Color me Blue

All those additives in food may not be bad for us after all. Or so say researchers at University of Rochester Medical Center. They have found that a compound similar to the common food dye known as Blue no. 1, when entered into spinal fluid reduces inflammation. This could lead to treatments for those who have endured spinal cord injury.

It is amazing that this discovery took place and leads one to wonder if an intern accidentally spilled their bottle of Mountain Dew Voltage onto a lab sample.

Read more.

Apple Nano-based phone coming

"Apple plans cheaper, Nano-based phone: JP Morgan

Apple Inc. (Nasdaq:AAPL - news) plans to launch a cheaper version of the iPhone in the fourth quarter that could be based on the ultra-slim iPod Nano music player, according to a JP Morgan report.

Kevin Chang, a JP Morgan analyst based in Taiwan, cited people in the supply channel he did not name and an application with the U.S Patent and Trademark office for his report dated July 8.

Apple filed a patent application document dated July 5 that refers to a multifunctional handheld device with a circular touch pad control, similar to the Nano's scroll wheel."

There! Now aren't you glad you waited to buy one? You didn't? Oh, sorry....

Source: JP Morgan on Yahoo! News

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.