rich ruminations

Toyota Prius proves a gas guzzler in a race with the BMW 520d

Coasting down the mountain into Geneva my Prius averaged 99.9mpg for a full 10 minutes. It was the highlight of my journey and improved my overall average fuel economy by a full 2mpg. But it was not enough. For all my defensive driving, slippery bodywork and hybrid technology, my average fuel consumption was 48.1mpg. I’d lost to a Beemer and I was disappointed; I had never driven so slowly or carefully for so long in my life. I’m considering buying a V8 Range Rover and opening my own oil well in protest.

(Via Instapundit.)

Take a few minutes and read this great story about the SR-71 spy plane.

Major Brian Shul: “I loved that jet”

Quite a few live blogs for the morning keynote:

Valleywag

Endgadget

TUAW.com

Ars Technica

CNET

Gizmodo

MacDailyNews

Fake Steve Jobs

Here are my predictions.

I don’t expect a 2nd generation iPhone yet… but do think a refresh to the current model is likely.

1st Prediction: iPhone RAM increase to 16 GB.

Looking at Apple’s history with the iPod, they followed the initial model design with a smaller version. I think this is likely with the iPhone, for a few reasons. First, some folks just don’t need the Internet access. Second, a lower-priced model would expand the market.

2nd Prediction: iPhone Mini (my name, yeah it sucks, I’m sure Steve and company will come up with something cool)

Lots of press about iTunes movie rentals. This seems likely, so I’ll go along with the crowd.

3rd Prediction: iTunes movie rentals (although I can’t see the reported 24 hour time limit being right, that’s just too short).

But just doing rentals with the existing hardware (iPods, iPhone, AppleTV, and of course Macs) seems incomplete. I think there will be something new here, something using AppleTV and FrontRow, but more interesting to a larger, iPod-savvy market. DVR technology is cool, but the technical issues for Apple to provide a solution that works with OTA, cable, and satellite are significant (witness Tivo’s struggles).

4th Prediction: An AppleTV line, probably three sizes of flat-screen, that includes the existing AppleTV functionality plus much larger hard-disk, and tight integration with Leopard and iDisk.

How about you? I’ve opened comments… Let’s have some fun!

We’ve been doing a lot of interviews for software developers at work lately, and this “overheard at a recent interview” item is quite relevant and hilarious.

The past several days the once speedy iPhone synchronization process had become glacial. By yesterday morning, a sync was taking 90 minutes.

I observed that the Microsoft Sync Manager was consuming large quantities of CPU frequently as well, and made a guess that Entourage calendar synchronization might be the root cause.

So, I rebuilt the Entourage database, deleted the Entourage calendar from iCal, relaunched Entourage and waited a few hours for it to reload all my email and calendar, re-enabled Entourage calendar synchronization, and now performance has returned to the previous speedy levels - just a minute or so.

Yet another justification for avoiding Microsoft products whenever possible. Unfortunately not possible in this case, as my employer uses Exchange, and refuses to enable IMAP email access — preventing me from using Mail.app. So the Mac users are forced to use Entourage. Yuck.

At least I can use OmniFocus for project management, Pages for word processing, Numbers for spreadsheets, and Keynote for presentations. All far, far superior to the Microsoft offerings.

This is somewhat awesome:

After years of development, a new class of weapon that uses computer-controlled electronic ignition instead of primers to fire projectiles may be finally taking its much coveted place in the U.S. military inventory.

Brisbane, Australia-based Metal Storm has delivered a four-barrel weapon to the Naval Surface Warfare Center for testing that uses a small electrical current instead a conventional firing pin to deliver stacked rounds at an astounding rate.

How astounding? Try 1 million rounds per minute.

Check out this video:

Via Instapundit.

New Zune review: better than before, but not quite good enough - Engadget:

For the second year running the Zune and its anti-Apple pedigree squanders its unique position to chase after the iPod-disenfranchised; it offers nothing special to ex-iPod owners, nor anything innovative to the proto-geeks looking to buy just about anything but an Apple product. It doesn’t do much anything better, cheaper, or all that differently from its primary competition, and it’s further behind today’s leading edge devices, like the 605 WiFi and the touch, than the original Zune line was last year. When we really look at the product, perhaps FM radio aside we can’t think of a single compelling reason to recommend it to an iPod user that’s ready to upgrade or switch — and we don’t even have any particular affinity for iPods.

13949712720901ForOSX .

I previously recommended the 1Password application. There is currently a fantastic promotion to get it for free.

Get into the Halloween spirit:

Jack-O-Lantern is a screen saver that displays a carved 3D pumpkin. The pumpkin is recreated in loving detail right down to the flickering candle inside. Several carving designs are included, and you can even create your own to be displayed. No getting your hands dirty carving the real thing. Artificial pumpkin smell not included.

I’ve got it installed on my MacBook Pro, works great on the built-in screen as well as the external 20″ screen.

Get it here.

This doesn’t look good:

Leopard BSOD

This is gonna leave a mark.

Releasing stuff on Friday is great, if it works, but then again, there’s always that danger of the Monday morning headline - APPLE’S NEW OS BRICKS THOUSANDS OF MACS.

Probably not going to be that bad, but it might be close.

Wow. You’d think after some of the buffoonery with the iPhone, the last thing that Apple needed/wanted was to put out something that would immediately annoy a significant number of people.

Well, they have. OS X 10.5 Leopard has…issues. Primarily, the upgrade installation option (which, after carefully reading the accompanying material, a LOT of people will try right off the bat) has a very, VERY nasty habit of leaving you staring at one of the last things a recent Apple user expects to see.

A Blue Screen of Death (BSOD). Well, not really a true hallmark Windoze BSOD, with indecipherable HEX included. It just . . . hangs. And refuses to start.

(Via Instapundit.com.)

I checked Macslash and some users there are reporting issues as well. I’m glad I decided to wait, hopefully Apple will sort this out quickly.

Hilarious

(Via Daring Fireball.)

MacDailyNews - Daedalus Capital CIO: Apple shares ‘going to $600’.

Wow.

Keeping track of passwords, credit card info, account numbers, combinations, and other personal data has become an important activity for many of us. For the past four or five years I’ve used the SplashID application, because it has both a Mac and Palm client, and can sync the data between them. SplashID was a must-have for me as a long-time Treo user.

Alas, with the iPhone, a new solution was needed, as SplashID isn’t available for the iPhone, and hasn’t had much attention on the Mac in several years.

I’ve been beta testing a cool utility called 1Password, which manages passwords, credit card, and other personal/private data. The UI is very nice, the features good. Full integration with all the usual Mac Web browsers, and data is maintained in the OS Keychain, fully encrypted and safe.

I’ve been beta testing the new 2.5 version the past few months. This version adds clever support for the iPhone. To work around the current inability to create an approved native iPhone application, 1Password creates a Safari bookmark that has the entire database encrypted and embedded, as well as a nice Javascript-based UI for accessing the data.

Version 2.5 is now shipping, if you are an iPhone user, give it a look.