Wow, the news I post here actually comes together and means something for once! Apple has announced the arrival of its newest member of iPods: The iPod Nano. How does my news come together? Lets see: New iPod in Fall (well it’s early September, close enough), Flash based drive, 4 GB max.

This thing is very pretty, but the black version blows me away. I love that glassy pitch black look. I’m not sure I like how stretched out it looks, but they were going for the smallest it could be with the largest screen I guess. One thing that struck me and nice was the enlarged center button. Whoever decided to do that gets a raise. Whoever decided to put the headphones on the bottom, FIRED!!! Sorry, but this just seems like a ploy to get you to buy their new lanyard headphones, but if you don’t have them… Dumb idea altogether.

Apple got rid of the Mini. Another dumb idea. I understand that now they want everyone to get the new Nano, but what about the $150 people? Do you tell them to get a Shuffle? I never liked the Shuffle, so another dead end. Tell them to save up fifty more bucks? You should never tell customers to spend more money because you cut a product.

This iPod Nano (as well as the other iPods I believe) has Podcast as a separate category in the file navigation system. Smart move. I think Apple should be doing even more than they are doing with iTunes to capitalize on the term Podcast. They didn’t even start the term, but it seems destined to become their own. I know people who use iTunes but don’t even know what a podcast is. Podcasting will take over radio!

The iPod nano - Engadget
iPod Nano - Apple

I doubt anyone has noticed, but I have removed the guidelines for what type of posts I would add on certain days of the week because I was not following that guideline in any way/shape/form. I would rather my blog to be what I want, with good content, when I want to post it. Sometimes news happens that I want up immediately, or sometimes an article might come up on another blog that can wait for a few days to see what other people have to say.

Somewhat along those lines, I have also added the category “Best Of…” and as subcategories: Movies, Music, and Books. Here I will comment on certain things that I have found to be extraordinary in their own right. You will find some “pop” stuff, and some way out there stuff here. I do not define what I like as a relation to its popularity. Sometimes some high quality stuff is highly popular, but sometimes high quality is shoved out of the spotlight; I’ll post on it no matter what.

On the way home tonight, “Smack My Bitch Up” came on the radio, so naturally, I told my dad to turn it up. About halfway through the song, he asks me who it is, so I tell him. Little did I know, but my dad used to listen to The Prodigy back in the 90s. He was even able to list some of their songs, most on this album.

This is arguably The Prodigy’s best album. It has staple songs present in nearly every collection that ranges from hardcore techno, rave, d ‘n b, and breakbeat. They are able to reach such a range of genres, your head is spinning from the get go with “Smack My Bitch Up”, till the end with “Fuel My Fire”.

Some of the most recognizable songs on this album for the casual listener are: Smack My Bitch Up, Firestarter, and Diesel Power. Being released in 1997, this album has stood the test of time because of its unvaried variety of never leaving the boundaries of creative music.

This is our third show. It’s around an hour long. Julie is our guest this time; look around the blog at the comments, you’ll find plenty of her comments.
Geek and the Freak Show #3

Here’s the RSS link to the podcast feed, put it into your agregator:
RSS Feed

Orange Hair, originally uploaded on 4th September, 2005.

This is a crazy picture of a girl in a watch ad. I found the ad in my sister’s Transworld Surf magazine. Since we just got a multifuntion printer for the office, I scanned the ad and cropped the image down to size and corrected some of the problems with scanning a magazine image (it still isn’t perfect). I then just selected her hair, feathered the selection a bit, and colorized it. I had to toy around with the hue I wanted. Photoshop is the best program. It just is. I love how I can adjust the tones and hues of the shaddows, midtones, and highlights of the selection. That’s how I got the hair to have a yellow tint in the body of it and to darken to an orange-red glow on the tips.

Never thought your hard drive could be pimpin? You were wrong. This web site GRYNX shows you how to install this hard drive window that is made out of plexiglas WITHOUT killing your hard drive. I have never heard of someone openning their hard drive and had it survive the process, but the site has successfully done it. GRYNX goes over the process in 5 pages of detailed instructions that scare me.

Plexiglas hard drive window

Tom’s Hardware Guide posted an article last week that Engadget picked up on, which is how I found it. The article focuses on how Samsung has approached Apple and said that they would match the prices that Apple’s provider for Mini hard drives currently charges Apple (I believe the hard drives are made by Hitachi). This doesn’t sound like a big deal because why would Apple switch to Samsung if they are just going to give them the same price? There is a little part that I forgot to mention, they aren’t just physical hard drives, they are flash based modules! Samsung has proposed to sell Apple 4GB flash drives to put into the iPod Mini.

This would be a major improvement because with hard drives, you can cause major disk errors with too much shock and ruin the drive. With the flash drive, there are no moving parts, so nothing can go wrong when you go running with your MP3 player. The only problem with flash based drives is that they don’t have nearly as much capacity as physical hard drives do right now. Where flash drives are reaching around 4GBs, physical hard drives reach 500GBs.

So what does this mean for Apple? They could run pretty far with this offer (they have the strongest marketing/advertising team I can think of), but how long will Samsung be able to sell them flash drives with the same capacity as physical hard drives, at the same price as the physicals?

Samsung slashing prices on 4GB memory modules for a flash iPod mini?
Samsung to match Flash / harddrive pricing for Apple?

Let’s get straight to the point: Suge Knight was shot in the leg this morning at one of Kanye West’s pre-VMA parties. If you know anything about the 2Pac/Biggie gang wars, this will grab your attention. If it didn’t grab your attention, just think of it this way: there should be a Grand Theft Auto game about it.

Let’s see, it all started with the two record labels Death Row Records and Bad Boy Records. Death Row is owned by Suge Knight, Bad Boy is owned by Diddy (aka: Sean Combs, Sean John, P. Diddy, Puff Daddy, Puffy). Death Row had 2Pac and Snoop Dogg on board, Bad Boy had Biggie Smalls on board. After Suge Knight, 2Pac, and other Death Row members were caught on video tape beating a Crip named Orlando Anderson, the East Coast vs West Coast battles ensued.

As a result of these battles, 2Pac died, as did Biggie Smalls, two of the most influential rappers of that time. Suge Knight has made plenty of enemies after coming out of jail for the sentence he recieved from the beating. He has dissed Snoop Dogg for leaving the label, Dr. Dre for leaving the label, Eminem, Xzibit, and others.

That is your lesson in rap battles and gangsta wars. Don’t go and kill anyone now.

Knight Shooting Casts a Pall Over VMAs

Google has released a new program called Google Talk. How original! The whole idea behind Google Talk is that Google wanted their own instant messenger, and they integrated a voice communications not unlike Skype into this IM software.

I have downloaded this new beta software and tried out some things. It’s a nice program, but I have other programs that do the same thing. Trillian is my IM of choice. Seeing as it is a jack of all trades, it is compatible with nearly every IM protocol such as AIM, Yahoo!, Jabber, ICQ, IRC, MSN, and Rendezvous. As for the VoIP part of Google Talk, I use Skype, which has gotten the VoIP market and product right on target.

So, at least for now, I see no reason to switch to Google Talk. And even if I really needed to, Google Talk runs over Jabber, so I could just use Trillian to do that.

Google Talk Review

I’m not really posting this because of its importance to news, but because of its absurdity, and because I want to discuss the Michael Jackson trial. I’m not too sure why this would show up in the news. It says that she was charged with fraud because she lied about her finances when she applied for public assistance. I’m not excusing this at all, but TONS of people do this, I’m sure. So, I guess to answer my own question: This is in the news because they were associated with the Michael Jackson trial. That is B.S.

Now onto the Michael Jackson trial… Has anyone ever asked you if you think he was guilty or not? If not, wow. I know I’ve been asked many times. My answer, I don’t know, and therefore reasonable doubt. I wasn’t in the jury room, and neither were you, so how can you make a judgment on a crime that horrific without knowing ALL the facts available? Michael Jackson freaks me out, no doubt about that, for that crime: guilty.

As to the two jury members who are now coming out saying that they made the right choice and that they weren’t given correct information: Too late. Isn’t that the same thing as coming out saying, “Umm, even though I went through this trial that was months long, I told you that I made up my mind, but now that I’m back to normal life, I thought about it again and I was wrong.” What’s the point of the whole process then?

Mom of Michael Jackson’s accuser charged with fraud