True to the announcement week before last, Apple made good on it's promise to give early purchasers of the iPhon a $100 store credit. While ideally, they' just give a check back, $100 to use at the Apple Store is no a bad thing. Thanks Apple!

Microsoft is hard at work on Office 2008 for Macintosh. It is supposed to be ready for release in January, 2008, presumably at MacWorld Expo in the early part of the month.

I've been following the development as closely as I've been able to, Microsoft is slowly releasing details.

Read the latest about Office using Apple Installer technology, finally, here.

For reasons I can't fathom, I've been on a new music tear the last few weeks. Here are some of the new things I've gotten:

Feist - The Reminder

Fall Out Boy - Infinity on High

Dixie Chicks - Taking the Long Way

James Blunt - All the Lost Souls

Amy Winehouse - Back to Black

Ozzy Osbourne - Black Rain

Chamillionaire - Ultimate Victory

My iTunes library at work is over 11,000 songs. And there have to be at least 300 on my personal machine I've yet to get there.

Apple posted two more software updates yesterday:
Compatibility Update for QuickTime 7.2
This update delivers increased compatibility with iLife.

Keyboard Software Update 1.2

IApple today announced it sold its one millionth iPhone yesterday, just 74 days after its introduction on June 29. iPhone combines three devices into one--a mobile phone, a widescreen iPod, and the best mobile Internet device ever--all based on Apple's revolutionary multi-touch interface and pioneering software that allows users to control iPhone with just a tap, flick or pinch of their fingers.
"One million iPhones in 74 days--it took almost two years to achieve this milestone with iPod," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. "We can't wait to get this revolutionary product into the hands of even more customers this holiday season."

Here are a number of resources for getting ringones into your iPhone.

Engadget: Custom iPhone ringtone hacking instructions prepped for noobs

The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Ambrosia's iToner

Hack the iPhone

Song Sender

iRing

Wow.

Over the Labor Day Weekend here in the US (the last hoorah of the summer), I was able to spend some time with my Mom. We did what has become a tradition, time at our summer place in Underhill, WI broken up with healthy amounts of side trips to take the edge off.

One of the new things we did was to head north to Marinette, MI to give Mickey-Lu Bar-B-Q a try. Mickey's is a burger joint, straight up. The place is tiny, really tiny. We arrive just after noon on Saturday. I know, what was I thinking? Noon on the Saturday of a holiday weekend? No problem. We only had to wait about 5 minutes for a table to open up. We sat down, our waitress greeted us warmly and wiped our table down, brought us glasses of water and left us to peruse the menu.

   

I went simple, a double cheese burger and a chocolate malt. Mom had the single and a vanilla shake. After about 8 minutes (excruciating only because the smell is so good) our food arrived. It was as good as it smelled, outstanding.

Mickey's isn't much to look at, but the food is great, the serivce was excellent, and sure was easy to find.

Those that know me know that I don't make very many vendor recommendations. There are a variety of reasons for this, I'm not always comfortable making them, I feel responsible if something goes wrong for someone after I've recommended them, etc.. So it's not often I do this.

It's a pleasure to point out and highlight RamJet. RamJet has been around for a number of years and have gradually grown to be my vendor of choice when purchasing RAM, either for work or for personal use. The folks there are always helpful when it comes to configuring RAM for, say a new 20" Intel iMac. Or a golden oldie like a G4 Digital Audio tower.

Check 'em out.

Lately, I've been observing just how well OS X 10.4.10 has been running on my PowerBook G4. The PowerBook is my primary workhorse machine at my job so it see a little bit of everything thrown at it. From the banal HTML editing to video/DVD production, this machine sees it all. And while my Intel-based MacBook completely smokes it in the video area, it's very much a usable machine.

One of the testaments to that workhorse title is the fact that it's currenty riding a 24+ day uptime streak. Now a number like that isn't unusual for a machine in a server role. My two primary production XServes have been running 41 and 47 days respectively. My Fedora-based mail server is coming up on 2 months. It'd be even longer but I didn't have a UPS on the unit and it went down during a power interruption earlier this summer. (Bad Dave!) It's got a UPS on it now so I fully expect it to go well into the fall before something breaks that streak.

But almost a month on a desktop machine? I mean, I throw everything at this and the machine has held up. Except for the occasional Firefox or Entourage hccup, which I just kill, there have been so few problems I can't even recall one. Apple has a very robust OS here, one that will be able to long outlive current iterations of Windows running. It's funny how until recently, I still had a OS X 10.2 Jaguar box running, and it ran perfectly fine. (sidebar, the machine's power supply failed and I decided instead of redeploying the repaired box, to consolidate the services being run there onto a 10.4 box.) And Jaguar is what, circa 2002? These Unix OSes just don't stop working, truly amazing. And something it would be nice of Microsoft to think about when designing an operating system. Someday, maybe they will actually start from scratch and create an x86 OS that's reliable beyond compare. Oh wait, why would they do that? Linux has been out there for well over 15 years now, and with Apple being the largest Unix vendor in the world, what's the point?

9/4/07 Update: I had to reboot as my network connection mysteriously died. And for reasons I'm embarrassed to relate, I couldn't fix it so I rebooted. Bring on September!

The net is just buzzing about what Apple will or won't introduce on Wednesday at their 'Special Event'. New iPods, phoneless iPhones aka Super iPod, Beatles coming to iTunes, the rumors abound.


The new model iPods make the most sense, one writer speculates a new 16gb Nano-type model given the price drops in 16gb DRAM chips.

While over a month old, this is an interesting article. It's about a new type of energy monitoring device in the form of an orb. Yeah, the Lord of the Rings kind of orb, you got it. Kinda cool concept. The orb is set to monitor energy usage and changes colors, flashes, etc. base don the current electrical load. An excellent thing for thos in energy starved areas like California, but helpful to anyone that wants a better way to monitor electrical usage. The developer of this envisions that people will find conserving energy competetive and continually strive to use less.

Will it work? Who knows, let's check back on this in five years.

Over at MacWorld, an article examines the possible legal ramificiations of unlock hacks for the iPhone being distributed. The lawyers all seem to agree that figuring out how to unlock the device yourself is not a violation of the DMCA, but that distributing the information to do so, even at no charge, is a violation.

On a seperate note, one of the ways I gauge the sucess or failure of a new Apple product is by the Joe On the Street index. The more buzz you hear about it from your everyday non-techie types, the better for Aple. And with iPhone, it's definietly a winner. Two cases, one an out of town friend who talked with me a couple days after the intro and wanted to know why I hadn't gotten one yet. She was clearly interested in seeing one and when I did get one, she was 'very jealous' about it. The second case was this morning at a local eatery where I decided to have breakfast. I placed my order and heard the familiar new mail notification so I took a look. When my waitress returned, she asked if she could look at my iPhone. She sat down beside me so I could give her the 10 cent tour. Her reaction? "It's even cooler than I expected!"

Now that's something that's going to revolutionize it's product category.

iStat is a nifty monitoring application from the guys at iSlayer.

It lets you view and observe CPU usage, memory, hard disk, and network thoughput usage. It displays uptime and average system load. If you are concerned about thermal failure, iStat lets you keep tabs on temperatures and fan speeds. And, it will also give you statistics on battery use and life.


Click image for a full-size view.

The app is extremely easy to use, just double click and go. You can configure what things you ant to observe. You are also able to adjust transaparency and display colors. Each section lets you change the update interval to suit your wants.


Click image for a full-size view.

Normally, I try to come up with fresh, witty content for you to read here. Today, I can only pass along a link to a blog entry by Russ Beattie.

Russ' article discusses the mechanism by which Apple is updating the iPhone, iTunes. He talks about how the updates Apple is providing aren't necessarily revolutionary in their content, but in the delivery mechansim and how easy it is to get those updates installed.

Having had some nightmarish update experiences in the past, (LF VX-1 anyone?) I'm glad this aspect of the iPhone is being talked about. Enjoy!

Well, everyone knew this would happen. it took a little less than two months. Apple's much herladed iPhone has been unlocked. So, one could go into their local Apple Store and purchase an iPhone, unlock the phone, and use it with the carrier of their choice. Interesting.

I haven't read much about this yet, I figure I'll wait until it's raining again (I'm in south central Wisconsin) and read up on the details then. but it should make the game a bit more interesting.

Some questions I have are:

Will it work with another carrier's data service?

What about visual voicemail?

Does GoogleMaps just work?
Will Apple & AT&T fight back? The hackers that pulled this off claim it will survive updates. We shall see.

If you find the earbuds Apple provides with their iPods uncomfortable, pick up a set of EarJams.

EarJams are a simple little snap-on device that allows Apple's earbuds to be used as in-the-ear earphones. Very cool, and at around $20, a good thing.

Please note that they do not fit the iPhone's earbuds. as those are smaller than the iPod-supplied buds. Which explains why I can use the iPhone buds but could not stand the iPod ones.

This popped up on me when I went to sync my iPhone last night. No clue what it does or fixes, but I went ahead and installed it. So far so good.

No release notes have cropped up on the iPhone support page, but I'll try to update when they do.
  

If you have to install a new drive into an Intel-based Mac, make sure when partitioning the drive, you click the Options button and select the GUID Partition Table button. Not doing so will prevent the drive from being a bootable volume. Apple's restore or insallation discs will not install either.

Just a tip from someone who knows.

What I'm buying from the iTunes Store.

Where are people visiting this site from? All over hopefully. This map represents the geographical locations users are visiting from.