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.  

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.

The PC of the future

It seems that we have entered the final years of using our PC computers the way we used to. Now, in the web 2.0 era things are changing. Advanced web technologies will enable full migration of the software from our hard drives on the Internet. As the Internet speed increases every month, soon we’ll be able to use complex software packages from the remote location online without needing to download and install it on our computers. That way users will be able to easily choose which software they want to use and probably will pay a monthly fee instead of buying a whole package.Another thing is the storage space. The usage of multimedia features(music,photos and video) has increased so now we need terabytes of hard drive space to store all of our favourite photographs, music collection or some hilarious holiday home videos. Services like Flickr and YouTube are making things easier for us by allowing users to upload their photographs and video on their own servers. By doing that, we don’t need as much storage space available locally but also we can share our media with family and friends easily and quickly.

Other hybrid solutions offer users remote desktop systems, backup tools and so much more. The Internet is not a huge database of vast variety of information available on it. More and more software applications that we use in our everyday lives are Internet-dependent so we won’t even know when the Internet transition kicks in. Facebook, Myspace,Twitter and Pownce web 2.0 services that made us forget about using conventional e-mail in day to day communication.What kind of computers we will be buying in the future then? Well, I think that we will be using some sort of terminals that will have ultra-fast internet access, lots of RAM memory and less then 30 GB hard drive built-in.

Configuration like this would be more then enough for many average PC users. Software developers on the other hand will also be more concentrated on developing web-based applications that will be easy to use and access. Our future is online, are you ready?

Are you ready for the Holiday season? [The geek edition]

It’s the Holiday season! We are busy buying presents and putting up Christmas decorations. If you are a geek, there is so much more to it. Here is the quick list of what every geek should do to make sure that has everything prepared for the upcoming holidays. Ho, ho, ho!

1. Make sure to update software. There is a software we don’t use every day and thus forget to update when the new version becomes available. You can use versiontracker.com to see if the new versions are available. Some software has “check for updates” option, so use that instead.

2. Redeem your wii points and if you are an XBOX fan, don’t forget to extend xbox live subscription. You will be playing more over the holidays with your friends and family.

3. Check your local TV guide and make sure you have your TiVo’s and PVR’s ready. There will be a lot of holiday specials that you might want to record.

4. Hand-make holiday cards for your geek friends. You can even use old computer parts to do it.

5. If you can, organize pre-Christmas LAN party. Geeks like those.

Drink and eat responsibly and enjoy the holidays. Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Kill -myspace

I wish there was a command like this! I really hate Myspace social networking service. I have an account on myspace which I created ages ago because I had some friends on it at the time. I have never really used it because it wasn’t fun at all, but if you want to view other people profiles, you have to be logged in. Over the years, myspace has become more popular with teenagers who were enjoying (and still do) decorating their myspace profiles with all the things that are considered a big no-no in the world of web design. That includes bulky animated backgrounds of 2+ MB photos, background music that plays automatically when the page loads up, unreadable fonts and screaming colours. Apart from the fact that a page looks incredibly ugly for the eyes that are sore from all the colours and flashing, it also takes ages for a page like that to load even on the high-speed Internet connection.Finally, I’ve decided to delete my myspace account. I did not want to use the service anymore and I wanted to remove all the profile information that I had on it. Every social networking site that allows you to create an account on it also has an option for a user to delete it if one do not want to use it anymore. The procedure is very simple. All that has to be done is to enter an e-mail address that the account was registered with and when you get a return e-mail, you need to click on the link to confirm account termination. Guess what, myspace has it too! Does it work? No! I have gone through the procedure of terminating the account over and over, but I can still log in to myspace with my username or password. Here is how myspace describes the whole procedure of how to delete your account:

How do I delete my account?If you wish to permanently terminate your MySpace account, start by clicking “Home” in the top navigation menu from any MySpace web page. From your personal home page, click the “Account Settings” next to your default picture. From your “Change Account Settings” page, click the “Cancel Account” link, found just above the “My Account Settings”. On the “Cancel My Account” page, click the “Cancel My Account” button. Check the email account that you used to create your account. Follow the instructions in that email to delete your account. Keep in mind, cancelling your MySpace account will PERMANENTLY REMOVE all of your profile information from MySpace, including your photographs, comments, blogs, and your personal network of friends. This information cannot be restored. You may re-register with your current email address after canceling, but you will need to rebuild your personal network from scratch.

It looks straightforward when you read it but in reality it wont work. I did everything as written above not once but more then ten times, and I still have an active myspace account. I thought maybe I need to give it some time (say 48 hrs.) for the system to terminate my account, but that hasn’t happened. Some services would automatically delete your account if you are not using it for a long time. As I am a Mac user, I thought that I might try the same procedure on my Windows PC. I’ve tried it from Firefox and IE 7 but no avail.Considering all this, it turns out that myspace is abusing their own users by not allowing them to cancel their account in any way. How legal is this I wonder? If you have any workaround of how to delete myspace account, please, post a comment. For the record, News corp. sucks!

Google Ramblings

Ok, it’s official now, Google has acquired Jaiku! If you don’t know, Jaiku is mini-blog social networking platform especially suitable to use with mobile phone devices. Unlike Twitter and recently Pownce, Jaiku was never gained much popularity among users for some reason. Now, that Google owns the platform, things are about to change. Google already owns some popular web services: YouTube,Blogger,Gmail, Google Earth, Google maps and many more smaller services within google.com portal. Another rumour that has been spreading on the Internet is that google is about to make it’s own version of a mobile phone device called “gPhone” It is very likely that gPhone is going to be similar to apple’s iPhone and it will use same touch-sensitive technology iPhone uses. Here is what, in my opinion, could make gPhone the best mobile phone device ever:

Operating system: iPhone uses OS X as a platform which makes it unique to other mobile devices on the market. gPhone thus has to find as unique platform to use, so it can compete with the iPhone. Developing a new operating system for a mobile device can be rather expensive and risky. Google needs to adopt already developed solution. So guys, do you remember BeOS? It was a great operating system but lack of software and hardware support forced developers to shut down the original project. BeOS variations still exist, (see Zeta OS) but they can not be considered a serious OS for a PC again because of lack of software and hardware support. I think it would be great for Google to acquire say Zeta OS and modify it to make a brand new mobile platform that would be used with gPhone. BeOS is very similar to OS X. It’s powerful and it has friendly GUI. I remember back in 1998 when I first tried the original BeOS, I was really impressed. It had great graphic and networking performances combined with an intuitive interface that looks like NEXT.

Application support: Google does not have to be worried about application support as they already own vast variety of services that all can be used on gPhone too. iPhone for instance already uses YouTube. Gmail is the most popular web based e-mail service and it’s very reliable and most important, it’s free! With a few modifications made, (IMAP support) gmail could seamlessly work with gPhone. It would be integrated into the OS just like .Mac service is seamlessly working with OS X. Putting together Blogger and Jaiku would be great, and I don’t need to mention Google Earth and Google maps as we all know what kind of potential they have.

Hardware tweaking: Google has had enough time to see how competitors (LG-Prada and Apple) are going with their products. Now, if they are smart enough, they can correct all mistakes made by LG and Apple hardware-wise. I hope they will be able to do the job right.

What now you are asking yourself? What’s missing? I think the missing link is that Google does not have an online music store. Both Apple and Yahoo have one. It would be great if Google could offer a wi-fi music store. I am really looking forward to seeing if Google is up to the challenge of developing a mobile phone device. Good luck!!

Smile, you are on camera

My opinion is that technology is always good, it’s people who are making it look bad. After 9/11 we are in a constant fear of terrorist attacks, but is that a good reason for governments to spy on ordinary citizens?

Surveillance cameras: If you’ve been to London, New York or any other big city, you couldn’t not notice presence of surveillance cameras just about everywhere. They are meant to protect us from terrorists and the bad guys of sorts, but the cameras are intruding our privacy and make us feel uncomfortable (no cheating your wife on the street or a public place. In other words, people just don’t like being watched, period!

RFID passports: RFID (Radio-frequency identification) will be available in the new passports . RFID is a way of storing and remotely retrieving data. RFID chips can store a large amount of information about a passport holder, much more then it is available now. Authorized persons (at the airport for instance) use RFID readers to read and collect information off the RFID chip. RFID chips can already be found as a replacement for bar codes in big supermarket chains and department stores.

For more info about how RFID works, see this CBN news report - All rights reserved:

Airport Security: If you often have to travel by air, you know that you have to wear your “stripper clothes” at the airport and oh, no shoes applied. Otherwise, you’ll be stripped by the airport personnel whether you like it or not. If that is not humiliating enough for you, don’t worry, if some “old chum’” at the airport decides that you are looking kind of suspicious, you can easily be sent to a “special room” for some additional checking.

All the things mentioned above should help us and make us feel safer in the crazy world we live in. Question remains how all that affects our every day life. Do you feel safer?

Please note: This article contains some copyrighted material!

Where is the Apple key?

When I first saw the new aluminium iMac I was astonished by the design of the product. When I saw the keyboard, I couldn’t not help but notice a very important thing - there was no apple logo on the command key! Instead, it was written “command” on the key which in my opinion, was much uglier then having an apple logo and a command sign on it. Later I realised that Apple did that on purpose. You are probably wondering why would Apple get rid of the apple key logo? The answer is simple - Windows switchers! Apple is doing everything nowadays to attract Windows users switch to using Mac and therefore trying to make Windows users feel at home with Apple products. What about us loyal Mac users? We are not important as we already know everything about a mac? They don’t care about us anymore? Unfortunately, it seems that way. Windows switchers are mostly confused when you tell them “ hit the command or apple button” they don’t know where that key is and it takes some time for them to get used to it. Apple figured all that and rushed to make it easier for them by simply putting command sign on to the key. The command key was the icon of the Mac community, and now Apple has taken it away from us. What is next, putting a Start sign on the Finder logo in Leopard? I always thought Mac users come first for Apple but it seems like I was wrong.

Sir Elton John wants to “Close down the Internet”

In a story from the British newspaper “The Sun,” Sir Elton John is calling for the internet to be closed down. How can someone who never used the Internet say that the Internet should be closed down because it’s “destroying good music”? Sir Elton John admits in the interview that he doesn’t own a mobile phone, an iPod or anything tech. related. Let’s say I don’t watch television at all and then I say ” Hey, let’s close all TV stations down because they are not good for our children”, but I never watched anything on TV. Sir Elton John is trying to stop music piracy in a very ugly way but he has a website of his own and posting on his forum requires a $40 fan membership. I am also against illegal copying and distribution of music but I can’t say that i would close down the Internet because of that. Sir Elton, please concentrate on writing music and leave technology to people who know about it.