Thursday Tattling

3G iPhone By Mid-Year
Apple has signed a deal to release a 3G version of the iPhone and we can expect to see it by mid-year, probably July or August of this year. Steve Jobs has been traveling three times as much this last quarter in his company jet and Apple's R&D department spending has increased by 34% - evidence of additional iPhone development and Steve's ongoing involvement in signing new deals with wireless carriers to expand the iPhone market. The chips for the 3G iPhone will be supplied by German chipmaker Infineon Technologies AG. You can also expect to see the iPhone being offered via O2 in Ireland on March 14th but without visual voicemail.

Jobs' Heir-Apparent Tim Cook Calms Investors
Apple's shareholders admit to being ill at ease with the thought of losing Steve but Tim Cook stepped forward yesterday and spoke before an assembly at Goldman Sachs Investment Symposium and impressed the hell out of everyone there. So much so that Apple's stock rose 4% from the appearance. Shareholders can be assured that when Steve steps down and Tim Cook steps up that Apple is in very capable hands.

Time Capsule Shipping Today
If you use a wireless network at home (Wi-Fi) and have held off buying an external backup drive for your Mac, be it the MacBook, MacBook Air, iMac or MacPro, you now have the ability to avoid those tethering lines and send all your backups to a one terabyte backup drive over Wi-Fi by using Apple's new Time Capsule. Buyers who pre-ordered are reporting the arrival of the first shipment of the coveted product. $499 for the 1TV version and $299 for the 500Meg version.

SDK Beta Arrives March 6
The final SDK will be released in June at Apple's Worldwide Development Conference 2008 in San Francisco. Apple will meet the stated goal of 10 million iPhone sales by the close of 2008. That is truly amazing.

Thursday Triumph

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New 3.2GHz Mac Pro Arrives Early
The folks at Apple surprised me today with the delivery of my new 3.2GHz MacPro. It was originally scheduled for delivery by March 3rd. Identical to the previous 3.0GHz machine except for the graphics card and the Quad Core CPU it was far easier to setup then imaginable.

I swapped out all four 1 terabyte drives and replaced them into the new machine. I also had to add six gig of additional 1G paired RAM modules and that was a snap to do. Instead of migrating everything over using firewire I surmised the hard drives were compatible and interchangeable, I would replace the new hard drive with the previous boot drives and add the other three 1TB hard drives into their respective slots. Would it work? Answer: Yes it did work within seconds of pushing that power button.

I had to do two things: re-connect my wireless Mighty Mouse and Mini-keyboard and restart my broadband internet connection.

And there you have it. A complete hardware upgrade from last year's MacPro Dual Core model to this year's MacPro Quad Core model. The new NVIDIA graphics card worked with no hesitation, is brilliant in color display and with 512 video memory it is as instant as any HD television, if not better. I couldn't be more pleased.

I shall now place last year's MacPro 3.0GHz on eBay at a very reasonable starting bid, along with a few other items, and let the world bid away.

Monday Munch

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New 3.2GHz Mac Pro On The Way!
Delivery on a new Mac Pro is expected by March 3rd. Would be surprised if it took that long to arrive because Apple is always early with their deliveries. Why a new Mac Pro? Want to move up to the 8Core Intel Xeon (currently using the Dual Core 3.0 Mac Pro). Here are the specs:

AirPort Extreme card (Wi-Fi)
Two 16x SuperDrives
Two 3.2GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon (8-core)
Apple Mighty Mouse
Apple Keyboard (English) + Mac OS X
8GB (8 x 1GB)
4TB 7200-rpm Serial ATA 3Gb/s
Accessory kit
NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT 512MB (Two dual-link DVI)

The two biggest changes are the 8Gig of RAM in 1Gig modules. The Mac Pro has eight RAM slots and for better throughput I'll fill all the slots with 1Gig of RAM. NVIDIA GeForce 8800 graphics card - the only graphics card now offered by Apple with 512Meg of video RAM. I'll need that much to support two 30" monitors.

Add to the above a 2TB LaCie external hard drive, a LaCie optical drive and the two 30" Apple HD Displays.

What I love about buying new Apple machines? The ability to firewire each machine and migrate everything from the old machine over to the new machine. So easy.

Friday Forward

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Busy Busy Busy!

Monday Moans

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Apple Moving Into Games
It appears Apple is moving into the computer game business with several new patent applications for hand-held and computer games as well as job opportunities now being advertised by Apple for Game Producer/Designers. The job description for the latter reads as
follows: "Video Game Design and Production. Successful candidate possesses a proven track-record of producing and designing great video games. This is a hands-on game-development position, spanning the entire game development cycle. The position offers the opportunity of owning the game design process and the responsibility of bringing those designs to successful fruition in the marketplace."

Apple To Drop Price of New iPhone/iTouch
During the upcoming special event to release the SDK (Software Developer's Kit) for the iPhone, Apple will announce a $100 price cut in the iPhone and the iTouch. The 16G iPhone now sells for $499 - $100 more than the 8G iPhone. Apple will discontinue the sale of the 8G iPhone just as they did with the 4G iPhone (making them classics today) and sell the 16G iPhone and the 32G iTouch for just $399. Thank you Apple.

Saturday Summons

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47 New Apple Patent Applications
Looks like Apple will be offering a slew of new products. On Friday they filed for 47 patents on a variety of items including new Apple TV functions including the use of a more versatile remote control, support for iChat, potential support for integrating broadcast TV programming into the Front row interface and support for widgets. Other patents include new tools for use inside an audio editor, a scrollbar enhancement for browsing data and methods for distributing files across networks to multiple clients. A personalised search and filtering system, card payment systems, remote control instruments, and image rendering applications.

Upgrade Your iPhone?
Yes, I did upgrade my iPhone to the 16Gig last Monday and sold my old iPhone on eBay yesterday (Friday). Upgrading was easy enough. Plugged it in to iTunes and went through the signup process. AT&T found my account and transferred everything over and within twenty minutes all my previous settings, items, contacts, etc., were transferred over to the new iPhone. And it works great!

Why move up? Because the SDK will be released on Feburary 26th and we're going to see a rash of new iPhone applications. Hopefully video recording, voice dialing, cut/paste, ToDo lists and games galore. You will need additional hard disk space for all that's coming!

Wanna Try The New Safari?
It is blazing fast and runs circles around the current Safari browser. Give it a shot: http://nightly.webkit.org/files/trunk/mac/WebKit-SVN-r30090.dmg

PirateBay Under Fire
If you are a P2Per then you probably know that the largest P2P Torrent site on the 'Net is under fire - but determined to stay afloat despite the heavy-handedness of the music and movie industries. To keep you abreast of the lastest PirateBay news they have setup up a blog located here: http://courtblog.thepiratebay.org/

This is one of the most recent entries: "As many of you already know. We are heading for a trial this spring. It’s the result of the raid against us in 2006 when the cops seized 200 servers(15 belonged to us) at our ISP. The investigation took 20 months (cops + servers with linux and “fulkod” is a bad combination). This blog is where we will write about everything surrounding the trial. We expect it to last for years, since it’s ruling will be appealed either by us or by the Mpaa/Ifpi. During this time, The Pirate Bay will continue as if nothing's happened."

I hope you'll help support the crew of the PirateBay and PirateBay itself to keep it up and running.

Thursday Tweeb

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Quicktime Update
QuickTime 7.4.1 addresses security issues and improves compatibility with third-party applications. This release is recommended for all QuickTime 7 users and can be obtained by hitting your Mac software update button.

For detailed information on the security content of this update, please visit this website: http://www.info.apple.com/kbnum/n61798.

Perian v1.1
And ... you'll want the new Perian plug-in for QuickTime that adds the ability to play many more media formats such as:

• Divx, XviD, FLV, AVI
• MS-MPEG4 v1, MS-MPEG4 v2, MS-MPEG4 v3, DivX 3.11 alpha, 3ivX, Sorenson H.263, Flash Screen Video, Truemotion VP6
• These formats when they are inside an AVI:
  h.264, mpeg4, AAC, AC3 Audio, and VBR MP3

It is free, of course. Download by clicking here.

Wednesday Wins

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PoKit and iPhoto updates

The Prokit update improves reliability for Apple's professional appllications and is recommended for all uses of Final Cut Studio, Final Cut Express, Aperture, Logic Studio and Logic Expess.

iPhoto - addresses issues when publishing photos to a .Mac web gallery, improves overall stability and fixes a number of other minor issues. For more information on the security content of this update, please visit this website: http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=61798

Monday Marvel

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Vote Hillary Clinton for President!
There is really only one candidate who posses the experience, skills and ability to lead us for the next four to eight years and that's Hillary Clinton. Those believing Barack Hussein Obama will bring about change are either too young to realize how silly such a promise is or too bullheaded to accept the fact that women have finally come into their own and deserve a shot at running this country.

I've never steered you wrong and I won't do it here. When it comes to electing a new President, I strongly urge my readers and followers to vote for Hillary Clinton in tomorrow's Super Tuesday primaries across this nation. Like every one else I want to see the United States of America respected again - and I certainly don't want our country to be confused with the U.S. of Africa!

Sunday Super

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.Mac Mail Tips
Apple offers a library of Mail addon downloads for their exceptional Mail program here. Things like "MiniMail", MailPlane, Message Filer, Spam Sieve, MaxBulk Mailer and many many more. The following free offering will improve and enchance your Mail program:

This free program is called "Letterbox" and it allows you to expand the default vertical column presentation of Mail into three shorizontal colums. This improves the readability of long lists of messages. Although the three column format may be a bit tight on MacBook screens, it is sensational on 20" and above iMacs and other wide screen displays. Letterbox is free and you can download it by clicking here.

Saturday Scents

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Friday Funnies

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Mac Owners Are Very Handsome!
Mindset Media came out in Advertising Age's Jan 28th issue with a study of the typical Mac owner. I'll only list the good stuff from a study by Mindset of 7,500 Nielsen online consumers. They found the following characteristics typical of Mac owners:

* They are more assured of their superiority
* Less modest
* More open
* More likely to buy organic
* Drink Starbucks or coffehouse coffee every day
* Drive a hybrid
* May be seen as self-centered, arrogant or conceited by others
* They listen to way more music than PC owners. Half of Mac owners pay for music...
* Very handsome (ok, I threw that one in....)

So what did the study show about OS/2 users?
Nothing. They couldn't find any.

Keeping Your MacBook Awake!
Have I mentioned this? If you want to connect your MacBook to an external screen, play music, download files - all with the lid closed then you should download and install InsomniaX. It prevents your MacBook from falling asleep when the lid is shut. Wake up damn you, wake up!!!

There Is A Holdup On 10.5.2
Apple dropped another seed of 10.5.2 this week to developers as 9C27. The release denotes no changes and some believe Apple is just teasing us. Now the anticipated release date is by next Friday (Februry 8).

Leopard Secret: Green Screen Recording
Leopard has an amazing new feature that is relatively unknown. You can add an animated video to Photo Booth and use it as a backdrop, hit the record button, and record yourself riding "live" in a roller coaster, swimming in the deep ocean, visiting the Eiffle Tower, flying through the clouds and much more. This is so cool! Try it! Open Photo Booth and down in the right hand corner you can flip through the various backdrops. Once you get to the roller coaster scene, select it and you'll be asked to step away from the camera for a second. When the roller coaster scene begins to roll you can step back into the picture and you'll be superimposed just as though you were riding in a coaster car over the tracks! Hit the movie record button and you can sing, yell, talk to your viewer and have fun making a video. Click the camera button again and you can stop the action. The movie is saved and drops down in the snap shot bin. Drag it to the desktop, click on it and you have a movie of yourself riding a roller coaster!

This feature is hyped for iChat as a way to cover up your background using a backdrop but it is also great for making a personal animated movie!