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About this site

For six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul

Coming soon: Everything Must Go

The next edition of "Everything Must Go" will be appearing here soon. --Paul

Saturday, March 15, 2003

Camino author says death exaggerated
Mike Pinkerton, one of the lead developers of Camino, says that the death of the Mac OS X browser has been greatly exaggerated. "Just in case anyone might have had the misconception that Camino was dead and/or dying, let me set the record straight: it's not. [It is] 15% faster, [and] we already have a bunch of new features lined up that will make 0.8 sparkle. We care a lot about this little web browser. It's not just going to go softly into the night." Sadly, they might have already lost me. Safari with tabs is just too sweet.

[ Posted at 8:29 AM | Permalink ]

Friday, March 14, 2003

Linux continues copying Windows. Why am I the only one noticing this?
In this glowing review of GNOME 2.2 on "eWeak" (as I call it), we discover that the new version of the Linux desktop environment "provides a number of usability niceties, such as a "show desktop" task bar button and support in GNOME's Nautilus file manager for the display of file metadata, such as the resolution of a JPEG image or the duration of an MP3 file." Nice! And they were nice features when Windows first added them years ago too, eWeak. Why didn't you mention that? Actually, that's a rhetorical question, but I have the answer: It's because eWeak, like many other publications, will only write about Microsoft in negative ways. Yeah, that's what passes for tech journalism today.

[ Posted at 10:57 AM | Permalink ]

Wireless freedom?
Joe Jones is excited about the freedom of working wirelessly, but we're not really there yet. We won't have true wireless freedom until all of the wires are unnecessary. This means true all-day battery life. All of today's Tablet PCs (with the exception of the niche Electrovaya unit which weighs a ton) only get 2-3 hours of battery life tops, and that's not enough. The Centrino will go a long way toward fixing this, though I think we can only expect 3-4.5 hours of life, on average, based on my experience with a new ThinkPad T40 (which is a notebook, not a Tablet). One of the weird problems with the Tablet PC is that it's active digitizer kills battery life, making these devices less energy thrifty than comparable notebooks. But the number one battery killer in any notebook is the Wi-Fi adapter we're both so happy about. It's an interesting Catch-22.

[ Posted at 10:54 AM | Permalink ]

Thursday, March 13, 2003

Mozilla 1.3 finalized
Mozilla.org has issued Mozilla 1.3, which includes junk-mail filtering (here's more information), image auto-sizing, an API for rich text editing in webpages, newsgroup filters, dynamic profile switching, nearly 2000 bug fixes, and much more.

[ Posted at 7:03 PM | Permalink ]

Tabbed browsing in Safari
Well, Apple is adding tabbed browsing to Safari, and if the early beta I'm using to post this with is any indication, Safari will soon be my favorite Web browser on any platform, supplanting Camino/Chimera (which, coincidentally, is also available only on the Mac). This is an interesting state of affairs: Before Camino, Mac OS X Web browsing was slow and miserable, but now OS X users have two of the best choices out there (and, in my opinion THE two best choices). In Safari v64, which isn't publicly available, you have to enable the tabbed browsing feature (using the obscure command line defaults write com.apple.Safari IncludeDebugMenu 1) but, man, is it pretty. And it works great. Bravo, Apple, and I can't wait to see this in a public beta, hopefully soon.

[ Posted at 1:59 PM | Permalink ]

Wednesday, March 12, 2003

Mo' memory for iMac
The fact that you can buy 512 MB of RAM for $130 is simply amazing. God bless Crucial.

[ Posted at 1:53 PM | Permalink ]

Time for external storage
My PCs are all maxed out with internal hard drives, but the new iMac sports a miniscule 80 GB drive with no hope for internal expansion. This means it's time to look into external storage, probably FireWire, though I have a few boxes here that might be of use, including 40 GB and 80 GB SnapServers and a 60 GB external FireWire hard drive. I want more.

[ Posted at 11:45 AM | Permalink ]

Mozilla 1.3 release candidate
Development of Mozilla 1.3 is finally winding down. You can grab release candidate builds here.

[ Posted at 11:40 AM | Permalink ]

Tuesday, March 11, 2003

My next camera
I ordered this Sony DSC-P72 about a week ago, but it's not shipping until April. Basically, it's a 3.2 MP digital camera with support for 3x optical zoom, a USB 2.0 interface, and rechargeable NiMH batteries. It also supports 128 MB and 256 MB Memory Stick media as well as 256 MB, 512 MB, and 1 GB Memory Stick PRO media. Good stuff.

[ Posted at 9:32 PM | Permalink ]

Monday, March 10, 2003

17-inch iMac
Well, I finally did it: I picked up a 1 GHz 17-inch widescreen iMac yesterday at the Apple Store in Cambridge. I had the store replace the stock 256 MB internal RAM to 512 MB so I could max it out to 1 GB of RAM on my own. Otherwise, it's stock, with a 4x SuperDrive and an 80 GB hard drive. My only observations so far are that iDVD 3.0 is frickin' awesome, Virtual PC 6 actually runs pretty well on a real Mac, and widescreens rock.

[ Posted at 7:50 AM | Permalink ]