AlphaBaby for Mac and iOS →

Great application to let a toddler bang away at the computer and produce interesting shapes and sounds. Since my guess is you’ll want to use this on an older Mac, you can download older versions here.

Watermarking PDFs with Mac OS Automator

Found this nifty action hidden in Mac OS Automator to watermark PDF documents. Start your workflow with Ask for Finder Items, then choose Watermark PDF Documents. You then select the image file to use as the watermark and control the layer, offset, scale, angle and opacity settings. The rest is up to you, noting you can add actions to encrypt the PDF or edit the metadata among other things. Great way to avoid the full version of Acrobat or other 3rd party solutions.

Really Apple? 35 screens of legal text to buy a song?

Sweetcron Installed in Lab

Experimenting with the open source Sweetcron in the lab as a lifestream or aggregation platform. Fairly simple LAMPS installation (assuming you remember to turn on mod_rewrite), with a good potential for customization.

Interesting that the project’s founder has switched to Posterous for his own site. Personally, I’m always amazed at how Tumblr (my gracious host) continues to evolve beyond that original concept.

Why I Didn’t Buy an iPad (Yet)

So I went to the store. I held one in my hand. And I didn’t buy it. I surprised my wife, and impressed myself. I figured by the time I actually saw it in person, I would have passed the event horizon and surely have brought one home. Yes, it helped that the 64GB models had been sold out, but I could have found one at another nearby location if I really wanted to.

Why didn’t I buy it?

1.  I need a multi-user device. Yes, I know if Apple allows for that, families would buy less iPads, since everyone currently needs their own. Well, this family didn’t buy any because of it. I’m not about to have my baby daughter (who’s grown up using an iPhone touch screen), playing her games, watching family videos, and then sending random tweets or composing gibberish emails to my boss from my account. If it could support multiple user accounts, I’d buy it.

2.  I like to write and draw. Multi-touch is awesome, don’t get me wrong, but for me to carry the iPad to meetings and take notes, I need to be able to write and draw on it, with the precision of a stylus. If it could replace a paper notebook, I’d buy it.

3.  I’m focused on content production. While I consume content, I don’t need another screen to do so. Yes, the experience is very elegant, and if I was in to luxury or had to travel frequently, I would have bought it. Same for the MacBook Air a couple years ago. But luckily for my wife, I’m a little too conservative for that. If the device could sit on a desktop easel and take a wireless keyboard and mouse (thus replacing my laptop), I’d buy it.

4.  Lastly, there was no killer app for me. So far, everything I would want to do on an iPad I can do on an iPhone, just with a small screen. Check/compose email, use Twitter, play a couple games, or watch movies in bed or on a plane. The on-screen keyboard is bigger, but not tremendously easier to use. If an app comes out that I simply must have, then I’d buy it.

So for now, I’ll stay on the sidelines observing how the apps evolve and if any of my use cases above will be supported. I’ll just have to make due with my iPhone, MacBook, Mac Pro, iMac, AppleTV and the MacBook Pro at work.

"In every field, there comes a time when we stop paying attention to examples of technical success. With the first telephones, televisions, and personal computers, people passed through an early stage of fascination with the medium itself, rather than the information being communicated."

— Galen Rowell

My (Somewhat) Paranoid Home Data Backup Plan

Despite working in corporate IT for over 12 years, I’ve never been comfortable nor proud of my data backup strategy at home. That recently changed and since I’ve been fielding an increasing number of questions about how best to backup stuff at home, I’ve posted my (somewhat) paranoid plan (it earned that moniker once I introduced RAID) to the private site. I’d encourage my IT friends to chime in.

Alfresco on Ubuntu Installed in the Lab

I’m very excited to have Alfresco running in the lab alongside SharePoint. These technologies are a key element of an enterprise content management (ECM) strategy and culture. More than simply reducing risk or cost to the company, a strong ECM environment can leverage a company’s information assets and be a critical differentiator in this information-based economy.

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More grid fun over at brianmcbreen.com.

I seem to get restless every couple of months with my site design, so he’s the latest ( creatively named “grid”). You can see the historic designs on Flickr.

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I love this clever laptop case, the BookBook.

"As We May Think" & the Memex →

Dr. Vannevar Bush’s 1945 article is amazing to read on a computer connected to the world wide web. Even more so on an iPhone.

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Witness my triumphant return to the links today thanks to Golfshot on the iPhone. Nifty GPS-enabled range finding with aerial photos and lots of statistics. Yes, I need plenty of practice.

Mac Plus Emulation & HyperCard on Mac Pro

You’ll always remember your first. For me, it was a Mac Plus. Purchased by my parents as a family Christmas gift in the mid-eighties, it later ended up in my room and quickly became the center of my universe.

The killer app for me was always HyperCard. Of course at the time I had no idea how prescient that experience would be, since the hypertext driven world wide web did not exist yet nor did my resulting career.

While’s I’ve kept that original Mac in working order (including the original 20MB external hard drive), at some point parts are bound to fail and my trips down memory lane will be over (especially attacking conveys in the Pacific).

Enter Mini vMac, a Mac Plus emulator for modern computers. Now assuming I can successfully migrate the contents of that SCSI hard drive (connected to a computer with LocalTalk but no TCP/IP networking) to the disk image running in the emulator, my Mac Plus can live on indefinitely (that is until 10 years from now when I’m emulating Mac OS X to run the Mac Plus emulator).

It’s only took a couple of hours to get cooking. Notice the top (black and white window) is actually the Mac Plus (running a HyperCard stack I created in the early 90’s), with the purple window being VNC giving me access to the desktop of a headless G4 running OS 9 (for the SetFType utility that does not run on Intel Macs), then some OS X finder windows with access to the G4 shared drive to move the disk images back and forth, and of course Safari with the emulator site.

Note how much more real estate I get to use these days compared to the original 9 inch screen. It really is amazing when you step back and think about it.

Following a fresh install of System 6.0.8 from Apple, I had success! Welcome back Larry, John, Steve and Bruce. Mounting disks is easy, just drag them onto the emulated screen and they mount. Don’t have to worry about only having one floppy drive!

And for those a little more curious, back in my early teens I developed several HyperCard projects, including this piece of shareware that generated random yet pronounceable words (perfect for passwords) based on a consonant/vowel/number structure you could customize.

I’ve toyed with the idea of getting the physical Mac Plus onto the internet via a LocalTalk to Ethernet bridge, or perhaps just getting the SCSI hard drive accessible via some kind of adapter to Firewire. I’d be curious if anyone else has undergone a similar effort—let me know. In the meantime, I’m off to sink a convoy!

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This notice from Twitter about their new Retweet feature gave me a chuckle based on the RT it highlighted.