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Lawsuits
Apple Sues School For Using The Same Fruit In a Logo
The Victoria School of Business and Technology in Canada could have probably taken a more original approach when designing their logo, but I doubt Apple is protecting themselves from much by suing the hell out of them. Are students showing up at Apple stores demanding that the so-called "Genius Bar" reconsider their essays marks? Are Apple store employees inadvertently showing up at the school and teaching hours and hours of "How to use iPhoto" classes? Apple is just trying to prevent the devaluation of their logo here, but it never looks good when you sue a school, even if that school is a for-profit vocational tech college. [CBC via MacNN]
Retromodo
Old-School Rapper Tells the 1990s to Quit Pirating Games
Back in the era of floppy disks, before programmers figured out how to implement DRM, they had to rely on no-name rap stars to keep kids from pirating software. That's right, rap stars. The video really speaks for itself, so watch it now—and remember, Don't Copy that Floppy! [-Thanks Stephanie!]
More Ringtones
Create Your Own iPhone Ringtone Using iTunes
In case you wanted to create your challenge to the world's longest ringtone, CNET has an interesting little video tutorial up that'll show you how to do so on the iPhone using iTunes. Turns out the music software lets you choose the start and stop times of a song, rename the extension and create a custom ringtone. You'll need Garage Band if you want to get fancier than that, but who needs fancy when all you want to do is make a 62 minute-long song? [CNET TV]
Hologram
Breakthrough in Holographic Tech Makes 3D Sets 5 to 10 Years Away
Holographic television sets may be only a few years off thanks to a new breakthrough in 3D technology. Researchers at the University of Arizona said they had made the first updatable 3D displays with memory, a prerequisite for getting any holographic image to move. With the new technology, displays can now be erased and rewritten in a matter of minutes. More »
Batteries
European Rule Could Force Apple to Unintegrate its iPod Batteries
A new European Union rule could spell the end to the iPod's pesky integrated batteries. The EU's proposed “New Batteries Directive,” which mandates that batteries in electronic appliances need to be “readily removed” would force Apple to change the iPod's design for the European market. More »
1:05 AM on Tue Oct 7 2008
By Elaine Chow
2,787 views,
39 comments
Pick up already, damn it
World's Longest Ringtone Clocks In at Over an Hour
For those of you who love to let your cellphones ring incessantly, never bothering to pick it up or let it go to voicemail, here's the world's longest mobile phone ringtone. The ringtone, supplied by Japanese company Dwango, lasts 61 minutes and 40 seconds and will be submitted for inclusion in the Guinness Book of Records. [PlusD via Textually]
Apple
Apple Ships New, Un-Shocky USB Power Adapters
Less than a month after Apple initiated the recall process for its USB iPhone power adapters, customers are reporting that their replacements have been received. The original adapters had metal prongs that could break off and remain in a power outlet, which carried an electric shock risk. The new one looks exactly the same as its predecessor, except it's bedaubed with an extra green dot. [TUAW]
Wireless
How do you make a wireless transmission that is as fast or even faster than most fiber-optic data passages? With laser beams of course! According to a Technology Review piece, super smart people at Battelle research in Columbus, OH figured out a way, using millimeter wave technology, to send data at speeds up to 20 gigabits per second. They even field tested 10 Gbps at up to 800 meters. Even accounting for Ohio's unnervingly flat terrain, this is several hundred times farther than a wireless transmission of that bandwidth had ever reached before.
More »
20-Gigabit Wireless Data Achieved By Crossing Laser Beams
How do you make a wireless transmission that is as fast or even faster than most fiber-optic data passages? With laser beams of course! According to a Technology Review piece, super smart people at Battelle research in Columbus, OH figured out a way, using millimeter wave technology, to send data at speeds up to 20 gigabits per second. They even field tested 10 Gbps at up to 800 meters. Even accounting for Ohio's unnervingly flat terrain, this is several hundred times farther than a wireless transmission of that bandwidth had ever reached before.
More »
Blu-Ray
Spinal Tap Blu-ray Hits January; Game Lets You Create Your Own New Originals
The upcoming This Is Spinal Tap Blu-ray is of course exciting to me. After all, it's been what, like seven years since I last hurled money at Rob Reiner, Christopher Guest and the rest of the lot for their well-deservedly best-selling DVD special edition. But while the Blu-ray will come with an intriguing-sounding game, this latest repackaging of the classic, due out January 20, 2009, could easily be dead on arrival, having choked on not necessarily its own vomit. For starters, it's not recorded in Dubbly. More »
Terrible Ideas
BrakeNutz Glowing Car Testicles are the Epitome of White Trash in the 21st Century
Wow. Just wow. Call me a cultural elitist, but who considers it socially acceptable to hang a glowing pair of balls from your rear bumper? I don't care if they're connected to your brake lighting, they're just wrong. I never thought it possible for LEDs to be horrifically misappropriated, but BrakeNutz just rewrote the script on that. Check out the video over on Jalopnik. [BrakeNutz via Jalopnik]
Blackberry Apps
Blackberry App Store Already Has Third Party Competition in BerryStore
After today's reveal that RIM will launch an official app store in the near future, TechCrunch reports on BerryStore, which not only promises to provide apps for the Storm, but the rest of the Blackberry line as well, including the old phones. What makes this a legitimate challenger to the official app store is that BerryStore's content will be available to everyone, regardless of the carrier (the official app store will make different apps available to different carriers...apparently). More »
Augmented Reality
Real Pilots Racing Against Virtual Airplanes Will Bring Simulators to a New Level
Sky Challenge wants to create a new massive sport, one that would allow you to race against real stunt airplanes, flying through virtual doughnuts and gates up in the real sky. To do that, they are using a mix of technologies that that allow real planes to be precisely tracked, as well as letting real world pilots see the course and the computer planes around them. Here's how it works: More »
Microsoft
Fake Boy Band Ushers In Windows 7, Makes Vista Years Seem Classy
Apparently, a simple blog post about getting Windows 7 early by attending Microsoft's Professional Developer Conference (PDC) in October or the Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) in November wasn't enough. No, Microsoft had to drive the point home by getting a fake boy band to sing a song about PDC, and the free 160GB HDD—containing the earliest release of Win7—that will be handed to attendees. Yep, they recorded an intentionally bad yet catchy late-90s-flavored pop song that includes the rhyme "Windows 7 my love is true/Now let me use Direct3D to unlock your GPU." Don't believe that kind of lyrical mastery still exists on this our earth? Well then press play, buster. [YouTube]
weirdos
People Who Hate Technology Are Total Freaks
If you've ever had suspicions about the kind of people that totally shun technology (aside from the Amish), it turns out that your stereotyping was in the right: They're absolute freaks. MTV profiled some of these Luddites in an episode of True Life, "I Live Off the Grid," and they make even the weirdest, most obsessed geeks around seem normal. Besides smelling like crap (for various reasons), living outside, and never, ever getting to do anything awesome, you have to respect old clams. Don't they make you feel so much better about reading Giz? [Jezebel]
Naptime
iSleep Laptop Airbag: Because Work is Not That Bad When You Sleep Through It
Designers these days seem bound and determined to lower our productivity with products that entice us to sleep when we should be working. The iSleep concept expands on the idea behind products like the Napbook by making the process a little more high-tech. When you close your laptop, the fan exhaust automatically fills up the latex-lined cushion with warm air. It also activates a music playlist that will soothe you to sleep for 10 minutes before sounding an alarm to wake up. I highly doubt that this product will ever see the light of day though, so it looks like you will have to continue to rely on you arm, the supply closet, your car or that space under your desk to catch a little shut-eye. [iSleep via Likecool via Yanko]
iPhone
iPhone OS 2.1 Won't Fetch Emails in Sleep Mode
Another bug in iPhone OS 2.1, which we have tested and reproduced, is that it will no longer fetch emails in the background while in sleep mode on battery power. It's most probably one of the power-saving tweaks introduced in 2.1, since Apple says that the 15-minute fetch interval is the worst wear on the battery because it never lets the phone go into deep sleep mode. This Apple discussion thread chronicles the problem at length. It's possible it'll be fixed in the next update—a reader tells us that Apple confirmed it's a "known problem" and that they are looking into it, but in the meantime, don't lean too hard on fetch. [Apple - Thanks Josh!]
Anderson Cooper Loves Giz
