The Other Drummer

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A magicaler and more revolutionier product at an unbelievabler price.

So this guy comes up to me in my work parking lot and was all, “Hey, I’ve got some frozen meat in my trunk that I really need to get rid of. Do you want some?”

And I think, “Hey, who am I to say no to this mustached stranger offering me free meat from the back of his car?” So I say, “Sure!”

He walks me over to his ’92 Corolla and pops open the trunk. There, next to a tire iron in a black industrial-strength garbage sack, is a bunch of frozen meat.

“Take as much as you’d like,” he says. “I’m trying to get rid of it.”

As I load my arms full of the stuff I ask, “Where did you get all this?”

“Oh. I shot something a while back. It’s been sitting in my freezer for a couple years and I need to get rid of it now.”

This man’s lack of freezer space was my good fortune. What a day!

As I continued to stack piles of the frozen meat in my arms I came up with a clever name for it: Trunk Meat.

I was so excited about my find I texted my sister in-law to tell her about it:

Me: I just got frozen meat out of the back of some guy’s car!
Sis: Ew! Why?
Me: Because it was free. I call it Trunk Meat.
Sis: But you can’t trust some person’s random frozen meat.
Me: He swore it was elk. I’m pretty sure he was telling the truth.
Sis: And I bet he swore that his beard was real and that he was a real hunter?
Me: Look, I haven’t heard of any missing persons or anything like that so I’m pretty sure it’s all legit.
Sis: So he did have a beard…
Me: No. It was a mustache.
Sis: That still counts. I’m telling you that’s sketchy.

Obviously, she’s jealous.

I put the meat in my trunk and headed home, whistling a happy tune the entire way. Oddly, my wife reacted the same way her sister did. Whatever. I have a steak to cook up on the BBQ come spring and if she doesn’t want any of it, more for me.

Moral of the story: taking candy from strangers is bad. Taking frozen meat from a stranger’s car is a blessing.

Thank you mustached stranger!

Found this gem over at KSL.com.

There’s been lots of talk (at least in the nerdy online circles I hang out in) about the iPad 2 and particularly whether or not it is going to have a “retina” display, similar to the iPhone 4.

The iPhone 4 doubled the amount of pixels on the phone from the previous model. If you aren’t aware, that’s an insane amount of pixels. Apple claims there are so many they are indistinguishable to the human eye. It’s a beautiful display.

The problem with the iPad doubling its resolution is that it would put the screen at 2,048 x 1,536 which is an astounding 3,145,728 pixels.

How astounding is it? It’s a million more pixels crammed in a 9.7″ screen than Apple’s own 21 inch (1920 x 1080) iMac has.

It presents significant technical hurdles. First, battery life to power all those pixels would be tremendous. Add to that the required processing power and the tight quarters of the iPad’s internals (can’t exactly cram a bunch more batteries in there) and it seems nigh impossible…at least at a competitive price.

So what if the iPad 2 didn’t double the iPad’s resolution, but instead doubled the iPhone 4′s retina display resolution?

Current iPad: 1024 x 768

iPad 2: 1920 x 1280

It’s not double, but it’s significantly better. And more feasible. And easier for iPhone app developers to scale their apps to the new dimensions.

I’m frickin’ brilliant.

Except I’m not.

@hughroper is though.

Hugh pointed out my proposed dimensions would change the aspect ratio from 1.3 to 1.5, something not seen in the pictures above, and also not something El Jobso would likely tolerate.

Lame.

Thanks to the good folks at 9to5 Mac for the image. Cruise on over there to see more evidence of my much anticipated muse.

What I’d really like is a single place to host all my photos, music, movies and videos. Why? Because having multiple computers is a pain (whine, whine, I know). I’ll explain.

Family outing

We went on a family outing on Saturday. We took the nice camera and took quite a few pictures. When I came home I moved the pictures from the camera to our old iMac. I went through and tossed some of the obviously bad pictures and left the rest for my wife and I to sort through when we found the time.

The problem

There’s no simple way to get the curated pictures of that event onto our laptop from the iMac. Sure, I could export them to a folder then put that folder on a USB drive then plug that USB drive into the laptop and import the pictures into iPhoto. But that’s a pain. And what if we end up editing/deleting pictures on the iMac after I do that? Then the pictures on the laptop aren’t current – I’d have to do all the work twice.

Phones are cameras, too

Getting media onto the phones is one problem. Getting media off of our respective phones and to our computers/each other is another issue all together.

My iPhone syncs with my laptop, not the iMac. To get the pictures from my iMac to my iPhone requires that I do all of the above steps, plus sync my iPhone. But my wife’s iPhone is synced to the iMac, so she has the exact same problem, only reversed. So I don’t get the pics/video she takes on my phone and she doesn’t get mine on hers.

Redundant, but not in a good way

Let’s say we jumped through all the hoops to keep everything up-to-date. It means we have the same pictures/videos/music taking up space in four different places: two computers and two phones. So your one gig family video is taking up four gigs of space. When you multiply it across all gigs and gigs of music, pictures and videos it can be expensive.

Of course, that redundancy does serve a purpose – you always have your files with you, even when you don’t have an Internet connection. So an option would be nice.

The Apple Home Server

What I want is an Apple Home Server (AHS). I can dump all my pictures, videos, movies and music into one place and have it accessible on all my devices. The server would work with Time Machine so I could have an on-site backup as well as a Carbonite/BackBlaze off-site backup. I could choose which things I wanted to keep local copies of (but still keep them synced, ala Dropbox/iDisk) and which things I wanted to stream.

For example, I want the last six months of pictures automatically stored on my laptop, but anything older than that I want to stream from the AHS. And the interface would be seamless – it would all look like it was right there on my laptop. Of course, I could pick and choose one-off files to keep locally as well.

All the files are available on my Apple TV, through the web (ala Pogoplug), and on my phone.

Bonus: this would greatly reduce the amount of hard drive space required on laptops, making SSD (solid state drives) much more feasible.

Family outing, take two

So, let’s reimagine the scenario from this weekend if I had a real fictional Apple Home Server.

Pictures and videos we shoot with our iPhones while we’re out and about are uploaded from our phones to the AHS before we ever get home, instantly viewable by grandparents in Oregon.

When we get back to the house and plug in the nicer camera, the photos are dumped onto AHS via iPhoto, divided into Events and scanned for facial recognition. As soon as that’s done, I can open the photo app on my iPhone, or iPhoto on either of my computers, and see today’s pictures.

One download to one location. Accessible anywhere.

Snow Leopard Server and Time Capsule

Something like this kind of exists. But only kind of. The Mac mini with Snow Leopard Server. It’s made for businesses rather than homes and while it has some awesome features, it’s not what I’m looking for. Mainly because it starts at $999.

Instead I’m thinking of a revamp of Apple’s neglected Time Capsule. It already has the built-in storage and networking capabilities. And with the added functionality described above, I’d happily pay $299 for a 2 TB version.

What do you think? Pie in the sky thinking? Or could Apple really come up with something like this? What would you be willing to pay for it if they did announce it? Let me know in the comments.