Recently my office switched over to VoIP telephony. Cool enough, but the best thing about it is that I can finally check voicemail online without picking up the phone. Voicemail queues up on a website as WAV files. I periodically download them to a local folder that feeds into iTunes and is tagged as Voicemail. A local colleague* recently noted he could access my voicemail via iTunes since I was sharing my music library. This gave me an idea. Why not share voicemail with trusted colleagues on your local LAN? Or, better yet, podcast it? Here’s how my message would change:

“Hi, you’ve reached John Tolva with IBM. I probably will not return your call, but you should know that many of my office colleagues will have access to any questions you might have. They may even provide answers. Thank you.”

This could be big. Social voicemailing.

[*] The same colleague from this post. I found him!

Recently we’ve been sifting through about six tubs of LEGO bricks that I grew up with and still own. It has been an archaeological dig through my past. Not only is it fun to find certain blocks I used to love, but I’ll often come across some aborted or half-destroyed creation and I’ll almost instantly (and quite eerily) remember why I built it or what corner of my LEGO universe it occupied. This is from two decades ago, mind you. But the real treasure in this dig are the non-LEGO items buried in the brick-silt. Small, fractured toys, leaked batteries (and their dried acid), dessicated food stuffs, and all manner of childhood jetsam probably make up 5% of the brick tubs. Your hands become visibly dirty after running them through the tub for just five minutes. But even the scum tweaks nostalgia a bit.

I’ve recently discussed The coolest LEGO brick ever. During the latest excavations I made it a point of picking out all the computer-type bricks I could find. Here’s what I found.

First, the classics, in two versions. There’s the command line terminal on the left and the flashy-button sci-fi bleep-bloop box on the right. No one ever knew what that one did, but it flashed and bleeped and it seemed right at home on the launchpad. The evolution of the colors is the interesting thing in how it roughly sketches the evolution of real case colors. The earliest blue computers derived from spaceships and command bunkers, evolved into the beige-box ubiquity of the IBM PC era and thence to the whites of the post-iMac world.

The special find was this version of the command line model. It is inverted so that it hangs above the minifig user. Because, as is obvious, computers that you dangle over your head mean that you have a lot of screens to keep track of and that you are, thus, supercool.

In the LEGOverse computers seem to have taken a step backwards after the golden age of space-inspired computer blocks. At least the early machines had screens. This lot of button panels seem like a throwback to analog days. Not sure what to do? Press the red button.

‘Course, sometimes you needed the big iron. Here’s the only LEGO mainframe with removable front plate that I know of.

And lastly, assorted bricks that belong to what you might call targetting computers. The one on the right actually lit up when attached to a battery. Still not as cool as the classics, but in their vectory goodness they echoed Battlezone, flight sims, and other important arcade games of the era.

At this point I thought I pretty much had the complete evolution of LEGO computer bricks documented — at least up to the point that LEGO sets and themes diversified to the point of incoherence. (What in the hell is Bionicle?) But I should have known better. LEGO geeks have done a far more thorough job of documenting computer bricks than I ever could. But hey, even the best archaeologists only confirm what’s already known, right?

First things first. I didn’t receive a cease-and-desist from Apple. I took down the original post about getting OSX Tiger to run on an Intel-based laptop because I, you know, panicked. Not sure why I did that, but then Katrina came and life got nutty for a while and you all must have thought I had been arrested, fired, or sent to geek nirvana. Or all three. But no.

(You’ll never know if this is Photoshopped, will you?)

So here’s how it works. The laptop has two 60GB physical drives. One is partitioned into NTFS for XP and FAT32 for data files. The other has Mac OS on it. The PC is running MacDrive so it can see the HFS volume, but almost all working files reside on the FAT32 partition so that both OS’s can access them. At startup I just specify the drive to boot from (default is Windows for now). Nearly everything in Mac OS works — even crazy stuff like Bluetooth and 1600 x 1200 resolution. It is astonishing. Having a portable Mac that also boots to a real version of XP is life-changing, I tell you.

So while this is all happening out comes the jaw-dropping iPod nano to replace the iPod mini. You have to wonder if the same thing will happen to the Mac mini. And then you have to wonder, how long before doing what I do — carrying around a stealth copy of Mac OS inside (or alongside) a working PC — is something Apple encourages. Sure, I could have installed Mac OS on my iPod and could boot from that, which would be pretty much a Mac nano, but with perfect driver support and updates a real Mac nano would be unstoppable.

Think of it, Apple equips certain iPod models with a full version of Mac OS for Intel so that when they are connected to a PC you can boot to it and convert your PC to a Mac right then and there. What a better way to steathily convert PC users — not by having them buy a new machine but by taking over what they already own. Problem is, Apple does not want to do this. They’ll put iTunes on a Motorola phone, but not OSX on a non-blessed Intel chip. Sigh.