Hasta La Gadget!

Apple continues adding new channel partners to its Apple TV hardware, and now it’s rolling out four new ones today (via 9to5Mac), including Watch ABC for streaming local ABC affiliate content, Crackle for movies and TV, and KOR TV, a Korean language channel. There’s also Bloomberg, which is going to be streaming a live 24-hour news channel that provides content seven days a week.

This launch is just the most recent in what’s been an increasingly fast-paced rollout of new content partners on Apple’s set-top box, but it brings some interesting ingredients to the mix, including local broadcast TV streaming and a 24-hour news channel, which are key ingredients to what many users would consider basic TV service. Apple TV didn’t start off as a really viable cord-cutting alternative for people looking to ditch their cable subscriptions, but it’s been building up a piecemeal library of a la carte content that begins to become a truly worthy option.

It’s true that many of the services are still tied to cable service and TV packages, including the new Watch ABC channel and the HBO Go app that was launched previously, but it’s best to take all of these launches as baby steps in a larger plan that sees content unbundled from traditional sources. Apple’s Apple TV bet is a long play, and I think we’re only just starting to see the next curve around the bend on the long road to what will ultimately be a robust alternative to subscription-based bundled TV services.

Of course, that takes for granted these service providers can deliver content in a high-quality, reliable way. I’ve heard less than flattering things about the WSJ channel, which delivers live news content, but only during certain hours, unlike the Bloomberg effort. Still, the building blocks are falling into place, and Apple just needs to continue this rollout while avoiding a big blockade from legacy players along the way

Google has amped up Google Calendar with new time-saving tweaks, including address autocomplete, better searching to avoid missing appointments, and support for group events. The new update, which is rolling out to Google Calendar users from today, aims to streamline the process of managing an agenda, pulling in the company’s other products like Google Maps. […]

In October, a Pew Research Center report was released showing that 30-percent of American adults on Facebook get at least part of their news through the social network. That number may grow in the coming months, with Facebook announcing today that it will be showing more news links, particularly for those who are accessing the […]

Backing up your hard drive is always good advice and this story should drive the point home. Do not let this happen to you. British IT professional James Howells mined 7,500 Bitcoins back in 2009. Then he completely forgot about them.

Those Bitcoins are now worth about $7.5 million(USD). So anyway, he later threw away the hard drive where he had it all stored last summer. Ohhhh that sucks. Now they are sitting somewhere in a landfill the size of a soccer field. They are buried under about four feet of trash. There is no way he could ever hope to find the hard drive. Man, that must feel like crap.

However, Howell isn’t letting it get him down, saying that he could either laugh or cry about it. That said has created a new Bitcoin wallet asking for help if anyone feels sorry for him.

[via Mashable and Nerd Approved]

Popular Android tweak tool CyanogenMod Installer has been pulled from the Google Play store, after developers Cyanogen were warned by Google that if they didn’t yank it, the search giant would. Released earlier this month, the CyanogenMod Installer Application effectively opens up an Android device to easier installation of the CyanogenMod package itself; as we […]