I came across a short article describing how Apple, Microsoft, and Google are all competing hard to "own the living room". Or something.
It got me to thinking. I primarily own Apple gear at home. But, if I bought a Google TV device (should it become reality) I would not be able to access the Apple Store for movies or TV shows. If I had a Google TV, would I be able to control it with an Apple, Samsung or Microsoft device?
We seem to be moving towards an age where the content you can get is dictated by the platform you choose. This is backward. I don't need to buy a computer from NWTel to use NWTel provided internet - the content is abstracted away from the physical device. As it should be.
The content should be free of the device platform I choose. I should be able to use Android devices to buy Apple Store content. Everyone wants to have a store/marketplace/bazzar for me to spend money in, but only if I own their "preferred" device.
It's a strategy of walled gardens of content that i can only hope will fail soon.
Updated: there is a bug in the tool, but really it's on NWTel's side. Their https certificate is misconfigured on the usage site. To make the widget work you have to login to the usage site (using Safari) and when it warns you of the certificate error you need to say you trust the certificate they have been issued. The widget will work perfectly after this confirmation.
I just finished putting the final touches on the little dashboard widget I use to keep track of my NWTel cable data usage.
In this release I have made some very minor wording changes, simplified the configuration and improved the ability of the widget to actually pull down data from the NWTel usage site.
This is mostly unsupported software - in so much that it works for me and with my testing on my machine. Throw support requests into the comments section and I will try to be fairly responsive.
It's somewhat ironic that my widget uses an https connection and the website itself uses http; not that it matters, but a MAC address could be used for nefarious purposes...
You could just use Safari's ability to pull a piece of a webpage and create a widget for it but this is more fun and I like the way the gauge fills up as more of your data cap is used!
For the three or four people that downloaded it last time I have a new and improved (ahem) version of the NWTel cable usage cap dashboard widget in the hopper and ready for release in the next few days.
I could release it now but there is some cleanup remaining and I would hide my head in shame if ever anyone actually saw how I am mangling javascript to do my beckoning.
It started innocently enough, as a twitter post asking if I could get an iPhone with no voice plan required. I barely use voice, but I could see myself rolling in data with the interweb at my fingertips (and Skype for the occasional voice call).
The newest iteration of the MacBook was announced and it is an interesting problem: buy a very attractive machine at a higher price or look at the Dell XPS range. The MacBook Pro is quite overpriced for the feature set but this is as it always has been/will be.
What to do? Wait - is my advice.
