If you understood that then apologies for the obligatory joke. If you didn’t then I can safely assume that you’re not a regular at Slashdot where I came across this on the RSS feed at the start of the month.
ASCII renditions of things just keep on impressing me. It started at university with FIGlet generators, returned last year while watching the 2006 FIFA World Cup and then once more a good few weeks ago standing 10 meters away from the computer monitor to watch a VideoLAN real-time transcoded version of a HD stream from a colleagues home media server.
Now it’s possible to do this while walking around using these ASCII goggles to present you with a view of the World in a Matrix/Terminator style. Actually ASCII is only one of the possible filters available. Cool but not without use for a change I’d say - surely these things could quite easily be modified to assist people with any number of eye defects.
I rushed home straight after work this evening to keep up with proceedings from the Apple media event. Okay, I’m the first to admit that I’m somewhat of a magpie and easily attracted to shiny things. Especially so when the shiny thing in question is designed by Apple – much to the amusement and bewilderment of most of my friends!
For the most part, Apple just seem to understand how their customers want things to behave and look. Observe the reaction to the Intel sticker question. Of course the $200 price-drop for the 8 gig iPhone which was also announced today isn’t going down too well with people who have purchased one in the past couple of months. One of the dangers of being an early adopter.
A lot of people (Ed Colligan for example) are having to eat some humble pie with the success of the iPhone. It was the biggest selling smartphone in the USA for the month of July.
Some people remain unconvinced. NBC have abandoned the iTunes Music Store in favour of the much more DRM restrictive Unbox from Amazon. Universal already receive money from each Zune music player sold as compensation based on the assumption that it will be used for playing illegally obtained music. Way to your treat your customers Microsoft. Maybe this is one reason that they’ve only just recently sold one million units. Or maybe because they’re brown. Maybe because they use the terminology “squirting”. Who knows.
I’m now wondering whether to cave in and get the iPod touch or wait it out for the European iPhone launch. The fact that the joystick-type-thing on my K800i is starting to misbehave may just swing it to the latter.
I set off on the train a little after 7am this morning from Edinburgh for the opening of the new Glasgow Apple store. The queue started at 10pm the night before and was a couple of switch-backs long when I arrived. The idea of queuing for this seemed to bemuse passers-by and denizens of the Starbucks opposite (which was doing a roaring trade).
Continue reading ‘Cult of Apple’
Take two of the biggest things around at the moment – at least in terms of column inches. Put them together and what do you get? The Facebook iPhone portal. Clean, uncluttered, funky transitions and as far as I can make out, advert free (although how long that stays remains to be seen).
Thanks to Mike Coulter’s status update, I know I’m not the only one to be playing around with it while I patiently wait for the UK/Europe launch of the Apple communication device.
As an aside, I was also interested to come across Cityware’s Bluetooth Facebook application that tries to tie-up your online and real-world networks. Something to maybe play around with and keep an eye on, if only to satisfy my curiosity as installation isn’t exactly what you’d call straightforward! Here’s another take on the experiment from the BBC.
After Apple announced the new iMacs and keyboards yesterday
we noticed something in the office. Doesn’t the Mighty Mouse look a little out of place with all of that aluminium everywhere else?
After a phone call to Apple to check on his order status, my colleague confirmed what we’d suspected. There are newly designed mouses on the way - expected in about a month from now. What is unclear is whether or not they will be the latest product to use the currently fashionable multi-touch technology.
The product designers at Cupertino have been busy. The nice illusion of a smaller “chin” on the iMac bears the hallmarks of Jonny Ive’s attention to detail. They’ve even made the super-slim keyboards visually stunning (despite messing around with the function and command keys).
In an attempt to shift my hangover I went for a wander around Edinburgh this afternoon. This turned into a mini shopping expedition which included some new running shoes ahead of the upcoming Edinburgh 10k and Rat Race. I also had a look around Scotsys as I hadn’t been since their Apple store style refit. I usually only let myself go in there if I know that I’ve left my wallet safely at home. My wallet escaped relatively unharmed on this occasion though as I only purchased a green iPod shuffle. It’s taken six years to get myself a new iPod - the old warhorse 20 gig 2nd generation model is still going strong!
Thanks to a hardware refresh at work, I am now the owner of a 21″ secondary display for my MacBook Pro. Admittedly, it’s a 10 year old CRT behemoth and so heavy that I all but put my back out carrying it up the stairs. Setting it up couldn’t have been easier, although there were a couple of tricks that I needed to learn to get VLCs fullscreen mode to behave how I wanted it to.
As the BBC reports MP3 FM transmitters have been illegal here in the UK thanks to a ridiculously outdated law from 1949. A new Wireless Telegraphy law will come into force from the 8th of December that exempts certain low powered devices.
Got me a new phone – the shiny k800i (which was codenamed Wilma at Sony Ericsson in case you’re wondering about the title of the post) and I’m stunned at the quality from the image-stabilized 3.2 Megapixel camera. Even the flash is a ‘proper’ xenon version. Still no optical zoom but you can’t have everything can you?
I’ve just found out that it’s the same phone as James Bond’s in the new film Casino Royal – but his is silver.
It looks like waiting for the Core 2 Duo (Merom) update from Apple may have paid off in more than one way. The wireless card appears to be based on the Atheros AR5008 802.11n chipset, dual-layer DVD writing and the hard drive uses PMR!
Of course, if I waited another meager eight months or so I could have been running OS X Leopard on a Santa Rosa based system . . .
