Category: Misc

As I mentioned yesterday, the new MacBook looked pretty appealing in the Carlson household, as a replacement for a 4-year-old iBook. After talking it over with my wife—who will use the computer most of the time—we drove to the University Village Apple Store and bought a 1.83 GHz stock model. This was the first time ...

Apple today announced the 13-inch MacBook, the Intel-powered replacement for the iBook. As rumored, it also comes in black (which, naturally, is only offered at a higher price). I’ll let my TidBITS colleague Mark Anbinder nail the details: Like its 15-inch and 17-inch counterparts, the new MacBook features an Intel Core Duo processor, here at ...

My Seattle Times Practical Mac column from last week looks at Boot Camp as a news item, and jumps from there into why this doesn’t mean Apple is going to build Windows boxes or license Mac OS X to PC manufacturers. Okay, if Mac OS X is so wonderful, why not forget hardware and license ...

Today’s mail brought a wonderful surprise: two copies of my Making a Movie in iMovie HD and iDVD 5 in Italian! The book shares the same layout as the original, but sports different dimensions: 5 1/2 by 7 3/8 inches, which feels like a good reference-book size. It’s priced at 12 euros. One reason I’m ...

The New York Times has an article today about how many sites are turning to user-generated content (specifically video, but also some general information) and offering cash rewards: Online Auteurs Hardly Need to Be Famous. Yahoo recently scaled back plans to create original programming in favor of putting up free user-created stuff. As you might ...

I’m testing a new MacBook Pro and ran into an odd dialog in iMovie after clicking the Media pane: “The plugin ‘Twirl.bundle’ cannot be loaded, because it isn’t designed to run on this computer.” My first suspicion was that some non-Intel-friendly code was moved over from my PowerBook G4 when I used the Migration Assistant, ...

I spoke with the velvety-voiced Chuck Joiner at Macworld Expo, and he’s made our conversation available as part of his MacVoices podcast. I haven’t done many radio interviews before, which made working with Chuck all the better: a good radio pro knows how to lead his guest by the hand when necessary. I’m happy with ...

I’m almost finished reading Michael Rubin’s DroidMaker, a fascinating history of how, essentially, George Lucas is largely responsible for much of the editing and computer graphics technology we use and see at the movies. I talked with Michael at Macworld Expo a bit about writing the book; after having collected snippets of information over the ...