Takumi's Blog

Time fly’s by, it really does. Even though I know that, I hadn’t realized that the eMac sitting in my moms office is about 4 years old! 4 years, a lot has happened in four years.

Apple introduced it’s xserve product line, upgraded it’s iMacs, and even made the transition to intel products. Everyone knows Apple’s going to be bringing more innovation to the PC market, after all, they probably are just getting started.

Designed in California has a detailed product listing of all of Apple’s products since 1997. Not just the product listings, but also detailed information on when things got upgraded, prices, etc. It’s a great site to take a look at sometime, I’m sure you’d be surprised by some of the things you find.

Merry Christmas ‘06 everybody!

Hope you had a fun Christmas and got presents you love! (They don’t have to be material things, the presents could be having a good time with your friends, etc.)

Everyone uses Google search. I bet even Yahoo people use Google search. Which is why I think it’s important that Google keeps its search engine fair. Lately, they’ve been ‘advertising’ Blogger as “hints” on any search that has the word “blog” in it.

I read before how Google puts ads for its own products in the top 5 placements for searches and website ads, but I didn’t believe it. I also didn’t want to believe it. But what Google is doing now, it’s so in your face there’s nothing you can do except believe it.

Think of how much companies would pay to have their product come as a “hint” for every search related to a particular term. Just because Google owns the search engine, I don’t think it should be able to bend it’s own rules and put itself at the top… unless of course it’s already in the Terms of Use, in that case I guess I’ve been using Google all this time knowing that would happen, eh?

I mean it’s been so good so far. People are cancelling arrangements they made with me, they’re ignoring my messages, and now I have no idea what to get my friends fro Christmas.

What are you getting your friends for christmas? Any last minute ideas? I leave for the US tomorrow morning, and I only have tonight to buy some presents and pack up…

SAT studying, Text-book buying, kanji tests… I can already tell this is going to be the best Christmas of my life

I’ve been using the Google Apps for Your Domain since March, and I’ve loved their initial idea, and keep loving the new features they add on to it. (Though, I think they need to work on collaboration between the services for the domain. Like, the ability to create shared calendars that are automatically added to all other users, the ability to have a ‘private’ and a ‘public/synced’ address book, to have Google Docs integrated and also having ‘private’ and ‘public/synced’ categories).

Up until now, you needed to have your own domain to be able to sign up for the service. Which probably means you already have your own hosting too. I guess the next step would be to add the ability to purchase domains that just use Google’s services right? Well, that’s what they did.

If you don’t already own on, then you can buy a domain, and have it automatically setup with all of Google’s Apps for Your Domain!

I guess they’re going to be finishing up the beta soon, or maybe it’ll always be in beta (like Gmail), either way, it’s a good service that keeps improving.

Finding colors that match can sometimes be hard, you’ve had those times too right?

For your computer, there is Color Schemer Studio (which has some pretty neat features). But what if you’re on the go, and you’re not at your computer? What do you do then?

Well, Adobe Labs has a lot of cool stuff, and one of them, is kuler.

It’s all built on Flash, so any computer that is Flash 9 capable can use it. You can create schemes from a set of rules. Analogous, monochromatic, triad, complementary, compound, shades, and even your own custom one. (though, I don’t know what half of those things mean, they sure do bring some good sets together).

One of the cool features is you can see what everyone else is making too, the most popular ones, the  newest ones, and even the highest rated ones!

MacHeist released their ‘prize bundle’ (I guess that’s what you call it, I haven’t been keeping up with their stuff, just don’t have the time to play the games either).

8 great Mac applications for only $49! Plus, 25% of it goes to the charity of your choice! The deal doesn’t get sweeter than that.

Here’s a list of the apps:

• Delicious Library
• FotoMagico
• ShapeShifter
• DEVONthink Personal
• Disco
• RapidWeaver
• iClip 4
• One Pangea Game (Pangea Arcade or Enigmo 2 or Nanasour 2: Hatchling or Bugdom 2)

And it gets better than that. If they raise $50,000 for charity, they’ll also give out Newsfire, and if they raise $100,000 for charity, they’ll also put in TextMate!

Most of these applications have won some sort of award (or been hella popular), and textmate is like everyone’s friend!

Oh yeah, macZOT is also offering the same bundle. I guess the two sites are working together on this!

PS. I’ve just noticed this today, but there are a lot of websites out there that are pushing independent Mac software developers (as in supporting them), another new one is called MacAppADay (they give 5000 free copies of a Mac App everyday at midnight)

You know Google’s Personalized Homepage. We’ve all used it, customized it, etc. I mainly use it for getting an overview of all the latest news on one page. Then they added a tabbing feature so you could separate what you were looking at.

They’ve done a great job at letting you customize it, but one thing I don’t like about it is you need to login to view your customized settings.

OriginalSignal has already done all the hard work for you. They’ve added feeds from many different news sources, and even took the time to split them up into different categories.

They have a nice integrated search to look through everything, and even have a cute little menu bar that lets you subscribe, change the look of the page, view it on a mobile phone, amongst other things too. I enjoy going to it, and now use OriginalSignal instead of my GPH! (well, OS doesn’t let you add your own feeds, so for that, I use GPH)

There’s TONS of data lying around the web. I mean, seriously, we wouldn’t know how to make use of it (well, maybe the genius’ at Google do). But the new Swivel site has an easy way to put together different data and make graphs out of them.

The site has ways for you to compare data, upload new data, and share the data you’ve come up with.

Swivel lets you explore data and share your insights with others. Swivel has data about politics, economics, weather, sports, business and more.

It’s still a Preview, (which, I’m assuming is like a Release Candidate?), so there isn’t as much data as you would hope, but the more users who upload and share, the more variety you get to compare data from.

Verizon has it’s new subscription based YouTube service, but it’s not ‘really’ YouTube. Well, not the YouTube we used to know. And many of us don’t even use Verizon, so what’s another video alternative for your mobile?

Well, there is TinyTube. The site is made for your mobile (no graphics, etc. except for the vid), and it’s all user contributed. There are videos from Google Video, and other online video sources too. And until recently, there were also video’s from YouTube that were on there.

It’s not a competing service, but it’s a place where mobile users can go to view videos on their phone. Videos from many different sources.  One of the first videos I saw that I liked was Shake That. It looks like it’s sort of cut out from a movie… maybe not.

All the major internet providers have huge IP backbones, interconnected with 10GB/s fiber optics. But that’s not going to last us long, the need for more bandwidth has become higher with streaming video and HD content on the internet. GigaOM’s article goes into the detail of how it works.

Infinera, together with Level3, Internet2, University of California, Santa Cruz brought 100GB/s interconnectivity to reality. What’s this going to mean for most of us? Well, our providers will be able to offer us faster connections, and a lot more people will be able to maintain the new, fast connections.

Azureus and BitTorrent are already in the works of making P2P video content a reality, and if that really does go mainstream, this new bandwidth will be needed.

Although, it’s not going to be standardized for a while. IEEE took nearly 5 years to make 10GB/s standard, and this time around we can’t wait that long!

I’ve read a lot of Mac sites before, ranging from blogs, news sites, to just plain websites… but Roughly Drafted sure has some fascinating articles. One of his series’ main topic is comparing Vista to Leopard.

It’s not the traditional comparison that you would think someone would write. He writes it more in detail, from pre-marketing all the way to … well, the tech specs.
I can’t write much, though I’d love to. I just found out I have an essay due tomorrow, and I just finished helping three other friends on a different essay…. so I must get to work on my own now!

Nearly everyone knows about the Million Dollar Homepage, and the 21-year old behind the idea. I mean, he made a million dollars off of a simple webpage!

1000Tags.com is trying to bring about something similar to it, but instead of pixels, using Tags.

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Perpendicular hard drives are the replacements for traditional ones. Some of you know what they are, and some don’t. Perpendicular hard drives store the data vertically instead of horizontally, which allow more bits to be packed into a certain area.

Hitachi has made a somewhat cheesy animated video introducing and explaining what perpendicular hard drives are. It looks like it’s targeted for kids, I’m serious!