Last week I
attended the Macworld Expo in San Francisco with Dave. I think I had
been there once before over ten years ago. According to Dave the Expo
was smaller and the crowds fewer, though it looked fine to me. The
North Hall had all the smaller vendors while the South Hall had the big
vendors like Apple, Adobe, Macromedia, and Microsoft. Lots more people
were in the South Hall than the North Hall.
I had already watched Steve Jobs' keynote speech — it was webcast
though I couldn't connect and see it live. There are new Xserve G5 and
upgraded Xserve RAID which I don't care about. The iPod mini many
people have complained is too expensive but I don't think they
understand Apple's target audience. Final Cut Express 2 is another
application I don't really need.
iLife '04 looked the coolest. Performance improvements for iPhoto, but
you still can't resize a picture (and maybe that's just not in the
scope of the application). More performance improvements for iMovie.
More expandability for iDVD. And then there's GarageBand. It looks cool
and easy to use — it even wowed Dave and now he thinks it may be easy
enough fo even him to use. Personally, I like the audio recording so I
don't have to use Audacity to transfer from casette tapes. As
always, I'd like to use Apple applications when possible.
We ate lunch at Thirsty Bear, which I've heard about but never been to.
It's an upscale Mexican restaurant. We had lots of tapas and I ordered
the fish and chips. The battered and deep fried fish was the best I've
ever had. Juicy and not dry at all. The fries werem't anything special.
Once again we ate too much but it was good.
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So what cool
things did I see at the Expo? Griffin's iTalk for the iPod. It's an
audio recorder adapter which competes with the Belkin Voice Recorder
for the same price. While the Voice Recorder is rather primitive the
iTalk has Automatic Gain Control and an audio input jack. If my current
tape recorder breaks I'll probably get an iPod with iTalk.
Griffin is also working on the RadioSHARK, which is a radio with
software for recording radio shows, much like EyeTV (not so much like
Tivo since there is no service or intelligence). Also cool because I'd
like to tape one or two radio shows that I keep missing, though once
again way overkill for my needs.
MacMice has SightFlex, a flexible iSight stand for $30. Another useful
little gadget that I might use. Right now I prop up my iSight far away
so Dave can see at least part of the gaming group. Still, a wide-angle
lens would be more useful.
Several places had memory but none were too specific about memory for
my PowerBook G4 (DVI). So I ordered some from RamJet and installed it
an hour ago. Now I have one gigabyte of memory! After 1-1/2 hours
uptime my PowerBook has 25000 pageins and only 18 pageouts. Next up is
to upgrade the hard drive.
MacAlly had somewhat stylish external hard drive enclosures, which can
be useful if I replace my hard drive. Unfortunately, they're a bit
pricey. Much cheaper to buy an ATA cable so I can hook it up inside the
PowerMac G4. Should be ok as long as I don't shake the machine.
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