Seth Godin on how to cure writer’s block:

Just write poorly. Continue to write poorly, in public, until you can write better.

Don’t give Justin Lin any new ideas.

My bet is that the next iPhone will be much more substantial than an “iPhone 4 S”-type of release.

Dr. Drang, writing about the announcement of the soon-coming TextMate 2 public alpha.

Great profile in GQ with the guy who taught the Internet how to dress like a grownup.

When the new MacBook Airs came out earlier this year, deciding which model to get actually came with a bit of drama. I knew I wanted the 13-inch Air with the 256 GB solid state drive. But which processor?

Ordering the faster, 1.8GHZ Core i7 seemed like an easy decision at first. For only $100 I could get a newer generation processor with a faster clock speed and more L3 cache. Though, for the 13-inch model I wanted, going from the 1.7 i5 chip to the 1.8 i7 chip didn’t offer a huge jump in performance — in fact, it’s likely that in day-to-day use I wouldn’t even have noticed the difference — but, since I was planning to have this computer for a few years, I wanted to future-proof it a bit by going with the i7 rather than the i5.

When the new Airs were first announced, Apple listed the i7 as being build-to-order only. Now, I don’t know about you, but when you’re ready to purchase a new computer it’s always harder to order it online and wait for it to be built and shipped than it is to simply drive over to the Apple store and buy it that day.

But, since I was in Colorado at the time and I knew that I the i7 model was my first choice, I went ahead and ordered online, expecting my new Air to arrive back in Kansas City the day after I flew home. If only…

Once I received my email confirmation from Apple, the shipping time had changed from 24 hours to 5 – 7 business days. The longer the wait, the harder it is to be noble and deny the temptation for instant gratification.

To make a long story short, the Apple store in Colorado ended up having the BTO 1.8 i7s in stock and I was able to pick one up the next day.

With my i7 in hand I very much wanted to do some research about the differences between the i5 and i7 processors — were the speed bumps really worth the extra cost? What were the differences between the i5 and the i7?

Not only did I want to know for my own peace of mind, but I also wanted to know so I could write about it. That was my introduction to Geekbench.

Geekbench

My thanks to Primate Labs for sponsoring the RSS feed this week to promote Geekbench.

When reading reviews of Macs (which I very much enjoy to do), Geekbench results are very common. Geekbench is one of the industry-standard apps for measuring the performance of your computer. And so I decided to download and use it on my MacBook Air. I was glad to discover that it is a very easy-to-use app. Considering the amount of data Geekbench provides I was expecting a learning curve before I could use the app. But nope, it takes all of one click to use.

Geekbench runs a series of processor and memory tests to accurately measure your computer’s performance. You can anonymously submit your scores to their online database and then compare against other scores of the same hardware configuration, or compare against other computers altogether.

When I first bought my MacBook Air it ran a Geekbench score of 6281. I quickly compared it to the i5 Airs and found that they were scoring around 5900. Today, two months later, my MacBook Air scores 6259 in Geekbench — virtually unchanged from when it was brand new.

In short, Geekbench is a great way to measure and compare your computer’s performance. It has a free version, and a for-pay version (which is the one I bought a few months ago when testing my Air).

According to a Harris Interactive Poll, people with e-readers buy more books and read more books than people without. Surely these poll results are primarily due to the ease of buying and downloading ebooks onto a device. I wonder how many of the respondents were buying and reading that many books before they bought an e-reader.

Note, the site requires Flash. Here is the full-sized graphic without flash.

Great piece by Dan Frommer on what the future of the iPod may look like. Like Dan says, there’s no way Apple is going to kill the iPod off (just because the iPod line isn’t seeing the same revenue growth doesn’t means it’s not still bringing in significant revenue at all), but I think we all know that something about the iPod lineup is going to be changing in the future. With the iPhone being announced this fall then perhaps we’ll see those changes this year?

Michael Agger, writing at Slate about natural scrolling:

Apple had decreed that “natural scrolling” was the new standard, overturning 25 years of convention. This was more discomfiting than rearranging furniture. This was pulling out the chair as you were taking a seat.

I disabled natural scrolling right away when I began using the beta builds of Lion, but once it shipped and the camps were divided (those who had gotten used to it and loved it, and those who couldn’t handle it) I gave it a second chance. It took me about 10 days to get used to it but now that’s ancient history.

On my Air I go back and forth between NetNewsWire 3 and Reeder. NNW Lite is a great app and I’d probably be spending a lot more time with it if it offered G-Reader syncing. I read feeds on my iPad about as often as on my Mac and so I can’t get by without sync. But that is one thing Thomas likes most about NNW Lite.

Michael Sheets:

There will be a public alpha release this year, before Christmas, for registered users.

Is there a more popular text editor for OS X than TextMate? Exactly half of all the Sweet Mac Setup interviewees use TextMate.

Episode 28 of The B&B Podcast:

Shawn and Ben talk about the adventures of roasting coffee beans in a popcorn popper which leads to the possible invention of a new product (just in time for the holidays!). Then they get to tech topics like shortcuts in iOS 5, iChat and iMessage, Time Machine woes, CDNs for blogs, the October 4th products from Apple, and keeping up with the news and the self-imposed urgency that goes along with that.

Old school.