must pass. At least it's $20 less than the competition.

So, we're kind of back where we started, with a few expensive options, but at least they have all matured into full-featured, efficient, and aesthetically pleasing packages, which have great tools for helping you pick the right type for the task. This AppleBlog article has a basic comparison of the apps. I have an old bias against Extensis Suitcase, which put designers through all kinds of bugs and crashes and incompatibilities through the evolution of Mac OS X. FontAgent has had an edge on Suitcase, but now the two appear neck-and-neck, with FontExplorer Pro taking a bit of a lead. The post makes the smart recommendation to kick the tires on all the trials.

Meanwhile, trying to design without one of these tools would be well nigh impossible, or at least mind-numbingly inefficient, and students should learn to get a handle on their font collection, even before they start trying to crank out their first document.

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Why I Believe Printers Were Sent From Hell to Make Us Miserable [Humor]

Too freakin’ funny!

Matthew Inman, aka “The Oatmeal,” is a former web designer turned comic artist. He subsists primarily on a diet of dead crickets and malt liquor. He also thinks that printers have a place in hell right next to unicorns.

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Google’s Free Public DNS

I know you’re a big fan of openDNS and I saw this article about Google free public DNS.http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/12/03/google_launches_free_public_dns.html

Maybe some would find it tragic that I actually got excited about this news. :-p

We do put OpenDNS‘s servers — 208.67.222.222, 208.67.220.220 — in everyone’s network configs, but I’ve always been a mite concerned that the service could shut down. I gotta assume there’s less chance of that with Google.

The reaction to Google DNS blogged by the founder of OpenDNS is brief but really instructive, and it allays my concern about their longevity. Also, he makes some good points about how their service is different.

NYTimes.com: Cable Freedom Is a Click Away

W00t! This Times article illustrates our latest favorite project: We’ve just finished our 3rd install of a Mac mini media server in the home. It’s beautiful. As this writer says, the mini replaces almost all your other home entertainment hardware. 

TECHNOLOGY / PERSONAL TECH 

  | December 10, 2009 
Cable Freedom Is a Click Away 
By NICK BILTON 
A computer, with software upgrades and a wireless keyboard and mouse, can replace cable service. 
I’m giving myself a little more time to budget for the right mini, because the one I use for my home server playground is a little underpowered, so I just recently bought an HDMI adapter for my laptops, so we are nightly plugging in a MacBook to the TV & stereo and watching all our stuff that way. It’s totally satisfying.

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Mac becomes more like dog

I used to use Salling Clicker with my Treo and my Sony Ericsson for remote control over Bluetooth. It was really cool that my Mac would recognize when my phone was nearby, and would start syncing or do other stuff that I thought handy. The iPhone doesn't do very much with Bluetooth, but this developer has figured out something pretty useful. Not bad for $8. 

http://themha.com/airlock/

Airlock allows your Mac to lock itself, plain and simple. Using your iPhone or iPod Touch, Bluetooth, and a smidgen of pixie dust, Airlock determines whether you're near your computer. When you leave the room – poof! – your Mac locks itself. “And when I come back?” You guessed it: your Mac unlocks. You can also customize Airlock to perform specific actions as you come and go – have your computer talk to you, log-in or out of iChat, walk the dog, and such.
 
(By the way, this is yet another tip I got from the picks by the guys on the MacBreak Weekly podcast (iTunes link). They're always mentioning useful stuff, and they maintain a nicely rounded perspective on the Mac, while still being obvious fans.) 

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Free transcription app for iPhone

Hey everybody this is pretty amazing. I am talking right now into Dragon Dictation software for the iPhone, made by the developers of the awesome Dragon NaturallySpeaking. it’s free right now and probably for a very limited time. If it continues to work I intend to use it for e-mail text messaging everything. Check it out!

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The difference between USB and FireWire

Here’s why we prefer that any backup drive purchased for a Mac have at least FireWire 400, if not 800 also:

FireWire has its own processor, where USB relies on the CPU of your computer to figure out how data should be transferred. So, when you’re moving files to and from a USB drive, it can affect the performance of your computer, while FireWire shoulders the burden itself. Since every Mac except the MacBook has FireWire, it’s worth the few extra bucks to get that on your external hard drive. 

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