My former colleague, Mike Speiser (who’s now over at Sutter Hill Ventures), recently suggested his vision of where Apple TV should be heading. With the rumored Apple TV-minus-the-box-plus-the-TV unit days from being announced, I wanted to add one more set of thoughts to his before any such unveiling. Mike was one of the folks behind […]

The Apple TV and the iPhone will (at some point) converge as a single development platform to complement the Mac computer platform. Or so my theory goes. Why is that? Apple dropped the Apple TV on consumers in January 2007 as a “hobby.” Since then, it has released several software updates, including a major on-demand […]

Last year, I posted a list of my favorite Mac software I used and recommended to others. 18 months have passed, and its time to provide an update for folks. Inquisitor Download Inquisitor | Previous recommendation that must be recommended again Aside from far-faster page-loading performance, Inquisitor makes Safari the one-and-only browser choice on the […]

Amazon apparently rolled out a quiet, but important, feature in the past couple of weeks: the Universal Wish List. By “universal,” Amazon’s simply referring to its ability to snag non-Amazon products and track them alongside its own inventory in its existing Wish List system. I’ve been trying to get my extended family to use Amazon’s […]

The Wednesday morning before last, I was excited to see that WordPress released an official iPhone application to the world. I instantly downloaded it, and added several of my WordPress blogs to the app. Aside from the annoying Twitter Tools glitch (which sent an empty tweet on blog setup), I was surprised to see some […]

I’m not sure how I initially found the news, but when I saw the headline (I Ain’t Got Nothing Against Ice T Or Nobody For That Matter But I Gotta Ride With Soulja Boy..) on Kanye West’s blog, I had to click. And, I had to click for two reasons. First, why would Kanye be […]

Nobody Wants to Hear Lloyd, originally uploaded by mlaaker. Shortly before I left the halls of Island Def Jam to come to Yahoo!, the company began promoting little-known Atlanta artist Lloyd on their Murder Inc. sub-label. After one spin, I smelled a stinker, and said so. “No, no, no. Lloyd’s gonna be hot,” I heard. […]

I recently offered to pre-screen O’Reilly’s first graphic novel, “Hackerteen: Volume 1: Internet Blackout,” under the caveat that I’d post a review afterwards. Quick review: I wish I hadn’t committed to write this review. I find Internet Blackout to be offensive to those who enjoy comics, the Internet, and learning. Full review: I’m a fan […]

The “animal cracker” is an often misunderstood delight, deserving of detail and defense in an era of mislabeling and generalizations. According to Wikipedia’s definition of “animal cracker,” they are “crackers in the shapes of animals… They are like crackers due to the way they are made, with layered dough, however the use of sweetened dough […]

MyBlogLog has been on a tear lately, releasing FOAF support, XFN support, and verification of sites. Most interesting to me, however, has been their quiet rollout of MicroID support last week. ClaimID quickly posted, Fred Stutzman followed suit, and the MicroID blog alerted folks as well. MicroID, for the uninitiated, is a snippet of code […]

My good colleague Max recently released his Yahoo! Media Player WordPress plugin. This add-on uses the Yahoo! Media Player, recently released on the Developer Network, to automatically create an embedded MP3/audio player for every link to an audio file you have in your posts (or every file linked from an XSPF playlist). Additionally, Max’s plugin […]

I’ve had a recurring problem for years in Mac OS X. Whenever I need to do a backup, I find myself repeating a pattern. I select a series of files and folders, and then check their total file size via the Finder’s Inspector palette (Cmd-Option-I) to see how close that is to the CD/DVD disc’s […]

Over the past year, I’ve had several friends and colleagues break out from their corporate jobs and start up their own companies. As such, I wanted to point folks over to their efforts, as there are several stand-out efforts that are worth checking out. Crush3r An events service that lets you send out beautiful, custom-designed […]

At the end of 2006, an interesting phenomenon in the Mac world unfolded. “MacHeist” was unveiled, wherein the public could engage in a number of challenges to earn passwords. Each password would “unlock” the MacHeist vault, wherein a user would get access to a piece of Mac software with a legitimate license for use. At […]

Rock chalk Jayhawk! My alma mater, KU, just won the Orange Bowl. This is big news for KU, whose football program dominated my home state team, Nebraska, this year (an inverse of the normal yearly relationship).(Posted from Twitter.)