Do you believe in Rock n’ Roll…

It’s a well known fact that teenagers have always wanted to learn how to play an instrument, drums, guitar or bass. They are doing that for many different reasons. While some really want to master their instruments and play like their idol musicians, others just want to be popular or impress girls. Girls always liked guys who could play say guitar. Nowadays, we have video games of sorts that simulate guitar or drums playing and it’s quite realistic. Video games such as “Guitar Hero” and “Rock Band” are ultimate hits on most of the gaming consoles and it’s not only for teenagers. People at Karaoke bars are enjoying it, and also there are competitions held around the world.

Teenagers today are mastering virtual guitars and drums, collect points and publish their scores online for other people to see. No more serenades and playing under the open starry sky. The romance is now in cyberspace. The virtual world of playing instruments and socializing on Facebook,Bebo and Myspace are certainly killing romance the way we know it. Rock on baby!

iPod touch in brief

I got my 16GB iPod touch last Thursday as I already reported in my previous post. When I first opened it, I was quite surprised to see that the iPod was already jailbroken straight from the box! The box was sealed and it was a brand new although it was not bought directly from Apple. It came with 1.1.4 firmware but I did not have apple apps on it (mail,weather and google maps). I only had YouTube and a few third-party apps on it. People recommend that I restore my iPod and jailbreak it again and I did so. 

After that, I had all apple apps and a third-party one as well. I had to manually install chat client from sources. Here is a good tip, if you miss a chat client on your ipod touch, just install Mobile Chat client from sources by navigating to: “http://twenty08.com/installer”. This will add a new category “Twenty08” in installer app. from where you can install mobile chat on your iPod touch. I want to thank my friend Peter and people from Mac Format magazine forum who provided very helpful suggestions and tips. I am sure I will be writing more about iPod touch tips and tricks, and I am also preparing a video presentation of some cool hacks I discovered.  

iPod touch 16GB [photo]

Love my iPod touch. The weird thing is that it has already been jailbroken out of the box.

Nabaztag now officially sucks

Not so long ago this little guy was the most popular geek toy. The intelligent wi-fi rabbit that can be programmed using very basic API to read the news, e-mail messages, stream mp3 music, online radio and tell the weather, turned out to be a waste of money. Here is the deal. Violet company that makes nabaztag bunnies had a false flash demonstration on their website. If you visited nabaztag.com around June last year (or earlier), you would see the bunny happily streaming Internet radio, reading e-mails and sending messages to other nabaztag owners by voice. Also, one could see nabazatag reading children books, recognizing objects and much more cool stuff all thanks to RFID support which never became available. I got my bunny (led by on-site demo) last year (see earlier posts for details).

At the time people at Violet were promising RFID support. The bunny worked quite well on my Mac and I was happily toying around with it. There were some glitches with the bunny but nothing serious. Problems arrived in December last year when Violet announced that they are changing platform and switching to Jabber. That change should make the bunny work and respond faster. That hasn’t happened!

Users had to wait for months for Violet to officially roll out Jabber platform and when they finally did, it turns to be a total disaster. Truth is that Nabaztag is now quicker but it does not work as it used to anymore. The bloody thing now won’t go to sleep or wake up at scheduled times, read rss feeds regularly and sometimes even refuses to connect at all. I’d strongly advise anyone who is thinking of buying nabaztag now, to stay away from it. Not to mention that RFID support is still unavailable.

Youtube: Sex,lies and videotapes

It has been months now since youtube announced that they will increase video bit rate but that hasn’t yet happened. I was just browsing some videos on youtube (movie trailers mostly) to see if the videos are now in better quality. I haven’t noticed much of a difference. I am sure that Internet nowadays is capable of streaming higher quality video material so I don’t quite understand as for why YouTube is hesitating on improving the system? I was really looking forward to streaming high quality videos on my computer, the Wii and on iPod, but it does not look promising so far? Other youtube type websites like Daily Motion are much more advanced when it comes to the video quality but they are still less popular with users. YouTube, what the heck are you waiting for?