Mac Mini is User-Upgradable

Unofficial Apple Weblog interview with the Mac Mini project manager states that RAM is user-upgradable without voiding warranty, and so is upgrading/adding Airport, Bluetooth and the HD. Doing the latter three might be harder, though.

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Unordered List

• Destroy Rock and Roll;
• The Incredibles;
• Clapham;
• Bette Davis Eyes, Paltrow-style;
• semicolons;
• Twisty Little Passages;
• my flying car;
• furiously amending specification documents;
• furiously highlighting clauses in horrendously complicated contracts; and
• giving.

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Frank Miller's Sin City

I hadn't really heard of Sin City before, but after having had the chance to see the trailer for the film adaptation, can I just say:

1. wow; and

2. the soundtrack for the trailer is an instrumental version of The Servant's Cells (RealAudio), which is similarly wow.

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Merry Christmas

And a merry Jingle Rock Bell...

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Better living through (the denial of) chemistry

The Times ran a suite of stories today on research suggesting a link between over-enthusiastic housekeepers keeping their immediate surroundings a little too clean and perhaps applying a little too much zeal with household cleaning 'chemicals' and the increasing prevalance of asthma. Times reporter Anna Patty diligently filed a story concerning a young boy with asthma and his mother, Shelley:

Although the cause of asthma is unknown, Mrs Cohen-Morgan believes that weather changes trigger Joshua’s asthma attacks. She also suspects that household chemicals and pollution bring on attacks, and is vigilant in keeping her home free of household cleaners and dust.

“Everything I buy is organic. I stay clear of anything with chemicals in it,” she said. “I don’t use polish, air fresheners or household chemicals. Joshua doesn’t need to be inhaling any aerosol-based products.”

The title of the story was, obviously 'I don't use anything with chemicals in it'.

I hope she doesn't know her son was born with chemicals in him already!

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Don't forget Poland

... I didn't.

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What kind of question is that?

Tom rightly takes someone to task for what appears to be an ill-informed, reactionary, passive-aggressive rant for what I thought was a perfectly reasonable business card.

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iTunes for PDF

• iTunes works with PDFs as well - Apple is using PDFs to distribute U2 liner notes. Do the files sync to iPods too, though, useless as they are on there?

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UK Stem Cell Bank

Guardian Life article on the opening of the UK stem cell bank:

It will be a tremendous medical resource: it has the potential to accelerate massively the field of regenerative medicine and it sets the benchmark for stem cell research worldwide. Funded by the Medical Research Council and the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, the new bank will be based in the National Institute for Biological Standards and Control in Hertfordshire. It is the only place in the world that will systematically maintain and distribute an ever-growing range of stem cells to scientists around the world. And the Centre for Neuroscience Research at King's College London yesterday donated one of the bank's first set of embryonic stem cells. [more]

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Extra N means it's really small

Via BBC News Online, nannobacteria versus nanobacteria.

Doctors claim to have uncovered new evidence that the tiny particles known as "nannobacteria" are indeed alive and may cause a range of human illnesses. The existence of nannobacteria is one of the most controversial of scientific questions - some experts claim they are simply too small to be life forms. [more]

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Apple bits and pieces

Some Apple-related bits and pieces:

• SubEthaEdit 2.0 has been released, still looks "free"
• Proteus X 4.0 has been released (I'm using Adium X for the time being)
• I have a theory (no demons): when Dave Hyatt writes about updates to Safari, say, improved page display timing algorithms, it means that a point release can't be far behind
• Possible Safari vulnerability

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Space management in 2D UIs

Stumbled upon Christian Sandor's homepage while doing some augmented reality research and saw this quite stunning illustration video (11MB WMV) of a spatially aware window manager. More details here, but the Columbia Dynamic Space Manager looks awfully like the granddaddy of Apple's Exposé (and does a hell of a lot more).

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Laughing-my-ass-off-hilarious

I'm sorry, but this really takes the piss. From the F-Secure weblog:

The FTP server in the Sasser worm family has an apparent buffer overflow vulnerability. A small program has appeared on the InterNet that exploits this vulnerabilty and opens a remote shell on TCP port 530 (by default). [more]

Sorry. That's terribly funny.

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Mutt, Safari

Mac OS X Hints: get mutt to open URLs in Safari.

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Semacode and CyberLink

Semacode 2D barcodes look awfully like Sony CyberCode 2D barcodes... (I've written about Sony's CyberCode 48 comments and trackbacks