Arstechnica on new NVIDIA 700M GPUs

Arstechnica has an article on the NVIDIA 700M GPU’s, which NVIDIA announced yesterday.

And basically it sounds like the the new NVIDIA GPU’s are the same as the 600M series, but with some slightly higher clock speeds, and a new GPU Boost 2.0, though these are all the lower end versions, and they haven’t talked about the higher end versions as of yet.

More speed is always good, and faster CUDA even better, but I would rather see a new series be a new architecture than just a speed bump.

Sonnet releases Thunderbolt Dock

MacTech has the news on these new Thunderbolt Docks.

It features:

15 ports: four USB 3.0, one Gigabit Ethernet, one FireWire 800, one headphone, one microphone, one speaker, one audio in, one pass-through Thunderbolt (for either another Thunderbolt device or an external display), two eSATA, and two internal SATA (one port for included optical disc drive and one 6 Gb/s port for a user-installable 2.5-inch SSD or 3.5-inch hard drive). In addition, the Echo 15 Thunderbolt Dock includes an 8x DVD±RW drive, or optionally, a Blu-ray BD-ROM/8x DVD±RW drive with Blu-ray player software for OS X

They range from $349 to $549.

Thunderbolt products are still a bit too expensive, but this is pretty impressive, especially since you could hook up a new MacBook air to and have a pretty impressive desktop machine (sans a serious video card).

The Future of Reeder

There is an update on Reeder for iOS and Mac on it’s website.

Reeder for iPhone is being updated to use Feedbin, and can already use other services (like the self hosted Fever, but not on the iPad app, which still hasn’t been updated), and he is working on standalone RSS, but he plans on adding more services soon.

As for the Mac and iPad versions, they have both gone free as of now until he can come out with an update that includes all sharing and syncing services, which will be version 2.0.

I just want the iPad version to be updated, and may consider trying out Fever, since it is self hosted and will soon be able to work with Reeder. Hmm.

Feedly Updates it’s Mobile App

feedy

Feedly has gone a major update to it’s mobile app, it has a new way to discover and search for feeds, and a Must Read section as well, though I was most excited about the new Title Only view, which is supposed to be more like Google Reader, but at least on the iPad it IS NOT! It still looks like the crappy magazine mode that is so damn hard to read because the formatting is different sometimes from line to line and almost always from page to page! I might be OK with FEEDLY if they would just give me a straight list view on the iPad!!!

Of course it also lacks Pinboard integration, which I really want now that I have moved my favorites from Google Reader to Pinboard.

Diet and Surgery Update, 10 Months Out

Had to do an update today as I weighed myself, and as of this morning I am down to 243.3 from 258, 14.7 Pounds! Nice! Now it has been 3 months, but I seem to be going down fairly steadily now, if slowly! Of course I am also doing quite well exercise wise and eating wise.

I go to sleep around 10PM and asleep by 11 and up around 4 AM with my alarm set for 5 AM.

I start my day with a 2.1 mile walk, and I have started jogging in it. a 1/4 of a mile section and then 2 1/8 mile sections I jog in. And I don’t even get all that out of breath, do I do sweat a ton! My new GP has me then doing some weights, I do some kettle bell focusing on legs, some hand weights and sit-ups. I then go to work, but right now am taking the subway from universal into Hollywood, and take as many stairs as I can handle, while carrying 3 bags, a backpack with my lunch, my briefcase with iPad and Kindle and my big bag with 2 big bottles of water and ice. The first walk is around 4500 steps, and the subway is around 3500 both ways, plus a lot of stairs in between. For lunch I have a salad (I pre-make a lot of salad) with chicken I bake and slice with my meat slicer and red beans. And some Briggs salad dressing cut with straight vinegar to make it less fattening. I have 3 apples during the day and a handful of nuts, though I do chew sugar free gum to get by as I get hungry by 11. I bring another salad, but have been saving it for dinner and having that when I get home along with something else. I have had nuts or a handful of goldfish or yogurt. And I end with a couple of 15 calorie sugar free popsicles and stop eating by 8 PM. Now I have cheated some, as we usually eat something bad on the weekend (I would prefer a rueben at Brent’s) and some days where I have been working late I got a couple of big burgers at Carl’s JR, and have still been losing weight! And my dad was just in town, so I had steak rice bowls at Take a Bao and made Bulgogi, and still am losing weight!

As for the surgery. Well honestly my chest is really sore. Not only working, but the weights I am sure. Chest just hurts, so need to do a little less weights, maybe the 10 pound Kettle bell instead of 15, and take some weight off my hand weights.

Now i just need to find more time in the day! Ha! Doing pretty darn well, just need to get taxes done!

Arstechnica on Developers problems with iCloud, and my own personal issues with it.

Arstechnica has an interesting article on problems of working with Apple’s iCloud.

It is really interesting to hear that developers are having so many problems with iCloud, since as a user I have completely given up on iCloud because I have found it to work so incredibly badly.

My first issues were with bookmarks and iCloud. I use X-marks to sync my bookmarks between browsers, since Chrome (and formerly Firefox) is my browser of choice, and I don’t use Safari at all, but since Safari is what syncs to my iPad and iPhone I needed it to have my bookmarks.

And every time X-Marks overwrote them it worked fine and they were correct until they went to the cloud. The cloud ones had become corrupt and would overwrite not only Safari on my mac, but also on my iPhone and iPad. And there is no way to get rid of the bookmarks! Now most companies would create a way to overwrite either on your computer or online, but not Apple. Their simplified iCloud bookmarks have no way to get rid of the bookmarks from iCloud, so I had to turn off iCloud syncing and just do a direct sync via itunes, which directly brings Safari’s bookmarks to my iPad and iPhone.

My Second issue cropped up when I moved from an iPad 1 to an iPad 3. I had been a Mobile Me user, so I got 25GB of space on my iCloud (necessary to backup an iPad, and not enough for both my iPad and iPhone), and had 3 months previously moved to iCloud backup. When I attempted to move everything to my new iPad, it would not work. None of the apps would install. They started to download, and then stopped there, for days! And I could get no help on the issue, so I ended up going to my 3 month old previous backup on my home computer and have been syncing with my computer every since.

Why should I even try putting stuff on iCloud when I have no control over it? And it does seem to get corrupted often! So why not just leave everything on my Mac and use Dropbox or Sugarsync or box.net or even my Synology NAS to sync to. They all actually work and don’t seem to screw up all the time, like iCloud does.

iCloud at the very least needs basic controls to allow overwriting of items on the cloud or on your computer (though they could probably get away with just overwriting iCloud, since that is where the glitches happen!).