Greg In The Desert

In my experience, if you treat a cat as “just an animal,” that’s how he will behave. He will sense that you are not really trying to understand him, and naturally enough, he will give up trying to communicate. The more you engage with him as an equal and try to understand his perspective on the world, the more he will respond to you, and the closer your relationship may become.

Matt handed me a 13” MacBook and told me to go nuts. The first thing I noticed, before even touching a tool, was how solid the new MacBook feels. Portables take a beating, and I would often see MacBook Pros with dented-in corners from impact damage and MacBooks with bent optical drive bezels from being lifted by the right side while the display was opened. While I’m sure there will be folks out there who will still find a way to kick the crap out of their portables, I can honestly say that this line physically feels like it will withstand more bumps and squeezes than the previous generation.

On Tuesday the Telegraph, the Independent, the Mirror, the Express, the Mail, and the Metro all reported that a coroner was hearing the case of a toddler who died after receiving the MMR vaccine, which the parents blamed for their loss. Toddler ‘died after MMR jab’ (Metro), ‘Healthy’ baby died after MMR jab (Independent), you know the headlines by now. 

On Thursday the coroner announced his verdict: the vaccine played no part in this child’s death. So far, of the papers above, only the Telegraph has had the decency to cover the outcome. The Independent, the Mirror, the Express, the Mail, and the Metro have all decided that their readers are better off not knowing. Tick, tock.

Getting into this Texas prison is turning out to be more difficult than I expected. First I had to submit a written application with a photocopy of my driver’s license, for a background check. After I was approved, I had to establish the date of my arrival, and when I drove out here this morning my car was subjected to some truly amazing security theater, as one humorless uniformed guard stared solemnly at all the stuff in the trunk while another peered under the hood at the engine.

The upcoming litigation between AMD and Intel, as well as the various ongoing investigations into the CPU giant’s activities combine in a tangled web of interconnected cases. We aren’t going to settle any of the legal issues today, but clarifying the structure of the cases has a value all its own.

Penn State Assistant Professor of Biology Tracy Langkilde has shown that native fence lizards in the southeastern United States are adapting to potentially fatal invasive fire-ant attacks by developing behaviors that enable them to escape from the ants, as well as by developing longer hind legs, which can increase the effectiveness of this behavior. 

“Not only does this finding provide biologists with an example of evolution in action, but it also provides wildlife managers with knowledge that they can use to develop plans for managing invasive species,” said Langkilde. The results will be described in a paper to be published later this month in the journal Ecology.

On October 3, 2008, President Bush signed into law the “Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008.” This bill extended tax credits for energy efficient home improvements (windows, doors, roofs, insulation, HVAC, and non-solar water heaters). Tax credits for these residential products, which had expired at the end of 2007, will now be available for improvements made during 2009. However, improvements made during 2008 are not eligible for a tax credit.

iLife ‘09 is finally available on store shelves, and while most of the attention will probably go to iPhoto’s spiffy new face-recognition, there’s a feature tucked into GarageBand that might be making headlines very soon: premium lessons for piano and guitar, presented by the artists themselves. Dubbed ‘Lesson Store’, Apple’s online marketplace for music lessons has all the makings of a revolution in music learning that could prove to be incredibly popular and lucrative. We’ve known about it since its unveiling at Macworld, but only after trying it out can I confirm what many initially suspected: this thing is going to rock.

Letter Opener is a Mail.app plugin which decodes the .dat files inline, so the process is transparent to you, the recipient. The attachments appear like any others, and life is that much easier. Letter Opener isn’t cheap, and the utility vs. cost ratio is dependent on how many winmail.dat files you deal with on a daily basis.

The global financial crisis has led many companies to slice payrolls, but these employers are staying loyal. Meet 9 of this year’s Best Companies that, as of mid-January, have never had a layoff.

Well, here’s some good news. The upcoming FeedDemon 2.8 release, currently in beta, will feature synchronization with Google Reader according to this spy screenshot released by Nick Bradbury himself.

As you may know, Apple added Flickr uploading to iPhoto ‘09. As you may guess, I was a little perturbed at this since I pay my mortgage by selling, er, a Flickr upload plugin for iPhoto. 

I acquired my copy of iLife ‘09 yesterday and decided to dive deep on how Apple have implemented Flickr integration in iPhoto ‘09. Here are the results of my investigation. Be aware as you read that this is the result of a morning’s click-around investigation and not months of serious use. I will do my best to give an honest assessment of what is in iPhoto ‘09, and you’ve already read my full disclosure in the previous paragraph.

the DTVPal DVR ($250) is pretty much one of only two mainstream retail HD DVR set-top boxes currently available. Unlike the similarly priced TiVo HD, DISH’s solution is subscription-free with guide data received OTA.