Well the elusive iPhone has been captured, dissected and photographed and is now ready to be stuffed and mounted. Somewhere in the night time sky a star has gone out.
David Pouge, New York Times technology writer, gives a brief overview of the pros and cons of the upcoming uber phone from Apple. This a quick run down of what he said: Pros: Interface is slick, it’s an iPod, screen is great, feature integration is fantastic, WiFi, Apple logo Cons: No memory slot, can’t replace the battery yourself, service through AT&T only, EDGE data speeds suck.
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Not that there can be much to talk about yet, but there you go. When ever the mythical iPhone erupts from the head of Steve and lands with a wet ‘plop’ on the shelves of Cingular stores (in a limited area only I bet) all the fawning Apple minions will have a place to sing the praise and squelch the gripes of the latest technological panacea. (more…)
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I think I might have done the impossible, I found a review of the new Apple TV that was not written by a drooling Apple fanboy. Nice review, gives an honest opinion of the video quality of what was playing on the demo model. He does put forth an interesting idea on how one could go about turning the Apple TV into an automated bit torrent downloading monster capable of transcoding Xvid video to H264. Ooo.. I wants one…
Perfect! An audio/video transmitter for your G5 iPod. Now you can send the iPods content to your in-car TV sets with ease. Or, you could use it to transmit video from other sources… Looks hackable to me.
Just great. For a long time I have been trying to figure out a way not to let Quicktime spawn web pages. Not only is it annoying but now it can get you phissed:
It begins with a QuickTime file being embedded in a Profile page. If the user “runs” the file (simply visiting the infected page is enough to trigger the attack in most cases), it uses the HREF function to activate some JavaScript.
Allowing JavaScript from a movie file….whoops.
When this happens, the profile page is “infected” and pastes a fake overlay of options onto the profile page - the most serious of which is (of course) the fake login button. If your page has been affected, you will see a strange, blue navigation bar such as this on your page. If this is the case, you will need to clean out your profile and check if any of your friends have also been infected - if they are, you will continue to be reinfected…most likely via the friends list itself. We have seen reports of users complaining that even when they’ve removed the fake navigation bar from their page, it comes right back if one of their friends is infected - so it looks like the friends list is being exploited in much the same way the Orkut worm used a similar feature to spread. Except in this case, the only option to fix the problem is get your friend to remove the infection code from their page, or remove your friend from your list indefinitely.
Going back to the fake login, if you enter your details, you have officially been Phished.
Very cool and potentially handy if your into building pinhole cameras and own a Mac. This calculator figures out the f stop for you from the pinhole diameter and focal length. If you don’t own a Mac (and your should) you can use some online calculators here and here.
Not all that long ago, like a month, I bought my wife an iPod Nano 2 GB. Both of us have PCs as our primary computers. I have a Mac but its a heavily upgraded blue and white G3 (now a G4 500 MHz thank you!) so I never expected to use the Nano on it. The Nano was un boxed (nice packaging) and instructions were read. It was charged over night and the next day she used it. The first day she only got three hours of life before it was saying ‘feed me!’. I figured that it needed to be run all the way down and the charged to set the battery life chip in it but the next time she used it it had the same life span. Weird. Ok, we took it back and exchanged it for a different one. We did the same thing with the same results. Three hours of use and then flat. Not finding any info on the web about this i decided to give it a shot on the old Mac. I hooked it up and it did it’s thing. I’ll say this, if you have a Mac the Nano integrates much better with it than the a PC. Not all that amazing but I figure I’d mention it because after I did that I was able to run it for 10 hours before it did an auto shut off. The music was played at 70% volume through the stock headphones with the same music as my wife had originally loaded on it. Did being attached to a Mac somehow jolt the energy management settings into life? Just weird luck? Has anyone else had this problem? Could this be a good reason to return it once again and just wait for the new Nanos to hit the market?
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Oops. Looks like Apple is getting bit by the same bug as Dell did. Man, first weird shutdowns and screen effects and now batteries that can ‘splode? Maybe I’ll keep my old B&W G3 a little bit longer…
"The recall arises because, on rare occasions, microscopic metal particles in the recalled battery cells may come into contact with other parts of the battery cell, leading to a short circuit within the cell," Sony said. "Typically, a battery pack will simply power off when a cell short circuit occurs. However, under certain rare conditions, an internal short circuit may lead to cell overheating and potentially flames. The potential for this to occur can be affected by variations in the system configurations found in different notebook computers."
Not much chance of the effect being minor there. Well I’m sure that Sony (makers of the little sparklers) will make good and come up with a fix soon. Until then keep the battery out and keep your laptop on your desk if your not the gambling type.
This sucks. As I blogged before, some of the latest Apple Macbooks have been calling in sick. The owner of Lonelocust has been struggling with pretty much all of the problems that have plagued these new wonders. It’s almost biblical.
Cool cool cool! Here is a clever DIY on how to run an old (but still quite usable) version of the Apple Mac OS (everyone remember system 7.2?) off from a 32 MB USB key drives. I’ve been looking for an excuse to buy a few 32MB thumb drives so I can case mod them, this would be a prefect thing to run off from them. Time to fire up my SE and pull a ROM image off from it. I’m off to play Mille Bornes!
As my family has just become the proud parents of a bouncing baby iPod Nano (2GB) we might have to use this service in a year. I love the idea that someone has opened a store front to fix these handy devices. His rates are quite good and the wait times are darned short. i just wish there was one near me. Oh well, another reason to visit my favorite Canadian city, Toronto!
Matt Bremner has created quite the buzz with his iRepair services, using good parts from broken iPods purchased from eBay. Bremner’s tiny 250 sq. ft. Toronto store front services walk-in and mail-in "patients," averaging about 30 per day at a 10 minute average wait time.
Could Apple’s Macbooks have a serious problem? I don’t mean the one where the plugs fall out or the cases turn colors when you use them, I mean that the notebooks will just up and quit on you. As documented here and here, at least one user is having just this problem. have any other of the shiny Apple users reported this problem yet, or is this smoothing that is yet to hit the blogosphere. I hope that this is an isolated event, I want to buy one of these puppies and would hate to discover that they hold some deep dark secret in the form of random power offs. That would suck, and not in a good way either.
I recently started using my Viewsonic V36 PDA as an MP3 player. Yeah, I know, Earth shaking news ain’t it. Well as I use iTunes as my music orginizer I knew that I’d be jumping through hoops to get music on to the PDA. You don’t know how happy I was when I found this app.
iTunes is a great music player and organizer. Unfortunately iTunes is made to only synchronize with iPods. Not everyone own an iPod, though Apple certainly would have loved that. How great would it not be if you could synchronize your non-iPod MP3 player, your Playstation Portable and your Walkman phone with your iTunes Library? Enter: iTunes Agent!
It works great, heck I told a guy at work about it and he’s using it to sync his phone to his library.
How can you case mod an Apple Mac mini? Car mount, Millennium Falcon, kitchen-ized, G5-ized,even turned into a toilet paper dispenser (!). This mini mod brings back on of the classics of Apple history. The SE/30 was quite the computer for it’s time. With it’s 16 MHz 68030, 9 inch screen, and a max of 128MB or RAM it was able to be a server as well as a desktop machine. Remember when those were specs you would drool about? Yeah, those were the bad old days… Well, this SE/30 is back on the A list with the transplant of a shiny new Mac Mini. The mini was wired into the case along with a new grey scale monitor to make a truly cool computer.