WWDC 2005 Keynote
Every year Steve Jobs, (Apple’s equivilant of Bill Gates,) makes a Keynote presentation all about what is going on at Apple. There is always loads of news about upcoming products, a nice load of statistics about how Apple are doing much better than retched Microsoft, and various product releases. Also, there is one big piece of news. The big item this year, as most of you know, Apple are giving up on Power PC, and changing to Intel. Many of you will be wondering why they are doing this. I could tell you, but I won’t. There is a far better way to find out what Apple were thinking when they decided that they were going to change from the Power PC to the Intel chip. The way to do this is to click the picture above. This really is the best way to find out what is going on at Apple. In two years time, all Apples will be running Intel Chips. My final item. For all of you who thought that Tiger is going to be that major competitor with Longhorn, it won’t be; by the time Microsoft have brought out Longhorn, apple will have realized their next OS. Leopard.
Tabs For IE
The new MSN toolbar enables people still using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer to use tabbed browsing. How long did that take? No doubt IE 7 will have this as a standard feature, but this is what will have to do for now. More about MSN tabs
here, or
download the MSN Toolbar. A better solution that I’m sure we could all think of;
Get Firefox.
Blizzard
This week, graphics hardware company
Sapphire, anounced a revolutionary new change in Graphic Card cooling. Dubbed
Blizzard, these new graphics cards are liquid metal cooled. The metal, which is non-toxic and none flammable, is 65 times more thermally conductive than water. The cards will require no refilling and no user intevention. They only take up one additional PC slot and because they use an electromagnetic pump, have no moving parts, consume much less power and are virtually silent. With 16 parallel pixel piplines, 256mb GDDR3 memory and a PCI express interface they will satisfy even the most hardcore gamers. The first commercially avaible versions are due to ship in July.
Just how bad Microsoft are
I was importing some music into Winamp, that I’d ripped using Windows Media Player, but when I tried to play a song, Internet Explorer (ugh!) popped up with the Microsoft Website on it - ahhhhh!!! This kept on going until 31 windows were open like that telling me about the DRM and how it was going to spoil my day. This is amusing; the computer crashed straight after I had managed to close all the IE windows! I can’t wait until I get linux it will be so much better. Here is a screenshot of all the IE windows at once displaying the WinMedia DRM alert page.
Hello, Apple…
What is going on over at Apple? Without warning they appear to have got rid of the old B&W iPod in favour of a version of the iPod photo (whose name has also been scrapped), known as the iPod color just the iPod. Hard drives come in 20gb and 60gb, which is rather a large gap in sizes. Prices are £209/£299 which is the same as before. This makes the iPod even better value than before, which can only be a good thing. If you miss the B&W screen, don’t worry! The iPod mini still sports one; though for how much longer we will have to wait and see.
Update: In the past few hours since I posted this, a new version of iTunes has been released. It features podcast support among other things. This also requires a software update for your iPod, which clocks in at a fairly hefty (for a music player update) 50mb.
Update 2: 1GB iPod Shuffle has been reduced to £89/$129.
Shoot Crazy Frog
This is a flash game where you get revenge on
that stupid frog! How can you not resist the temptation to visit it?
Gmail for Web Hosting
At Seekers on Friday, someone suggested using Gmail storage space for hosting a website. I am not sure if there is an attachment size limit, but if there is it should be pretty high judging by the amount of space they give you. With attachments on Gmail you download them, and that gives you an address of the file, you could then use that address, for hosting files for a website. If it would work in practice or not I don’t know; but that will be something to do today.
UPDATE:The picture within this post is hosted on Gmail.
ANOTHER UPDATE:The picture in the post only displays on my computer; you need the gmail login cookie for it to work.
Goggle display
Katie Williams of Brunel University has developed software for goggles which displays the number of laps swam, the speed of the swimmer, and the elapsed time on the goggle lens itself. This can help swimmers stay focused on swimming rather than looking at their watches or other devices outside of the pool.
P.A.T.R.I.O.T
Following september the 11th, the USA passed an act allowing the secret services huge amounts of freedom over the various ways they collect information on suspects. This act, called the P.A.T.R.I.O.T act allows the secret services access to literally billions of phone, medical, financial and student records with very little judicial oversight. It also broadens their power over internet and phone surveillance.They will have permission to perform searches without warrants and without ever informing the subject of their search. (more…)
Podcasts For iTunes
Finally! A way to use podcasts in iTunes! A new company, BadFruit, have developed a plugin, called BadApple, for the PC version of iTunes, that changes the function of the Music Store option in the Source pane. (more…)
Japan wants a robot moon base in 2025
Japan wants to build a base on the moon within 20 years by using more advanced versions of today’s humanoid robots (Honda Motor’s Asimo and Sony’s Qrio). “Japan’s lunar robots would do work such as building telescopes and prospecting and mining for minerals,” said Keiji Tachikawa, the president of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. I doubt they have the money for this, as PCWorld mentions JAXA’s annual space budget is only about $1.5 billion (one tenth of NASA’s), which may delay this project for a while.
Why switch when you can have both?
This is a rather cool hack for PC users who are looking into getting a mac (now that should be all of you; if you aren’t , why not??). The idea is you have one mouse, one keyboard, two operating systems (Windows XP and Mac OS X), two screens, but just one mouse pointer. You can’t drag windows between the two systems, but you can copy and paste stuff over the gap and move files. You move the mouse from OS to OS just by moving the mouse. This is for people who have a mac, but just can’t do without some Windows software. I am not sure how it works, but it involves a very clever software hack called Synergy. And then once you don’t need your Wintel anymore, you can use the second screen with Mac OS X :) Have fun!
Speed up iTunes when mounting iPod Shuffle
Isn’t it annoying how long it takes for iTunes to recognise the fact that your iPod Shuffle is plugged in? Luckily, there’s a way to speed this up.
- Open Search and enter “iTuneshelper.exe”.
- When you find it, drag the file to your desktop/quicklaunch.
- When you plug in your iPod Shuffle and open iTunes, clicking on this will speed up the connection to your library.
If you’re looking for information on what to do if your iPod Shuffle won’t mount into iTunes, we recommend this Apple Discussions thread.
Dual Screen Setup
This may seem a little sad to some, but I now have a dual screen set up. This means I have double the desktop space. I have an Apple eMac, which is not officially meant to support dual screen. The only Apple computers that support Extended Desktop off the shelf are PowerBooks and Power Mac G5s. But some German geek noticed that the graphics cards in all the current macs on sale, have a graphics card that will support Extended Desktop. So he made a little script which enters the apple firmware (where the setting is that stops Extended Desktop resides) and changed some values and now all Macs can use Extended Desktop. If you have an eMac and are interested in having a Dual Screen Setup, then click here to go to the site to download the firmware crack. You use the patch at your own risk so it is worth checking out the forum for any known problems before downloading. You also need to get a mini VGA to VGA adapter (depdending on the second monitor you wish to use), which are easy to get from Apple for £15 (or eBay cheaper). You may also need to get Switch Res to configure your second monitor, although in some cases this may not be necessary.
From News.com:
