Give me a keyboard and I will give you 10 problems with it. I love a good keyboard but I can also type equally bad on just about any keyboard. I’m not a speed writer. I touch type about 50% of the time but I still look at the keyboard often. I don’t use the correct hand posture but I do use a consistent finger placement. So with all of those caveats out of the way, here’s my review of the new Brydge keyboard for iPad (and an accidental review of the Apple Smart Keyboard Cover).
Sure, I’m a little down on the AppleTV and the new MacBook Pro. But already in 2017 Apple has released one of their very best products, and it only costs $150.
Street Cred I own way too many headphones. I have closed-cup, open-cup, noise canceling, expensive studio monitors, and cheap ear buds. I’m not an audio-quality-phile but I do listen to an inordinate amount of audio during the day. By my estimates I listen to audio a minimum of 12 hours a day and most of that is done with headphones.
The holiday shopping season is upon us (if you are an obsessive planner and early shopper like me). Every year I publish a list of things I bought on Amazon that wasn’t terrible which might also make a good gift list. Although, I recommend just using the Magic Erasers to clean up after a party, rather than giving them as gifts.
Of course, all of these are affiliate links. If my dastardly plans works I’ll break even for the costs to run this site.
The new MacBook series has made the switch from USB and Thunderbolt 2 to all Thunderbolt 3. Glenn Fleishman did a pretty good job breaking down the new order of things on Twitter:
Just to be clear:
USB-C ports can’t handle Thunderbolt 3 devices TB3 ports can accept both TB3 and USB-C devices He even goes so far as to link out to a quite excellent CNET article1
I installed the DSM 6 release candidate several weeks ago. As usual, it’s a great update for the Synology NAS. The most notable improvements over DSM 5 for me is the file indexing. Now it’s available as a final release for owners of many Synology NAS boxes.1
From the Mac Finder I can now do a spotlight search on 7 TB of data within a few seconds.
Not to mention, some of the contents of text files are also indexed by DSM 6.
I just love seeing this stuff. Here’s one of my favorite artists showing that the tools don’t make the artist. It’s impressive what someone with talent can do. I expect to see a lot more cool stuff created with the Apple Pencil and iPad Pro.
Time to put on a coat if you’re headed to hades because there’s now an officially sanctioned Plex app for the Apple TV. And it looks good.
Mine arrives in a day or two. Even if the Plex experience is equivalent to the Roku, I will be pleasantly surprised. If the rumored Amazon video app comes out this week, I’ll gladly eat my words and kick back with season 2 of Gortimer Gibbons.
Basically, Western Digital is still way better than Seagate even with a smaller sample size for WD. Seagate drives have failed me so often that I refuse to buy anything with one of their platter drives in it.
Monoprice sells high-quality alternatives to many of the major manufacturers of geek utility hardware.
These hard cases are great for storing all kinds of stuff.
They also carry quite a few USB-C cables and connectors now too.
I still think their Zinc-alloy Lightning cable is one of the best I’ve owned.
OWC makes some good stuff, so I imagine this forthcoming USB-C dock is going to be top notch. From one USB-C connection you get Gigabit Ethernet, two audio, two high-power USB-A ports, two standard USB-A ports, one USB-C port, HDMI, and SD card reader. I imagine every new MacBook owner will want one of these.
By way of Twitter
