Tao of Mac

Mar 9th 2005 · 1 min read

Wednesday

...as I pointed out to one of my colleagues today, is that day of the week when you look at your calendar and find chaos and devastation on either side.

Random news items I picked up:

  • MiniMo, the Mozilla port to , is approaching a usable state. You can look at some photos and get the latest bleeding-edge builds here (Coralized links). I wonder if it will run on a Jornada...
  • Gnome reaches 2.10, and the splash screen sucks, not only for the geeky anti-design, but also for the simple reason that it shouldn't be there - it makes the desktop seem slower to load.
  • Linus switches... to the PowerPC. If it ain't running , it ain't a .
  • Intel decides to add to the mess of Wi-Fi standards and gets behind 802.11s. I have to see if this is the draft spec that was making the rounds last year, or something almost, but not quite, completely different.
  • The SliMP3 lives on, as the Squeezebox2. My original SliMP3 is still going strong, even though I wish they had switched to DAAP instead of their native protocol by now.
  • The DSC-T7 appears, further compounding the notion that buying v1.0 Sony gear is a big mistake. I like my , but this one looks a lot slimmer.
  • More rumors about the Second Coming of the Newton, or something like that.
  • A great HOWTO that shows how to use Google Maps with your own waypoints and annotations. I hope this becomes a permanent feature (so that I can use it when they finally have a map of Europe).

De-Assimilation

And, finally, Debrander, a application that brought two questions to mind:

  • Why doesn't Motorola do phone branding in non-volatile memory?
  • Were my on the topic of phones even slightly on-topic? Is there really a paying demand for removing operator branding, even when it simplifies access to services?

Either way, I have a nagging feeling this is just the tip of the iceberg - much like phone unlocking, there are probably dozens of similar (but unpublicized) hacks out there.

Which reminds me, would you (yes, you, from an Italian , who tried to search for "unlock Nokia" around fifteen different times) please cut it out?.

I work for a mobile operator, in case you haven't noticed.