Gadgets and Gizmos

hopefully this year’s grand challenge will be more of a success than the last one .

at least there’s hope, because a contestant is driven by max os x (albeit there could be a kernel panic on track :-)

if you forgot how the last year’s edition ended, then this boingboing-post links to a video excerpt (31mb .wmv) of the satellite-feed from the 04-edition, so you can see for yourself how craptacularly bad most of the autonomous vehicles drove.

dear apple.

i just spent an hour and a half to layout a book (for a gift) in iphoto. now, that i want to buy it, you inform me, that my credit-card cannot be accepted for this transaction. i double-checked with my credit-card-company, and yes, my card is fully valid and within its limit, so there’s nothing wrong with that. and i’d also love to buy sunny days , but that also doesn’t work.

apple just released the new itunes , now with included podcast-feature .

the ITMS now features a podcast-section, so apple released a directory, where anyone can add their podcast. for a start, you can go to the top 20 of apples podcasts , which will be more than enough to fill all your gadgets with stuff to listen to.

so, you podcaster-guys and -gals, get ready for some massive bandwidth-consumption! (cause apple is only linking to your files, i download them from you…)

ok, i admit, i could also have bought a really long (but marginally less expensive) cable, but i has got me an airport express from ricardo [1].

now i can play all my tunes [2] over my bad-ass stereo with b&o loudspeakers, much better than the puny logitech speakers :-) and if i’d actually had a printer, i could print wireless, but that’s another story. now i just need another wireless enabled gadget to fully use this new one.

those guys are geeks, but also know where to make some funny additions to their code :-)

map.search.ch now features the water temperature of some pools and lakes in switzerland (e.g. in bern , where i just came from…).

they’re pulling in the data from wiewarm.ch , so if your favorite pool is not listed, you know where to go.

happy swimming!

‘cause they now come with tetris . i’m now really gonna buy a new one. or shall i wait ’till after wwdc next monday?

[via engadget ]

**update: **hm, raph just told me that ipodlinux now comes with tetris (it didn’t in january…), so i might just wait a litlle bit more….

**2nd update: **wow! pt just managed to view videos on an ipod . this leaves for some speculation. see here for more info on this.

i wanted to (digitally) record the ibrahim ferrer show that drs3 aired last thursday evening so the post about enabling your ipod to record anything on hackaday came just right. but after installing linux on my first-generation ipod (see here ) with the extremely painless ipodlinux installer i could not get it to record more than 5 second snippets (but played some games on it…) so i figured out an easier way. i started the live-stream of drs3 and used wiretap 1 to record the concert. nonetheless i’ve now got two working operating systems on my ipod.

apple updated their displays . they are friggin huge and stylish like hell! if you want to take the new display for a spin, apple provides a 360°-quicktime-movie of one with a g5 attached. a pity i don’t have 3k$ lying around to buy myself the 30 inch beast… (which would involve getting rid of my ibook which is far away from having the graphical power to juice the 4.1 megapixels on the biggest model…)

i seem to be chewing up posts from other blogs tonight, but this is just too cool. leo links to the newest hit by apple, the smallest sibling of all airport basestations, the airport express which includes a nice little must-have feature: airtunes . connect the airport express to any outlet in the reach of your wifi-connection. plug in your stereo (or any set of powered speakers, which is really cool) and you can listen easily to all your tunes in any room where your wifi connection goes. or if you want to be the cool dj on your friends next party take your apple computer equipped with an airport card and your airport express, connect to his stereo and rock on!

but it is only made from cardboard :-) filewile ’s new single comes in a beautiful hand-crafted limited-edition card-board-special-media-8"-powerbook. (and it’s yours for only 35 bucks ). and have you read the article about their journey to the uk? (96kb .pdf)

oh, and the chumpnrun-video (which is also on the single) is absolutely hilarious. i hope to see it on telly sometimes, it’s really good! go andy and dejot!

update: it turns out that i’m quite lucky. the limited edition single won’t officially be available until the 17th of march! so i already know the song with the incredible sassy hook-line and i own a limited piece of art, there are only 300 filewile-power-books available for sale, then they’re gone for good.