Cool Little MiniMate

Just came across the Mini Mate and felt like it was worth saying something about. I've been surfing tonight thinking about (a.) my next video editing machine for home and (b.) a replacement machine for the office that needs to do some light production work but still be affordable. The Mac mini keeps coming up in my head as a possibilities, but then I realize I'd need some additional storage and end up thinking along other lines.

This little add-on is a pretty interesting item. Not only does it look like it's a match for the Mac mini, but it a fairly reasonable price (250GB is $279) and it includes both a FireWire hub and a USB hub, so that you have a few more ports that the anemic little Mac mini offers you.

And I have to wonder if the fact that they're building knock-off peripherals for the Mac mini isn't a good thing -- it suggests this little guy might be here to stay for a while.

Why Apple Should Already Offer a PDA

Apple should have released the LifeDrive before PalmOne did, not because the LifeDrive is going to be much of a challenge for Apple, but because Apple is going to look like a copy-cat if they come out with something similar to it in the next few months or years.

I've said for a long time that what was most interesting about the iPod was the fact that Apple had made it cool for us to carry a hard disk in our pockets or bags. If it wasn't for the whole digital music thing, relatively fewer of us would be willing to walk around with hard disks in our pockets.

The LifeDrive takes that concept to another level, adding a nice screen and support for wireless technologies. Now you can have a hard disk in your pocket -- which means you can carry a non-trivial amount of data, documents and multimedia files with you -- as well as your contacts, e-mail, calendar, photos, music and so on. Plus...with the wireless access built in, you've got a big enough display for serious Web surfing using near-ubiquitous WiFi service. (Que Sera Sera, the cajun restaurant and bar across the street from my office, is advertising free WiFi.)

This is a cool trick because it's more than just a gimmick -- it's a near-complete desktop replacement. Right now when I go to a film festival meeting in our local indy-movie-rental-store-slash-coffee-and-sandwich-shop I take my PowerBook in order to connect and look things up. With the LifeDrive, no need. Plus, someone can ping me with e-mail. Very nice.

If it were an iPod, all the better, as I'm constantly striving to replace my current pocket and portable devices with one all-in-one (or, at the most, an all-in-one and a mobile phone), and I haven't gotten there yet. Palm makes good stuff, and the LifeDrive looks like a neat move in the PDA space. Apple could so pull this off, and with a larger disk and more Apple-friendly stuff, to boot. Oh -- and let it stream tunes to an AirPort Express. Yowza.

The only thing would be what to call Apple's version. The iPod PDA? iPod Life? iPod WiFi? The iPod AirPort? The iPod Everything?

Site News: My Books Page, Wikified

I'm constantly struggling with the issue of keeping this site up to date vs. working for a living. You may have similar problems. Obviously, it would help to blog more, but that's not the only issue.

One of the things I fret about it keeping good information about the books I'm writing up-to-date. I've felt for the past few months that if I could get a good-looking wiki solution, I'd do better at the managing-my-books thing. I could log right in and edit the pages, add notes, talking about changes or updates or whatnot. And I'm loving wiki tools right now, for pretty much the same reason that I hate HTML and FTP.

Enter BackPack (http://www.backpackit.com) a very cool service that I've just stumbled upon and will probably start paying real money for here in a little while. What BackPack does is enable you to selectively make wiki pages public or private, using them for a variety of reasons. Already I've got a page for my current to-do list, one for a film festival subcommitee that I'm a part of, one for advertising sales at our newspaper and one where I'm gathering info about my books. That's the only purely public page in my "backpack" -- the others are either my-eyes-only or designed for small workgroups, which can be automatically invited by e-mail and managed by the application.

Let me put it this way -- this is flickr, or Blogger, or MeetUp in terms of the level of Really Good Web Idea that Backpack represents.

I'm not done with my book page(s) -- and knowing me, it could languish a bit now that I've started -- but so far I'm almost giddy over the potential that my Backpack offers. So far. We'll see if that continues...it's up to me, I suppose.