TechWB - Tech things turn us on!

Last week Microsoft announced that they have created some new partnerships. These now allow you to monitor your recordings and make changes from anywhere with a web browser. The second partnership allows you to watch any video that you have recorded from any web browser. Now lets combine that with Orb, the program that lets you watch your TV Tuner from any web browser. So no lets recap; we can watch live TV, change and monitor out recording schedule, and then watch videos that we recorded to verify that they are right. So what does this have to do with Apple? The iPhone 3G! The device Steve Jobs hinted at last week to be coming out next September is the perfect compliment. A mobile device with a web browser, DSL speeds and an unlimited data plan. When you combine that iPhone and a Media Center PC you get the ultimate media device allowing you to run all your recordings from anywhere in the country!

It seems that since Apple started a trend of black devices with the launch of the Black iPod two years ago the white has been fading from the product page. The iPhone comes in solely black and now the new iPods lack white across the board. The new iMacs are now silver with Black. The only products that lack black are the MacBook which still is available in white or BLACK, the Cinema Displays that come in brushed metal with a silver apple, the brushed aluminum Mac Pro, and the brushed aluminum X Server. In the months leading up to MacWorld apple is expected to launch a new Silver MacBook without a white option. Along side of those are new Cinema Displays with a black apple and new Mac Pros with no rumored case changes. Are the good days of the Apple white products gone? Maybe for now but like the colorful days of the 90’s and the recent wave of colorful ipods everything apple is cylindrical and white will be back. Till then we’ll just have to hope the Aluminum takes over faster than black.

This week following the announcement that Sony made batteries found in Dell laptops could explode the Australian airline Quantas has decided to pass more regulations on laptops. Alright, that sounds great with airlines now offering satellite tv and the many other high tech amenities they must know how to handle the use of technology in a safe manor. Wrong, the new rule has no effect on any dangerous laptop at all and is completely pointless. If a passenger would like to use his/her Dell laptop they must sit in first or business classes, remove the battery at the gate, tape the contact points up, and then plug into the power outlet in order to use the laptop. So if Dell recalled all of it’s dangerous sony batteries wouldn’t that mean that the ones being removed are safe and all those companies sitting out there with exploding batteries are a ticking time bomb in the back of the plane. Even Apple has realized the danger and recalled their batteries yet they don’t have any special rules for plane usage. So how could an airline be this stupid?

Two years into a four year iBook one-to-one program apple decided to have us switch over to the new MacBooks with a new cheaper contract without having to pay any kind of penalty on the old one. So at the beginning of June all 700+ iBook G4s were taken away to be replaced by a new 700+ MacBook shipment latter that month. Once they arrived they all had to be taken out of there brown shipping box, then out of the white MacBook box before they could be labeled, inventoried, and imaged.

Here are the first 203 to be unpacked waiting to be labeled, inventoried, and imaged and the piles of brown shipping boxes which includes the nice hangover. By the next morning the boxes had collapsed.

The iBooks besides being less powerful are also not as wide which means that the old bags don’t fit the new computers so an entirely new bag had to be bought. Unlike the iBooks though the MacBooks are brand new and the bag selection is basically nonexistent leading to months of searching for something evan usable, but finally a great deal was made on a nice bag that can double as a back pack and for labels we were able to get apples entire stock of luggage tags to match the MacBooks.

Here are the 700+ MacBooks all labeled, inventoried, and imaged waiting to be handed out as well as the new bags and Apple tags.

On Tuesday August 22 from 8am to noon and Wednesday August 23 from noon to 6pm Sophomores, Juniors, and Seniors had the opportunity to pick up there new MacBooks while Freshman have to wait until the end of the first week of school next week to take theirs home. Out of the roughly 450 laptops able to be picked up only about 60 were still left in the end. A much lower number than the nearly 200 left after last years Mon-Wen 8am to 6pm pickup days.

ZDTV/TechTV turns 8 today. On May 11, 1998 ZDTV went out into the air waves for the first time starting what would be one of the biggest TV cults around and a legacy that still lives on today.

This article talks about how the embedded OS works in the XBOX360 and PS3. In a nutshell, the PS3 uses over 23% of its hardware resources to run the OS versus the XBOX360\’s 4%. The PS3\’s OS is a basic 360 copy and the XBOX360 is more efficient with system than the PS3.

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The state’s high schools would compete for a share of $20 million under Gov. Rendell’s budget proposal to pay for laptop computers for every desk in English, math, science and history classrooms in 100 schools this year eventually expanding to every high school in the state, at an estimated cost of $200 million.

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Computer company eMachines has launched a new site tonight with a pleasant appearance mostly from having no ads anywhere except an eMachines logo at the top. Under their products page they are still offering four models but they range from an AMD Sempron 3300+ to an AMD Athlon 64 3400+ without an Intel in sight.

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It’s the eve of another MacWorld and it seems Apple may be letting some hints out about tomorrows keynote. Currently people with Front Row are reporting that none of the Movie Trailer features are working right now and similar reports are around about iTunes. I don’t have any access to Front Row but I have been able to confirm the iTunes rumors. At the moment if you try to add a song to your cart it will say that the service is unavailable. I’m unable to take a screenshot at the moment but here is what it says:

Could not add an item to your cart. The Music Store
is temporarily unavailable. (5555)
There was an error in the Music Store. Please try again latter.

It’s a new year and time for another MacWorld filled with announcements. To follow along with my earlier censored post about no new computer hardware related announcements I’m going to list the announcements that I believe may be happening at MacWorld 2006 instead of the Intel announcement that everyone else keeps speculating about that probably won’t happen.

1. The headlining announcement that Apple will most likely use is their famed “Red Box” that’s been rumored for years. It seems likely that with the whole switch from PowerPC to Intel Apple would want to get Windows applications emulated into Mac as seamlessly as possible. Apple has already said that they are going to have a special dual OS system that allows both Windows and Mac to run at once and there is no smoother or faster way to do it than with it running natively within the OS itself.

2. To go along with the previous announcement of the new “Red Box” project will probably be a preview of the new Mac OSX 10.5 Leopard. This is logical since there hasn’t been any mention of that lately and it will probably be tied in with a lot of Intel-related issues and announcements that have to get out before any kind of hardware can start being announced and released.

3. Apple will probably be announcing Front Row being included in all new Apple computers. They will probably be releasing it as a stand-alone product that includes the remote or as a bundled product in iLife 06 with the remote available separately.

4. Apple may also finally be releasing an update to the iSight to bring it up to the quality level of the one built into the iMac that would also ship with Apple’s Photo Booth program. This could also go along with an announcement of built in iSight for all of Apple’s Cinema Displays.

5. The general upgrades of all Mac Minis seems like an obvious announcement for Apple to make since they were slipping 1.5GHz Mac Minis out a few months ago with a few other updates but have still never made an actual update or announcement about it.

6. Like every other Apple keynote lately it can’t be complete without an iPod update of some sort. This time it seems logical for Apple’s lowest selling and oldest iPod, the Shuffle, to see some long awaited changes. To follow the iPod brand change from late summer the Shuffle will at the least see a change to the shiny polycarbonate coating that has become the iPod and will most likely become available in both black and white. The main thing that held the Shuffle back while the rest of the iPod line took off was its lack of a display; with a second-generation release it seems likely to make that addition the main focus. With the iPod’s endless goal of getting smaller the shuffle will become thinner but probably not to much shorter. To fit a display on a device the size of the Shuffle the vertical way would make it hard to fit even a normal size title on the screen so I wouldn’t be surprised to see a shorter and wider screen be placed on the Shuffle that gets held horizontally with a change in the buttons to a normal iPod style wheel turned sideways to go along with the display. The new thing with Apple has been to expand their brand to more people by offering lower costing brands so this time I wouldn’t be surprised to see the standard 1G model for $99.99, the 512MB for $74.99, and a new 256MB version for only $49.99, getting them into an even lower price range for buyers.