Apple recently announced the iPad, what they claim to be “There most advanced technology in a magical and revolutionary device at an unbelievable price”

Now lets dissect the above statement, it is basically a large version of the Tablet PC, running a very large version of the iPhone OS. I do not see what makes it magical or revolutionary. If anything I believe the fact that it is running the same OS as the iPhone very annoying, and I do not believe I would want myiPhone any bigger than it already is. I am not saying it will not be an interesting product to use, I am simply saying that the iPhone OS is designed for smaller screens, instead of trying to make it work on a bigger screen, why not just make a whole new OS specifically for the iPad?

Now as for pricing, I guess if I found a practical use, the pricing would be okay. $499 doesn’t seem too steep for a large iPod touch with 16GB of memory I guess, however the only iPad I really see a practical use for is the one that supports WIFI + 3G and unfortunetly that adds another $129 to the price.

I guess until an actual release, and a chance to sit down and spend some time messing with the iPad I will not know for sure if it has a purpose or not, I guess we shall see.

Oh and I almost forgot, more information at: http://www.apple.com/ipad

Recently I got an iPod Touch, and began playing with some of its many features. I soon found that if I jailbroke it I could get even more apps totally free and even add more functionality to it. So thus began my jailbreaking research, below is what I have found.

Currently, if you have an iPod Touch that is a 3G or 3GS, you can only have a tethered jailbreak. This means that if you want to turn your iPod back on after you restart it, you will have to plug it back into the computer and rerun the jailbreak program. This does not erase any of your information or anything like that, it just takes time and is very inconvenient if you need to restart on the go. If you have an 2G or 1G iPod Touch or any version of the iPhone however, you can jailbreak and will have an untethered jailbreak.

Now, enough talk, here is how you can jailbreak your iPod. There is a program called blackra1n that came out last month which allows you to jailbreak any iPhone or iPod (and tethered jailbreak the ones mentioned above), and it even jailbreaks it in under 30 seconds. The link to the site is http://blackra1n.com. Here are a few steps you should take when running the program. First, you should kill all iTunes processes using the task manager, and second if you are running vista or above, you will need to run it as an administrator for it to work properly. Once it is jailbroken, you will then be able to open an app called blackra1n on your iPod or iPhone which will allow you to install one of three app managers. I suggest using Cydia.

Unfortunately the iPod I got was one of the newest ones, and an untethered jailbreak is not available for it yet. Fortunately however there is currently a very new program being worked on that will fix that and me and other 3G and 3GS users to ability to have an untethered jailbreak! It is called greenposi0n, and should be released by the end of the year! The link to their website is http://chronic-dev.org/blog. I will be watching it closely for any updates on release dates and shall check back when I find more information.

Please comment!

Not long after the release of Ubuntu 9.04 (which LinuxMint is based on), LinuxMint 7 has been released. It looks like the developers put a lot of work into making this disto an improvement over the last one, with a nice new green spin on things.

LinuxMint 7 Gloria Screenshot

Other than a new look, the rest of the work has been done by Ubuntu, stability fixes, etc. So far I have run into almost no problems with this new distribution, except one problem with the sound drivers, which I easily fixed.

If you are already a LinuxMint user, the instructions to upgrade can be found here: http://www.linuxmint.com/blog/?p=861 although it is suggested that you completly refomat your computer when upgrading.

If you are a new user, you can find the download information here: http://www.linuxmint.com/download.php

If you have ever wondered if the person on the other end of the phone is really who it claims, well wonder no more, thanks to this new technology that can verify people’s identity based on sounds emitted by their ears. This technology is based off of the response power of the persons ear, which is different on everyone. What I mean by this is, it sends pulses into the ear, and based on the amplitude, etc of the response, it can tell whether it is the person that it claims to be.

Unfortunately, this new technology is not fully developed yet, and still has to work around basic problems, like the fact that ear wax buildup, along with many other things, will alter the amplitude of the response of the ear. Once this technology is fully develolped, however, it will have many uses, anywhere from disabling stolen cell phones, to verifying identies, as mentioned earlier.

More information can be found here: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20227035.200-our-ears-may-have-builtin-passwords.html

Vista Transformation Pack, the emulator for the Windows Vista theme on Windows XP has been released. It is an upgrade to the last version 8.01. New features Include x64 and Windows XP SP3 support. Also, all the programs built in have been upgraded to faster and better compatibility.

Vista Transformation Pack allows you to make your computer which is running either Windows XP or 2000 to look like it is Windows Vista, using a mixture of programs which are programmed to add different capabilites of Vista to earlier versions of Windows. This pack is the closest you can get to Vista without auctually getting it. If you would like to download it, it is availaible from the following link: http://www.winxtp.com/vtpdl.html

Recently, a µTorrent for Mac has been leaked. Before now, there have been claims that there was one being made, but this is the first official sign. I of course could not test it because I have Windows, however it is said that a lot of people had trouble getting it to work. The owners of µTorrent said that they were not very worried about it, as it is a pre-alpha version. I really would not reccommend installing this on your system, unless you are really desperate for µTorrent and are using mac.

this can be discussed in: the forum