or, the role of social media in today’s internet

Facebook – Useful way to keep in touch with (or keep tabs on) people you can’t really be arsed keeping in touch with (or stalking) for real.

Twitter – fun way to communicate with friends and receive news in a nicely abridged fashion, without all the other cruft.

StatusNet – an open source version of twitter, without all the users (follow them on Twitter)

Buzz – it’s integrated with GMail

LinkedIn – add your boss to your network, and get linked to all his pals, many of who are bosses of their own companies in the same industry – neato!

Email – useful way to keep in touch with Dave

Orkut – it’s kind of like Facebook, except Brazillians use it for hooking up

Microsoft LIVE profile – is to Facebook what Windows 98SE is to OS X Snow Lepoard

LiveJournel – like a private diary, except shared with the world

Flickr – cool photo sharing site with (slightly) less of a focus on pets, and (slightly) more of a focus on photography as an artform.  At least, it is if you want it to be…

World of Warcraft – get a satisfying feeling – one so desperately lacking in the rest of your life – of achieving something

Blogs – useful place for rants, and posting shit you may like to recall

Blogger – as with blogs, but banned in China

craigslist – like the personals section in a newspaper, but without the cryptic acronyms

del.icio.us – Ctrl+D on steroids

MySpace – some website with lots of static background images and underage kids

Wikipedia – you can change George W. Bush’s portrait to that of a monkey

Second Life – provides a valuable virtual space for people to get naked and have sex with strangers, stage protests with flying dildos

YouTube – upload Downfall parodies here, take them down here

So my unibody mac has passed it’s one year birthday. Awesome piece of hardware (and software), been really great to me.

One complaint - occasionally my fan starts making abnormal noises. Not just the high RPM noise, but another more disturbing rattling noise. I may need to get it repaired, which I’m OK with – just not OK with the downtime…

Some useful tools I have found while running some MacBook health checks…

• smcFanControl – a cool tool shows you core temp, fan RPM’s and best of all lets you tweak the RPMs (I’m trying with setting a higher minimum speed to combat the rattle)
• Coconut Battery – sweet App that tells you how many times you have recharged your battery, and it’s current capacity (compared to new capacity). Remarkably, mine is 97%! This just saved me a few hundred bucks because I was thinking of replacing the battery to refresh it.
• iStat Pro – awesome dashboard widget showing you many vital statistics of your mac.
• Disk Inventory X – useful tool to show disk utalisation, cousin of WinDirStat

It was tempting to upgrade to the new Unibody 13″ Macbook Pro with it’s 7 hour battery.  For me that is a very compelling feature, in that it greatly enhances productivity (more than a few extra CPU cycles or RAM).  However it is hard to justify the ~$1000 upgrade price tag (assuming a good ebay sale).

The amount of times I had to stop work this year due to my battery being empty is probably only 2 or 3.  Even on a long 9+ hour flight, I generally only clock a few productive hours working, and the remainder resting off the travel, or watching movies on the inflight entertainment.

This MacBook line upgrade was released in June 2009.  My guess is they will next update the model on around June-October 2010 which seems to be their standard release cycle.  I’ll upgrade then.