Author: Randy Stewart

Xbox 360 is in the house!

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date April 3, 2006

So, I’ve been secretly lusting for the Xbox 360 for some time. I told myself and others that I wasn’t going to hang out at Best Buy or Costco like the other nerds, but all the while I’ve made side trips into these dens of electronic goodness for the past several months.

The persistence finally paid off yesterday, when everyone and their brother could finally get the 360. Apparently, local Best Buy, Walmart and others received shipments of around 60-80 Xbox 360’s. Mind you, they still sold out, but a lot more people got their hands on Xboxes this weekend.

I’ll post a more detailed report later, but so far the experience has been fairly positive. While a minor detail, the most impressive thing so far is how well the wireless controllers work with the Xbox. If you’ve ever tried to pair Bluetooth devices, you’ll appreciate how you turn the Xbox on, hit the big X button on the controller and it just works. You’d think Apple made it :-)

Downloads Home Entertainment Media Servers and Streamers

Movie downloads compete with DVD

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date April 3, 2006

Movielink and CinemaNow announced today that they will have day and date releases with their DVD counterparts reports the Wall Street Journal this morning. Starting tomorrow with Brokeback Mountain, both companies will give users the ability to buy movies the same day they arrive on DVD.

Both seem to limit what people can do with the movies. Movielink will allow users to burn the movies to DVD, but those DVDs will only be playable on PCs. For the privilege, Movielink will be charging between $20-30 per movie for new films, on par with DVD’s MSRP, but not the actual street price. CinemaNow will be charging between $10-20 per movie, but users won’t be able to burn the movies to DVD.

More details at WSJ.com (paid subscription) and Yahoo!

General

April Fool’s Fun

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date April 1, 2006

Hey everybody, just a reminder that today is April Fool’s Day, so be on the look out for unusual activity. Slashdot for example, is professing it’s true love for the color pink and ponies of all kinds.

Check out urgo.com for a canonical list of April Fool’s enabled sites.

(Via Waxy.org)

iTunes

Free from iTunes

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date March 29, 2006

This was a feature that I thought about adding a while back, but it looks like someone beat me to it. Worth a weekly check in. Maybe if Apple would get that RSS feed of free stuff going, you wouldn’t go anywhere else.

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Apple iPod Portable Entertainment

Creative Zen review critique

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date March 29, 2006

Here’s a an email a friend I’ll call ‘iPodFan’ sent me today regarding the Creative Zen. You might remember, I played with the Zen:M back at CES and wished it didn’t suck.
——–

My review of this review… and I’m completely unbiased!! ;)

Creative ZEN Vision:M Media Player

This is the same cost as the 30GB iPod with Video Playback. The ZEN Vision sells at Amazon for $299. The iPod 30GB is $289.99 at Amazon. ;)

My iPod’s hard drive kicked the bucket a mere week after its warranty ran out. Talk about rotten fruit. To get my life back in tune — and to spite Apple — I picked up this Creative media player.

Just like a cell phone, but with a delicate moving part, iPods have a useful lifetime… they won’t last forever. I’m sure Apple feels the spite, enjoy your Creative media player. Good luck getting it serviced if it develops problems.

In fact, upon further research, there are some interesting warranty features:

Creative’s Warranty	Apple’s Warranty
warranty is not transferrable	transferrable warranty
warranty is only good in the country of purchase	worldwide warranty
labor costs are covered only for the first 3 months	labor costs are covered for the first 12 months
refurb models are only covered by a 30 day warranty	refurb models are covered by the same 1 year warranty
buyer pays repair shipping	pays shipping in the first 6 months

Surprisingly, this stylish 30-Gbyte handheld held its own against my old iPod. It matches the video iPod’s MP3 and MPEG playback, makes up for lack of AAC support with DivX and Windows Media compatibility, and dazzles with its 2.5-inch LCD.

Same size screen, wonder how nice the Creative screen looks… I’ve never
seen one that was working on display.

(Editor’s Note – I’ve seen the screen, it was pretty nice.)

The menus and one of its buttons are customizable, and it has FM radio and a mike for recording messages. Plus, it mounted on my PC as a hard drive, so I could add files by just dragging and dropping — no more iTunes nightmares.

Windows Explorer for organizing your media… that sounds like loads of fun. FM radio: more fun. I am interested in the included Mike, is he cute? Does he take dictation? It’d be cool if they included a mic. (Sorry, pet peeve, Wired copy editors suck… I’ve seen so many typos lately.) My only iTunes nightmares are having to upgrade every ten minutes. ;)

My only complaint is that the vertical touchpad is a little too sensitive. And without iTunes Store compatibility, I have to get most of my video via BitTorrent. But that’s a small price to pay to escape Steve Jobs’ stranglehold on my music collection. — Erin Biba

Have fun getting sued. How does iTunes create a stranglehold? iTunes creates full quality Fraunhofer MP3 encodings at up to 320kbps, or VBR AAC, or even Apple Lossless (okay, that one is proprietary).

——

Thanks for the email, iPodfan! I love it when you’ve woke up on the wrong side of the bed. Keep ’em coming!

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Apple iPod

Volume limit iPod update?

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date March 29, 2006

Hmmmm….. this sounds like a great idea. Apple has been getting flack for iPods having potentially ear damaging loudness –

The move follows a class action lawsuit that was filed against Apple in a federal court in California in January, which claimed that iPods could cause hearing loss because they have the capacity to produce sounds in excess of 104 decibels and up to 115 decibels.

But it’s a 27.7 mb download for a volume limiter and “bug fixes?” That seems kinda big. I’m not sure we’re getting the whole truth here, folks. Apple has notoriously put new software into iPod and iTunes software releases, so I wonder what else might be in here?

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Apple iTunes

iTunes Season Pass Fiesta!

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date March 27, 2006

Didn’t think they were going to stop with The Daily Show and Colbert Report, did you? Apple added multi-“we-swear-this-isn’t-a-subscription-“passes to Lost and Desperate Housewives tonight. More on this tomorrow morning.

iTunes Video Store

Home Entertainment Tivo

New Tivo?

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date March 27, 2006

No Series 3 Tivo yet, but Amazon has specs on a SD dual cable tuner (one analog, one digital). Sounds like they may have one input for an external tuner and one internal tuner. Probably not the most straightforward thing to hook up, but Tivo has been pretty remarkable in the past making this stuff just work.

No official word from Tivo yet, but Amazon, Buy.com and a few others seem to have product info, but no ship date.

(Via Zatz Not Funny. . ..)

Satellite Radio XM Radio

XM adds 10 new music channels

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date March 27, 2006

Haven’t been paying too much attention to our pals over at XM lately, so here is a little update. After a little tiff with Clear Channel about adding advertisements to their channels (CC provides programming to several XM channels), XM decided to add genre channels that match the CC provided channels.

Those new channels are:

U.S. Country – XM 17 – Country Superstars of the 80s and 90s
Flight 26 – XM 26 – Modern Hits 90s & Now
XM Hitlist – XM 30 – Today’s Hit Music
enLighten – XM 34 – Southern Gospel
XM Liquid Metal – XM 42 – Heavy Metal XL
Big Tracks – XM 49 – Later Classic Rock
The Heat – XM 68 – Rhythmic Hits
Escape – XM 78 – Easy Listening
XM Chill – XM 84 – Chill Music
Viva – XM 91 – Latin Pop Hits

They also will be adding 6 regional talk radio stations in the spring and summer.

If you can tolerate another subscription in your life, XM is really great. If you spend a lot of time in the car or just like ad-free radio, check out XM.

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(Via Orbitcast.)

Apple

Mac OS X turns 5 today

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date March 24, 2006

Another Friday afternoon Mac post, sorry Windows people. Ars Technica takes a look back at the last 5 years of OS X. For you fogies out there, we can remember that OS X was arguably the second most important thing that Jobs did upon his return to Apple (the first being the iMac). OS X made Macs cool for developers to use and many normal folks followed their lead. Nice retrospective for this piece of tech I use every day.

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Apple

Why Photoshop isn’t a Universal Binary yet

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date March 24, 2006

You might wanna skip this post if you are not a Mac geek. Here is a personal account from one of the engineers who works on Photoshop as to why it’s not so easy to convert Photoshop and the rest of the Adobe software family to Mac on Intel.

‘But, c’mon’, I hear people saying, ‘Steve said it was just a recompile!’ Or, ‘Back during the PowerPC transition, you guys released a patch!’

Well, this time is different. And I really wish it weren’t. But let me tell you how…

Bottom line is, Xcode the development environment for Mac on Intel hasn’t been suited to a large application like Photoshop until just recently and Adobe wasn’t using Xcode. And Xcode is necessary to develop for Mac on Intel. If you’ve ever gone through this experience, you know that it is very costly from a human resource and financial perspective.

Definitely an interesting read to get some insight into what developing a program like Photoshop must be like.

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Microsoft

Windows Vista Slipsta

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date March 22, 2006

Now, how is that for shocking? We’ve never known Microsoft to announce a product before it’s ready or slip on a very public schedule… oh wait, that’s Apple. Now, writing a new OS must be difficult, but after stripping out several big features (including WinFS, a next gen file system), you’d think that it would have been made easier.

Vista was supposed to ship right before the holiday season and it will now ship in January 2007. Vista’s most recent date slip won’t come without repercussion. MS has announced a new Windows chief and heads are expected to roll soon.

CNET has a nice roundup of stories regarding the date slippage.

Have to give credit for that title to my cousin Jason, tech geek extraordinaire. His puns and wordplay may only be slightly worse than mine.

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Apple iPod iTunes

Real Housewives

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date March 21, 2006

It’s Tuesday, and I’m a whore for the iTunes Music Store (hey, that rhymes).

Continuing iTMS’ tradition of free downloads promoting not-yet-launched tv shows, this week we see Bravo capitalizing on the success of the “Desperate Housewives” with their launch of “Real Housewives of Orange County.”

From Bravo’s website:

“The Real Housewives of Orange County” will follow five sophisticated women and their families who lead glamorous lives in a picturesque Southern California gated community where the average home has a $1.6 million price tag and residents include CEOs and retired professional athletes.

“Roseanne” it ain’t.

Free Download

Games Xbox

Xbox 360 to triple shipments this week

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date March 21, 2006

Ok, I admit it. Once I found out that Best Buy received their shipments on Thursday mornings, I have been known to find a reason to visit them a little more often towards the end of the week. But apparently, the news wasn’t exactly an exclusive.

This week, however, their might be a reason to take a trip over to the local BB. Emboldened by the delayed PS3, it looks like all y’all that have been waiting for an Xbox might get one real soon now.

“Today we have turned a major corner,” said Peter Moore, corporate vice
president of the Interactive Entertainment Business in the Entertainment and
Devices Division at Microsoft. “With more consoles on their way to retail,
80 games available by June, and new content and experiences coming to Xbox
Live(R) all the time, there has never been a better time to own an Xbox 360.”

Oh, yeah, and to you other guys hanging out at the Best Buy on Thursday mornings, you should get lives.

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(Via Engadget.)

Apple

New MacBookPro redefines FireWire

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date March 20, 2006

Wow, I knew there was something about the new MagSafe connector I didn’t like (besides the fact iGo doesn’t make a tip for it yet). According to Gizmodo, a Dutch user had this image (and more) on Flickr but took them down after Apple quickly offered to replace the MacBook.

Haven’t heard any other cases of fiery MacBooks, but this picture is a little unsettling.

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Apple Home Entertainment HTPCs Microsoft

Windows MCE on a iMac

Post author By Randy Stewart
Post date March 20, 2006

Not satisfied with just running regular XP on an Intel Mac, the folks over at the OSX86Project have gotten Windows MCE up and running on an Intel iMac. They don’t have the IR port working yet, but I imagine that it will only be a matter of time.

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(Via Matt Goyer’s Media Center Blog.)