On Monday, many of us discovered Nambu, a Twitter client that also works with FriendFeed. It's still in beta. It's capability for multiple windows, side by side, may be overkill for those still trying to get their heads around Twitter -- and it does use a lot of screen area in that mode. In single column mode, it looks just like many other Twitter clients. I prefer the date stamp of Syrinx as opposed to Nambu's "x" minutes ago. However, you may like it.
Teenagers are getting into some trouble lately by misusing technology. We've read about "sexting," which in some cases is a felony. We've also read on Tuesday about two young people doing terrible things to food behind the scenes at a Dominoes in North Carolina, making a video, and posting it on YouTube. Result: they got fired and criminal charges are possible. Who did them in? Why, the Internet community. And the company president had to apologize publicly. Finally (for this list alone), 17 year old Michael Mooney got bored and inserted a computer worm into Twitter this week, breaking a host of Federal computer crime laws.
On Wednesday, I learned of a neat trick to replace the drab, gray logo in your Mac at startup. Here's a tip on how to replace it with something cooler.
Also on Wednesday, Walt Mossberg at All Things Digital revisited MobileMe. The first time around, Mr Mossberg wrote that MobileMe "was so buggy and ragged that I couldn’t recommend it." This time, he's spent a few weeks retesting the service and found it largely fixed. As Steve Jobs promised. So let be written. So let it be done.
Arik Hesseldahl at BusinessWeek pondered Jim Goldman's questioning of how long Eric Schmidt can remain on Apple's board of directors:
"First there’s Android, the Google-made smart phone operating system that is sold to phone manufacturers as an alternative to the iPhone. Now there’s word that Android may show up in netbooks from HP, putting it competition or a sort with not only Microsoft’s Windows but also the Mac. Google’s also a big backer of Clearwire, which is a would-be competitor to AT&T on the wireless data front, though that will take some time."
Mr. Hesseldahl doesn't see how Mr. Schmidt can avoid mounting conflicts of interest.
On Friday, I read about how Blu-ray disc sales have nearly doubled from a year ago. That's a nice growth rate to have in a deep recession. Speaking of Blu-ray, I also ran across a nice summary article on "Blu-ray: Everything you need to know". I put that in my hot reference article directory.
Of course, I can't let a week go by without broadcasting from the Netflix department of Car Talk Plaza. Netflix, if you hadn't guessed, is spending US$100M in 2009 to improve its streaming services. Blu-ray subscribers are gonna foot the bill. Netflix is planning for the day when they'll no longer be mailing DVDs and Blu-ray discs. Are you?
Finally, I ran across this cute piece entitled: "If Philosophers Were Programmers". I spent a lot of time in my career programming for the DOD in Simscript II.5, C, Fortran and Perl. I love to read about the philosophy of computer languages, and this one is right on. If you program in any language, you're gonna love it.
To close, I'm adding a new item to the blog: Tech word of the week (TWoW).
Kindlefolk: (n.) People who use the Amazon Kindle book reader. First usage seen: Dan Frommer.