New Theme

New Theme! I was in the mood for a good change, so here we are. Wonderful, all ready for summer! Oh yeah, I'm also starting to tag all of my photos when I post them, so put your mouse on any picture and you will get a description or caption!

Apple DVR? Not likely.

____Many people have speculated that Apple would release a DVR, perhaps bundled with the Mac Mini. I however find this highly unlikely for numerous reasons. First, lets look at what Apple has done in the past few years. They have created a very good name for themselves by creating and implementing the iTunes music store. They've done so well enough to sell more online music and videos than ever before, they have essentially revolutionized online music/video distribution. Okay, so now Apple is selling music, tv shows, and one movie so far, they are the largest distributer of podcasts in the world. They currently have over 70 percent of the personal digital media players in the world with the various iPod versions.

____Now, wouldn't it be great to add to Apple's wonderful arsenal of beautiful products a built in DVR? Then you could automatically record all of your favorite shows that you're already paying for with cable and satellite and watch them at your convenience. Great, sounds awesome, but here's where this concept falls apart real fast: Apple makes tons of money off you buying tv shows at $1.99 a pop, why would they then make a device that lets you get your favorite tv shows for no additional cost to your existing cable bill? If Apple were to introduce a DVR it would cut out a major portion of their revenue. The only solution I have for why Apple would do this is to increase iPod sales.
____Only time will tell what Apple will decide to do, but for now I'm putting my money on no Apple branded DVR unless another major company (Dell, HP, possibly MS) came out with an integrated DVR component.

Updates!

New OS X Tip, soda keg pictures posted on the Non Tech page, and hey, a big decrease in load time will be starting with the first post of next month due to some new code I'm testing.

Behold the power of the new 17-inch MacBook Pro!

I'm just happy they brought back the Firewire 800 ports and increased the speed AGAIN! This is arguably the fastest laptop on the market today, and seriously, hands down the most beautiful and feature packed notebook available.

Listen to my music

So here's something I forgot to mention about the nanometer... if you see a song that I've just listened to and you want to know what it is, just click on the green arrow next to the song if it's available and an onscreen java/flash player will popup, no new pages, no popups, no external players, no hassle. This is a wicked cool feature, go try it out!

Nano-Meter

Want to know what I've been listening to lately? Then just check out the little Nano on the right hand side on the panel just above the archives. This is a graphical display that shows what I've been listening to this week.

Last.fm looks at what I listen to in iTunes, Pandora, and their own IP radio player and makes charts and tags about my style of listening, pretty cool.

Open WiFi? Hell yeah!

Check out all the open wifi access points I found when I was sitting in my truck outside my residence hall! Most of them weren't even protected!

Dapper Drake and Songbird

I'd imagine most people don't care, but a new version of Ubuntu called Dapper Drake 6.06 is being officially released in June, but the beta version is out now. This is really exciting for me because this new version adds a lot of really cool functionality that us Mac users are used to: they have added a search feature, 'Deskbar', that works exactly like Spotlight. Their music player now reads RSS feeds, so you can subscribe to podcasts. Also, the overall appearance got a new makeover, it has a more OS X feel to it, it's very nice.

↑ Deskbar in action! ↑

Also, if you want to check out an awesome new iTunes replacement or in the case o Linux, it will be the only nice media player, check out Songbird. This app will be released for OS X and Linux in the next few weeks, so keep your eyes open for that release!

Google Calendar

Google's latest web app is their calendar. If you use Gmail then you already have a Google Calendar, just go to google.com/calendar and have fun. This is a super powerful tool that lets you connect all your contacts with your everyday schedule. You can import the calendars you have all set up already from iCal or any other calendar application that exports vCard format.

Google put some good time into making this a really well developed application. It's AJAX based, so everything is smooth and fast. You can even have Google remind you about certain events by email, soon it will support SMS messaging of your schedules and appointments right to your cell phone. This cool app is still in Beta, but it packs a huge punch on other sites such as 30boxes.

Mac OS X Keyboard Shortcuts

This week's OS X Tip is from the good people at MacAddict Magazine:

The $5 iPod scratch fix

Check this month's Helpful Hack is a good article on do-it-yourself iPod scratch removal!

Ubuntu Success

Late Friday night into very early Saturday morning I installed Ubuntu Gnu/Linux on a 600MHz Dell Dimension XPS x86 desktop. The installation went smooth, once I went into the Bios and altered some configurations. I must caution that this installation was more difficult than the standard Mac or Windows install. It did involve some coding in the Linux terminal and messing for a few hours to get everything working properly. In the long run I'd say this was a great experience. Learning the Gnu/Linux based on Gnome system was a lot of fun, isn't that what computers are all about?
This system is blazing fast for a 600 MHz system with a low end x86 processor. Actually, anyone who wants to speed up their computer and is willing to spend a few days learning the Linux system would definitely benefit from the switch. No matter what kind computer you have, Linux can be installed and run pretty fast.

Ubuntu Pandora Project

____I'm installing Linux onto an old pc that I got from my girlfriend's parents this weekend. After looking around at the many different distributions of Linux I decided on ubuntu. I looked at a few others such as openSuse, RedHat, and Knoppix, however, ubuntu seems to be the best option because it comes with tons of helpful apps such as Firefox and OpenOffice pre-installed, it runs natively on a separate partition of your existing hard drive, and also, from what I've read ubuntu seems to have little to no issues with recognizing hardware.

____There are a few reasons I'm doing this: first reason is that I want a computer to stream music from Pandora to my stereo. Second reason being that this summer I'm probably going to load my iTunes music library onto the Linux box and use it as a server. This way my music can be streamed all over the house, and when I get my own house I'll already have a working system. Third reason being that by the time I have my own place streaming video will be a big deal. Video over IP is already catching on, in a few years it's going to be huge: I'll be ready.
____I'll let you know the install went later this weekend!

XP on Mac legally, by Apple

Summer Break Poll

Check out the poll! Oh and by the way, anyone notice who overcame Vancouver?
Hell yeah, search Joe Cote via Google and you get my site before some hot shot professor's!

JosephACote.com Summer Break Poll

What are you looking forward to most about summer?

Working and making some money Just chilling and relaxing Nothing, I love school Seeing old friends Getting a tan Working on a summer project

View Results

Pandora Revisited

I hope you use Pandora (Pandora.com), the personal internet streaming that customizes itself to your exact taste for music. I was using it recently when and just happened to be looking at my activity monitor and noticed that the memory for Firefox was through the roof and it was slowing down my computer like crazy. So I did a little testing with some different browsers to see if this was the case.

Safari started out with 44 MB of real ram while Firefox started with 82MB, after an hour they were both at 130MB. After 2 hours Safari took the lead and went up to 185MB, while Firefox had pretty much stopped going up at around 138MB.

I guess the moral here is to use Firefox (duh) if you want to keep your memory in control.

New Apple Ad

Check out the new Apple ad in my Podcast this week.
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April Mix

It's Sunny April!
It was such a nice day outside, it got me in the mood to make a nice sunny April Mix playlist!


I post these iMixes to iTunes because it's an easy way to preview songs before you buy them, but if you don't want to spend money, or don't use iTunes, you can just download the songs.

Get iMix

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