Category Archives: technology

April Fools?

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The outlaws at ThinkSecret are reporting today that Apple will release Tiger on April 1st, the next major upgrade to the OSX operating system (full feature rundown for v10.4 here).

Apple will officially announce Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger’s release at an event in early April and will begin shipping the operating system within two or three weeks afterwards, Think Secret has learned. Apple has previously only stated that Tiger will ship during the first half of the 2005.

I’m hoping this new release helps out my Mom with the promising set of new disability features built-in.

Xcellent XPS

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It’s taken a bit of time to get around to blogging this, but Amy and I bought a new home PC recently. My old Dimension 8100 was showing it’s age (bought in 2000), and Dell had a great sale on President’s Day a few weeks back. All told, I saved almost 50% off the normal price on a brand-spanking new Dell XPS Gen 4 machine. Yes, that’s the one with the glowing faceplate, aimed at the gamer market. And yes, the front panel backlight can be changed to any of eight diferent colors. Silly, but cool nontheless. It’s a sweet piece of machinery. The specs:

P4 650 w/ hyperthreading (3.4 GHz, 800 front-side bus)
2GB 533MHz dual-channel DDR2 SDRAM
ATI Radeon x850XT/256MB Video Card
250GB SATA/7200RPM HD
Microsoft Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005
16x DVD/CD Burner, Double-Layer write capable

Anyway, the machine absolutely rocks. Most of the settings were fairly easy to migrate from the old machine (although some of our email seems to be lost to the ether), but boy oh boy – games run like butter on this bad boy. I’ve cranked up Far Cry and the Half-Life2 Demo to their absolute maximium, and there is no lag whatsoever. Battlefield Vietnam is a new-found joy to play. And I cannot wait for Band of Brothers to be released this week.

Related: AnandTech XPS Review
Related: Dell.com XPS Page

Delicious Monster in the News Again

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Seattle NBC Affiliate KING-5 visited Delicious Monster HQ (the Zoka coffee shop) recently. Mike Matas posted the 90-second Quicktime — it’s a nice promo for the boys from DM. Now if I can only find some time to scan all my stuff. Trouble is, my Wi-Fi gets weak in the back room of my house where all my books are. So I’m gonna have to methodically cart them to the office at the front. A small price to pay to fill my library though. My earlier posts on Delicious Monster here and here.

The RSS Challenge

Lots of interesting things happening in the RSS space. MediaPost Daily (free registration required) has an interesting run-down on the anxiety level among mostly ad-sponsored publishers concerned that the pressure to deploy RSS feeds could eat into their bottom line. MediaMusings talks about one solution – customized, branded RSS readers like C|net’s Newsburst. I’ve fooled around with the C|Net application, and the interface/organization of items doesn’t thrill me. It’s still beta, and I’ll continue to fool around with it. But for my true RSS fix, I’ll continue to stick with zFeeder for now.