New Yorican Hip Hop / Downbeat / Lo-Fi producer Tony Simon has finished his latest album: “The Music Scene”. It is gonna be released on Monday 18th, 2010 on Ninja Tune. Until then enjoy “Music Scene”.
Free album megamix available on NinjaTune.net…
» Incomplete-MP3 Store: Buy “The Music Scene” here (U.S. customers)…
» Incomplete-MP3 Store: “The Music Scene” hier kaufen (german customers)…
Telefonica (O2/MoviStar) has approved Palm’s latest update. We expect they found some bugs that are on the american 1.3.5.1. The update will be installed automatically over the air. The 15 MB update brings Tethering via Bluetooth and 3D graphics acceleration to European Palm Pre’s, thus allowing us eventually to play Doom, Quake and Need For Speed.
The update features:
We are still waiting for a full changelog from Palm for this update.
Warning
Before updating: don’t forget to use the “Emergency Patch Recovery” (EPR) tool, if you installed patches via PreWare. The EPR tool can be found in PreWare under Available Packages -> Linux Applications -> All -> Emergency Patch Recovery
Tablet PCs seem to be the next big thing. After Apple’s smartphone revolution with their iPhone, it seems the next big market revolution might be the Tablet PCs.
Steve Ballmer of Microsoft introduced one of the Tablet PCs – a prototype of the HP Slate – last week on the CES 2010. In his presentation the HP Slate is of course running Windows 7, what else, but there are rumors it might also be shipped with Google’s Android. We suppose Amazon’s Steve Bezos will not really like it, because Steve Ballmer showed the HP Slate running the PC Kindle application.
Dell seems also be ready to enter the Touch PCs’ market with the Dell Slate. Gizmodo.de got photos of a prototype of Dell’s Slate. Dell’s Slate has a 5-inch screen, most likely an OLED, a SIM slot and a 5 megapixel camera.
If Apple was a typical tech company they would also have showed something to the public on the CES, but Apple isn’t. Anyway there are enuff rumors floating around about Apple’s Touch-Mac – rumored to be named Apple iSlate. According to Reuters Apple might be launching the iSlate in Q2/2010. It is expected to have a 10 or 11-inch display and a aluminium case. TheStreet.com reports that Apple’s Slate will be shipped with a P A Semi CPU, instead of Intel based Atom CPUs. This could be also the reason, why Atom CPU has been removed from Mac OS X Snow Leopard’s latest update 10.6.2. It is widely expected that Apple will announce the iSlate on Januar 27th, 2010.
Kara Swisher of AllThingsD interviewed Mr. Podfather Prefather Jon Rubinstein of Palm at the CES. Although he seems to have been highly involved in the development of Apple’s iPhone back in the days when he was Apple’s senior vice president of hardware engineering, he said he never used an iPhone. Well… All in all he wasn’t telling too much, but when Kara asked him, if Palm will do a Tablet aswell, Rubinstein answered: “(..) we designed webOS to scale and it could be used in different form factors.”
What is Wikileaks
Wikipedia‘s definition of “Wikileaks”:
Wikileaks is a website that publishes anonymous submissions and leaks of sensitive governmental, corporate, organizational, or religious documents, while attempting to preserve the anonymity and untraceability of its contributors. Within one year of its December 2006 launch, its database had grown to more than 1.2 million documents, leading to many front-page newspaper articles and political reforms.
Achievements
Since their going public in December 2006, Wikileaks have won several significant Awars like the “New Media Award 2008” by the Economist magazine. In 2009, Wikileaks won the Amnesty International UK’s Media Award for their 2008 publication “Kenya: The Cry for Blood”.
In 2008 Wikileaks published documents of business practices of Swiss Bank Julius Baer. The documents contained allegations of illegal activities of the Bank on their Cayman Island branch. Julius Baer sued Wikileaks, and Wikileaks.org was taken offline, but remained accessable thru its various world wide mirrors. Eventually the case was dropped, after a coalition of major U.S. newspaper publishers and press organisations filed a motion protesting the censorship. As of today the documents remain available on Wikileaks mirrors.
Financial problems
While Wikipedia managed to collect 8mill US$ within the last few weeks to keep up operational, Wikileaks has major financial issues. According to their spokesman Julian Assange Wikileaks requires about 600,000US$ per year only to maintain their services.
Main Page Offline
To underline the necessity of financial help, Wikileaks has gone offline until Januar, 11th. The website currently states:
To concentrate on raising the funds necessary to keep us alive into 2010, we have reluctantly suspended all other operations, until Jan 11.
Find more information on how you can (financially) support and contribute to Wikileaks here…
I. Summary
Quite a bunch of news for the Palm community has been presented by Palm’s CEO John Podfather Prefather Rubinstein. Find the whole video presentation at the end of the summary.
II. WebOS Update 1.4
WebOS 1.4 will be released in February, 2010 (in the US at least, we Europeans are still waiting for 1.3.5). WebOS 1.4 will feature:
III. WebOS Plug In Development Kit
For developing native 3D games Palm secretely extended their development tools with a plug in kit, that allows to write code in C or C++.
IV. Native 3D Games
Moreover Palm showed they are in the know what their customers will like and how to explore more markets besides the Linux community. As of today some 3D games have been released to the U.S. American AppCatalog:
IV. Palm Pre Plus coming to Verizon
A special version of the Palm Pre is coming to Verizon Wireless, only 7 months after the initial release of the Palm Pre to the Spring network. Verizon’s Palm Pre Plus is coming with 16GB Ram, a reworked slider mechanics and a tethering plan. Verizon is said to have one of the best 3G coverage in North America. We suspect the Palm Pre Plus to be SIM locked.
V. The whole video presentation on the CES 2010
Enjoy Mr. Podfather Prefather John Rubinstein…
European customers are still waiting for webOS 1.3.5 update. The European carrier Telefonica (o2 and MoviStar) seems not to have approved it yet.
Meanwhile it seems versions 1.3.5 had issues. According to PreCentral.net, Palm Pre customers on Sprint (USA) and Bell (Canada) are able to update to version 1.3.5.1 since Januar 5th, 2010. Version 1.3.5 has been released in the US and Canada on December 29th, 2009.
Issues with homebrew apps on 1.3.5 and 1.3.5.1
It is known, that webOS 1.3.5 breaks homebrew installer PreWare. Known workaround is using WebOS Quick Install to remove and then reinstall PreWare. It should be working well again.
There are also issues with homebrew apps that don’t contain an appinfo.json file. Apps not properly prepared would not be getting moved from /var to /media/cryptofs/apps. Package Manager Service 0.9.24.3 has fixes for this problem.
And the latest 1.3.5.1 also breaks myTether. This seems not resolved yet.
Amazing news
In the meantime people from the WebOS Internal forums have discovered, that webOS 1.3.5 includes Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL). SDL allows hardware accelerated graphics and sound and is available on different platforms for free and open source. Via homebrew installer PreWare a playable alpha version of Doom using SDL has already been released.
Europeans still waiting
Although Palm is said to be unveiling something big on the CES 2010 tomorrow, we don’t expect Telefonica to approve 1.3.5 until then for Europe.
It is rumored, on the CES Verizon Wireless will be officially named the new partner for a device called Palm Pre Plus (Palm Pre 3).
Links
» PreCentral: webOS 1.3.5.1 Available for OTA Download…
» PreCentral: webOS 1.3.5.1 goes live for Pre users on Bell…
» PreCentral Forums: Status of Preware and 1.3.5…
» PreCentral Forums: Preware + mytether unavailable after 1.3.5.1…
» WebOS Internals Wiki: Doom on Palm Pre…
» Wikipedia: Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL)…
» WebOS Blog: Was kommt zur CES 2010 von Palm? (Google translated link)…
» PhoneArea: Verizon to get Palm Pre Plus…
Video
Enjoy and go buying the MP3 at Amon Tobin’s Online Store. Find his discography on Discogs.
I. Abstract
As some of us have already realized: iTunes by default does not allow adding AVI files to its library. This is very sad, but there are several solutions for this problem.
II. Converting or going Commercial?
One might be converting all files to something that QuickTime allows to play. As this is not a convenient solution for people having a lot of AVI files, we might give Aroona’s VideoDrive app a try. VideoDrive allows adding AVI files to the iTunes library with a simple click. This is nice. But it costs 15€.
III. Using a freeware Apple script
But you might also try a custom script for free. Since as long as QuickTime can play your file, iTunes is also able to do so. And you know it: QuickTime on the Mac plays AVI, XviD, DivX, x264 movie files and a whole bunch of interesting codecs just beautifully using Perian.
Anyway the solution provided here has originally been publicly released by a guy going under the nick Nevyn on the MacRumors Forums. Aroona’s VideoDrive appeared much later on the markets. By the way: Arroona’s VideoDrive also uses Apple scripts for their things… so yes, the universe is full of funny coincidences.
Nevyn’s script does a simple thing. It adds the movie-type meta-data to the AVI file. And this basically could also be done via terminal:
testuser$ SetFile -t "MooV" /path/to/movie.aviBut the nice thing is Nevyn put this idea in tiny Apple Script, that allows creating a nice Apple Script Droplet. Thus allowing us to just drop the files or folders on the Droplet and have the AVI files instantly available in iTunes’ movie library – ready for sharing on the local net via Bonjour…
As said this script has originally been released on the MacRumors Forums:
(*add movie to iTunes
The script will add OSList file-type information to a list of files. This identifies them as movie files, the files are then imported into iTunes.
TO DO:
Verification of file list passed as video files
Growl integration (if installed)
Move repeat loop into separate object script to clean-up code.
*)
--Folder Action [Attach to a folder in Finder]
on adding folder items to this_folder after receiving file_list
repeat with each_file in file_list
try
tell application "Finder" to set file type of file each_file to "MooV"
end try
end repeat
tell application "iTunes" to add file_list
end adding folder items to
--Droplet [Compile and drop items onto application]
on open file_list
repeat with each_file in file_list
try
tell application "Finder" to set file type of file each_file to "MooV"
end try
end repeat
tell application "iTunes" to add file_list
end open
Yes this is basically it. In case you are too lazy to copy and paste. You’ll find the script already put into a Droplet ready for download here. Shouts to Navyn. Nice script…
Enjoy and yes: happy new year to all of you :-)
Links
»MacRumors Forums: Add AVI to iTunes…
»Aroona.net: VideoDrive Download…
»MegaUpload: Download AVI to iTunes Droplet for free ;-)…
»Perian.org: Download Perian for QuickTime…
Inserting USB sticks to your Mac OS X based system makes Mac OS X mount the stick without assigning certain permissions like owners, or groups.
I. How things get mounted on Mac OS
The mount command on the terminal returns most likely some lines, like that:
testuser$ mount/dev/disk0s2 on / (hfs, local, journaled)
devfs on /dev (devfs, local, nobrowse)
map -hosts on /net (autofs, nosuid, automounted, nobrowse)
map auto_home on /home (autofs, automounted, nobrowse)
/dev/disk3s1 on /Volumes/CHAMBOOT (hfs, local, nodev, nosuid, journaled, noowners)
/dev/disk1s4 on /Volumes/Mac OS X Install DVD (hfs, local, nodev, nosuid, noowners)You can see quite a lot of slices (i.e. ~partitions) are mounted to that system I am running here. For instance disk1s4 is the forth slice of disk1 and it countains an image of a Mac OS X Install DVD. And you can see a CHAMBOOT named drive mounted with several options.
II. Mount Options/Permissions
Our beloved USB stick named CHAMBOOT (contains Chameleon and) is disk3s1 and is mounted to /Volumes/CHAMBOOT. Mac OS handles USB mounting for most of our every day life operations fairly reliable. But this comes at a cost, as this simplicity is achieved here by applying options like nosuid and noowners during the mount process.
For people willing to run Chameleon from a USB stick permissions are inevitable, as for instance an Extensions.mkext kextcache can only be generated with proper file permissions being set.
II. Mounting USB with permissions
This just requires some simple mount operations being performed manually on the terminal. Do the following:
testuser$ sudo -stestuser$ cdtestuser$ synctestuser$ umount -f /Volumes/CHAMBOOTtestuser$ mkdir chamboottemptestuser$ mount_hfs /dev/disk3s1 chamboottemp/testuser$ mount/dev/disk0s2 on / (hfs, local, journaled)
devfs on /dev (devfs, local, nobrowse)
map -hosts on /net (autofs, nosuid, automounted, nobrowse)
map auto_home on /home (autofs, automounted, nobrowse)
/dev/disk3s1 on /Users/admin/chamboottemp (hfs, local, journaled)
/dev/disk1s4 on /Volumes/Mac OS X Install DVD (hfs, local, nodev, nosuid, noowners)You can see the USB stick is now mounted without “extra” options.Now you can apply changes to the USB stick’s files in the proper manner (like copying files, repairing permissions and creating a kextcache). After having performed all the changes, you can correctly unmount. Read here:
III. Manually Unmounting
testuser$ cdtestuser$ umount -f chamboottemptestuser$ rmdir chamboottempIV. Links
» Mac OS X Reference Library: Man Page for “sync”…
» Mac OS X Reference Library: Man Page for “mount”…
» AsereBln.BlogSpot.com: Some terminal work…
Anti-Pop Consortium perform “Volcano” from their latest album “Fluorescent Black”. Performance has been recorded live on KEXP on November 19th, 2009. Enjoy…
» Anti-Pop Consortium on Bigdada.com…
» Pre-Listen complete album on BigDada.com…
» KEXP Radio 128k mp3 live stream…
» KEXP Radio website…