The Computer Chronicles

http://www.archive.org/browse.php?field=su...puterchronicles

While I never knew this show existed when it ran, I've been going through and watching many episodes since I found this archive. It looks like it ran from the early '80s all the way to 2002 or so, covering everything from the Commodore 64 to Windows 95, to DVD drives, with tons of stuff in between.

One episode, for instance, discusses all the cool things you can do with a brand new DVD drive in your PC, such as not have 36 discs for an encyclopedia. Another demonstrates all the cutting-edge techniques to enjoy music in 1998, including Napster and mp3.com, as well as high-capacity MP3 players with up to 1.6 gigabytes of storage. An especially interesting segment featured a desktop trackpoint from 1996, accompanied with the observation that "the laptop industry seems to be standardizing on the trackpoint as the pointing device of choice."

Some of the videos do have some audio problems, but overall the collection is very interesting to spend an afternoon browsing.

Safari 5

Surprised to see it's out without the usual beta. In any case, looks nice despite receiving the complete shaft during the main presentation.

I like the Reader. Oddily enough, it seems to spawn a weird sort of window that prevents the screenshot from working right. It wants to either grab a shot of the regular window, or just the reader.




Edit: Just realized that it actually obtained the second page of that article automatically. Nice.

Bliss HD

Remember the default wallpaper in XP? The 800 x 600 compressed jpeg? Well, since it's an actual photo, someone went and found the original and put out an HD version here (the first post has a 4:3 version, scroll all the way to the last for a 16:10 version.) He's even linked the original, 25 MB .tiff photo.

I actually first got it in the xpize package, which is sort of like a Windows XP HD Remix. Pretty cool.

Google Reader

I recently got an email that Newsgator would be discontinuing several products including their online feed reader and integrating the remaining ones into Google Reader. Having not used it before, is it any good? Just from looking at the interface (and knowing what they can do) it looks good.

Anyone else a Newsgator user like me who's heard about the switch?

Anyone else seen this iTunes glitch?

For some reason apps won't wrap past a certain width. Albums in tile view will, but apps won't.