The battle against oligarchic cable companies continues on several fronts, with more people joining the ranks of the cable cutters daily. Apple’s offering to the fray is the Apple TV, where you can rent movies on demand and stream content from a variety of providers. And today you can get yourself the latest generation model for $78, after a $22 rebate. “Apple TV has built-in HDMI, 802.11n Wi-Fi, Ethernet, built-in IR receiver, Optical Audio and Micro-USB. ”
Arcade machines were for a long time the only way that you could get any gaming done. Home consoles wouldn’t conquer the living room properly until the mid 80′s and for a good period from the mid 70′s onwards, Atari was pioneering the genre. Most of you don’t need the brief introduction to the company, but we’ve come across way too many teens lately who’ve shockingly never heard the name. Sadly, they won’t be able to appreciate the beauty in this docking station for the iPad, a collaboration between Discovery Bay Games and Atari. Just dock your generation 1 or 2 iPad and instantly get access to 99 games, among them classics like the original Pong, or Asteroids. Sadly, the games are not included in the $60 price. A 25 game pack is $1, while $15 gets you the whole library.
While the company overshot their late October target launch date, the important thing is that iTunes Match is now up and running. If you’ve not been keeping track, this service gives you access to your music library in the cloud. Now if your entire library consists of songs you’ve bought on iTunes, then you have no use for iTunes Match, you can simply use iTunes in the Cloud for free. If that’s not the case… if, say, you got your collection by ripping dozens of physical CDs, then for a $25 yearly fee, iTunes will scan your hard drive, identify everything you own and simply enable your access to matching songs on iCloud. So you don’t have to actually upload a truckload of songs, the software simply identifies the ones you have and lets you listen to a 256kbps version on demand, streamed to or stored in up to 10 devices. If no match is made, only then is the song uploaded to iCloud.
There’s a limit of up to 25,000 non-iTunes purchased songs, and while the songs you decide to download from the cloud will be DRM-free, they’ll be in AAC format.
Refreshing lines and advancing technology means falling prices, even on normally “premium” items such as Apple’s MacBook Pro. This is an early 2011 model, with a 2.3GHz Core i5 processor which normally would sell for $1,199 but hits the sub-$1k point today, at $999. “Features Thunderbolt port, Gigabit Ethernet, FaceTime HD camera, SDXC card slot, Aluminum unibody and more.”
As we increasingly untether our computing tasks from the desktop we start to rely more and more on battery power, and that in turn means chargers and cable spaghetti hell. Any solution that helps tidy things up even a bit is always welcome. The PlugBug elegantly attaches to your MacBook charger and introduces an additional USB outlet; you can then charge both the MacBook and any iDevice simultaneously. It’s rated at 10W which means your iPhone or iPad will charge much faster than if it’s charging from the MacBook USB port. Plus, at $35, it sure beats using a $2,400 laptop to juice back up.
Yeah, so the iPhone 4S came out a while ago and aside from a faster processor, everyone was pointing to Siri as being the only real improvement over the iPhone 4. Of course, Siri is software and it didn’t take long until hackers figured out how to port Siri over to the previous generation device. That early port was rather useless since the real processing and the brains behind Siri take place on Apple’s servers; these servers only talked to Siri requests coming from an iPhone 4S and nothing else. But now there’s a new port out that has succeeded in getting Apple’s servers talking to other devices. So yeah, Siri obviously works outside of the 4S.
That’s nice to know. Except we can’t get our hands on this yet since whoever developed this has decided not to release the port. It was more of a proof of concept.
Fear not Internauts, this is the interconnected tubes and it’s only a matter of time until others walk in these footprints and take away the most and only compelling reason to upgrade from an iPhone 4.
There are now two “security flaws” with iDevices. The quotation marks are there because one is real, the other isn’t. First about the one that isn’t real. You can make calendar appointments, email and text through Siri on an iPhone 4S even when it’s locked. This is not a security flaw, it’s a feature. You don’t like that feature, you can turn it off through the settings. The entire point of Siri is to not have to access your phone while it’s locked! Anyway, now onto the real security flaw and this one is on the iPad 2. Uncovered by 9to5Mac.com, the flaw is explained in the video above. If you can’t access it for some reason, here’s how it works.
When on the lock screen press the standby button until you see the red slider for powering off the device. At that point, close the Smart Cover and take it off again. Press cancel… and you’re in! Now you don’t have complete access to the iPad 2, only the last screen before going on standby. If that happens to be the main menu, you can scroll applications but you can’t launch them. The problem is if you were in the middle of an email, or browsing something private, then that will show. This is a big issue.
Of course the word will eventually spread and the gap closed in a software update, but until then here’s a little fix. Go to Settings in the General tab and disable Smart Cover Unlocking. That should do it until a fix is out.
When we say dangerous, we mean for your iPad 2 of course. Not for the kids or anything, but quite frankly, our iPad 2 being in danger seems almost as unnerving. See, the Crayola Trace and Draw is a toy that would encourage your kids to play with the Jesus tablet. Encourage them, as opposed to instilling mortal fear of ever getting close to it lest they break it. It’s a kid-resistant polycarbonate shell (we’re certain it’ll resist the inevitable fall down a flight of stairs… right?), a peel-off plastic screen and an app. Slide in some tracing paper and the app will show your little’un things they can trace, or color or whatever it is kids do with colored pencils. There’s storage space in the shell for their crayons. And you’ll be getting plenty of “art” which you can proudly display around the house and even at work.
An extra benefit of the $40 toy is that it’ll help chip away whatever is left of your manhood with the mighty cleaver of domestication.
Griffin’s Faces Cases are made from silicon and let you customize the look of your iPod touch on a daily basis. They come with three sets of mouths and six different eyes so you can easily swap them out for a total of… well let’s see now. How many configurations does that make? 6 choices for the left eye, say, multiplied by 5 remaining choices for the right. That’s 30. Multiply that by 2, since there are two eyes, so we’re at 60. Finally multiply that by the 3 mouths and you’ve got a total of 180 different configurations.
Of course this whole calculation was unnecessary, but there really isn’t a whole lot to say on this product. It’s quirky and it’s $25.
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