Apple's Problem with TV

John Siracusa, arguing that Apple should go all-in with a set-top box. Make it the only box you need in your media cabinet. Let it record TV, play DVDs, stream Netflix, and sell you iTunes stuff all in one interface.

Something you can watch for when Steve Jobs debuts products are cues that he personally doesn’t have a lot of passion for them. He knows lots of people play and care about games, but he doesn’t. Game Center is important to iPod owners and will help Apple sell to them, but Jobs clearly doesn’t have much enthusiasm for it in his talk. Compare the Game Center segment to any feature at all he talked about when he showed off the iPad for the first time.

Several years ago Apple released Keynote, which was later joined by Pages and Numbers as the iWork suite. Keynote was a program Apple designed specifically for Jobs because he so hated the existing presentation apps out there (that is, PowerPoint). When Jobs wants something, he has his team design the very best (in his eyes) version of it possible.

I really, really wonder what Steve Jobs’s home entertainment center looks like. Maybe he just has an Apple TV and watches pay-per-view movies on it. I’d think if it were the spaghetti mess of wires and boxes most of us have, it’d drive him crazy and he’d direct his engineers to solve the problem. Apple TV would truly be that one box to rule them all. How hard would it be to throw in a DVD slot and a DVR application? That Apple hasn’t is, just guessing here, because Jobs doesn’t watch much TV and isn’t a live sports fan.

Posting to Google Reader from NetNewsWire

NetNewsWire, a superb free RSS reader for the Mac, syncs with Google Reader but doesn’t have a built-in way to share news items. I installed this AppleScript and used the Keyboard System Preference to set its keyboard shortcut to ⌥⌘S. That command normally invokes NetNewsWire’s “Add to Clippings” key, which I think really should be tied to Google Reader’s share feature. I also added “activate” before the last line of the script to bring Safari to the front when I share an item.

Top 10 Lost Technologies

The world has never been more technologically advanced than it is now, but that doesn’t mean that some things haven’t been lost along the way. Many of the technologies, inventions, and manufacturing processes of antiquity have simply disappeared with the passage of time, while others are still not fully understood by modern day scientists. Some have since been rediscovered (indoor plumbing, road building), but many of the more mysterious lost technologies have gone on to become the stuff of legend. Here are ten famous examples.

(via Instapaper)

All six volumes of Scott Pilgrim hit the iPad, iPhone

The smaller manga size works perfectly on the iPad. I only got into Scott Pilgrim recently, in time for the last volume to come out, and it’s very fun.

"God’s Number" Is 20

With about 35 CPU-years of idle computer time donated by Google, a team of researchers has essentially solved every position of the Rubik’s Cube, and shown that no position requires more than twenty moves.

How Star Trek artists imagined the iPad... 23 years ago

To understand the thinking that lead to the design of the Star Trek PADD, we spoke to some of the people involved in production of ST:TNG (as well as other Star Trek TV series and films), including Michael Okuda, Denise Okuda, and Doug Drexler.

Sally Draper’s 45s

When Don Draper asks his secretary to buy his daughter some Beatles 45s, here’s what she likely picked up for Christmas 1964:

  • “I Feel Fine”/”She’s a Woman” came out November 27 of that year.
  • “A Hard Day’s Night”/”Things We Said Today”, July 10, 1964.
  • “Can’t Buy Me Love”/”You Can’t Do That”, March 20, 1964.

All are semi-early Beatles releases. The band was still in its early mod period, sporting what the early 60s would think of as long hair but would seem very short come St. Pepper’s full-on hippie look. They wouldn’t start experimenting with different sounds until “Rain” and Revolver in 1966.

The band was pumping out three records a year, and early on their single releases were not collected on the subsequent LPs, so there was a lot to keep up with for the early Beatles fan. Capitol Records, which distributed the band in the US, compiled the albums differently than the UK releases. With Help! in 1965 the releases started to sync up, but in 1964, if Sally had any LPs, she would have had titles like Meet the Beatles!, The Beatles’ Second Album, and Something New. A Hard Day’s Night came out with the film’s release in the late summer but had a slightly different track listing than the UK. Beatles ’65 was the most recent LP Sally could have gotten for Christmas that year, having hit the shelves on December 15.

Kier Dullea on 2001

Staff Writer Todd Levin on the End of Conan O'Brien's Tonight Show

The next afternoon we had another staff meeting, presided over by a very different Conan. Yesterday’s Conan was an immovable object. Today’s Conan looked drained. He entered the studio unceremoniously, dressed in a leather jacket and baseball hat—like someone getting ready to leave—then slumped into the guest couch and fixed his gaze on the far wall as he addressed us, never really making eye contact. It was a sight that shook your faith a little, like seeing your dad on crutches.

Doctor Who on Netflix

Netflix has four seasons of Doctor Who available on its Instant Queue streaming, except for three specials that they only have on DVD. To watch everything in the right order:

  1. Watch the first three seasons.
  2. After season three, you’ll need to watch the Christmas special “Voyage of the Damned” on DVD, then season four.
  3. After season four, watch “The Next Doctor” and “Planet of the Dead” on Instant Queue, then get the DVDs for “The Waters of Mars” and “The End of Time”.

Then, while you’re waiting for season five to come out (it’s airing now), you can watch three streaming seasons of spin-off Torchwood. The other spin-off, The Sarah Jane Adventures, isn’t available for streaming as of now.

I’m woefully late to the party on Doctor Who. It definitely has some cheesy sci-fi stuff in there that you’ll either love or have to get past, but when it’s on, it’s absolutely fantastic. I think it’s very well served by the BBC’s shorter season length. US series like Flashforward suffer from having to fill twenty-something episodes. Doctor Who, with only thirteen episodes, can have a few one-off shows and slowly build it’s season-long story without too much filler.

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That sounds awesome, and not just because Cornell’s idea of a “realistic take on British super-heroics” involves Dracula shooting vampires at England from his castle on the moon before getting into his magic space pirate ship.
A Brief History of The Knight and Squire
The new iPhone 4 can play high definition video, but with a 3.5″ screen, you probably won’t notice the difference. On the “Summary” tab in iTunes you can tell it to sync the standard definition copies of videos if you have them. Anything you buy in iTunes that’s HD comes with an SD copy, too. Click for high-res photo

The new iPhone 4 can play high definition video, but with a 3.5″ screen, you probably won’t notice the difference. On the “Summary” tab in iTunes you can tell it to sync the standard definition copies of videos if you have them. Anything you buy in iTunes that’s HD comes with an SD copy, too.

6 Things From History Everyone Pictures Incorrectly

[S]ince the Pyramids were the tombs of the pharaohs, they made sure they were the biggest, most sparkly things of all. The original outside consisted of smooth, white limestone that hid the layers of brick, giving the effect that a pyramid was one giant solid piece.

iPad and Kindle Reading Speeds

A study of people reading long-form text on tablets finds higher reading speeds than in the past, but they’re still slower than reading print.

Sometimes I think they redesign iconic characters just so, years later, you’re rereading a book and think, “oh yeah, they did that dumb thing for a while”. Morrison had to deal with electric blue Superman in the first bit of his JLA. Civil War has the Iron Spidey suit in it. Now Wonder Woman.