Apple iPad

Apple held a conference yesterday and the introduced the Apple iPad, an over grown iPod with limited support as a real computer.

Apple has built a really small, but still over sized, tablet for the purpose of surfing the net, and basically doing what you do now on your iPhone or iPod Touch.

The unit weighs in at 1.5lbs for the wifi only model, and slight more at 1.6lbs for the WiFi + 3G model. The size of the tablet is a small half inch depth, with a 9.7 inch screen, the whole shell comes in at 9.56in x 7.47in.

Running a 1024×768 (132 ppi) resolution the screen looked really nice on the videos everyone posted yesterday.

The 1Ghz Apple A4 processor gave the unit a good smooth power that made all the apps run really nicely.

More specs for the iPad are available at the Apple Store

Since the device is built on a modified iPod OS, it is sort of crippled. Furthermore you might expect the iPad to be able to multi-task, or even run background processes. This is not the case. Apple has continued with their less than stellar no-background-processes policy. Although this can really boost the performance of apps, it cripples the device from being a good twitter/facebook/social media device.

Given the device also has WiFi you would expect it to sync with iTunes over the WiFi (ala Zune), still not the case. Apple is still requiring you to sync with a good old fashion USB cable, truly disappointing.

Finally, there is no Flash support, so sorry to all you guys and gals (my wife) who thought it would be good for playing your Facebook games.

Over all at $499 there are some things the iPad might be good, and even great at, but it still doesn’t meet the needs of my family, and as such won’t be on our to purchase list.

It looks like Matt and company have been busy getting things lined up for the WordPress Foundation, a non-profit with the goal:

“to ensure free access, in perpetuity, to the projects we support”

From the About page:

The WordPress Foundation is a charitable organization founded by Matt Mullenweg to further the mission of the WordPress open source project: to democratize publishing through Open Source, GPL software.

The point of the foundation is to ensure free access, in perpetuity, to the projects we support. People and businesses may come and go, so it is important to ensure that the source code for these projects will survive beyond the current contributor base, that we may create a stable platform for web publishing for generations to come. As part of this mission, the Foundation will be responsible for protecting the WordPress, WordCamp, and related trademarks. A 501(c)3 non-profit organization, the WordPress Foundation will also pursue a charter to educate the public about WordPress and related open source software.

I have long been a fan of WordPress, and now even more so. I am always amazed at the things that Matt and company come up with to move forward the power of WordPress.

For all those true WordPress geeks out there, the new site is running the WordPress 3.0 development version.

Pomodoro Technique Illustrated (Book Cover)

Today I am reviewing Pomodoro Technique Illustrated: The Easy Way to Do More in Less Time which is best summed up by the books official website on The Pragmatic Bookshelf site:

Do you ever look at the clock and wonder where the day went? You spent all this time at work and didn’t come close to getting everything done. Tomorrow, try something new. Use the Pomodoro Technique, originally developed by Francesco Cirillo, to work in focused sprints throughout the day. In Pomodoro Technique Illustrated, Staffan Nöteberg shows you how to organize your work to accomplish more in less time. There’s no need for expensive software or fancy planners. You can get started with nothing more than a piece of paper, a pencil, and a kitchen timer.

The best part of the above statement is that it is 100% true. I haven’t had enough time to really evaluate the use of the Pomodoro Technique, but the book really lays it out in a clean an easy to understand way.

Author Staffan Nöteberg has really written a quick read about the Pomodoro Technique, that will allow you to breeze through the book, learning the technique as you go.

The book is short, approx 200 pages total, with each page being an indepenent thought or section. You literally could read a single page each time you sat down and feel good about stopping in the middle of a chapter. The thoughts are clear and expressed in a clean format that really makes the things stick.

The technique itself is really simple. And Staffan’s style of writing only makes it even easier to pick up and use.

I would strongly suggest getting Pomodoro Technique Illustrated: The Easy Way to Do More in Less Time if you plan to learn or at least try the Pomodoro Technique, even more so if you plan for the year is to be more productive!

Looks like I wasn’t the only one to write a review on this book today either.

If you are lazy like me then bookmarking is great!

In that thought, I have copied all the links from utos.org and made them into a bookmarks file for Chrome.

I have tarred and gzipped it, so you will need to untar and un-gzip it

http://utahcon.com/files/utos_bookmarks.tar.gz

So I have had the Xbox360 streaming my Netflix selections for a while now, and it was kind of annoying to have to move it to the living room if I wanted to watch a movie downstairs instead of in the comfort of my bed.  Well now I don’t have to make such a decision.

No, I didn’t get a Xbox360 for the living room, but now the Wii is getting streaming from Netflix! Here is a snipplet from the New York Times about it:

Nintendo is bringing Netflix’s online streaming video service to its Wii gaming console, the most popular in the industry, the companies plan to announce Wednesday. The service lets subscribers choose from a catalog of generally older movies and television shows and watch them instantly.

It sucks because the rumor is that you will have to use a disc to start the service (ala the PS3), which is sad since Nintendo has a market that in theory should be able to provide such a software sans-disc.

Furthermore I hope the rumors are wrong and the disc is a one time channel install. That would be acceptable in my mind. Otherwise watching videos on the Wii will still be cumbersome as I will have to protect another disc from the kids.

Update: You can now signup to be notified when the streaming disc is ready for Netflix @ https://www.netflix.com/NRDInfo/Wii