For me the biggest news came on Friday with a tiny entry in the bangkok Post Business section with the information that the release party for the iPhone in Thailand was to be at Siam Paragon on 16 Jan. More on that later. This week I am looking at other small stuff we may want to buy for ourselves or our loved ones.

Smaller Apples for Xmas and New Year

According to reports coming from Amazon, sales of iPods this year are really high. Not bad when there is supposed to be a recession. The Ars Technica article also has some feedback on what is selling at the App Store.

And of course, the next president of the US, like the current incumbent, has an iPod, according to images which are online and a report in the Silicon Alley Insider.

Next week in the Post I will be writing about the MacWorld show and the keynote, this year by Phil Schiller, but of course, when you read that, I will be in SF and the keynote will have been completed (and there, for the grammar people is an example of the future perfect tense - hard to come up with examples for students). Without wishing to pre-empt next week's item, I will outline some of that later.

But first, sad day. I had an email on Sunday evening from Tony Waltham, editor of the Post Database, who tells us he is retiring today. He started in the Business Section of the Post, which was in the U-Chuliang Building then, opposite Lumpini Park, and is really hard for us westerners to pronounce, particularly when you are dealing with a taxi driver from Ubon. He persuaded the powers that be to expand some technical stuff in the business section into a separate supplement and they went for it.

Initially, it was every two weeks, and I well remember going down to the distributor in Songkhla at about 3pm on a Wednesday every time it came out -- newspapers did not arrive in the south until mid-afternoon in those days. Then I would read it cover to cover. I was one of the few people in the area with a computer in those days having got my introduction when studying in the US. But there was a real antipathy to my trying to teach students an introduction to word processing. Students were actually warned off: territory.

When I moved to Bangkok, I communicated with Wanda Sloan a couple of times: we were on the cutting edge then with MSDOS 3 I think. I put forward an item, via Wanda and it was taken up some weeks later, so I sat down and wrote another which was in the next week. We were off. Over the next few years, I wrote almost constantly. At that time, George Mann did the Mac column and he used to send a completed bromide to the Post - all ready for print. It looked like a big photograph negative.

George moved on and Macs were in the doldrums, but Steve's return and the subsequent release of OSX moved me into a different gear. I had bought a used Mac when my last PC died and that had system 7 on it. We got a couple of G4s with System 9 and OS X at work. When I tried OS X, I was scared by the total difference, but went back and tried again. Then I sort of got it.

Tony took the idea of a Mac column again and initially, I had one every 2 weeks. After a trip to Phuket and a demo to the users there, the year before the Tsunami, the columns became one a week.

In his email mentioned several of us contributors and expressed thanks. I also remember John De Haven as someone who, in the early days put a lot in; but Tony was the editor and we can safely say, He made a difference.

I did write two pieces on the iPhone introduction here for the Bangkok Diary last week, one of which was also in Macsimum News. I cannot say I am totally happy about the terms and conditions; nor the need to have a specific credit card: this is because we must sign for 2 years and Thai banking rules restrict the ways this may be done, so Bangkok Bank or Kasikorn are the only credit cards True is using. I have checked and this is not something that Apple has anything to do with.

I just also picked up a piece that came via Reuters, confirming what I had heard, that originated with AIS: "Apple is talking with every operator, including us and DTAC. When will we sell iPhone? It depends on when we can reach a deal with Apple on terms and conditions," Somchai Lertsuttiwong, AIS’s executive vice president for marketing, told Reuters. Another source suggested that Maxis might handle the iPhone in Malaysia later in the year.

Talking of True, last weekend I went to the new apartment of a friend from university who works here for one of the TV agencies. Just behind Central Chidlom and very swish indeed. Just as they moved in, so his Thai wife had the baby some three weeks early. Add to that the incomplete alterations and the shoddy pipe-work by a company that should know better, called Modern Form, whose workers have come more times than he has fingers, yet still it leaks; and you get a picture that the lack of internet is just a minor part of the show.

Despite moving less than a kilometer from his old apartment and giving True three weeks, they have still failed to link him up. And this is the company handling the iPhone?

Let me contrast that with an example of customer service that happened to me. I broke the arm of my sunglasses so took them in to the optician i have been using for a few years, a Japanese company called Paris Miki who have branches in Central World, Siam Paragon and Siam Center. They were sent to Rodenstock, the makers, for repair, but when they could not do this, Paris Miki got out of them a new pair for me. Those who diss Apple might note that part of the cost is for service and guarantees on top of quality.

I moaned recently about the disappearing Post RSS feeds, but the answer was easy: the Post has had a revamp of its site.

The feeds appear to have been brought together on one page, rather than having the icon show in the URL bar, which is what I and thousands of others do. The link to that list is on the page that goes with the podcast, or a simple click at the top right of the main Post page.

I see also that there is now a Tech link, not that my stuff from last week [or this] was there; but, early days, early days. . .

To save re-subscribing to the Breaking News feed, I just changed the URL in my bookmarks. I wish web masters would let their subscribers know when changes occur.

I had hoped to record some of this on Monday, but the Four S company decided to hold their new year party, which was in preparation when I got home about 2.30PM. 6 hours of Thai country music does put the world's problems in some perspective.

I mentioned in the main article about buying SimCity for the iPod touch, but I keep buying these apps and downloading free ones as well: every one is either interesting (at the time) or helps with productivity. Maybe. I just checked and I have over 80. The latest, which arrived this week is one from HP, whose last contact with iPods was less than stellar and some people still grumble about this.

This time, they have created a printing app for photographs, which links via wifi to an HP printer (it states that and despite adding an Epson to the list, the iPod app failed to recognise it).

Will it blend? is an interesting series of YouTube videos [and a dedicated site - see below] that demonstrate the fairly muscular BlendTec blender in the US in a very tongue in cheek way. We may be used to mango or banana, plus some ice and some other ingredients, but Tom Dickson has almost made an art of putting weird things into his blenders. I first came across this with the iPhone, and he later repeated it in a heart-rending demo when he turned an iPhone 3G into toxic dust.

There are a whole load of other blendings available via youTube, including glow sticks: great advertising of course with some 100 million downloads. So now there is an app called "Will it blend?" and it is one of the $0.99 downloads. How could I resist?

When patents are filed, they can give an indication of new products or of a company's thinking. We know that touch gestures have been used for a while on Macs and on the iPhone and touch, but Apple has a patent for new gestures on the iPod based devices to replace some of the keyboard input.

There have been rumours of a new iPhone nano for a couple of weeks, mainly because of cases seen in China that could not be for the current iPhones. On Tuesday, for example, another maker appeared to have added an iPhone nano case to the linkup, according to AppleInsider.

But an iPhone nano was seen in Bangkok last weekend. Not in any Apple store of course, but the usual outlets. I am not sure if it was Mahboonkrong or Phantip, but the images are there in the AppleInsider article.

That iPhone app I just mentioned hints at change at HP as far as Apple is concerned. Also this week they announced a home server that is Mac friendly. It starts at $599 for 750G of storage, but there is no indication if it will ever come to Thailand.

Apple are also rumoured to be working on a media server with some useful specifications, but we also read another rumour to the effect that the Apple TV software may be released for use on any Mac. As MacDaily News suggests this should be taken with a pinch of salt. Interesting nonetheless.

One of the users who regularly asks me questions, mainly because he is not cautious enough, had a look at the get Info for his hard disk and saw that Everyone was granted read only access, so changed that to no access. The problem is that doing this prevents the system from starting up, so we had the panic phone call on Monday afternoon. I must say, I was stumped although had read about this.

The Apple forums gave me an answer within about 15 minutes. I had a link to a solution which needed (as I had expected) a start-up in single user mode and work at the command line. My next step was to send the four lines of commands by SMS, then to get him to write them on paper, going over them several times to make sure they were right. Then we started the computer up. He had never seen the Unix command line before, so I had to talk him through it all. After the final, Exit, he was taken aback by all the text appearing on the screen, and then whooped when the blue panel, then his account appeared. Saved again by the Apple forums.

I saw what appears to be a video of Snow Leopard this week: a developer version, of course (so someone has broken the terms of the agreement they signed). The menus were in German and we had a basic look at some of the surface suggesting, as had been expected, changes to the Finder. One thing that does appear is that there is a new addition to menus of icons in the Dock and we can select the Space that an application appears in, from there. There is also a new version of Safari. They did display something in the Activity Monitor but it was quick and I could not catch it, plus it was all in German, which I d not read. The MacNN article I saw this in tells me that these are shown as 64-bit processes. Insanely Great Mac also had a comment or two on this.

There are a couple of rather good and free utilities available for the Mac and this week one of them, Onyx, was updated. Rather than a one size fits all approach, there are versions for Leopard, Tiger, Panther and Jaguar It is free, but there is a button on the page for donations.

So . . . MacWorld? New minis, new iMacs, or something completely different? . . . Latest rumours on top of the iPhone nano are a large format iPod touch with a 7" or 9" screen, but this would not be until later in 2009.

I wish all podcast listeners and all readers a happy new year.

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