After the MacBook Air, what next?

MacBook Water: splashproof to survive your eXtreme lifestyle, or at least a spilled latté when you show it off at Starbucks.

MacBook Earth: the natural organic sustainable recycled biodegradable cruelty-free dolphin-safe fair-trade computer. 10% of all proceeds are divided equally between Greenpeace, PETA, and BDS.

MacBook Fire: oh, wait, they already make those.

Pretty much every review I’ve seen by someone who has read all of the specs can be summed up as: “this would be a fantastic machine for someone else”. The deal-breaker for me (and I was already lukewarm on the concept) was the lack of ethernet, which means that the spiffy-keen “use the DVD drive on any networked Mac or PC when you need one” feature is crippled by the performance of your wireless network or Apple’s optional USB 10/100 dongle. Suddenly it doesn’t seem so spiffy. Also, if you spring for the outboard optical drive, it ties up your only USB port, and they don’t mention it including a hub.

I can’t see very many people adopting it as a primary machine, which means syncing configurations and data to another Mac. .Mac sync sucked horribly for the entire lifetime of Tiger, and I still see occasional outages for .Mac mail. They claim to have put a lot of work into it for Leopard, but if the Air is really a secondary machine, then they need to add direct sync between Macs as a solid OS feature.

I think the real accomplishment of the Air will turn out to be improving the quality of lightweight PC laptops and tablets running Windows Vista. I expect to see the first round of them in about three months.

…of Minimoni. Sort of. If they start turning into mini-skirted mini-hamsters, though, they’re going too far. Meanwhile, here’s Athena & Robikerottsu:

Their new video replaces the first one as the opening theme of the kid’s anime series Robby & Kerobby. Fear for the future.

I mean, serious stupid.

...firefighters learned the woman’s boyfriend had given the children a jar of mercury as a gift about a month ago.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit that mercury is fun to play with, and I can state from personal experience that it doesn’t taste like any other metal, but we were teenagers at the time, not little kids, and they managed to clean up the classroom without involving a hazmat team.

Jodie Foster romances the stone? It could work.

[Update: just received an apology for the mistake, an updated license key, and a partial refund to bring my price down to the current $39 promotion.]

[Update: I can’t currently recommend this application, for the simple reason that I made the mistake of buying it four days before the release of 9.0, and they charge $29 for the upgrade. Until March, it’s only $39 for a brand-new license, but if I want 9.0, my total cost ends up being $88, which is more than the app is worth. Worse, the updater offered me the new version without mentioning the fact that it would revert to a trial license and require new payment. Fortunately, I was able to revert to 8.5.4.]

Your file-transfer app, Interarchy, is very nice. I particularly appreciate its solid support for Amazon S3. In the latest version, the thing I like most is the fact that permissions settings for uploads are now an honest-to-gosh preference, rather than being buried in some pulldown menu.

I question your decision to make the new version look like the unholy love-child of Finder and Safari, however, especially since your Bookmarks Bar and Side Bar are only cosmetically related to their inspiration, and share none of their GUI behaviors. It looks like a duck, and it sort of quacks like a duck, but it’s really just a cartoon duck, and not worth eating.

And I haven’t the slightest idea why you thought it would be a good idea to have the first item on the Bookmarks Bar be a menu containing every URL in the user’s personal Address Book. Considering that the user can’t rearrange or remove items on the Bookmarks Bar, you’re wasting an awful lot of valuable real estate on a very marginal feature.

Oowakudani is the source of the sulfurous waters piped down to the Hakone hot springs resorts. It’s also a popular destination in its own right, due to the terrific views (1, 2, 3, 4 ) and novel cuisine.

The current name for the place translates as “great boiling valley” (大湧谷). This was an early example of tourist marketing, since until they heard that the Shogun was going to come up and take a look, the locals just called it “the big hell”.