Next up is Airport Base Station Update 2008-002, which

includes general fixes and compatibility updates for the following applications:

- AirPort Utility
- AirPort Base Station Agent”

As to what these fixes and compatibility updates actually are, we certainly won’t know from Software Update. It doesn’t even link to a Knowledge Base article on the Apple website. (We’ll look it up for you.)

The update will fix what’s pertinent to your system. In the Doodler’s case it just updated Airport Utility to Version 5.3.2, a 10.5mb download.

Non-Filipino readers might find this post’s title odd, but it’s just Taglish for “I’m mobile”, which for this blogger is a clumsy play on the rumored new name for Apple’s .Mac service (and for the purposes of this blog will be referred to as DotMac, to retain the sanity of my word processor’s autocorrect feature.) It’s also a play on the current and more-than-annoying marketing campaign of local telecom provider Smart Communications called “Me na Me” presently irritating us silly here in Manila for their Smart Buddy service.

Ok. So there I go ruining the whole structure of the post just so I could have my silly title. Let’s just have it out then: According to rumors, Apple seems to be set on renaming their DotMac service, that US$99 one-year thing where you get a paltry amount of online storage and a snotty email address that ends in “mac.com” (and some other stuff), to Mobile Me. Ugh.

Dunno about you, but the fact that you can get everything DotMac is offering for free elsewhere online seems to me a testament to the lengths fanboys will go to for their mothership. (Full disclosure: I used to be suckered into this thing too, and had a DotMac account for three years or so until I wised up and saved my money instead to buy more useful things like food. And beer.) But apparently it may be time to come back to the fold.

According to many archived reports, Apple trademarked the name Mobile Mac on Jan. 5, 2006, and while much was made of it at the time as Apple folk are wont to do, nothing happened and people forgot about it. Now though, people poking through the code of the recently released 10.5.3 update of Leopard have come across considerable evidence that Apple is finally going to use the two-year-old name, presumably after the relaunching announcement to be made at Steve Jobs’ WWDC keynote on June 9.

A rose by any other name, blah blah. What’s more important is what new stuff it will offer for the hundred bucks (or however much they’ll be charging for it), and right now all we can do is make educated guesses. Obviously it will tie in with the new 3G iPhone and include stuff like push email, wireless syncing and things Blackberry fans have been enjoying for years. We’ll just have to add Mobile Me to our list of things to wait for during the keynote. If it had really useful features, I wouldn’t be averse to signing back up again and resurrecting my old DotMac address.

Which also means most of us renegade iPhone users will have to formally sign up with Globe Telecom when it finally releases the phone for my country (sometime in September, if rumors are to be believed). Obviously my non-3G first-gen kracked-and-jailbroken iPhone won’t do, so I’ll have to pony up for the new one. Life is hard. Ah, well.

(By the way, is it just me, or does Mobile Me really sound like an embarrasingly jejune name for an Apple service? It even sounds …Microsoftian, like something Gates and Ballmer might’ve thought up. Sheesh.)

[Box art mock-up via TUAW]

Of course the sticking point with the MacBook Air is that it is a closed machine - it is what it is, and that’s it. Well, that’s never really stopped some folk. If there’s a will - plus some dremel tools and a soldering iron - there’s a way.

Take this guy named Jordan Bunnell who added an EVDO broadband wifi card (a USB727 Verizon Aircard) to the innards of his Air, something most people didn’t think possible given the space available. True, he had to sacrifice his wifi and Bluetooth, but he proves it can done. Hm.

Check out the butchery, complete with pictures and discussion here and here.

Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan, 7:31pm, Oct. 25, 2007: Water, water everywhere, but not a drop to drink.

On the heels of the Jobs announcement of the iPhone/Touch SDK’s release in February comes the announcement of CommonTime of a solution for using Lotus Notes, the ubiquitous office productivity suite that is a stable of corporations and big businesses everywhere, in the iPhone using mNotes, the mobile device solution for Lotus Notes on smartphones and PDAs for release in July 08.

Nigel Mackrill, CommonTime’s CEO said:

We can’t say just how delighted we are to be coming back home to an Apple device, our very first mNotes product was for the Apple Newton back in 1995, we believed in the platform and loved working with Apple. We will have a full mNotes5 solution for the iPhone and a desktop synchronization product for the iPod touch available by summer 2008, this will be a true rich mNotes client with high data fidelity and rich functionality that can really capitalize on the unique usability of the iPhone.”