MacBook Air(port) cleared by TSA

The original MacBook Air confused the TSA when it was introduced two years ago.

Now, CNN is reporting that the TSA has cleared the new MacBook Air so you don’t have to take it out of your bag for screening:

Apple may wish to avoid comparisons of the MacBook Air to similarly compact but underpowered netbooks. However, like netbooks, Apple’s new laptop is “smaller than a standard-size laptop,” meaning it can stay in a bag, said TSA spokesman Nicholas Kimball.

When I still had my Eee PCs I always had to remove them from my bag when going through security and they were a lot smaller than the new Macbook Air. Granted, they were thicker and that probably affected the x-ray photos, but it’ll be interesting to see how this plays out at the airport checkpoints.

The Evolution of the Geek

I found this on Flowtown via the Nerdist:

In the past, being described as a geek was considered an insult, for it reflected a certain manner of social skills or status. Today, it is used to describe someone impassioned or obsessed by a particular area or interest. This reclamation of “geek” has even gone so far as to filter into commerce, with the ever-popular “Geek Squad” from Best Buy.

I’m not sure I agree with the “ever-popular ‘Geek Squad’ from Best Buy” part, but the flowchart image is great. How many Geek branches can you identify with? I trend mostly to the middle and right side .

Happy Birthday, Dizzy Gillespie!

Famous jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie would have have been 93 today … check out Google’s cool Doodle:


Being a trumpet player myself, I was a big fan of Dizzy, primarily because of his sweet horn and the cheeks (although try as I might I could never play with my cheeks puffed out like that). When I was a freshman in high school I had an upperclassman bully (yes, they exist even in marching band!) take my cornet and bend the bell up (why he did this, I cannot remember). It kinked the bell tube though so of course it wouldn’t play that well. My parents had it repaired but that was pretty much the last straw for that old horn (which I had been playing since grade school) and I ended up getting a new silver Yamaha trumpet (which I still own and occasionally play) so it ended well. 😉

One of my favorite memories of Dizzy was his appearance on The Muppet Show:

Man, that guy could blow! Happy Birthday, Dizzy!

Manage your TiVo Season Passes online

This past week TiVo unveiled its online Season Pass Manager, available through your account on tivo.com. Adding to the existing features of being able to view your Now Playing and To Do lists online, the SPM lets you re-order, copy, and delete the Season Passes on your TiVos from your web browser.

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Apple iPad

About a month ago I got a 16gb (WiFi only) Apple iPad from work so I’ve had about 30 days to mess around with Apple’s “magical” tablet. If I had to sum the iPad up in one word?

Slick.

I’m not going to bother with the specs, or a general overview of the iPad here. It’s been out for about 8 months and you can certainly read/find all the technical details you want fairly easily (just typing ‘ipad’ into Google yields “about 123,000,000 results”). Instead, I’ll talk about how I’ve been using it, the apps I’ve installed, and my overall impressions.

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10-10-10

October 10, 2010 – 10/10/10

In addition to my little sister celebrating her 30th birthday (10 + 10 + 10 = 30, much cooler than my binary birthdays!) lots of other stuff is going on today, mainly:

  • the answer to life, the universe, and everything!
  • the new GreenPois0n jailbreak for iOS 4.1 was supposed to come out but was delayed due to the release of LimeRa1n yesterday (which apparently works on all iOS devices, including the iPad and Apple TV)
  • the Tampa Bay Rays won Game 4 of the ALDS against the Texas Rangers, staying alive and forcing a Game 5 back here in St. Pete on Tuesday
  • the release of Ubuntu Linux 10.10, Maverick Meerkat (I’ve already got the netbook edition running on my EeePC 900A but haven’t really played with it much yet. I’ll be upgrading my server later today or tomorrow).

Help save Xmarks!

Earlier this week Xmarks, the cross-browser synchronization service, announced it would be shutting down in 90 days.

I’ve been using Xmarks for years, ever since it was known as Foxmarks, to keep my bookmarks in sync across multiple PCs and browsers (IE, Firefox, and more recently Chrome). It was usually one of the first add-ons I would install, so I was disappointed to hear that they would be shutting the service down in January. Apparently the “give it away free and figure out how to make money later” approach just wasn’t working (according to a recent blog post it costs $2M a year to run!).

Well now, due to the outpouring of sentiment like my own after the announcement, Xmarks is reconsidering turning into a pay service.

… we’re revisiting the idea of Xmarks as a premium service. We’ve set up a Pledgebank page where you can sign up if you’re willing to pay at least $10 a year for Xmarks. No credit card is required, but please only pledge if you are genuinely willing and able to pay:

www.pledgebank.com/XmarksPremium

This is not a scientific experiment to predict what % of our base will pay, but it’s a data point that will definitely help.

Would you be willing to pay $10-$20 a year (~$1.50/month) for the convenience of having your bookmarks synchronized everywhere? I would! Please try to save Xmarks by making a pledge with the link above. They’ve set a deadline of October 15 to get 100,000 pledges and as I write this they still need 95,820.

Are there free Xmarks alternatives? Sorta. There are browser-specific tools like Firefox Sync for Firefox, but nothing that does the cross-browser synchronization I’ve come to rely on with Xmarks. I’ve considered trying to use LastPass, which I use to securely store my website logins (check out episode #256 of Security Now for more details), but it’s meant for logins and not normal browser favorites. Have any other ideas for how I can replace Xmarks if it does go away? Leave ’em in the comments!

WIJFR: Makers

Covering the transformation of Kodacell (formerly Kodak and Duracell) into a network of tiny teams, journalist Suzanne Church goes to Florida and the inventors behind it all, Lester and Perry, who have more ideas than they know what to do with. The New Work takes off, with a mini-startup in every abandoned strip mall in America. But suddenly, it crashes, and things get really interesting. Lester and Perry build an interactive ride in an abandoned Wal-Mart, a nostalgia trip through their glory days, that catches the eye of a vicious Disney exec—and the old corporate giants fight their last battle against the new economic order.

Earlier this week I finished reading Cory Doctorow’s “Makers” (the e-pub version through Stanza on my iPhone). This is the sixth Doctorow novel I’ve read and the second one that has a lot of Disney stuff in it (the other being “Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom“). Since I live near Disney World and tend to go there a lot (we’ve had resident annual passes for the past few years), it’s fun to read Cory’s books that involve a place he obviously has a thing for as well.

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Syncing podcasts without iTunes

Last month I purchased Podcaster for my iPhone (thanks to this thread over on the TiVo Community Forum) and have now been using it for a few weeks.

Podcaster was originally rejected by Apple back in 2008 so the developer put the app on Cydia instead for jailbroken phones. Then in 2009, a slightly stripped down version called RSS Player accepted into the App Store. Finally, this past June, Podcaster for iOS4 devices was approved by Apple (RSS Player is still available for older iOS3 devices).

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