August 31, 2007

A Yellow Submarine iPod?

Can't wait to buy a new iPod? Wait, cause Apple is about to launch a new family of iPods.

Yesterday Apple has distributed invitations to a September 5 event in San Francisco, but as usual gave no clues as to what it would be about. I got an invitation from Apple Holland to join them to the usual parallel event in London, where the Steve Jobs keynote will be streamed live on a big screen, but pity, I can't make it this time, due to other obligations.

'The product announcement is likely to include a full line-up of revamped iPods with significantly greater functionality at current price points, including the much-anticipated full-screen video iPod', Goldman Sachs said in a note, urging investors to buy Apple shares. Overnight Apple shares rose five percent.

Is is expected that Apple would launch wide screen, multi-touch iPods. It's not so hard to predict to what this will lead inevitably: a cross between an iPhone and a video Ipod, Google Earth and Maps probably pre-installed.

Of course this thing will arrive in the near future, but only Steve Jobs know when. Apple could build the bloody kit right now if they wanted to, but why hurry, when one can sell millions of different sub-versions during the next two or three years?

One more thing, Jobs shall say next Wednesday; we will be selling everything Beatles from now on; music, video's, films, DVDs, and other fab four paraphernalia.

Like a Yellow Submarine iPod maybe.

in Dutch @ DutchCowboys

 Posted: August 31, 2007, 12:28 PM | Comments (0) |

August 30, 2007

Coming soon: VWApple iCar?

According to different sources, like AP this morning, Apple and Volkswagen are discussing the possibility of building an "iCar" that would feature products by the producer of the ubiquitous iPod personal music player.

Several Newspapers and magazines - try to Google iCar on Google News - Apple CEO Steve Jobs and Volkswagen chief Martin Winterkorn have met on several occasions in Cupertino and are planning to meet for further discussions. Said Hans-Gerd Bode, spokesman for Volkswagen.

in Dutch @ DutchCowboys

Bode stated that there are 'scores of ideas', but not too many concrete plans right now.

According to market experts a compact car upgraded with Apple products would be of substantial interest to young target groups.

Apple is already working with VW and other automakers to offer an integrated in-car hookup for iPods.

For instance electronics, satellite navigation machines, cup warmers, dvd, e-mail, inbuild sound systems are an increasingly selling point for automakers. Take Ford Motor, that's soon going to present an in-car communication and entertainment system developed with Microsoft Corp (so let's hope they leave the blue screen of death option out).

This system, called Sync, would allows drivers, using either voice recognition or steering wheel controls, to listen to their digital music players and have text messages on their cell phones read aloud.

Right. My with the black fenders, that I'm enjoying since 1986, started it's life in 1969 in the Volkswagen factory in Wolfsburg as a standard white 1300. Maybe it's time to deliver Dorus at the painter once again, this time for an all white makeover, including some iPoddery.

 Posted: August 30, 2007, 10:57 AM | Comments (0) |

The Gmail video is ready

Right on top of my Gmail this morning: a red link, indicating something new: 'Watch our video'.

The Gmail asked US a promotion video for THEM, and WE did it. Ended up pretty neat, I must admit, as it was a pretty neat idea to begin with.

A simple one, as all good Google ideas are. All we had to do was to print out a PDF of the red Gmail envelope showing the 'M', and then record a ten second clip of a funny, cool, hilarious or creative way in which this envelope was passed from the left to right. That was all folks, and after we uploaded the result to YouTube, all we had to is wait if we were in. (We're not, cause we forgot about the deadline :-(

But why did we have to pass from left to right?

According to the Gmail blog: you can see this as a symbol of how email connects people from all over, making the world feel a bit smaller. Or as a metaphor for mail exchange servers, Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP), and all of the technical steps involved in getting a Gmail message around the world from one inbox to another.

The Google Team: We asked you to help us imagine how an email message travels around the world. All it took was a video camera, the Gmail M-velope ( ), and some creativity — and, wow, did you get creative!

The clips you submitted were amazing and it was hard to choose selections for the final video featured here. You can check out all of the submissions we received on YouTube, and read more about it on the Official Gmail Blog.
Enjoy!

 Posted: August 30, 2007, 09:51 AM | Comments (0) |

August 29, 2007

How To Blow Up Flappentappers?

I'm a bit reluctant to try it myself, cause there's a fat chance, even in The Netherlands, that a Swat team will burst trough my front door within the next ten minutes after Googling: 'How to Blow Up ATM Machines'. Since you've arrived here: learn another beautiful Dutch word, this one for ATM: flappentapper. Slang, made up from slang: flap is slang for paper money, tapper is like in a beer tap.

in Dutch @ DutchCowboys

Anyway' interesting court case, started today in Sydney's Central Local Court. In Australia, as in America, defendants, while innocent until proven guilty, are mentioned with their full names in the media. So we learn that three of the four defendants (Bassil, Taouk and Nassour) are probably of some kind of Arabic origin, which could mean some twenty countries.

While we in The Netherlands enjoy our problems with some of so called second and third generation Maroccans, Down Under the problems are more diverse. For instance Servian youngsters like a good fight with Croatians, and every year around Xmas and New Year there are fighting festivities on the less popular beaches on the south side of Sydney. Large groups of young True Blue Aussies are seeking confrontation with what they call the Bloody Arabs. (If the Arabs don't come young ultra right Australia likes to beat up some Vietnamese or whatever looks 'different'.

Anyway, the court case is interesting for us Dutch Cowboys now that ATM boys are arrested before they blew the flappentappers to smithereens. They landed behind bars after the Australian Feds found out they'd ordered 23 litres of chemicals from the Northern Territory this month. According to Australian Federal Police forensics experts the chemicals could have been used to make up to 40 kilograms of high-powered explosive.

What intrigues me is how the Feds found this out, now that the defendants admitted they have been Googling on how to get the job done. Don't try to Google 'How To Blow Up Flappentappers', but feel free to try 'How to Blow Up ATM Machines'.

Don't mail me the results, because we both might end up in court. It might as well be the case that one or more of those websites the Australian defendants landed on, are honeypots. Where the Feds (American, Australian, French, Dutch, whatever) are posting at the other side of the street, facilitated by Google or American law.

Am I being paranoid? Maybe. But: I'm pretty sure that even in Holland a red light starts flashing, a bell will be ringing, the moment I start buying diesel, sugar and fertilizer in large quantities.

Maybe better too, cause he who has done nothing wrong, has nothing to fear?

 Posted: August 29, 2007, 09:58 AM | Comments (0) |

August 28, 2007

Journalism in 1940

Educational film from the Prelinger Archives, made in 1940, as an educational film for high school students.

I like this phrase et the end of the film: 'There's no better way to get this experienthan on a small town newspaper'.

And: 'If you don't like to write, you won't be happy in journalism'.

 Posted: August 28, 2007, 10:55 AM | Comments (0) |

August 27, 2007

In The Forbidden City where iPods are made

Fascinating article in The Wall Street Journal: Where iPods are made. I don't know if any of the Dutch newspapers are affiliated one way or another to the WSJ (maybe Het Financieel Dagblad?) because I'd like to see the story translated for the Dutch audience.

Fat chance that any other reporter or press agency will get a chance to interview the president of Hon Hai Precision Industry Co, as ik took The Wall Street Journal five years (!) of requests before Jason Dean was finally allowed to interview Terry Gou for three hours.

In short: Hon Hai has a workforce of 270.000, produces the iPhone, but also HP's computers, Motorola mobile phones, and Nintendo Wii video consoles. The revenue has grown more than 50% a year for the past decade, to over $40 billion last year.

Wall Street Journal: The Forbidden City of Terry Gou

 Posted: August 27, 2007, 08:46 AM | Comments (0) |

August 26, 2007

I just love steampunk

I just love steampunk. No, it's not music, though it could be that there's a new subculture emerging - a mix of punk, rock, pop, jazz, Goth and classic music - that calls itself steampunk.

While I haven't discovered that genre, the shortest definition of steampunk I could find is 'making modern artifacts in a Victorian coat'. There's no entry for steampunk in my 2004 Cambridge Advanced Learners Dictionary, but of course Wikipidea has a lot about it.

According to Wikipedia steampunk is a sub genre of fantasy and speculative fiction which came into prominence in the 1980s and early 1990s. The term denotes works set in an era or world where steam power is still widely used - usually the 19th century, and often set in Victorian era England - but with prominent elements of either science fiction or fantasy, such as fictional technological inventions like those found in the works of H. G. Wells, or real technological developments like the computer occurring at an earlier date.

Other examples of steampunk contain alternate history - style presentations of 'the path not taken' of such technology as dirigibles or analog computers; these frequently are presented in an idealized light, or a presumption of functionality. It is often associated with cyberpunk and shares a similar fanbase and theme of rebellion, but developed as a separate movement (though both have considerable influence on each other). Apart from time period and level of technological development, the main difference between cyberpunk andsteampunk is that steampunk settings tend to be less obviously dystopian.

For my visitors and readers, especially those on DutchCowboys and MobileCowboys it starts to become interesting when we start looking at steampunk as an object style.

in Dutch @ DutchCowboys

While the Dutch and Mobile Cowboys might find the punking with bikes and bicycles, boats, trains, planes, cars, weapons, fridges or ovens just as interesting (or maybe not at all) as I do, all they have to do is a bit of Googling on steampunk phones or steampunk computers and - ah! - here we go!

As I'm going to buy a new iMac very soon, it feels like a tempting idea not to eBay my current G5 iMac, but to dress her in coat of copper and bronze, riveted to the plastic, and to take apartor electrify a keyboard of one of my old Underwood typewriters. With any iMac - old or new - this could be a piece of cake: a copper panel as big as the front, cutting a window in it the size of the screen, a bit of glue or two strips of double sides adhesive tape and the first mod is there.

Check out the embedded Bright Cove Video on top of this article and see what wonderful things Richard Nagy from New Jersey makes. What a fantastic hobby, but I'm afraid it would take away way too much time from other hobbies, not to mention the job. There are however steampunkers who are making a living steampunking, but those guys and girls are very, very good. Like Richard Nagy.

 Posted: August 26, 2007, 10:33 AM | Comments (0) |

August 25, 2007

The iPhone definitely unlocked

His fame will survive much more than fifteen minutes since George Hotz from Glen Rock, New Jersey, developed a way to make the iPhone, the hottest gadget of the year, available to pretty much anybody, anywhere.

It took him the whole summer, though I don't know what summer was like over there, as we had some rain, and rain, and, well, lots of rain.

According to al the news flashes racing over the internet last night (night in Europe), the hack of the 17-year old makes it possible that a whole new niche industry will spring up, buying iPhones, to unlock and sell them to people who hate AT&T for one reason or another, to people over here in Europe, or anywhere else.

An reporter form AP yesterday verified that an iPhone George Hotz brought to the AP's headquarters was unlocked. George put the reporter's T-Mobile SIM card, in the iPhone, which then then connected to T-Mobile's network and placed calls using the reporter's account.

George Hotz on Blogger: Finding Jtag on the iPhone

George Hotz on Wikipedia

in Dutch at @ DutchCowboys

 Posted: August 25, 2007, 11:50 AM | Comments (0) |

August 06, 2007

The Fake Steve Jobs Is Busted

For about a year and a half I've been enjoying the work of an anonymous blogger who was acting as Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO, one of the world’s most famous businessmen, and certainly on of the worlds best salesman.

On 'the Secret Diary of Steve Jobs', Jobs came out like a difficult and egoistical leader. 'Fake Steve',” attracted also many famous readers, the real Mr. Jobs as well as Bill Gates acknowledged reading the blog, though the latter probably enjoyed it more than the main subject of the blog.

Turned out the writer wasn't living in the valley, nor is he an Apple employee, but a tech writer and editor living and working on the East Coast; Daniel Lyons, from Forbes Magazine.

Mr. Lyons was pulled out of his hidden closet last weekend by the New York Times' Brad Stone.

Check out the report at the NYT website.

What I really like is the comment of his boss, Richard Karlgaard, who said he had a good laugh and holds no grudges; 'I think it is the most brilliant caricature of an important part of American culture that I’ve seen. We’re really proud that he’s one of ours.'

Right! (Do ya read, up there?)

The comment of Mr. Jobs are less funny. By now we all know that one of the worlds best sellers has an en ego that's so big it doesn't fit in his fattest Pro Mac.

A pity, bit stupid also, because with just al little bit of wit, a small piece of self-referential humor, Steve Jobs could have gained a lot of sympathy, courtesy of Steve Fake Jobs.

in Dutch at @ DutchCowboys

 Posted: August 06, 2007, 10:49 AM | Comments (0) |

August 04, 2007

Windows on my Mac?

No matter what Walt Mossberg does, shows or tells, I'll never ever!

 Posted: August 04, 2007, 01:46 PM | Comments (0) |