Oy, Google

Oh gosh, oh golly, Google. What hath become of thee?

If you haven't noticed yet, Google has a new home page for you! It's called iGoogle, which sounds strangely reminiscent, to me only probably, of MyYahoo. Funny how that came to me, since my default iGoogle page has news headlines, weather and other assorted junk that I don't have much need for. Guess they want to make MyYahoo redundant, but heck, I've already wasted countless precious minutes adding RSS feeds and backgrounds and other important customizations to my MyYahoo page, and I don't see the point of doing the same with another page.

I guess I'm a purist, but I like the start, no-nonsense old Google.com, with a lot of white space and a big blank box right in the middle, which I can hit with my mouse even at 6AM when my vision is fuzzy and the coffee hasn't kicked in yet.

Fortunately, if you search around a bit you can find a link called "Classic Google" that pulls up a page with the address of http://www.google.com/webhp. Quick, make a shortcut before it disappears. Hey, maybe I can customize my iGoogle to look good ol' Google! Oh, shoot. Now I forgot what I wanted to 'google' in the first place.

"Apple" Comes Before "Amazon"

"Apple" Comes Before "Amazon"
No, not in your Wiki, in sales!


Holy Apple Pie, Batman! Apple has just passed up Amazon in the music retailing biz.

When iPod was born, we all hit Snooze, since it was just another MP3 player, but we woke up quick when Apple followed it up with iTunes. As the saying goes, content is king, and Apple knew content would be what made its iPod zoom past all of the MP3 players already on the market. Now Apple is proving that content, services and Sssstyle are way more lucrative products than the nuts and bolts hardware platform. Listen all you dinosaur computer and gadget vendors: people don't fall in love with your RAM size or your logo! They want art and instant gratification by way of instant downloads!

You may have missed a smaller story in the news today that said CD-R for OEM is now only $0.10 a piece, due to a glut of materials. In other words, no one's buying CDs any more. Well, now we know where the music money's going. Look out, Hollywood, with your DRM dissolution...DVDs are the next to go!


Sources: Yahoo! News/Informationweek
and other random synapses

Flickr a favorite of the digital photo amateurs?

A look at the Flickr camera recently finds that cheaper models are taking the lead in popularity.

Flickr tracks the most popular digital cameras used in posted photos via the EXIF data from the cameras. Digital SLRs from Canon, Nikon and Olympus had been in the lead but they have been usurped recently by point and shoot models.

Yahoo, which now owns Flickr, explains that the merging of Yahoo photo, which appealed to the snapshot crowd, with Flickr has diluted the high end pro shots with photo album faves.

Keep in mind though that users have the choice of uploading scanned images and images with EXIF data stripped out, as is often the case with RAW images shot with high end cameras, so I wouldn't count their camera polls as entirely accurate.

Source: Tech news blog - Web 2.0 - CNET News.com

Paris Hilton

Paris Hilton

Paris Hilton Paris Hilton Paris Hilton Paris Hilton Paris Hilton Paris Hilton Paris Hilton Paris Hilton Paris Hilton Paris Hilton Paris Hilton Paris Hilton Paris Hilton Paris Hilton Paris Hilton Paris Hilton
Paris....

Woah! Sorry about that. I guess I was feeling left out by not talking about her. Not that I ever would. Although if there is a Hilton in Paris, France I might visit it sometime.

USB Portable Paper Shredder

USB Portable Paper Shredder


You've got your mini spy camera and your talking watch. Now it's time to upgrade your James Bony spy persona and highten your mistique with a portable shredder. Take it on the plane, in a restaurant, anywhere you can plug in to a USB port, and shred documents in public. Sure beats eating your top secret spy instructions from headquarters.

US$22.50 at Usb.brando.com.hk (mid-Juy)

Heart Keychain Digital Album

Heart Keychain Digital Album

Looking for a cool gift for mom or your favorit digital shutterbug? I know my mom loves showing off pictures taken by her kids of just about anything, so this little trinket would make her smile. The Heart Keychain Digital Album is a lightweight photo storage device, that you can attach to mobile phones, key rings, handbags, etc. It comes in pink, red or white.
US$23.00 at Usb.brando.com.hk:

Sony Goes Cheap, Strips Out a Chip

In order to save costs on the PS3, Sony is removing a chip that allows backward compatibility for some PS2 games. The PS3 is due to go on sale in Europe on March 23. This is not likely to change the selling price of the PS3, but rather is an attempt by Sony to recoup some of the loss they are carrying for their fiscal year, which ends on March 31.

Woot!

Frugal geeks rejoice! If you haven't seen it yet, check out Woot! It's a blog/store dedicated to the bargain hunter in all of us. Woot buys up a large volume of products wholesale and then offers them up at a discount, one a day for 24 hours only. Woot ties in a humorous blog to advertise the product, often pointing out the product's shortcomings. This hasn't stopped the frenzied buyers, however: products often sell out within hours or even minutes of their announcement. Today, for example, they offered a refurbished TomTom GO 510 for $280, plus the regular $5 shipping charged for all products. I checked Amazon and the lowest price for a used one is $294. Needless to say, the units were already sold out on Woot. But don't despair, there will be a new bargain posted tomorrow. If you sign up for the RSS feed, you can be one of the first shoppers to try and push through the virtual door and snap up whatever bargain they offer tomorrow.

Woot!

Apple TV is Coming...soon

According to Gizmodo, Apple TV will be here by the end of this month. With an interface that looks something like my Media Center PC interface, Apple TV looks to be a smaller unit than the mini, with a low-power Intel mobile processor, Apple remote and 40GB hard drive and sells for $299, making it an easy fit into an existing entertainment system. The 40GB drive can store about 50 hours of video and iTunes libraries. The built-in 802.11 wireless support lets you download TV shows and movies from the iTunes store to your PC or laptop and automatically synch up the latest on your Apple TV so you can view them on your nice, big HDTV screen. Finally, you can see that mole on Will (ala Will and Grace)'s face again!

Links
Official Apple TV Site
Pre-Launch Review

Let's Separate the Product from the Porn

Shiny, Shiny, the geek site written by and aimed at women, is tiring of the overuse of underdressed women in technology ads. Hear, hear! The gadget world should wake up and realize that women control more wealth today than ever and are huge buyers of the latest and coolest gadgets. Instead of appealing to pimply 17-year old boys with no jobs, wouldn't it be more lucrative to entice successful women to open their wallets wide rather than disgust them with more pics of naked females splaying themselves over otherwise great-looking electronics gear? Being a techie, I tend to read the reviews and look at the features of a product and ignore the ads, but I'm not the norm. So drop the "sex sells" mentality from the 70's and show the raw sexiness of the product instead and you're likely to turn on a much larger market.

SuperBall Shoes

Oh, to be a kid again.

Why didn't they have these when I was growing up? A longtime favorite, the crazy high-bouncing Wham-O SuperBall has found a new purpose: part of a kid's athletic shoe.

As if kids needed any help bouncing around. This shoe actually has several SuperBalls in its sole. The SuperBall, for those of you who are uninformed, is an amazing high-bouncing plastic ball. We used to throw these around the house, to my mom's dismay, and they'd bounce off the walls, sink, windows, etc. What you may not have known is that these toys employ a futuristic technology known as "Zectron technology", which was invented accidentally--as is all great technology--by Norman Stingley, who found a way to compress synthetic rubber to 3500 pounds of pressure.

PR Link: http://www.prwebdirect.com/releases/2006/11/prweb478886.htm

Firefly Lives On

Oh, this will make my sister and several friends happy: Firefly, the short-lived Sci Fi series about futuristic cowboys and such (yes, I know I haven't captured the true essence here), will live on as a massively multiplayer online (MMO) game. Makes sense, as most online fantasy gamers I know loved the series and the movie, plus you can buy costumes and action figures and such now. I was always a Futurama fan myself, and lament the loss of such hidden gems as Wonderfalls and The Chronicle. These masterpieces are lost for good. But take heart if Firefly is your real true love.

Read more in Wired .

Via Kotaku

Wiimote = deadly weapon?

If you've missed it, there have been numerous reports of the straps on the Wii remotes breaking loose and freeing the lethal devices from the hands of the overexuberant. Stories of walls, TVs and laptops getting smacked by the errant devices are circulating, along with an official statement from Nintendo warning folks to be careful if their palms begin to sweat. But I think it all just adds to the realism of the games. Imagine getting clunked in the head when your pal swings the golf club in Super Swing Golf and it slips from his hand, just like a real club. And imagine his crys of pain as you smack him back on the head when you chuck it back at him. Now all we need is flying balls that really break windows!

Links
Nintendo strap safety statement & diagrams: http://www.nintendo.com/consumer/wiiplay.jsp
Via http://kotaku.com

Whew!

Looks like Blogger has fixed the template problem so I didn't have to go changing the site around after all. Thank goodness. Now I can finally get back to blogging. ;-)

hey!

Something weird going on with blogger today.

PS3 for a good cause

If you need a good excuse to shell out $600 for a new Sony PS3 when the next batch comes available, here’s one: Sony’s reviving the peer-to-peer computing craze (remember SETI @ Home?) through Cure @ PLAYSTATION 3, a program through Stanford University to support medical research on Alzheimer's, cancer cures and other compute-intensive activities.

Lest you worry that your PS3 is getting cool while you get a couple of hours of sleep between games, this will put your mind at ease and maybe do some good for society, too.

Via AP

Peace Through Technology

Long time rivals AMD, Apple and Intel working together to build you the best laptop money can buy? That’s the rumor that is floating around by way of tech review site Engadget. If you’d asked me about this possibility three years ago, I’d have told you to lay off reading The Inquirer for awhile, but today the idea is not so far-fetched.

It started with the Apple-Intel alliance, where Apple became so fed up with heat and production issues of the latest IBM-based PowerPC processor that it finally followed the prophecy of former Apple CEO John “...turning down x86 was one of the biggest mistakes I've ever made…” Scully and joined forces with Intel.

Next came the acquisition of ATI by AMD, filling the chipset gap in AMD’s product line and driving Intel CPU-based notebook makers into a quandary. Not to mention the decision point that Apple is now at: Continue to sell ATI, now AMD graphics paired with Intel Core 2 Duo CPUs (presuming they will get along) or switch to Nvidia graphics. Uh, in case you’re thinking the Intel graphics will work here, forget it. Intel makes integrated graphics solutions, not dedicated graphics processors, and lest you forget, Apple fans are all about great graphics processing. And switching from Intel CPUs to AMD-based designs as some suggest will happen is likely to be a challenge for Apple, requiring a new board design to support the hypertransport bus. But imagine it, if you will: The fastest Intel processors paired with the best graphics from AMD wrapped up in the Apple coolest designs! Sounds so good it almost makes me weep!

Via Engadget

Windows on your Toaster?

Sorry, not yet. That promise of the future uttered by the pre-dot-com optimistic geeks of years past has still not come to fruition, much like jet packs and flying cars. But take heart, there is some progress in the area of technicizing your breakfast. Melitta is now offering an MSN-based coffeemaker. The Melitta Smart Mill and Brew Programmable Coffee Maker is out now, just in time for your holiday shopping. It includes an FM radio that receives MSN data related to your coffee-brewing morn: the weather and sunrise and sunset times, and …well, that’s it. Oh, it makes coffee, too.

Some may remember (but many have forgotten) the MSN Fossil watch of a few years back that was supposed to receive equally valuable data and display it in a monochromatic LCD display on your wrist. Apparently you can still buy one of these, but I’ve never seen anyone, geek or not, wearing one. It seems that Treos and Blackberries are worth the inconvenience of not being strapped to your wrist in exchange for a color display and worthwhile content.

If you absolutely have to have one of these coffeemakers now and don’t need steamed milk or the traffic report, then by all means go out and get this. Amazon.com has it now for a mere $200 and free shipping! The rest of us will wait for our Windows toaster and listen to the forecast on our AM radios in our cars while we wait in traffic and dream of jet packs.





Via CNET

The Sony Faithful

As the countdown to launch continues, lines are forming outside of stores such as Best Buy. Despite delays and compatibility issues, there is still strong demand for Sony's PS3 game console due to launch in the U.S. tomorrow. It's a good thing, too, for Sony, since it has so much invested in this, from the new Cell fab venture with Toshiba and IBM, to its proprietary Blue Ray DVD format. PS3's limited supply won't help either. It means that Sony will miss a lot of holiday sales that could be picked up instead by the Nintendo Wii, which is coming up fast from behind and is due to launch on Sunday. Will Sony's faithful who can't get a PS3 of their own convert? We'll find out very soon.


More blogs about best buy ps3.

Is Zune Out of Tune?

Anyone who dares to compare a Microsoft product to an Apple product risks entering into a religious war about good vs. bad companies, big vs. little guys, quality vs. mass appeal. The details of the products under consideration quickly get lost in the process. Don’t expect things to be any different this time as Microsoft takes on Ipod head-on with the introduction of the Microsoft Zune. Just a quick scan of readers’ comments on the Cnet Zune review page shows the emotion is already high, even though most have not even tried the Zune.

Microsoft’s success on this product will not be based on how cool the player looks or what hardware features it does or doesn’t have. There have been MP3 players available long before IPod and they have come and gone. Some had cooler features well before Apple debuted IPod, but none lasted long. What launched IPod into the high-volume, mass-appeal category was not the product itself, but the content and services that Apple cleverly packaged with IPod, in the form of ITunes. Were it not for ITunes and the legitimized downloadable music business that Apple enabled, IPod would just be a curiosity, heavier, more fragile, more expensive and less versatile than some of the products that came before it. Fortunately, Apple was smart enough to recognize that a portable music device needed music and lots of it. And while other companies struggled with proprietary formats and DRM issues, trying to get movie content out for their portable media players (PMPs), Apple went to the television networks and simply expanded its successful music service to TV shows, driving sales of its video Ipod.

If Microsoft is paying attention, it will start playing catch up on content real fast and not worry so much about the software side of things for Zune. Otherwise, the shiny new music player from Microsoft will end up on the pile of unsuccessful PMPs of the past.