Melinda & Cristiano

I decided to move my personal tech blog to my new domain: blog.cristianobetta.com. Please adjust your RSS feeds if you use it to read my blog.

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I was/am in the Apple Store today and took a moment to play with the iPod touch, and “WOW”. It is so coooooool. I played with all the elements and was amazed about the speed, precision, and the screen. I never used an iPhone so this was my first iPhone-like experience, and I don’t know how the touch compares to the iPhone.

I even tried typing some info in the address book and browser. I really like the landscape keyboard in Safari, it is simply flawless for my fingers. The portrait keyboard is a bit less accurate but amazingly works really OK for my fingers. I entered all my details (address, phone number, etc) into the address book within 2 or 3 minutes, which is a lot faster than I can do with any other phone keyboard. Ow, and yes, I deleted all the info afterwards.

I was a bit disappointed that you can’t edit events though, but I think we will see that soon either hacked or by Apple.

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Starting from today, Mailplane is localized to Dutch. Me and 5 other translators did our best to bring the tool to Dutch, Icelandic, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish and Swedish. All and all the app now runs in 11 languages. Pretty neat!

[Read announcement on Mailplane blog]

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Yes, it’s time for Appdate #10, meaning that there are at least 10 cool applications out there for the Mac!

My pick for this Appdate is a simple little application that does something very powerful: it prevents your Mac from getting any sleep. The fitting name that was chosen for this application is Caffeine as it works like a shot of caffeine to your OSX. It measures only 48KB and it can be downloaded for free from here.

The idea behind Caffeine is that there are these moments that you want to prevent your Mac (including the screen) to go to sleep or standby. Some examples for why you would want to do these include reading a PDF on screen, or showing a YouTube movie to friends. In both cases you don’t want to go and touch the mouse every few minutes, and you neither want to go and mess with your power saving settings.

When installed, Caffeine gives you a little icon in your menu bar that can be clicked on to turn Caffeine on/off. It is the simplest app I ever used, but it does something so powerful that I can’t live without it anymore. Thanks to Melinda for pointing this little application out to me.

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I went to see Planet Terror today with Melinda. This is the Robert Rodriquez part of the Grindhouse movie he made with Quentin Tarantino. In the USA people didn’t get the joke of the series (get the explanation here) and they decided to release the films in two separate parts in Europe (too bad). I really loved the movie (I got free tickets, so I’m a bit biased) because of the style, bad special effects, and the way they totally didn’t take themselves serious. It was even extremely funny that next to the “fake” meltdown of the tape, we actually also had a real problem in the cinema. I hope to see the other part soon, and I would like to thank Tweakers.net for the tickets.

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