Macintosh

I picked up an Eye-Fi card at Macworld, but I didn’t really get a chance to try it out until now thanks to the crappy WiFi connection and not having my D40x. It works exactly as advertised. I can take a photo and have it uploaded immediately to Flickr without using my computer, and also have it sent to a folder on my computer.

However, I find that I prefer just sending it to my computer, since not every picture I take is good enough to share, and I usually like to clean it up a bit before I upload it.

One nice feature is that it can handle losing the connection in the middle of an upload. If I take a picture outdoors where there’s no WiFi, it will start uploading as soon as I get within range of my network. If the connection is interrupted (or, more likely, the camera is shut off), it will resume when the power or connection is restored. Changing the camera’s auto-off timer (which they tell you how to do in the Eye-Fi help page) can keep it from interrupting the upload.

The last day of the show is crazy even though the crowd is smaller. I got a lot more swag today since everyone wanted to get rid of stuff. I spent most of the afternoon in Moscone West, where the smaller and more fun booths were. One company was selling headphones half price. I got a very nice set of iPhone compatible in-ear buds for $10.

EA was showing Spore, which they claim will ship “sometime this year”. It’s been in development for 4 years, by the author of The Sims.

Guitar Hero III drew the biggest crowds. One kid was playing for over an hour. I finally got a chance to try it and I found the guitar controller more comfortable to use than the Wii, although it isn’t wireless.

My hotel internet is still down, so I’m now blogging from the Apple store.

My day 4 pics are up now.

The only place I could find good connectivity in Moscone South is the corridor outside the exhibit hall. My hotel’s Wifi sucked even worse than usual – I couldn’t obtain an IP address at all.

Instead of buying the overpriced food in Moscone, I took a walk to Metreon for lunch. They have a really cool game floor, where kids play by walking, jumping, and stomping on the active surface. They also have an iPod vending machine.

I really like Guitar Hero 3 on the Mac, but I probably won’t buy it, since I already own it for the Wii (not to mention trying to get it home on my flight).

We had the 23rd annual Netter’s Dinner at Hunan on Sansome & Broadway. As usual the food was great and it was lots of fun. I haven’t been to all of them, but I usually try to go whenever I’m at Macworld. As always, it was organized by Jon Pugh and Adam Engst. I donated a few copies of LoJack for Laptops, which were given away as swag.

My day 3 pictures are now up here.

Connectivity was a lot better today. Today I discovered that they have a “hidden” network (no SSID broadcast) outside the exhibit hall, so I was able to get online at Moscone South. I took advantage of it to update my iPhone to 1.1.3. The upgrade went smoothly and my iPhone didn’t get bricked.

I went to the WordPress meetup lunch at Chaat Cafe and met some interesting people from WordPress, C|Net, and MacTeens, and I got a new red WordPress T-shirt.

I bought an Eye-Fi card, which I haven’t had a chance to try yet. It’s a 2GB SD card with built-in WiFi that can upload directly to Flickr or into iPhoto. I’ll post something about it later.

The Eye-Fi card won best of show, along with Parallels Server, MacBook Air, and Photoshop Elements. Ben Rudolph from Parallels was sitting behind me and he noticed the Parallels Desktop icon in my dock.

I’m now blogging from H&R Block Tango’s Blog Spot, where the wired internet connection is very fast, and they have free beer. I’ll probably post more later.

I was up at 4:30 AM and on line before 5:30, yet I only got into the overflow room. I was very disappointed with the lack of internet access and power. I was able to plug in my MacBook Pro a few times to charge it, but I wasn’t able to get online for more than a few minutes, at Microsoft’s Blogger Lounge, where the WiFi only worked intermittently.

Today’s keynote was the first in a long time where I didn’t want to run out and buy something right away. The MacBook Air is gorgeous, but I can’t really use it since it doesn’t have enough storage and is too slow to be my primary machine, and there’s no easy way to sync it with another Mac.

I met Daniel Brusilovsky, Robert Scoble, and Patrick Scoble in the show and at 6PM I went to Daniel’s Apple Universe Live event.

The internet connection in my hotel isn’t working and they said it would be several hours before it’s fixed.

I haven’t been able to upgrade my iPhone without a reliable connection, although that’s probably a good thing, since Patrick Scoble bricked his iPhone doing the update. I’m now posting this from Starbucks near Moscone West.

I got to San Francisco on time, and even more amazing, my luggage arrived with me. I only had 25 minutes for the connection in Salt Lake City because my first flight arrived about 15 minutes late. When I got to the gate (which was in the next concourse from where my first flight landed), it was already boarding.

I made it to the Ars Technica party tonight, but less than 2 hours of sleep in the last 48 hours started to hit me, so I’m now back at the hotel to get some sleep before tomorrow’s keynote.

I hope to be at Moscone West before 6AM tomorrow morning. I will be meeting Daniel Brusilovsky, who has guaranteed seats, and we’ll be covering the keynote together. If there’s no wifi, I’ll attempt to post via email and Daniel will stream live at Qik.

I bought the MacHeist bundle yesterday. Only $17,337 needs to be raised for charity before Pixelmator gets unlocked! Since Pixelmator sells for $59, even without any of the other applications it makes the $49 bundle worthwhile.

I finally decided to try FlickrFan, Dave Winer’s application that downloads photos from your Flickr RSS feeds. A few days ago I bought PhotoPresenter when MacZOT offered it. The two work great together – simply add FlickrFan’s download folder as a source and you can make a stylish animated slideshow of your photos or your friends’ photos.

FlickrFan looks a lot like every other application Dave Winer has written for the last decade or so. Like Frontier & Radio Userland, all of the functionality is provided by a ‘root’ file, with a built-in outline editor.