I am quite busy at the moment, too much coursework to do; I will be back in a few days.
Archive for October, 2007
Jailbreak iPod Touch
I bought my iPod touch today; I tested one in the shop first and loved it, bought it, got home and synced it. I probably can’t tell you anything more than you do already, all I can say is that I am very happy with my purchase, and it is worth £270. The only con I can think of is the keyboard, I hit the wrong key very regularly, I need to take my time to not make any mistakes. Other than that I am very happy customer and I love everything about it.
Bust, I was very scared earlier today, silly me I tried to jailbreak my iPod touch at around 00:00, I was tired and I did something wrong, this caused iTunes to think that the iPod had 600mb of storage, then 5gb, and what worried me the most was the fact I could not restore. I continued the process as best I could, and thankfully I could restore and it showed the full storage how it should be.
Right now I am re-syncing, which is going to take a long time, but I am very happy that I have not broken my iPod in my first day of having it.
Overall, it is a very nice piece of kit, keyboard is too small, and I will certainly not be jail breaking it any time soon.
16gb
Apart from the wide, multi-touch screen and everything you have read about, a great thing about the iPod touch is that it is available in a 16gb model.
This may not sound like a big thing to you, but it is for me. There has always been a large gap between flash-memory and hardrive media players, not long ago the storage gap was 26gb (from 4 to 30). This was a problem for many people because they needed to buy a player that was either too big or too small for their music collection.
I have always had a small music collection, when I bought my first player it was a 4gb iPod nano to accommodate my 2gb music collection, by the time the next generation of nanos were released I had nearly filled first generation model so I bought an 8gb nano. Luckily the advances in storage have been in time with the growth of my music, but if they had not been then I would have had to buy a much larger player only to fir 5gb of music, wasting 25gb and a lot of pocket space.
Finally the bridge has been made and there are 16gb flash-memory players, the iPod touch, Creative Zen and Creative Zen V Plus are the only ones I have come across, and it is about time they have arived. The next player I was going to buy would have probably been a 30gb Creative Vision W, but the iPod touch has arrived so I get the benefits of flash-memory, and a much better play.
So today I will be a very happy customer with a new iPod touch to play with, my films are converted, my music updates and I am ready to go.
DVD to iPod
I am quite sick of having problems ripping DVDs. All this copy protection should be done away with, I have bought the DVD and I want to watch it on my iPod, I don’t see why I can’t do this quite easily.
I am buying my iPod touch tomorrow and I want some videos ready to sync to it using my laptop, I should be able to put a DVD in the drive and click to rip it into mpeg 4, but this is not the case. I am experimenting at the moment trying to figure out how it will be possible, at the moment I am ripping my DVD using DVDFab Decrypter, hopefully into a .iso file, then burning it to a blank DVD, then ripping it into mpeg 4 using Handbrake.
There is software out there which will do it all in one step, but they cost money. How stubborn can apple be to only allow their players to play mpeg 4? I have a few AVI films I would like on my iPod, but I have found a free video converter that will convert them, but all this converting and burning seems too much hassle when it could be done with one click.
I am thinking of maybe buying DVDFab Decrypter Platinum to just get rid of all my woes, but I should not have to pay any more money than what I paid for the DVD, evil money grabbing people.
Optimus Maximus Keyboard
This keyboard is just like any other keyboard, except each key is its own OLED display. This means that the pictures on the keys are not set in stone, so different layouts or languages can be displayed. As well as different layouts and languages the keys can be set for shortcuts to programmes or different functions. Some examples are shown on the website http://www.artlebedev.com/everything/optimus/demo/ this site shows different language layouts, the dvorak layout, a Half-Life layout and a Photoshop layout. The demo gives a good idea of the possibilities that are opened by this keyboard.
|
width |
537 mm |
|
depth |
173 mm |
|
height |
38 mm |
|
key |
20.2×20.2 mm |
The rear of the keyboard houses 2 usb ports, an sd card slot (for keyboard layouts), a K-Lock slot, usb output and dc input.
The only problem is its approximate price, 1564.37$ (£763.112). £763 is far too much for a home user to pay for a keyboard, but there may be a space for this kind of product in industry, certainly in the future we should see cheaper products of this ilk, but not any time soon
Multi-touch
The idea of multi-touch is that instead of a touch screen only being able to understand one touch, it can understand as many as it wants. Most people now will have come across touch screens more than once, especially with the new self service machines in Tesco. The people, who are more familiar with touch screens and use them every day, will have probably at one point tried to see if you could touch two places at once, and found that it does not work.
Companies have been experimenting with multi-touch for some time now, starting in the 80’s it was in its early stages, about a year ago I saw a video on the internet with a person demonstrating the possibilities with a multi touch screen and more recently I saw a demonstration of the iPhone and noticed straight away that multi-touch had finally arrived.
The main example of multi-touch technology today is seen in apple iPhones and iPod touches, this technology allows users to scroll through music with a flick of a finger, and the ‘pinch’ allows user to zoom in and out of web pages, pictures and maps.
Multi-touch also means multi-user, on a larger scale than the iPhone or iPod touch many people could use the same device at the same time. This has been something nearly impossible with regular devices and computers. An example of the future possibilities of multi-touch can be seen in the “Microsoft Surface”.
Microsoft Surface is a product that will soon be seen in restaurants, phone shops and hotels. To look at you would think it was a coffee table but really it is a powerful computer with a large multi-touch screen. To see a demonstration of this product is like watching those adverts showing what everybody would love, when I saw an advert showing the possibilities I was sure that nothing like it could exist today, but when I watched the demonstration I was pleasantly surprised. Really to get the full idea you have to watch an online demonstration of it so I will not talk about it too much. The main thing behind it is being able to recognise objects placed on the screen, be it a credit card you can pay with or an mp3 player it can sync with.
It is all very promising stuff, hopefully soon we will be seeing multi-touch tablets on our desks and Microsoft Surfaces in our living rooms, and of course filing our pockets with iPhones or iPod touches.
Being John Malkovich
Written by Charlie Kaufman, directed by Spike Jonze and staring John Malkovich as himself.
This film is the best I have seen in a long while, it was shown on channel 4 yesterday and having heard good reviews I decided to watch it. It starts well, keeps well and ends well. It is quite strange throughout and you get the feeling of strange in the first few minutes when Craig Schwartz (the person I see as the main character) attends a job interview on floor 7 and a half, this floor is really just a full floor split in half by a low ceiling.
Craig finds a very small door in his office, behind the door is a long tunnel leading to the mind of John Malkovich, he experiences 15 minutes of John life then is dumped at the side of a road. The whole film forms itself around this portal, many “but what if?”s the viewer may think of are answered during the film and there are no gaps are left in the viewers understanding of the portal.
Overall it is a very good film which I plan to buy some time soon, the plot is very well thought out and it is certainly a must watch.
Limb Regeneration
Many animals are able to regenerate in some way or other.
One of the most noticeable examples of regeneration can be seen in salamanders. Whole, fully functioning, limbs can be recreated if needed. As soon as a limb is severed the regeneration starts, the wound heals and then a growth of de-categorised cells forms. These de-categorised cells are much like human stem cells as they can become any type of cell they need to be. Over the next few days or weeks the limb grows back using the de-categorised cells; the limb is fully functional with nerves and blood vessels, an exact copy of the original limb.
Some regeneration is seen in mammals with the re-growth of antlers, finger tips and ear holes. Human children up to the age of ten have been known to grow new finger tips if needed as long as the wound is not covered and human livers can fully regenerate as long as they have 25% of the original tissue.
The idea of regeneration is often used in fiction, with comic book heroes such as Super Man, The hulk and Spiderman all able to regenerate their wounds.
It is a very interesting idea that animals can re-grow limbs, and that humans can re-grow finger tips, if only we could use these ideas to re grow human limbs and organs; I suppose if we did more stem cell research we might actually get somewhere, who knows.
In Rainbows
In Rainbows is the new album by Radiohead. Overall it is a fairly average album, it will probably be a big hit with big fans, but I have not heard much of their music so I can’t compare it to much else.
As a person who just enjoys music I say that there are two good songs, on the album (the download version), but I cannot make a real opinion on it without hearing the second CD in the full £40 pack.
My friend is a big fan of Radiohead so I think I will be borrowing some CD’s from him, including the second CD of In Rainbows.
A disappointing factor of the download is that they have not even released the album art yet, it seems a bit silly to release an album without the album art. People might as well just illegally download the album and get the same quality of product.
So yes, the album is okay, but only okay.
Time
What is the earliest time for it to be acceptable to get into bed? When is the latest you should get out of bed? Is there time where if you wake up you should give up on the day?
I think that the earliest time to get into bed is around 20:00, but people think differently, Peter complained when I said I went to bed at eight o’clock, but other people didn’t.
The latest I have got out of bed was about 03:00 and my regular on weekends is around 13:00. I think that 03:00 is a bit too late and the line should be around 02:00. What is a lie is in classed as anyway? I think maybe 2 hours more sleep than you normally get would be classed as a lie in, but of course not a very good one.
Once I woke up at about 11:30 so I just gave up on the day because I was already 2 and a half hours late for school, so there wouldn’t have been much point. It was a bit far away from the give up line, but I am lazy. Again Peter complained, but a few months later he didn’t come in because he woke up at 12:00, which is closer to the give up line, but he still deigned that there was a time when you should give up, but he is stubborn.
Many people will have many different sleeping patterns, mine is very lazy, Peter’s is much less lazy because he hate time wasted. Time is seen very differently to other people, everything is relative I suppose.
