Mokka mit Schlag » 2007 » July

Since JavaOne, I’ve been thinking its time to upgrade my roughly 5-year old TiBook. The wireless is having trouble connecting, and it’s really a little slow for some of the things I’m doing now. It can’t even play my Doctor Who AVIs without skipping a lot of frames. Apple had just released some new MacBooks, and I’ll need a laptop at Architecture and Design at the end of the month, so I was thinking this was a good time to buy.

Then I read this:

Back on June 20, I reported that there’d be new, slimmer MacBooks coming in October that along with being made from new materials would also feature some “speeds and feeds” updates to the internal components. Today, another “trusted source” told us this was correct and added that the iPhone’s multi-touch technology is theoretically supposed to roll out with all the new laptops, including those coming out in October. The feature will be built into the touchpads, allowing you to navigate through your notebook’s files, applications, etc. the same way you can on the iPhone. (Yes, I know you can already scroll with them, that’s nothing new. I’m talking about all the other finger gestures that can be done on the iPhone’s screen.)

Since size is really everything to me in a notebook, I think it makes sense to wait until October before upgrading. I’d hate to buy a MacBook now, and miss out on a smaller, sexier model just a few months later.
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Run , don’t walk, to http://perian.org/ and install Perian, a simple, Mac-friendly collection of open source video codecs that finally lets QuickTime play and encode many popular video formats that Apple has ignored including Divx, XviD, FLV, AVI, MS-MPEG4 v1, MS-MPEG4 v2, MS-MPEG4 v3, DivX 3.11 alpha, 3ivX, Sorenson H.263, Flash Screen Video, MKV, Truemotion VP6, and AVI.

Yes, I know there are other products out there like VLC that can play some of this stuff some of the time. This is the first one that actually works.

Definitely worth a donation.

Yesterday, Peter Dorosh, myself and about 20 other people attended the second of the New York City Parks Dept’s “Listening Sessions” for Ridgewood Reservoir. We learned that $50 million has been allocated specifically to turn Ridgewood Reservoir into a “destination park”; that is, one that will draw people in from outside the neighborhood. This is part of PlanNYC, Mayor Bloomberg’s 25-year plan of which, according to Kim Fallon, the “biggest part is greening the city.” In particular, the plan proposes planting about one million new trees. As Peter kept pointing out, it seems rather strange to bulldoze an area that’s already full of native trees in order to accomplish this.

Seven other areas are up for the same treatment including the beach at Far Rockaway, Dreier-Offerman Park in Brooklyn, Ocean Breeze in Staten Island, Fort Washington Park and the Highline in Manhattan. Mark K. Morrison has already been selected as design consultant. A preliminary plan should be available in a few months. They hope to start construction in Fiscal Year 2009. It’s not clear how far advanced the city’s plans are, or in fact what they are. Other than the statement in the plan that they want to “set aside two of three basins as a nature preserve and new active recreation center” they really haven’t said very much. I hope they haven’t made up their minds yet.

The stated goal of the session was to listen to what local residents want to be done to the park. Roughly 25 people attended, split about half and half between nature enthusiasts like Peter and myself and folks from the immediate neighborhood. (The Parks Dept. employees kept calling the nature folks “birdwatchers”, but the group that was there was quite a bit more diverse than that.) There were also about a dozen Parks Dept. officials. Also in the audience was state assemblyman Daryl Towns.

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