SDS

Those of you who don’t know, apple announced a few new toys a couple of days ago.  my lackluster post is due mostly to the underwhelming release.  Mostly announcing features that have been obviously lacking since the iPhone first hit the scene over 3 years ago.

Among their offerings is Apple TV: a cheaper apple tv with a smaller footprint and no storage.  Designed to promote more rentals from the apple store, most of the exciting features are “Coming Soon” undoubtedly to coincide with iOS 4.1 or 4.2.  New iPod Touch with everything you’ll find on iPhone 4 except for GPS, (because that might actually be useful).  Cool to see FaceTime on the iPods though.  New Shuffle combines the inovations of the last model with the usability of earlier ones.  The Nano was a mixed bag.  joining the iOS family with this version they remove it’s camera and video playback capability.  It is unclear if it will ever get the benefits of iOS such as apps.  Touch screens are cool, but if there aren’t apps, i’d rather have buttons and play videos.   Lastly, iTunes 10.  As if iTunes wasn’t a bloated POS already, now it is it’s own social network: Ping.  Caught between wanting to be blip.fm and last.fm, Ping offers me nothing but more iTunes Store Spam.  At least i hear they’ve finally added some threading.  My biggest complaint about previous iTunes is that it does so much and often gets a little shall we say “Pinwheely.”  It’s usually when i’m importing new tracks or syncing/restoring an iDevice.  Of all it’s many features, the ONE thing i EXPECT itunes to do is control my music!  at that, it often fails.  Let’s see if this new version will improve their already abysmal record.

Jailbreakers or Unlockers Note:  iTunes is safe, but you will want to hold off on the inevitable iOS updates.  if you saved your blob you can always go back, but not with your baseband, so unlockers should especially be careful.

Just a few days after acquiring my new Blu-ray burner, i’m already transcoding my first HD movie. After an hour to rip, i must wait nearly 3 hours to transcode. i don’t know why i expected it to be more difficult then it was.   Perhaps i should wait to see the output before making such a boast.  Before you cry DMCA, remember that fair use allows me to make any additional copies of media that are required to play it. How else am i supposed to play Prestige on my iPad in HD?  don’t answer that.  We’ll let the lawyers fight it out.

Without any 4k screens, i am forced to output a cut @ 2560×1440 for my 30″.  went tripple nutty with this one.  i’ll check back in the morning but with R3d, it might not be this week!  red should thread.  it rhymes, i thought that made it true.

i received this voicemail on my service.  i just had to save it.  it reminds me of that old tmbg track “Who’s they may be giants?”  download message.mp3

As if I haven’t already learned my lesson, i continue to tempt fate. just yesterday i skated by on my data recovery skills and pure luck when i nearly lost 200GB of personally encoded tested and tagged dvds! i can only imagine how many hours of man and machine work to went into that collection. i’ll only have to redo a handful of movies. lets hope they haven’t wondered off, that they are in their cases, and all the horrible things that drove me to encode them all in the first place. if you care about it, back it up. storage is so cheap now. there is no reason not to just back everything up!

In the coolest workaround yet, Infinitec out of Dubai made this nifty little gadget that lets your server, NAS, or any PC with media be accessible as if it were on a USB thumb drive.  It even fakes out file systems that have a 1 or 2GB barrier.  It relies on wifi so you do have to be in range. . . we can dream.

http://www.engadget.com/2010/01/07/exclusive-infinitec-demonstrates-ium-ad-hoc-streaming-device-m/

with a snazzy new interface, hulu integration and a set top box from dlink slated for June! (less then $200)

sign up and download today! boxee.tv