Happy Halloween 2005!

Happy Halloween 2005!
Originally uploaded by Jillako.

Happy Diwali to folks in India! While we waited for Diwali here in Dublin, App and I carved our pumpkins! There were no kids going around trick or treating however, the sad part about living in a condominium.

My evil long-lost twin!

Nah, just more PhotoBooth fun! This is the 'dent' effect. And yes, I did get FrontRow running on my 1st Gen iMac G5. There are some folks putting together Salling Clicker scripts too, should be real fun! Front Row has a cool interface, I can see this being pretty useful. There are lots of ppl including Paul Thurrott comparing it to Windows XP Media Center. I don't think they're quite the same thing. Although FrontRow could easily grow to compete with Media Center. As always, Steve Jobs will decide!

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Tonight's wine - The Sequiot Tempranillo from Spain - very smooth, goes with anything but not a whole of lot of flavour; still, it's pretty inexpensive so I might buy it again!

Thermal me!

Had a moment to fool around with the new Apple PhotoBooth application this morning. Yes, it is only bundled with new iMacs; No, I didn't go out and buy one; I just discovered BitTorrent. I just started using BitComet last night to download some pre-formatted videos for my PSP. Upon a whim, I searched and found PhotoBooth and FrontRow (surprise!). Installing FrontRow required more time than I had this morning but here's Thermal Me!

Photo Booth or PhotoBooth?

These names that folks at Apple come up with! In the case of Photo Booth (the fun app included with the new iMac G5), they conveniently forgot about Stunt Software's PhotoBooth which has been around a while, long enough in fact, to be listed on Apple's own dowloads page!!?!

The W900 Walkman Phone

If I get pepped up about a new gizmo on the bloc and it's not made by Apple, chances are it is made by Sony (remember the PSP?). A Sony that has it's act together can really make life tough for Apple. Case in point, the just announced W900 phone. A bit bulky but man look at those specs - 2.2-inch QVGA 262k TFT display, FM radio, 2 megapixel auto-focus camera with flash, records and plays video at 30fps, and MP3, AAC audio playback, dedicated music controls, 3.5mm jack, and 470MB built-in memory with a memory stick duo slot!!! It's a beauty.



And if you, like me, are sitting there thinking the phone looks attractive then Sony comes along with some of their consumer electronics expertise and introduces a couple of interesting accessories to the mix. First off, the awesome speaker system that doubles as a phone charger. When you get home, where better to set your phone than on a charging base connected to a high performance speaker with a remote control. It would make a perfect bedroom sound system (our bedroom currently has none - hope you're noting this App). Here's a pic



Then there is the FM transmitter, pretty useful for folks like us who have a car stereo with no input and no hope of upgrading it easily either.




Somehow I don't see this phone available for free after rebate anytime but I'll still look forward to the release. Now if I could use iTunes with Sony Walkmans... :)

How Apple Does It

From Time,

"But Jobs doesn’t care just about winning. He’s willing to lose. He has done it often enough. He’s just not willing to be lame, and that may, increasingly, be the winning approach."


An excellent observation from the full article, worth a read if you have a few minutes. And Apple has another special event scheduled tomorrow..

Stay tuned.

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Current wine - A bottle of 2002 Cabernet Sauvignon from Wente Vineyards, excellent flavours that open up when decanted, awesome value!

Note: I'm gonna add footnotes about wine / music / tv that I liked when I posted!

One more thing..

If you haven't, watch this first - Stream from y'day

Gotta admire Steve Jobs. He maintained perfect composure as he delivered a double whammy yesterday at Apple's special event. To me it confirms that Apple has an eye on dominating digital media in the home the way I would like them to. Sure, they're moving far more slowly than I would like them to but they're working within the limitations of being a big corporation working with other big corporations. As it is, it is stunning how far we have come over the last couple of years. Lets look at Apple's acts from yesterday.

Act 1: The iMac - surely the biggest surprise of them all. With hardware upgrades, an improved enclosure (hopefully one that avoids heating issues), a built in iSight and Front Row w/ Apple Remote, this is an amazing desktop for the home! In fact, its more than a desktop. If I could connect coaxial and watch TV on the iMac, I'd throw out the TV in our bedroom and replace it with this! It would be a 20" HD capable TV with a built-in DVD player and media player functionality, a huge hard drive to store your digital library. Third parties could write software that brings DVR functionality, the possibilities would be enormous. And Apple is inches away from this..
The iMac G5 can be wall mounted now - mount it on an arm attached to the wall. Position it as a TV when you need to, use it as a computer when you need to. Get the wireless mouse / keyboard and you're all set. The iMac has built in wireless / bluetooth, DVD burning (dual layer) and what not. Please put that TV tuner in, Apple. I beg you..


Act 2: The iPod - not unexpected but a smart move nonetheless. Apple is testing the video waters with this iPod that can play video. First impressions of the screen have been surprisingly good. I'm not going to complain if my music player can play videos. But will customers buy videos in droves? I suspect not. Audio appears to be a much better value than video at the moment. However, the TV shows are killer! If Apple lands more shows, and I suspect they will, this will be great. Imagine getting on a long domestic flight with no entertainment. I could take the effort to buy some UMDs for my PSP or I could spend the time to rip them from my DVDs onto my Memory Stick Duo or I could launch iTunes and pick up a half dozen TV shows for less than the cost of one UMD. The answer is obvious and I think this will catch on.
Hardware-wise, the iPod keeps abreast in the style department, and the black color is very desirable. However, black glossy finishes tend to appear more scratched than white ones, like the nano this will need a sleeve.

Act 3: iTunes. Not much of a surprise here, the aforementioned hardware changes usually mean a change in iTunes. However a jump to version 6 was a bit of a surprise. iTunes keeps evolving.

Joining in the speculation

Apple sold 1 million iPod Nanos in the 17 days since launch! Record profits, big stock tumble, and yet another special event tomorrow continue to keep Apple in the limelight. Even by Apple standards, the media frenzy around tomorrow's event has been huge. Rarely (or is it never) have company events hogged as much of the limelight without revealing what the event is all about.

Think Secret joins the bandwagon today by predicting a video capable iPod, even after conflicting reports earlier. The BBC link appears to be real. I think we are going to have a new iPod that is video capable. No movies, but video podcasts, music videos etc. If the hardware in the iPod nano were capable of playing back video, I would even expect a software upgrade to enable the functionality, once iTunes supports movie transfers.

I would not rule out a wireless media player (similar to the Airport Express but bigger and with support for video playback) either. It is known that Apple has been working on such a device. However, 802.11g has limitations that would leave HD out of the picture so Airport would need to be upgraded first. Maybe not tomorrow...

The Engadget Reader Meetup

So Arjun, App and I wound up at the Engadget reader event in San Fran last wednesday. It turned out to be a lot of fun along with a lot of gadgets and giveaways. Anyway, they just posted up some pics from the event and we're all over it.. lol, I meant you can spot us in some of them photos that are towards the bottom of the post!! Hooray, its almost like being in the newspaper.

Read The Engadget Reader Meetup: The Aftermath