The BBC is reporting that HP is going to open source WebOS and continue to “invest” in the platform (whatever that means). This finally provides some sort of answer to what is going to happen to the seemingly stillborn mobile operating system.
Of course, it still doesn’t tell anyone if there are going to be new devices for this platform or who in their right mind is going to develop for it. I guess “we’ll fix it in post”!
Michael Lopp, writing at Rands in Repose, wrote about his bag he currently uses.
Well, it’s a backpack. That got me thinking about my own bag, which is also (now) a backpack. So, I’m writing about it here.
I’ve used a number of bags with the many different portable computers that I have owned or used. I started with a Brenthaven messenger bag with my 2005 Apple PowerBook G4 and have probably had maybe a dozen other bags since then along with six other portable computers. I’ve never really been happy with any bag I’ve owned because they always involve tradeoffs. However, that is just the way it is.
I’ve owned generic-looking bags from Targus and two bags from STM Bags. While the STM Bags were very good, and my wife still uses one for her MacBook, they were both too small for me to use as my every-situation-I-can-think-of bag, but were great for just going to work and back home again.
The other issue I came upon was that they are all shoulder bags of some sort. While nothing I carry is terribly heavy, walking to work was becoming an issue because I tended to put the bag on the same shoulder every time. While not causing any pain yet, I could definitely see it happening in the future.
Too small, single-shoulder-only … definitely needed to find something else.
I hadn’t looked at backpacks ever because I was thinking that I had graduated from high school/college and was done with that sort of thing! Wow, what an infantile position to take. I should have done this a long time ago.
So this is the bag I ended up settling on.
That is it’s default look when on the floor of our office at Martin Luther College. It is just a SwissGear (Wenger) backpack from Target. It was the cheapest one I could find that offered any type of padding between the backpack and my back.
The main reasons for getting a backpack are these:
The last one doesn’t really matter because other bags do as well, but the top two were the important ones.
The three compartments (not counting that little zipper one on the front where I keep the stray set of keys or USB drives) allow me to carry the following in it every day:
There is also a ton of space left. On my list of things to get are a small surge suppressor (if you can find out that outputs 10 watts for an iPad, let me know), a tiny USB hub, and maybe an extra iPad adapter to replace the iPhone one. Right now I’m stuck charging the iPad at home since I have only one adapter.
It is just about the perfect bag. It’s not pretty, but it gets the job done. I need to spend a few minutes and search out my winter hat before I can start walking in the cold.
On an unrelated note: my coworker is not crazy. Lined pants are a great investment, and one I might have to make for the future.
It is no secret that hard drive (the spinning disk variety) prices are crazy at the moment and that the floods in Thailand are the majority of the cause. It was just a little over two months ago that I was looking at terabyte drives to maybe fill out a simple NAS at my house. At that time, drives were sitting around $80 for a terabyte drive.
However, today, this is what I have to pay for a terabyte drive.
Yeah, prices have doubled and now we have news of manufacturers running out of high-capacity (2TB+) drives and pushing custom machine build dates in the future (from Ars Technica).
That change in price makes a custom-built NAS a little bit less desirable at the moment.
So two things change in my perception at the moment because of the price increase:
Now, you can get a 2TB drive for less, but you still need to get the rest of the hardware to support your NAS. I know that. You also still are locked into a single size for your Time Capsule. Understood. However, it does look far more desirable with prices where they are right now.
With Christmas coming, maybe I’ll look into getting one just to have another layer of backups available at home. Right now I’m using SuperDuper! to make clones of my wife’s MacBook just in case something happens, but having Time Machine always sitting vigilant would make me feel much better.
Just an interesting side effect of the rising hard drive prices.
You can read about the Swiss and their government findings about piracy on TorrentFreak (they also link to the Swiss news article). This is the killer quote for me:
“Every time a new media technology has been made available, it has always been ‘abused’. This is the price we pay for progress. Winners will be those who are able to use the new technology to their advantages and losers those who missed this development and continue to follow old business models,” the report notes.
So clear, so easy to understand, and so true. This should be how any company approaches a new technology, as an opportunity to provide something new for customers, and not as a nuisance they need to try and squash so that they can keep their old business model around for as long as they can.
Is this pie-in-the-sky-unicorns-and-rainbows? Perhaps, but it is how I wish things were approached. Find value for new customers, not new ways to force customers to not give you money.
I think I have to declare tech news bankruptcy.
I’ve always tried to keep up with the latest information flowing from the tech arena, and it is part of my job, but I think I need to change some bad habits and get things under control again.
I could spend hours reading all of the articles that are published every day, keeping track of all of the latest technology being tossed about and following every juicy detail of every tech story. However, I can’t. I have a life and better things to do with it (having a family will do that to you).
So, starting tomorrow, I’m giving up on Hacker News. That’s where I’m starting. I spend too much time getting upset by commentators there, and not enough time actually doing stuff. That’s it, cold turkey, and removing it from my Top Sites screen in Safari right now. I’m done.
I’ll be cleaning out RSS pretty soon as well, but this is where I am starting.