Rumours have been flying around about this kind of thing for months. Here’s more: Apple is preparing a 3G iPhone, and it’ll hit the streets initially on Telstra’s NextG network.
(via iPhonic)
Category Archives: Hardware
Apple pushes Safari
Watch out, Windows iTunes users: Apple is pushing, via its security updates feature, Safari 3.1 onto Windows users. You can opt-out of it, but if people just click OK on the default, they’ll get it. Ed Bott rants about it here. (Amusingly the report, at least for me, is accompanied by an Apple advert.)
I’ve got IE7 and FF on my PCs already. I don’t need or want another web browser. It was rude enough that Apple insisted Quicktime be bundled with iTunes… no wonder the size blew out from 19Mb to 33Mb.
But now they’re pushing Safari onto people as well?! No thanks.
Help needed for retired computers
The Australian Computer Museum Society is looking for benefactors to help them keep their collection intact. They had moved to an empty warehouse a couple of years ago, but now need to find somewhere else to store all their gear, some of which is a century old. Evidently they need about 400 square metres.
Virus in a picture
Reports that viruses are now being found in digital photo frames, ready to infect your computer as soon as you plug them in to start putting pictures on them. (Thanks David)
iTunes and 64bit support
A little update to my previous entry on purchasing a iPod Touch.
Apple surprised me by releasing a 64bit version of iTunes 7.6 with little or no fanfare on the 15th January 2008. I actually didn’t get the update until the following week and it was only by chance I noticed a 64bit version.
I’m very happy to say that I’ve been using 7.6 on my primary 64bit box and have been extremely happy with it, i’ve even moved over my iTunes music collection from my temporary home (a 32bit Windows 2000 installation in VMWare (thanks Josh for the tip)).
As I write this I’m still hunting down Album covers for music that iTunes can’t find and removing all duplicates from my library, but it’s fun đ
Card number please?
Happy New Year.
Apart from my sister, my eldest also got an iPod Nano for Christmas. Thankfully here we use Windows, so unlike my sister, we didn’t have problems having to upgrade the OS to get it working.
He also got a $50 iTunes voucher. Very cool. So we logged onto Windows as him, and ran iTunes, so it would set up a music library for just him. Ran through the usual guff to get it started, and we set up his Apple ID so the voucher could be redeemed.
Problem: It wants a credit card number. He’s 12. He doesn’t have a credit card. Maybe we can skip this step? Nope. He’s got a $50 voucher, and no credit card, but it wouldn’t let us use the voucher without entering a card number. Idiots!
The workaround we ended up with was to put in my card details. Then we put the iTunes voucher number in, and went and found the option to remove the credit card again. And we had to change his name on the Apple ID, as it had assumed that my name from the credit card was the one to use.
Problem solved. But it shouldn’t be that hard.
Merry Christmas from Apple
My sister is fuming because she got an iPod Nano for Christmas, and apparently it won’t work with her 3 year old PowerPC MacBook, which runs MacOSX 10.3. Sure enough, the Nano specs say it needs 10.4.8 or higher. She’s got no real interest in paying and installing for an OS upgrade to get around the problem, so she’ll ask a friend to load her iPod for her.
Basically it means that Apple is saying you can’t have a new iPod if you run a version of OSX from before April 2005 (with the appropriate free updates).
Whereas it does run happily on Windows XP (SP2) or Windows Vista. So you need to have a version of Windows from no earlier than before October 2001 (with the appropriate free updates).
How does Apple get away with treating its customers like that?
The patch that bricks
“CCP’s latest major patch to the EVE-Online client, Trinity, comes with an optional DX9-enhanced graphics patch that dramatically improves the visual quality of the in-game graphics through remade models, textures, and HDR. It also has an unfortunate bug: the incredibly stupid choice of boot.ini as a game configuration file, coupled with an errant extra backslash in the installer configuration. The result is that anyone who installs the enhanced graphics patch overwrites the windows XP c:\boot.ini file with the EVE client configuration file, bricking the machine on the next boot. Discussion in a couple of forums threads is becoming understandably heated.”
From Slashdot (via Lauren)
iPod Touch and the ‘classic’ geek blunder
The most famous blunder of all time, according to Vizzini from the Princess Bride, is “never get involved in a land war in Asia” but the most famous blunder, I think, for a geek is not to research fully the geek tech they are going to buy.
I treated myself to an 16Gb iPod Touch yesterday, I’ve been meaning to get an iPod for a few years and being a user of iTunes at home for my music collection it was a logical step. The iPod Touch is a great little device, not too heavy and has a great screen but hey you already know that because “we” geeks have read all the reviews, and if lucky enough to have a nearby Apple Store we’ve had a play with one.
So late yesterday afternoon I took a spin down Pitt Street here in Sydney to Next Bytes (Apple Reseller) and purchased my iPod Touch, I even bought a nice silicon protector for it. I resisted the urge to open it and play with it on the trip home and ripped the packaging off once I was in front of my PC.
Bloody convergence again
Follow up from this rant.
I got so sick of my stupid Dopod 838Pro being incapable of operating like a phone that I decided to have a trial separation. I borrowed a colleague’s mobile phone and thought I’d have a go at using a separate phone and PDA for a while.
The separation didn’t last long… I’m back using my converged device again.
I was amazed at how hard it was to do common tasks with the mobile. For example starting a text message required 5 button presses on the phone compared to 2 on my device. Then entering the message is so much simpler on the Dopod’s Qwerty keyboard. Admittedly I’m out of practice with numberpad texting. Having a large touch screen is a huge advantage for a user interface.
So now I’m stuck with trying to figure out how to make the Dopod behave better as a phone. I’ve uninstalled lots of apps that probably suck a fair bit of cpu. Hopefully that’ll help.
Outsourcing your toolshed
Making stuff is fun. But sometimes you need a 3D printer, and Bunnings are out of them – besides, they’re thousands of bucks. What to do?
There’s a place in the USA called TechShop which is a workshop fully fitted out with most imaginable tools, industrial grade. I lust after it. $30 for a day-pass, $100 for a month. Only problem is, cool ideas like this don’t seem to get financial traction. If something like this opens up in your area, make sure they’re going to hang around before you part with long-term payments.
Parallels have been drawn to the MIT FabLab, which is in a number of countries, but seems more focused on technology than materials.
Crysis Single Player Demo
The big gaming news this past weekend was the release of the Crysis demo by EA, Crysis has been the ânext big thingâ in PC gaming since it was first shown over a year ago. I was lucky enough to grab the single player demo, which weighed in as a hefty 1.7Gb, on Saturday afternoon. Sunday afternoon I installed the demo and spent an hour or so running through the jungle in the mission available.
I was very surprised to see after installation that Crysis is available in both 32 bit and 64 bit versions and whilst Iâm sure the native 64 bit version does have benefits over the 32 bit version I donât know what those benefits are at this time itâs just nice to have native 64 bit executable to run.
I really enjoyed playing Crysis, graphically its outstanding where BioShock was graphical champion for indoor and underwater action Crysis is going to be the outdoor champion. I only had my settings on medium but the whole environment looked fabulous.
One of the âcool featuresâ of Crysis is that the environment can be shot up and destroyed, not everything can but the trees can be shot and felled and buildings can be rammed with vehicles and fall apart as if theyâre real, even bullet holes appear in walls when shot. Kudos to Crytek for the attention to detail that so many other games lack.
With the release of DirectX 10 a few months ago people have been wondering what difference it will make to gaming, BioShock did look a little better using DirectX 10 but Crysis appears almost lifelike running under DirectX 10.
Performance wise the game averaged 20 â 30 fps on medium settings for me. As my gaming system has dual 1900 series ATI graphics cards in CrossFire I would have expected better performance but Iâm not even sure if CrossFire was working for Crysis and ATI havenât released an updated driver for Crysis as of yet whereas Nvidia have in their 169.01 Beta drivers.
Overall I think Crysis is a very good game, I’m looking forward to buying the full version when it is released in a few weeks time….. which is just enough time to decide what upgrades I need in order to play the game at it’s maximum settings <evil grin>
 Edit: A pair of Nvida 8800GTX’s will be running in SLI tonight, wife not going to be happy. But dangnamit, we need more power!