I’ve purchased a Nifty MiniDrive Air a few months back, shortly after I bought my MacBook Air. It arrived a month or three later, but that’s to be expected about products funded with Kickstarter.
I was lucky as I didn’t have to use tape to make it work - it just worked, out of the box, exactly as you’d expect it to work. Transfer speeds are great (or not so great, completely depending on your Micro SD card - don’t expect SSD performance), it sits flush, and the surface looks exactly like the MacBook’s aluminium.
After finding out that Time Machine refuses to backup SD cards for no good reason, I decided to use my Nifty MiniDrive to store movies and TV shows I’m going to watch soon - the read speed ist fast enough for anything my MacBook can decode without stuttering, there’s no point in putting large files that I almost never use on the internal SSD, and all of my movies and TV episodes are already backed up on at least two external drives.
Remember when I promised to update my photo blog more regularly?
Yeah, me neither. But yesterday, after finally editing all publishable photos I took in Denmark last summer, dumping the 15 GB worth of PSDs on a few external hard drives and dealing with a broken file system, I decided to begin putting those photos on Tumblr to acquire some meaningless internet points.
Also, on a completely unrelated note, I created ReAD a few weeks back. It’s quite nifty, if I may say so myself (which I may, because this is my blog).
Apparently, Microsoft thinks that demoing their latest products at my university will drive sales, so they have a small booth in the cafeteria this week. (Most of the students have access to a free, legal copy of the most recent Windows versions anyway, so I don’t fully understand why Microsoft thinks throwing money at stuff like that is a good idea.)
I talked to a really nice Microsoft person for about twenty minutes today, and I gotta say: Windows feels really snappy on the Surface RT. On other devices that are not optimized for the newest Windows versions, not so much, but the performance is still acceptable. Also, while using Windows 8 on a giant TV screen, I found that all the new touch gestures and hot corners and menus and stuff are interesting, to say the least - ome might even say that they’re good, but I haven’t used the OS for more than a minute at a time, so I don’t feel comfortable expressing a definite opinion.
That said, I like the simple, colorful desig more than, say, the approach Apple has been taking with iOS.
I don’t really know what to say beyond that - you can read about the new Windows’ numerous features online, and if Microsoft does a booth somewhere near you, go there and talk to a staffer, even if you hate Windows with the force of a thousand neckbeards. Microsoft products aren’t neccessarily bad, even though they don’t respect your freedom, Mr. Stallman. Also, the Microsoft employee I talked to was quite knowledgeable, though, let’s face it, he tried to sell me on Windows - which is what he gets paid for, after all.
I’ll stick to my MacBook and Android phone for now, but if someone decided to gift me a Surface RT (hint, hint), I’m sure I’d use it on a regular basis.
What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time.
A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.
Carl Sagan, The Persistence of Memory.
When I saw this quote on The Changelog, I immediately read it in Carl Sagan’s voice. I don’t know if that’s because I’ve watched and loved Cosmos or because of his unique use of language—probably a combination of both.
It’s a shame that he died in 1996, two years after I was born.
