MacHeist is back with a new deal. In years past, there has been plenty of controversy over just how much of the MacHeist bundle money goes to software developers. The new MacHeist deal, which is actually free, should lay that controversy to rest once and for all. MacHeist has never been about the money made from the software bundles. It’s been a matter of exposure, upgrade sales, and sales of companion products.

Alas, for me, this particular bundle doesn’t really have any software I want. Maybe next bundle…

Every now and then, I wonder what kind of balance I should draw between consuming content online and producing it. Between having new information pushed at me via Google Reader or Twitter, for example, and pulling information that I need via searches. Between spending time looking at a screen and spending time looking at stuff that has mass and takes up space.

During the summer, the balance definitely shifts toward spending time away from screens, and that’s a good thing. Michigan winters are entirely too long, even for me, a Michigan native. I want to take advantage of the summer, so much of my time not spent working is spent doing things away from the screen. This year, I’ve been having a good time riding my bike with my daughter on her new Burley Kazoo Trailercycle.

For the next month, I want to try an experiment that I haven’t tried in a long time and that is to go on a serious information diet. For a month, I’m swearing off Google Reader, Twitter, Hacker News, etc. I’ll still post to Twitter and watch for Twitter mentions and DMs, but I’m not going to follow the random links that appear there.

Doing this will eliminate a source of randomness in my thoughts, and I’m curious to see whether or not I’ll miss it. Will I miss finding out about the latest Snow Leopard seeds, or technical indicators of how crappy the economy is? By stripping down my inputs, I’ll find out.

I’m pretty sure that I’ll miss some of the news I get. The real trick, I think, is that I want better filters. Maybe over the next month I’ll discover how to increase the signal-to-noise ratio. I’m certain that the answer to that is not more Digg.

My wife and I recently upgraded our iPhones, given the apparent value of used iPhones on eBay. The first one was sold via Buy It Now, to someone who turned out to be a scammer from Nigeria. Though I haven’t yet confirmed the vileness of the second purchaser, I strongly suspect a similar situation.

It appears that perhaps “it’s now completely impossible to sell a laptop on eBay” (or cell phone). This could really hurt eBay if this keeps up, but it’s not entirely clear how they can prevent it. They’d almost need to have a system where a user with positive feedback will vouch for any new user. Even that can be gamed, but it’s harder. Both of the scammers going after our phones have 0 feedback.

Take my advice: if you have an electronic doodad to sell and put it on eBay, be very wary of any buyer with 0 feedback and never trust the email messages you receive.

Sympathy for the bad apples « The Poor Man Institute

We’ve got what amounts to a reverse Nuremberg defense, where Bush administration officials are let off the hook because they were only giving orders.

But while Apple caused a revolution, it is unlikely to become dominant in the market. It has sold just over 20m iPhones since the first device appeared in 2007; in that time more than 1.5bn phones have been shipped by everyone else. A similar thing happened with the personal computer market. The concept was championed by Apple when it launched Apple II, the world’s first personal computer, in 1977, and the first Macintosh in 1984, but other players now lead the market.

From Sound familiar? Apple launches a revolution – and then gets overtaken

Apple sure is fun to write about, isn’t it?

From what I can see, Apple likes to make neat products that they would personally enjoy using and that can be sold for a reasonable profit. The Observer article chose to mention how Apple lost a tremendous amount of market share in personal computers within a few years of the Mac’s debut (let’s ignore the fact that that also occurred within a few years of Steve Jobs’ departure). The Observer did not choose to focus on portable music players, a market that Apple stepped into and still holds a dominant position in.

In the case of music players, Apple’s cheapest iPod is $50. I’ve seen MP3 players with comparable features for $20. Apple competes in music players not by driving prices down, but by driving features up. There is a low end that they will not touch. They same is true of Macintosh computers: Apple will compete only in price segments in which they can compete profitably. Though they ensure that their prices are not insane, they also don’t worry too much about competing on price. They compete instead on fit and finish and the software.

What does this tell us about Apple and phones? Unlike music players, the cell phone market is already quite established. As the Observer points out, Apple has had only about 1% market share. Apple doesn’t care. They may have only 1% market share, but they have a product that is generating billions a year for them. As the iPhone line expands and improves over time, Apple’s market share will likely expand as well. But, that’s not the goal: the goal is making profitable products that people want to use.

So, back to the Observer article: they say that Apple started a revolution but will be overtaken. While I am pretty sure that Apple will never have a dominant market share position in cell phones (say more than 30%), I don’t think it’s certain that they will be overtaken in the new segment that they have created: portable computing and communication devices. They have first mover advantage with the App Store and have already built a thriving ecosystem around the iPhone. Those 20 million phones sold, plus some number of iPod Touches, represent a platform for Apple to grow, rather than “just a phone”.

Apple’s ultimate success (or failure) with the iPhone should not be measured relative to cell phone market share, but relative to ultra portable computing devices in general.

In 2009, it’s likely cliché (maybe even passé) to complain about things that you see around the security checkpoints at airports. For example, today I saw a mother removing tiny sandals from a baby’s feet to put them in a bin for x-ray scanning. I’m pretty sure that I’ve read before that the whole “shoe bomb” thing was overplayed. I’m more certain, though that a pair of baby sandals are not a risk. Maybe if the bad guys can hire away James Bond’s Q, baby sandals will become a risk.

The sadder thing that I saw, however, was the posters with a photo and bio of a TSA employee. I’ve certainly seen these in the past, but I hadn’t really thought about why they were there. The only thing I can imagine is that they’re there to “humanize” the TSA employees. It’s sad that such a thing is necessary. I’m sure that TSA employees have taken tons of verbal abuse over the past few years, and these posters are probably there to deter that.

Yelling at a TSA employee is not only likely to ruin the day of someone who’s just a normal person, it’s not going to do you any good. Those people are not empowered to do anything. If you have a complaint, wouldn’t it make more sense to complain to the TSA itself? Or complain to your congressperson? Or on your blog or twitter?

“When the iPhone came out, it was so far beyond what was out there on the market, pretty much up until now,” said Edward Zabitsky, analyst with ACI Research. “But with what’s coming out from competitors, that advantage is going away. For the first time, Apple’s going to be faced with a serious growth challenge.”

via Apple: 123% surge in iPhone sales – Apr. 22, 2009 .

Yeah, the gizmos coming out from competitors are going to kill Apple, since Apple hasn’t been working on anything new.

The analyst started off on the right track: the iPhone was indeed way ahead of the pack. A year later, Apple introduced the iPhone 3G and, more importantly, the App Store. Which put Apple even farther ahead of the pack (don’t underestimate the power that the App Store gives Apple for the time being!). At this point, we already know that iPhone OS 3.0 is coming out the summer with more goodies, and it would be fair to guess that Apple is not sitting around letting the iPhone hardware languish.

Perhaps the iPhone 3G’s advantage is going away, but I sincerely doubt this will be the year that the iPhone starts to fall.

Recently, I recorded a new screencast (an introduction to Bespin’s Python backend), and I got to use the new ScreenFlow 1.5. It’s a great update to an already awesome product. The ability to add text layers from within ScreenFlow is a very welcome addition.

Beyond that, one of the lesser features is a actually a big deal for me: mics that are recorded in mono are automatically played back in stereo. Lately, I’ve had to record screencasts using my Blue Snowball USB mic. The Snowball sounds OK and all, but it’s very quiet, even with the firmware update that increases the gain. With ScreenFlow 1.5, I can use my Audio-Technica large condenser mic instead of the Snowball. I used that mic on my latest screencast and did not need to adjust the gain after the fact at all. The relatively small improvement of making a mono signal come out in stereo makes a big difference for me.

Speaking of audio, ScreenFlow 1.5 added audio effects. I found them to be largely useless, because I don’t think a screencast sounds very good with reverb. I had expected the effects to be something more along the lines of compression and normalization rather than reverb. Maybe next release…

Beyond that, The Omni Group has released OmniDazzle for free!

The Omni Group – OmniDazzle

Introducing OmniDazzle, a set of fun and useful enhancements that help you highlight certain areas of your screen, create visual effects, and track the location of your mouse pointer.

It’s not the kind of product I would pay for, but for free it looks like a nice addition to a screencaster’s toolbox. Highlighting portions of the screen with OmniDazzle looks lot better than normal text highlight. OmniDazzle’s price change didn’t happen until after I recorded my latest screencast, so I’ll have to use that one next time.

Camtasia for the Mac is still vaporous at this point, but I know that TechSmith is working hard on it, so the competition will be heating up.

Study Finds High-Fructose Corn Syrup Contains Mercury – washingtonpost.com

Almost half of tested samples of commercial high-fructose corn syrup (HFCS) contained mercury, which was also found in nearly a third of 55 popular brand-name food and beverage products where HFCS is the first- or second-highest labeled ingredient, according to two new U.S. studies.

Back in August, I posted about 10 health experiments you’re probably participating in. One of them was the great high fructose corn syrup experiment. We’re beginning to see how that experiment is turning out, aren’t we? Thank goodness there are alternatives available.

Update (1/29): Also via Daring Fireball, comes the rebuttal that sounds perfectly rational. I still think that we’re likely to find, over time, that HFCS is bad stuff, but it doesn’t look like mercury is going to be the reason that it’s bad.

Obama takes steps to reverse Bush climate policies | U.S. | Reuters

U.S. President Barack Obama began reversing the climate policies of the Bush administration on Monday, clearing the way for the government to allow states to set stricter limits on greenhouse gas emissions from cars.

Immediately after the 2004 election, I announced that I’d be saying “I told you so” to the folks that voted for Bush. I was certainly correct. Bush’s second term was terrible, and I’m quite happy that we voted for a break in policies.

Obama has been in office for less than a week. He’s got a lot of problems to deal with in his presidency (not all of which are Bush’s fault, mind you, but they certainly have gotten worse under Bush). You can certainly tell that he’s making some changes, starting with the executive orders on ethics and transparency and then in today’s change in direction for the EPA.

Sure, Obama will have his missteps, but I’m happy to see what he’s starting off with.