I was pretty overjoyed to report a few months ago on Letterbox: a three-pane email plugin for Apple’s mail.app written by Aaron Harnly, which has made my email life blissful indeed. With Leopard came some unexpected changes to mail.app that broke most of the plugins out there, so it was back to the drawing board for Aaron.Thing is, he’s been stuck on “any day now“ for releasing his update for two weeks or so, and the comments from others are turning from words of encouragement to sheer hair-pulling frustration. Read the rest or post a comment »

Telecom has, generally speaking, become a zero-sum game. In fact it probably always was, despite numerous attempts by governments at deregulation. The fact of the matter is that even today, full-duplex voice conversations between two parties is almost entirely controlled by a cabal of international telecom companies, both wireless and wireline, who manipulate and milk their effective monopolies with customer lock-in and draconian pricing. Furthermore third-party access to these networks is hugely restricted thanks to highly limited and uneconomical network-side interfaces, fundamentally incompetent internal provisioning and support, and of course the omnipresent threat of lawsuits, manipulation of regulators, and political pressure.

There is, in most respects, not much room for the little guy. (more…)

I’m starting to think this subject warrants its own WordPress Category. As I previously disclosed, despite the fact that Apple is at war with its users on the iPhone and other platforms, iBought. I seriously love the thing. It has a great user interface, the applications are easy to use, and when unlocked and jailbroken, I can add my own applications. I now have a phone that runs BSD. Wow. At the Web 2.0 conference last week, I went completely without my MacBook Pro and relied solely on my iPhone to stay in touch, surf, etc.

Since I made my purchase, though, there have been three major developments: (more…)

It’s a miracle that people running XP/Vista can ever get anything done.  As friends of mine will know our house is all Mac except for my girlfriend’s HP notebook (which, inexplicably, doesn’t shut down when you close it… but that’s another story).  Since I’m sharing a printer, my HP OfficeJet 6200 series, from an Apple Airport Extreme connected to my home network, one would think this would have been a piece of cake.  But oh-ho!

The networking stuff used to be the hard part, but Apple’s bonjour makes it easy.  But as for installing the correct drivers, the Windows world knows no delimiters of common sense..  Two hours later I had performed the correct sequence of incantations and solved the problem so I thought I’d share the misery with you here in the hopes of saving you an hour or so.

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None of us really knows how our cars work, which means that every trip to the auto mechanic is an act of faith. Even when we’re suspicious of the repairs or dubious diagnosis provided by the corner mechanic we often roll over anyway, throw open our wallets, and genuflect in the presence of their mystical wizardry.

So no surprise then that CBC Marketplace has taken the boilerplate “bust a mechanic” TV camera entrapment scheme and used it to go after the 21st century’s answer to the auto mechanic — Geeks. In this video they busted Geeks On Call Nerds on Site (thanks to the Geeks On Call pseudo-lawyers for clarifying this), Geek Squad, and the nerds in VW Beetles from a number of other smaller organizations making all kinds of wacky diagnoses of the planted problem (albeit a persnickety one) of a damaged RAM DIMM. (more…)

“Information wants to be free..” or so said Marshall McLuhan. Steve Jobs should heed this as a warning, rather than just using McLuhan’s image as a marketing shill as Apple did during its “Think Different” campaign.

Apple’s customers, embracing the simplicity of its products, want to move their music and movies around (particularly ones they actually pay for) unfettered by DRM: Apple says no. With its market clout, Apple has the opportunity to take a stand against the music insultry and the movie biz. It has consciously chosen not to.

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Tonight at Vancouver’s Launch Party event, Lypp’s Erik Lagerway will be talking about their new service and API.  Earlier today I talked about MaxRoam and its game-changing technique to defeat mobile roaming and long-distance costs.  Both companies are founded by friends of mine, which represents an interesting conflict of interest for yours truly. 

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Cubic launched its service, MaxRoam, at TechCrunch40 last week. The crux of their offering is that you can take a secondary phone with you when you travel, forward your existing number to it, and roam wherever you are at local calling rates. David Pogue wrote it up this week over at iht.com. All you need to get it started is a SIM from their web site, or one of their rather dubious dual-mode phones, manufactured by (no, this is not a typo) Pirelli.

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As Liz Gannes reports, iPhone mania persists in NYC, with folks lining up at 3AM clutching fistfuls of twenties to buy iPhones five at a time — for export to Europe. This despite the fact that Apple has been throwing cold water on the whole iPhone unlocking marketplace by warning people that a future firmware update could render liberated iPhones to shiny plastic/alloy bricks.

But why? When you’re looking for answers, as they say, follow the money. The NYTimes (now mercifully free for you to read) reports on their blog that Apple, with their recent price cut, is effectively taking a loss on each iPhone and making it up on the fees paid to them via the Wireless Carriers. Well, duh. This should be no surprise to folks (more…)

Last week the Canadian Dollar reached parity with the US dollar. In fact, it’s been within 5% of the value of the US greenback for about 3 months now. Today, it’s actually worth more than $1 USD.

Which brings to mind the obvious question for any self-respecting Canadian Apple Fan-Boi: How has this impacted the cost of a 15″ MacBook Pro on the Apple Canada web site?

The answer will disappoint you: (more…)