Links for Wednesday December 17^th, 2008

• Rumor: New Mac Mini Coming to Macworld 2009 | Gadget Lab from Wired.com: While I'm personally hoping for more from an updated Mac mini (dual internal 2.5" drives, internal power supply, quad core CPU) - this more modest looking upgrade featured on Wired today is probably more likely. Not sure about the pricing though. I don't think that Apple does anything "in light of the recession". I think they look at the numbers -- they look at the products they are selling, and the component pricing, and what they would like to sell, and then decide on a price.

• Apple - Support - Discussions - 10.5.3 Update stuck at "Configuring ...: After knocking my MacBook Air on Sunday, it crapped out on Monday. I got a kernel panic, and had a really difficult time getting 10.5.6 installed. I had the error referenced in this link, and after many reboots, cache purges, PRAM resets, etc, the final solution was to install the combo updater. It's a big download, but my Air seems to be happy now.

• Apple Announces Its Last Year at Macworld: This is a bit of a surprise. While I'm glad that I didn't spend a lot of money this year on an Expo pass that gets me into the keynote, it's going to be sad to see Macworld SF go. While I can see not wanting to do this show from Apple's point-of-view, I think that Apple is missing out on the fact that it's users do like to congregate, swap stories, and touch new products. Hopefully some user-centric conference will fill the void, but I'm not hopeful.

• How He Did It | Newsweek.com: Newsweek has an in-depth, and extremely fascinating, series of articles on the 2008 presidential campaign online. The deal is that they had several reporters embedded with the campaigns, but nothing could be reported until after the election was over. The access that they got, and the picture of each campaign that is painted, is amazing.

• Flickr: The Say hello to Steve! Pool: So glossy!