I am a little late with this, but today was Blog Action Day 2008, and this years topic is another issue I am passionate about and that’s poverty. I try to give aid whenever there is a terrible disaster somewhere and I have a sponsored child through World Vision. Late last year I sponsored a second child for my Mother. It’s a strange feeling doing something like this, although it feels great knowing you are helping in a very small way, it also makes you very sad to know that people live in such poverty, especially children.
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There has been a load of buzz over the past few days about Apple’s new MacBooks. Rumours of a sub 1000 dollar laptop along with speculation of a new manufacturing process that allows Apple to produce them for less are fueling the buzz. The new laptops are being code named “brick” and it may refer to a new manufacturing process.
On Tuesday, October 14th Apple has invited media to a special notebook event, so the wait to find out if the rumours a true will be over tomorrow. AppleInsider has more details and photos of the laptop.
Techcrunh also has details on the new laptop and CrunchGear will be there for the announcement.
(update: Engadget will have Live web coverage of Apple’s “The spotlight turns to notebooks” event.)
Tonight I was browsing the top free downloads and noticed Space Monkey in second place. This was originally a $9.99 game, but right now it is temporarily free from the Glu developers (Update: Space Monkey is no longer free, but it looks like it’s now 99 cents, still a great price). This is why it’s always a good idea to check out the top free apps every few days, because a lot of apps start out free and then cost money later on. Sometimes they will also go on sale or as in the case of Space Monkey go completely free.
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I spent a good chunk of time this weekend figuring out how to transfer files from an iTouch to a new laptop. The original library was on an old computer and I wanted an easy way to transfer the files from the iTouch to the new laptop. Considering how easy most Apple products are to use it’s surprising that there is nothing easy about transferring your files from an iPod to another computer. Yes there is the quick transfer purchases option, but unless you bought every song from the iTunes store it’s a pretty useless feature. Many of us have invested a lot of time ripping our old CD collections or heaven forbid may have bought our mp3 music elsewhere. Why is it so hard to transfer YOUR music? The apple method requires burning CDs, DVDs or transferring the entire hard drive over. Maybe the record labels play into this, who knows, but it’s damn inconvenient. The locks on transferring files are obviously artificial since an iPod is a simple USB storage device.
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The days of physical media are almost over. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Blue Ray disks bite the dust in a few years and I’m not the only one, but that’s another topic. The future is online and the only thing really holding back online adoption by the masses is clumsy DRM punishment for customers who buy music and movies online. Most people don’t even know what DRM is, but they do know what it means when they find out they can’t copy a song from their favourite device to their new computer (I’m looking at you Apple). This is severely annoying and the industry still doesn’t get it. We have been able to rip, share, and use our CDs and DVDs on any device we saw fit, but unfortunately this is not the case with our downloaded purchases. The industry needs to stop locking down things we paid for! Stop treating your paying customers like criminals, the people pirating this stuff will continue to do so and you only hurt legitimate users.
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Earlier this week I saw several articles on Sony’s new all in one desktop, and it really stood out. Sony’s new JS1 all in one desktop looks sweet, at least in the pictures. There is also a sister laptop, the NS1, but it’s the desktop that really made me drool.
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What happens when two geeks go on a canoe trip for a long weekend? Well, they talk about geeky things for a few days and enjoy the spectacular outdoors. Mike is a good friend of mine and fellow Geek; he also runs the site Geeks In Training and his personal outdoors blog A Word in the Woods. Last weekend we took a four day canoe trip to the beautiful Algonquin Provincial Park, which covers 7630 square kilometers of pristine wilderness in Ontario, Canada. We got as far away from the city and our gadgets as we could, well everything except our iphones and camping gear, but more on that later.
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Electronic paper, and e-book Readers are all based on a pretty cool technology that is truly something you have to see to believe. E Ink is the brand name manufactured by E Ink Corporation and it really does look like paper. The first time you see it you realize that it has a completely different feel to it than your standard LCD display. You can check out an E Ink display at the Sony store or anywhere that sells E Ink based readers.
Lately E Ink has been getting a lot of press. Earlier this month Esquire showed off the worlds first ever E Ink magazine cover. This brought visions of the science fiction film Minority Report to many people and an environmental disaster in the making for others. There are also many e-readers being released with iRex to introduce a 10.2-inch E Ink reader next week. Although I love the technology, I think the current vision of E Ink by the press and blog sphere is somewhat flawed.
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If you bought an iPhone 3G in the US, Japan, Canada, Mexico or Several Latin American countries you may need to ship it back to Apple and get a replacement.
From Apple:
Apple has determined that under certain conditions the new ultracompact Apple USB power adapter’s metal prongs can break off and remain in a power outlet, creating a risk of electric shock. We have received reports of detached blades involving a very small percentage of the adapters sold, but no injuries have been reported.
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Everyone is wondering what HTC and Blackberry will have up their sleeves over the next few months. The Android powered HTC Dream will be unveiled at a press event in New York City by T-Mobile next week on September 23 and it is rumoured to be ready for release sometime in October. There is also a pretty interesting video of Android being shown off at the Developer Day in London, and it’s looking very polished.
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