Unless you have been living under a rock for the past 24-odd hours, you will have heard about the new Macbook Air ultra-slim laptop from Apple. Reactions seem to be falling into two categories:
Since everyone else is talking about it, I thought I would join in the fun.
Cartoon courtesy of Hugh MacLeod.
It would seem my assumptions about the target market for this site are a bit off.
I skim through my report from Google Analytics every day or so to observe traffic, but I had a bit of a closer look today and noticed something interesting: Safari is the most popular browser to view this site.
Here are some of the more pertinent figures:
Hi. My name’s Dave and I’m a Futzer.
Compulsive browsing – or as I prefer to it, learning – has a new name: Futzing (which I discovered via Web Worker Daily. Defined by Tara Hunt as:
the process by which one wanders around without aim, having conversations (with new and old friends), gathering random information, learning ostensibly useless knowledge and avoiding all tasks/duties clear and present.
Of course the only other definition I can find is:
a sound as if it is coming over the telephone or radio
…so I’m happy to accept Tara’s one.
I’ve been futzing for years. I use the internet to constantly learn, although I don’t always realise the value of that learning until later on. Invariably though, what I have learnt always comes in useful.
Prism – from Mozilla – tries to integrate web applications with your desktop by giving you an icon and dedicated browser window for each application you configure. That’s it.
I saw Prism when it was first announced, but never got around to looking at it. Then a recent post by Lee Tambiah reminded me about it and I actually got around to looking at it just now.
Installation is simple:
Nice and simple, eh?
There’s not really a lot else to say. It’s Gecko based, so it will work as well as Firefox. There’s no tabs, Extensions or Flash – I’ll let you decide if that’s good or bad.
For sites like Twitter, Pownce or Google Calendar (and at a pinch, Facebook) it’s great, but without tabs I couldn’t imagine using it for Google Reader, or Launchpad.
After a rather late (or more accurately early) night, I was awoken by a text from my friend asking when my Nokia N800 was arriving. I forewent answering him in favour of more sleep, only to be woken again, but this time by a delivery man with the item in question.
After upgrading it to OS2008 (thanks mrben), I started playing with it properly. So far I’m loving it, but I’ve not done that much with it besides surfing, mail and Skype but then it is an internet tablet.
Things I would like to see:
Are there any apps I should check out?
On a semi-related note yesterday I debranded my N95 and updated it to the latest firmware.
Oh, and of course this was posted from the N800! 
The photo in my previous post was taken with my shiny N95. The N95 is capable of uploading photos to Flickr (and other services), but when I tried to configure it it kept rejecting my credentials. It turns out you need to use a special one (not your normal Flickr/Yahoo! ones) which you can get by visiting their N95 configuration page.
Once I set my credentials accordingly, it all worked fine. I wonder if I’ll start using Flickr more now…
Two weeks.
Two full weeks.
For over two full weeks I’ve been trying – in vain – to delete my Twitter account, For some reason it finally(!) worked this morning. One less piece of clutter to worry about.
I’ve been doing a bit of autumn cleaning. I’ve dropped some feeds, some friends from Facebook and Pownce, and I’m dropping Twitter and Jaiku entirely (if they’ll ever let me delete the account without erroring).
I’m keeping Pownce, even though I don’t really use it. We’ll see in time if I change my mind.
It seems I have a surplus of Pownce invites. Any takers?