Entries from January 2009 ↓

If you’ve ever wondered how the Internet was born, but can’t be bothered reading a whole book on the subject, check out this short animated documentary from Milah Bilgil. Entitled History of the internet, it does a great job explaining time-sharing, file-sharing, arpanet and internet. The video uses a new type of info-graphic called PICOL icons, which will soon be made available for free on picol.org. PICOL stands for Pictorial Communication Language – it’s a project that aims to create “a standard and reduced sign system for electronic communication.” PICOL is free to use and open to alter.

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History of the Internet from PICOL on Vimeo.

Discuss

Ecamm Network have announced the world’s first webcam with Bluetooth wireless technology. The new BT-1 webcam combines top-notch video and sound with complete freedom from wires. This is the first Bluetooth webcam supported by OS X, and will be priced at $149.99 when launched in a few months time.

Technical Details

The BT-1 streams H.264 video and AAC audio, taking advantage of Mac OS X’s rich media capabilities to provide a truly seamless experience. The detailed specifications are:

• 640×480 H.264 video and 48 kHz AAC stereo audio
• Compact 2″ x 2½” x 5/8″ design
• Compatible with iChat, Skype and more
• Standard tripod mounting screw
• 4 hour talk time
• Includes a flexible mini-tripod and USB charging cable
• Works on all latest Macs with Leopard and Bluetooth v2.0+EDR or better.

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Picasa, the popular free photo management software made by Google, has finally made its way to the Mac. The application has long been noticeably absent on the Macintosh – especially given the fact that it has been available for Linux (which typically lags behind Macs and Windows) since 2006. It’s also a direct competitor to Apple’s long running iPhoto product, which has come with all new Macs for years. So how does it stack up?

In my brief testing the application seems to be very snappy (much faster than iPhoto), though it lacks the sleek look of Apple’s products. Photos import quickly, effects are easy to find and apply, and most things are intuitive, though the folder browsing can be a little confusing. It might not be as pretty as iPhoto, but I won’t be surprised if power-users make the switch (or at least consider it).

One of the biggest differences between Picasa and iPhoto is that Picasa doesn’t move or reorganize images, but instead keeps track of where your images are scattered across your hard drive and allows you to view them in one place. For users that manually manage their photos by sorting them into folders, this is a very welcome change. In contrast, iPhoto has long transfered your photos to its own library, and encouraged users to sort their photos through the app itself.

Given that iPhoto has come preinstalled on every Mac for years, Google is doing doing everything it can to make Picasa play nice with your existing library. While users can typically modify any image on their hard drive directly from Picasa, all images in iPhoto’s library are treated differently: the application will copy these images to a new location, and only then apply edits. The application also allows users to revert back to previous versions.

Picasa is a welcome alternative to iPhoto, but it’s still premature to drop iPhoto entirely. It’s highly likely that Apple will unveil a new version of iPhoto at tomorrow’s Macworld keynote, and you can be sure that it will include some significant enhancements.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Music mashup site shows how User Experience is done.

MP3 blog aggregator Hype Machine launched a new microsite today called the Music Blog Zeitgeist. There you can listen, for free, to entire albums from the most blogged-about musicians of 2008. Bringing together a whole host of different technologies to create one experience, the site is beautiful and a lot of fun to navigate.

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Lots of sites have published top album lists for the past year, but Hype Machine tells us objectively who the most popular musicians on the web have been, at least among the army of music bloggers it’s been tracking for years. The Top 50 lists will be published throughout this week, starting with the 50th through 41st most popular songs, bands and albums posted today.

Technology combined with Hype Machine’s own aggregation and parsing includes:

• Imeem Flash players that let you listen to entire albums for free. Not thrown haphazardly on the site, either, they are displayed beautifully.
• Creative Commons photos of the bands are used to illustrate each entry. The effect is really nice. Reminiscent of what we’ve see at travel social network Dopplr but actually inspired, they say, by this similar city guide to Berlin.
• Blog Fresh Radio has produced embeddable “shows” about all the music, including interviews with the artists.
• Musebin has been used to automatically create 1 line album reviews, parsed from all the blog coverage discovered via Hype Machine. Visitors can click through multiple reviews without leaving the page.

The end result is an awesome site that we’ll be visiting all week and beyond. When it comes to data driven media mashups, we can’t sing Hype Machine’s praises loud enough. With this new site they’ve really outdone themselves.

Check it out at hypem.com/zeitgeist.

Discuss

You can find a whole collection of historical tweets over at historicaltweets.com. Most of them are hilarious. I loved the Elvis tweet “so comfortable, you’ll think you died and gone to heaven.” and the Benjamin Franklin’s “It’s all about the me’s, baby“. What would Jesus have Tweeted? It’s there!

Can you think of other historical figures and what they would have tweeted?

I know that no matter what controller I use, I’m awful at video games not involving Mario or Karts, but XIM’s new mod’ll surely be of interest to hardcore Xbox 360 gamers.

The XIM 2 gives Xbox 360 owners the ability to use a plug-and-play keyboard and mouse with their console. It’s available from XIM’s site for a steep $180, but then, the ability to shoot more things even faster and more accurately has to be priceless to somebody, right? It’s available to order from their website, though you’ll have to wait a bit for shipping. [Engadget]

The iPhone 3G unlock is now available. The unlocking software is called yellowsn0w, runs as an invisible application, and it’s very easy to install. Here’s how. Updated 3: Now works for me with 0.9.4.

Yellowsn0w, the iPhone 3G unlock, runs as a small command line application that gets installed in any jailbroken iPhone 3G using Installer. It’s very easy to install:

• First, update your iPhone 3G to the latest iPhone OS provided by Apple using the latest iTunes.

• Then, use QuickPwn 2.2 to jailbreak and activate your iPhone 3G. If you have Mac OS X 10.5.6 installed, you should follow these instructions before doing it.

• Use Installer or Cydia to install yellowsn0w, which is completely free. Here are the addresses you have to use to add yellowsn0w to your installer application:

For Cydia enter: http://apt9.yellowsn0w.com/
For Installer enter: http://i.yellowsn0w.com/

• That’s it. There are some special SIM cards that give problems, but f you have a normal SIM card from any non-official carrier, you are fine.

BEWARE: This is a beta application—version 0.9.1— so install at your own risk—I’m installing, it, though. Since it’s a daemon which doesn’t alter anything permanently, it seems safe. Just proceed with caution and be warned.

Update: I’ve been trying to get this to run all day. The installation is very easy. Getting it to work right is a completely different matter.

After reboot, the iPhone won’t pick my Vodafone carrier (the Vodafone SIM card works fine in an iPhone first generation, unlocked with the old unlock). It will just sit there, idle. Won’t give any error, but it won’t connect to the carrier network.

My iPhone 3G has the 2.28 baseband, as it should, and has been Quickpwned for the first time to do the unlock. Installer and Cydia are there, working fine. I’ve carefully followed the instructions in their page—about getting out the SIM card for a minute, then get it back in (and all other possible combinations)—but it just won’t fly.

Like they say, this is beta. It won’t damage your iPhone—in theory—but it may or may not run. It seems like there are other reports of the same, as well as other people talking about losing the network connection.

Even while this is labeled as a beta, it saddens me that the iPhone Dev Team has embraced the damn beta culture just to make the release on a cute date. It looks like the old days of solid versions are long gone by.

Update 2: There’s a poll here with people saying if it works or not. At the time of this writing, these were the stats:

It worked: 23 34.33%
It doesn’t work: 44 65.67%
Voters: 67.

Hopefully, a more stable and predictable release will come soon. Until then, I will keep trying. If you have any reports, drop me a line via email.

Update 3: iPhone Dev Team has released version 0.9.4. After some magic moves in the terminal, it worked for me. My iPhone 3G is now working in Spain in the Vodafone network. [IPhone Dev Team]