In celebration of the Apollo 11 anniversary, Google decided to enable exploration of the moon in Google Earth. The most notable feature of Google Moon is the inclusion of two guided tours for the Apollo 11 and 17 missions. The tours are actually quite awesome in terms of animation and rendering. You can watch the Apollo 11 landing without installing Google Earth below.
I saw Daylen’s recent Twitter update on an article called “If Microsoft made toasters.” That led me to wonder: If Microsoft bought Ford out of bankruptcy and then merged with Ford, what would the future Ford cars be like? This is what it would be like:
Image credit: Apple
Since I’m going to be getting a 13-inch MacBook Pro pretty soon, I looked at it when our family went to Best Buy. I strolled through the cell phone display, and all the brand-new Windows notebooks and netbooks, and finally got to the glowing white Apple logo on a black background. Classic Apple move: put an island of simplicity in the sea of different Windows notebooks.
I looked at the MacBook plastic, the MacBook Air (useless unless you’re going for style), and saw…the 13-inch MacBook Pro. Wow. That thing is beautifully engineered—it looks better in person than in the photos at Apple.com. That thing is all display when you open it up. And the unibody is really sturdy compared to some of the plastic Windows notebooks. It’s almost indestructible.
Of course, the first thing I noticed about it when I started testing it out was the display. It’s a whole ton better than the MacBook Plastic and MacBook Air to the left of it. When I put the same wallpaper on, the colors on the MacBook Pro were noticeably richer, crisper, more vivid, and altogether better-looking.
I played around with iPhoto, dabbled in iMovie and Keynote, checked GarageBand out, and found that the huge trackpad is great for long-term use. You don’t feel confined, and gestures speed everything up. My only concern is that it the trackpad is hard to click. You have to push really hard and once it clicks, your finger may have slipped and moved the pointer somewhere else.
Flipping it over to check out the bottom, I noticed that the keyboard lit up. Wait, this comes with a backlit keyboard? Awesome! But what activates it? I tried putting my finger on various holes in the computer, but none of them activated the keyboard’s backlight. Then, I tried putting my finger over the iSight camera. The backlight faded in. I took my finger off. The backlight faded out. Smart move on Apple’s part, using the webcam also as an ambient light sensor.
I noticed that there was a tiny microphone, but could not find the speakers. They just weren’t there. So, I played some music from iTunes and put my finger over various parts of the laptop trying to figure out where the sound was coming from. Four songs into an ACDC album, it finally dawned on me: The speakers are internal, but they still can pump out a lot of volume and have OK bass response. Ooh! Asian Moment of Realization!
Clearly, a lot went into the design of this laptop. You really tell (if it wasn’t obvious enough) by when you go into the Windows side of the computer section at Best Buy. The HPs and Dells all have muted screens and small trackpads. If/when I do get it next year, I will be installing Windows 7 on it. It should be a wonderful laptop.
This is an example of corporate bullying at its worst.
So, awhile back, FailBlog.org posted a screenshot of the GBWR page for the “Most Individuals Killed in a Terrorist Attack.” Underneath it, it said “Break This Record!”
So, as any idiotic legal department would do, the Guinness Book of World Records shot FailBlog.org a cease-or-desist e-mail basically saying that FailBlog.org had better take that page down, because it was “copyright infringement.” Now, this is an exception, because FailBlog.org is using the screenshot for critical commentary and/or parody.
You can read FailBlog.org’s response here.
So, according to Wikipedia and BatteryUniversity.com, I should deep-cycle my iPod touch’s lithium-ion battery by depleting it completely and then letting it charge up all the way. Since I haven’t bothered to deep-cycle in the last few months, I thought I should deep-cycle my iPod’s battery again because this should be done every 30 charge cycles.
Now, completely discharging an iPod touch is hard because it automatically shuts down when the battery gets to around 5 percent. But I’ve discovered a way to really deplete the battery.
How I did it
First, I turned up the brightness all the way while my battery meter was showing red. I played some games (mainly Bejeweled and Cro-Mag Rally) and downloaded podcasts. Video podcasts. Pretty soon, the device just flat-out gave up. It didn’t even bother with a shutdown, or even a hardware-level shutdown. The system just cut power to everything. How do I know this? The LCD screen, instead of instantly going black, went black slowly as each pixel returned to its default position. (Sorry I have no pictures, I didn’t intend on writing a blog post until afterwards.)
Next, I waited a few minutes before trying to turn my iPod touch on again. This gives the battery some time to recover and appear to gain some charge. Now, the iPod started up again, but before it got to the Home Screen, it turned off again. I repeated this until it wouldn’t start. Then I did it again.
The last time I tried this, instead of getting a black screen with a shiny Apple logo, I got a light blue screen. No, not a BSOD. I’m not really sure what it was, but a few seconds later, it went black again. This time, I thought I’d done something terribly wrong, and that possibly I had permanently damaged my iPod touch. Looking back, I think it might’ve been a kernel level thing? I don’t know, but if you do, leave it in the comments.
At that point, I decided it would be a good idea to plug my iPod in. I painfully waited a few minutes, not knowing if I’d have to take it to an Apple Store. Luckily, the Apple logo showed up, and within a minute, it was ready to go again.
Conclusion
It was interesting seeing the LCD screen slowly fade to black, and seeing a blue screen instead of the familiar Apple logo. Although it’s probably not a necessary to deep-cycle a battery on an electronic device like I did, you could try it, and be sure to send us photos. Direct them to tweknology@gmail.com. Thanks for reading my story about an iPod touch battery!
Update: I forgot to mention this the first time around: Extreme deep-cycling like this actually reset my time to January 1, 2000.
Ah, the App Store. I remember when you first opened your doors on July 11th, 2008 through the iPhone OS 2.0 update.
Now, as that same date draws nearer, the App Store is about to turn one. Let’s take a look at how far it’s come since the release of 2.0 on that fateful July day.
| Item | July 11, 2008 | July 11, 2009 |
|---|---|---|
| iPhone OS version | 2.0 | 3.0 |
| Number of applications | 500 | 50,000+ |
| Downloads | 0 | 1,000,000+ |
| Imitations | None | App Catalog (Palm), Android Market (Google), Windows Marketplace for Mobile (Microsoft), Blackberry App World (RIM) |
| Number of immature reviews | 0 | Too many to count |
I have to say, that’s pretty impressive. Only the Steve Jobs Reality Distortion Field could’ve done that, and it has. Happy birthday, App Store! It’s been an awesome year.
You know, I always wondered about the quality of service you get from airlines. Finally, we have proof of that.
In the spring of 2008, Sons of Maxwell were traveling to Nebraska for a one-week tour and their Taylor guitar was witnessed being thrown by United Airlines baggage handlers in Chicago. The $3500 guitar was severely damaged. For nine months the various people they communicated with put the responsibility for dealing with the damage on everyone other than themselves and finally said they would do nothing to compensate for the loss. Dave Carroll promised the last person to finally say no to compensation that he would write and produce three songs about his experience with United Airlines and make videos for each to be viewed online by anyone in the world. United: Song 1 is the first of those songs. United: Song 2 has been written and video production is underway. United: Song 3 is coming.
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For five years now, Gmail has been in beta. In fact, almost all of Google’s projects seem to be in perpetual beta. But today Google announced that Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Talk—both enterprise and consumer versions—will no longer have the beta tag attached to them! Awesome!
Now, it’s cool that Google Apps have grown up and all. It’s wonderful that these products are now super reliable. And now businesses won’t shy away from Google Apps when considering enterprise software. But really? Only after five whole years does Google decide to bring Gmail out of beta. Apparently Google has no idea what the word beta means. Or they just like breaking the rules.
Oh, and by the way, if you’ve grown kind of attached to the beta tag over the years, Google has added a setting you can toggle in Gmail Labs to turn it back on. Isn’t that sweet?
[via The Official Google Blog and other sources]
According to Dell, yes. Dell has been caught cutting corners on its website by posting above each netbook’s operating system “Microsoft Operating System” and then the name of the OS. Which becomes a problem when the OS is Linux:
You fail, Dell. Epically.
[Via Linuxologist]
Update 1: The mistake is still up.
Update 2: If Dell really was right, what would they call it? Mubuntu? Scary.
