For this week’s Photoshop Contest, we asked you to place Woz in your favorite TV shows. You did not disappoint. I may never see some of these shows the same way again.
First Place — Jon Schear
Second Place — David Poller
Third Place — Steven McGann
Classic films like Reservoir Dogs, Top Gun and Wayne’s World employ slow-motion for emotional impact. Now that Casio, Samsung, JVC, LG and Ricoh cameras and phones tout slow-mo, amateurs can wield this same mighty power:
First, How Slow Motion Actually Works
Understanding the basic principle of slow motion is helpful for both properly following and bending the format’s rules, so bear with me for just a second. The film effect has its origins in overcranking—in the early days of film, camera operators literally cranked the film reel when shooting a scene. By cranking the reel faster, they saw their films projected more slowly.
Why? That’s where we get to the basic premise of slow mo. Slow motion captures a bunch of pictures very fast—at least 120 images per second, and often 300 or more. Meanwhile, video typically plays back at an eyeball-friendly 24-30 frames a second.
So when you play back those 300 fast images at the speed your eye is happy with, you have a huge excess of images. Your 300 images may have been filmed in one second of real shooting, but they will last for 10 seconds on screen—slow motion is born.
And while digital video has traditionally struggled in capturing the high frame rates necessary for true slow motion, many new cameras work just like overcranking, shooting hundreds of lower-resolution pictures per second. The tips here concern cameras and camcorders capable of high speed frame rates—not just cameras from Casio, but camcorders from Samsung and JVC, a Japan-only camera from Ricoh and LG’s Viewty cameraphone. This is not about slowing down your regular-speed footage in some kind of video editor.
1. Use Lots of Light
When you shoot slow mo, you are taking pictures quickly. And when you take pictures quickly, light has less time to create an image in your camera. Shoot in plenty of light, or you will get dark and gloomy slow-mo.
In real terms, that means that super high-speed shooting might not work indoors. On the Casio EX-F1, for instance, you can shoot 300fps indoors, and maybe 600fps if you’re near a window, but you can’t pull off its 1200fps setting without adding bright light. For the same reason, night shooting may very well be out of the question, depending on your particular rig and just what you expect from the image in terms of detail—artsy stuff may be fine, but don’t expect to film a hummingbird under the soft glow of the moon.
2. Mind Your FPS
As stated above, slow motion really doesn’t work very well on camera systems not designed for it in the first place. So if your camera only shoots 24 or 30 frames per second of video, your slow motion will be merely faked by whatever editing software you use. (It’ll suck.) This is about capturing life you normally can’t see: The flitting of a bug’s wings, the popping of a water balloon, the fleeting microexpression of joy or pain on a person’s otherwise complacent face.
Choosing the right frame rate for your subject is of vital importance. Here’s a chart with exemplary clips to get you started:
120fps: Baseline slow motion, just a quarter the speed of real life; it’s the go-to speed for sports replays
300fps: Good for narrative slow motion like walk scenes, love scenes and displays of manliness (see aforementioned Top Gun)
600fps: The beginnings of slow-mo porn, human movement becomes less narrative, more anatomical
1000-1200fps: Human subjects move too slowly for this rate, now you’re into explosion mode; 1200fps is the fastest Casio’s EX-F1 can shoot
5,000-10,000fps: Bullet-time explosions, shards of glass split and float in the air…and you can see the intricate design of lightning. Storebought cameras can’t do this—yet
3. Think Outside Stabilization
You’re always better off shooting on a tripod for optimum clarity, but if there’s one time you can really stretch your imagination with shooting video, it’s slow motion. Because you are shooting so many frames in such a limited space, you can take advantage of time stretching to make video appear more stable.
So not only can you shoot most slow-mo clips without a tripod, but you can even toss your camera in the air to try that crazy shot you wanted. It might not come out, and you might want to insure your camera first, but why not push the limits? We’re talking 300-1200 frames per second. That’s a lot of room to fudge things.
4. Compensate for Slow-Motion Side Effects
The downside to shooting in slow mo is that you almost always end up with more footage than you need. Remember, six seconds of shooting produces one minute of video at 300fps, two minutes at 600fps. Some cameras let you trim your clip right there on the spot, and you should take advantage of it, as it frees up wasted memory, too.
Another issue is aspect ratio. As the frame rates go up on the Casio EX-F1, they get longer, slimmer and lower in resolution. At 1200fps, you get strips of video 336×96. Our friend Robert Woodhead made up for this in his Mentos and Diet Coke video by stitching four vertically oriented videos together in Final Cut.
The final problem with slow mo is sound, as in, there is none. That’s the reason you often hear music playing over clips. It’s not necessary to add music, though clearly Tarantino enjoyed that part.
Still, the ultimate reality about slow-motion shooting is that it’s surprisingly simple with today’s equipment—not necessarily any more difficult than normal video if you are shooting with enough light. Until this meme is done (and in our book, it most certainly is not), go out there and shoot with confidence. It’s an interesting artistic medium that’s just become democratized to the public, so let the whoring commence.
Today’s Slow-Motion Cameras, Camcorders and Cameraphones
• Casio Exilim EX-F1
• Casio Exilim EX-FH20
• Casio Exilim FC-100 and FS-10
• JVC Everio X
• Samsung HMX20
• Ricoh CX1
• LG Viewty
If you liked these camera tips, check out our guide for getting started with a digital camera.
If you want to install cool apps on your iPhone or iPod Touch for free, easily, breaking Apple-imposed limitations without breaking your warranty or Applethingie, here is the how-to guide for Mac and Windows users.
What is a jailbreak?
Jailbreaking is the process required to install applications in your iPhone or iPod touch. It is a very easy procedure. It’s also safe: There are no risks in this operation*, as you can easily use iTunes to restore your iPhone or iPod touch to the default factory settings. When you do that, the iPhone will be like new.
Why jailbreak your iPhone or iPod touch from Apple’s iron fist?
You should jailbreak your iPhone or iPod if you want to install really cool and useful applications that are not in the iTunes App Store. Many of these apps are a complete must for any iPhone user but are not allowed by Apple in their iTunes App Store.
This is what you can do with a phone that has been jailbroken:
• Use your iPhone as a 3G modem with your laptop.
• Record video using Cycorder.
• Unlock your iPhone installing a simple program, so you can use a pre-paid card when you go out on vacation instead of paying outrageous roaming charges.
• Follow speech turn-by-turn directions in a GPS program.
• Copy and paste (yes, copy and paste).
• Play Nintendo Entertainment System games and other emulated classic cames (like Monkey Island!)
In other words: Do it.
*WARNING* Of course, the usual do this at your own risk and we are not responsible caveats still apply, but this process is really fool proof thanks to Apple’s iTunes factory reset. If you are looking to unlock your iPhone now or in the future, DON’T USE THESE INSTRUCTIONS or you won’t be able to unlock it. You will need a different process, which we will explain in another How To.
Opening the backdoor (Mac Users only)
The first thing you need to do to install free apps in your iPhone or iPod is putting it into DFU mode, or Device Firmware Update mode. Don’t worry, this isn’t anything weird: It’s what your device goes through every time you update the operating system in it. With this step, you will be making the iPhone go into this state.
This is the only long part of this tutorial because—since the 10.5.6 update—Apple has made it difficult to easily connect your Mac to a manually DFU’ed iPhone or iPod. This can be solved by replacing some USB drivers from a previous version of Mac OS X. If you have 10.5.6 installed, follow these instructions:
Step 1. To do this, you need to get yourself a free Apple Developer Connection account. Since you are using iTunes with your device, you are already almost there: Just log in with your Apple ID from here. The form will ask you to answer a couple of questions (just answer whatever you want), and you’ll be done as soon as you click the Accept button.
Step 2. Now you need to download and install the drivers. Go to this page and look for this file:
IOUSBFamily-315.4-log.dmg” for Mac OS X10.5.5 Build 9F33
Once it’s downloaded, disconnect ALL USB peripherals except for your Apple keyboard and Apple mouse and install the package included in the disk image.
Once you restart after the installation, you will be ready to run QuickPwn, the program that will allow you to install the applications.
Important: Once you complete the jailbreaking process, you have to restore the previous USB drivers. Go to to this page and download IOUSBFamily-327.4.0-log.dmg” for Mac OS X 10.5.6 Build 9G55, then repeat the same operation. Once you restart, Mac OS X 10.5.6 will be restored to its original state.
Freeing your iPhone or iPod touch (all users)
Here’s the easiest part: Running QuickPwn. QuickPwn is a program that will easily “jailbreak” your iPhone or iPod touch. Jailbreak, as the name says, just means breaking Apple’s limitations on accessing your device, allowing you put anything you want in it. This means installing any application you want, and not only the ones that Apple allows you to install.
Step 1. Download QuickPwn for Mac OS X or Windows from any of the following links:
Windows
• QuickPwn 2.2.5 for Windows: Get the official release via Torrent here.
Unofficial mirrors
• http://miphone.ca/iphone-dev/QuickPwn225-2.zip
• http://foskarulla.com/QuickPwn-225-2.zip
• http://downloads2.touch-mania.com/QuickPwn-225-2.zip
• http://www.applei.ph/devteam/QuickPwn-225-2.zip
• http://phonenews.com/phones/gsm/apple/QuickPwn225-2.zip
• http://rabstalk.bplaced.net/mirrors/QuickPwn-225-2.zip
• http://www.evil-crew.de/QuickPwn-225-2.zip
• http://daniel14.com/QuickPwn-225-2.zip
Mac OS X
• QuickPwn 2.2.5: Get the official release via Torrent here.
Unofficial mirrors
• http://iphone-dev.fgv6.net/QuickPwn_2.2.5.dmg
• http://iphone.schwarzmetall.cn/QuickPwn_2.2.5.dmg
• http://rabstalk.bplaced.net/mirrors/QuickPwn_2.2.5.dmg
• http://jmcoon.net/QuickPwn_2.2.5.dmg
• http://www.iphone-storage.de/QuickPwn_2.2.5.dmg
• http://downloads2.ipod.backshot.eu/QuickPwn_2.2.5.dmg
• http://miphone.ca/iphone-dev/QuickPwn_2.2.5.dmg
Step 2. Run QuickPwn and pick the kind of device you have: iPhone, iPhone 3G, or iPod Touch.
Step 3. Follow the instructions on the screen. QuickPwn is completely automated:
• Firstly, it will download all the necessary components from Apple on its own.
• Then the software will build a custom iPhone operating system, which includes Installer and Cydia, the two programs that will allow you to install the iPhone applications outside of the iTunes Apps Store microsystem.
• When QuickPwn asks you to enter your system password, do it. It’s not malicious. It just needs this to work.
• Finally, follow the precisely timed instructions on the screen to put your device on DFU (Device Firmware Update) mode. QuickPwn will do the rest.
If something doesn’t work, don’t worry. Start the process again. If your device gets a bit nutty, restore it to default factory settings using iTunes, and you will be back to square one, no harm done.
Step 4. Be patient as your iPhone restarts. Once it’s done, you are done too. It’s fun time.
Installing the applications
This is where the fun starts. You will notice two new icons in your iPhone or iPod touch’s springboard: One says “Installer” and the other says “Cydia”. These are the two competing systems for installation of software. It doesn’t really matter what you use to install your software. Most applications can be installed from both—there are exceptions, like xGPS, which can only be installed on Cydia—and both allow you to browse and install software from a a variety of sources.
• Browsing the catalogs. Whatever system you choose, installing applications is as easy as going through the available catalogs and picking the application you want.
• Manually adding applications. There will be times in which you will discover applications on the web which are not in the default catalogs in Cydia or Installer. Fortunately, you can add these by just entering the URL provided by the developer in the web page, a process that is referred to as “Adding a source”. Here’s how to do it:
In Cydia
• Click on “Manage.”
• Click on “Sources.”
• Click on “Edit” and then “Add.”
• Enter the address in the dialog field.
• Click on “Add source.”
In Installer
• Click on “Sources.”
• Click on “Edit” and then “Add.”
• Enter the address in the field.
• Click “Done” and get back to sources by clicking on “Sources.”
And that’s it. Now you can install any application you want using either program. Have fun!
Digital cameras do more stuff than ever—detect smiles, track specific people, shoot HD video—but while some are adding dials and buttons to manage feature bloat, others are shedding buttons like dead, obsolete skin.
Here’s a sampling of user interfaces across compact cameras from every major digital camera maker: Canon, Nikon, Sony, Panasonic, Casio, Olympus and Fujifilm. User interfaces matter in these cameras more than ever because they’re increasingly the major way you drill down to change settings or switch modes—rather than manually cranking a dial, like on a pro DSLR. Some are pretty good (Canon, Samsung) while some are pretty bad (Casio).
The better ones tend to use a list or grid style, where everything is clearly laid out and easy to access, and more UIs seem to be trending toward the branching list model—when you highlight something, you can see its parameters underneath it. Fonts are rough on some but clearly polished on others. This is a make-or-break issue, since quick visibility is key when you shift from a button UI, or a visual one that only relies on icons.
Canon actually now has two sets of user interfaces: The old one you’re used to if you’ve used Canon lately, and a totally new one that they’re rolling out on two of their new cameras. It’s slicker, with pop out animations and a more modern font, but I think a bit more confusing since it doesn’t show you everything at once. It uses a list style for displaying settings. Once you get the hang of it, though, it’s a solid UI.
Nikon has a few different UIs, but the style isn’t even consistent within one camera. Oddly, its touchscreen camera shares its ugly UI with some of their other cameras, with few, if any tweaks to make it touch-friendly. It’s only Nikon’s second-gen touch camera, but its meh UI stands in contrast to the pretty capable one on their DSLRs.
Sony, too, uses the same UI on their touchscreens as they do on their non-touchscreen cameras. It works about as well in touch as it does on non-touch cameras—which is better than Nikon’s I feel, since it uses a cross bar type of GUI that Sony’s good at. Maybe slightly bigger buttons would help. Overall, Sony’s is one of the nicer camera UIs—not terribly confusing.
Too much stuff happens on the back of their cameras, but Panasonic’s touch UI seems ‘specially designed for fingers, with big, finger-friendly options. (I didn’t notice it on their other cams, so I think it was just for the touch FX580, but I could be wrong.) Their standard non-touch UI isn’t too bad—I’d put it in the middle of the pack.
Olympus goes with a unique icon style, but it’s pretty confusing in terms of trying to get to stuff quickly or navigate backwards and forwards, since you don’t know what becomes before or after something in the hierarchy, conceptually speaking. That said, it looks better than the messy menu on the back of their latest DSLR.
Casio has the worst UI out of any camera I checked out. It’s cluttered, tiny, ugly and every other sin in the book.
Basic, boring, not particularly helpful.
I mentioned how much I liked Samsung’s list UI on the TL320 earlier. It’s straightforward, easy to navigate and looks pretty good. When you highlight something, its sub-settings pop up as a list on the right, so you know what you’ll be adjusting when you drill down a level. Their other UI isn’t quite as good, but it’s also fairly straightforward, if slightly more cluttered.
Here are all the touch UIs together. You’d think Panasonic’s was the best, except it’s wildly inconsistent about when you can touch a menu item and when you can’t. So Sony wins by a nose. Weird, Sony winning a UI battle, I know. Nikon’s touch interface is just too grotesque to be considered.
Camera UIs can definitely get better, and really need to, because it’s clear that the feature-bloat train isn’t going to slow down anytime soon. But it’s a tricky balance: How do you simplify a user interface for quick, easy access to functions while containing the smorgasbord of new features crammed into every generation of cameras? Can you even make a truly usable touch camera? Uneasy questions without easy answers.
PMA is an annual show where we get to see tomorrow’s digital cameras—the ones that’ll be populating pockets and purses for the rest of the year.
Apple may seem different than other companies, but the recession is kicking their ass too. The move they made with the new iMac was the smartest they could make under the circumstances—it’s a great deal.
In this new iMac release, Apple didn’t invest in a radical new design. That sort of thing doesn’t go over in an economic downturn. The case is identical to all other iMacs since August 2007, down to the brushed aluminum body and the occasionally annoying high-gloss screen. What Apple did instead—something they won’t let you forget—is drop the price of the 24″ iMac from $1800 to $1500 while spiking the performance.
The baseline chip used to be a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo; now it’s a 2.66GHz, with the Nvidia GeForce 9400M integrated graphics now found in almost every other Apple product. iMacs used to come standard with 2GB of RAM, now there’s 4GB in the entry-level 24 incher that I tested, along with a 640GB 3.5″ hard drive.
The 20″ iMac is cheaper at $1200, but doesn’t carry as much value: It comes standard with only 2GB of RAM and a 320GB hard drive. You’d really need to up the RAM to 4GB, so that brings the bill to $1300. At that point, you’re just $75 away from doubling the internal hard-drive capacity. Now, at $1375, you’re a stone’s throw from the other system, the $1500 iMac with its noticeably larger screen—a screen that, mind you, Apple asks $900 for when sold a la carte. (I reviewed with the iMac side-by-side with the 24″ Cinema Display; they’re essentially identical even though iMac is CCFL while the Cinema Display is LED.)
The $1500 model really sits in the sweet spot. Stepping up beyond that may not make much sense either. Apple charges $1000-a thousand dollars!—to swap 4GB of RAM for 8GB. The good news there is that there’s an easy-access RAM-swap hatch, so Apple is almost encouraging you not to buy the extra RAM now, but to upgrade on the open market later when prices drop to sane levels. You can swing a 1TB hard drive for $100 more. However, if you save the $100, you keep the 640GB internal, and have the money for most of a 1TB external too.
People who are serious about gaming or video work do have higher-end iMac choices. There’s a 2.93GHz system for $1800, and you can jump to 3.06GHz for $150 more than that. At those levels, you also get dedicated graphics processors: There’s the basic Nvidia GeForce GT 120 256MB, then the $150-more GeForce GT 130 with 512MB. Another $50 on top of that gets you the ATI Radeon HD 4850 with 512MB. Those choices are good if you know what you’re looking for because, as the good people of iFixit found out, the iMac is not built for the average user to upgrade anything but RAM. Still, for most people—for most uses including anything less than serious gaming—it doesn’t make sense to buy above the $1500 2.66MHz iMac, especially given the performance I’ve seen.
And what have I seen? Well, you can see from these benchmark charts (which I also ran in the Mac Mini review) that the new iMac stays on top the whole time, through batteries of tests, when compared to both the Mac Mini and the far more expensive MacBook Pro (using the same graphics chipset):
Xbench test results
Geekbench test results
In real world testing, I made further discoveries of the iMac’s pre-eminence among its Mac peers. Ripping a 26-track CD in iTunes took just 3 minutes and 50 seconds on the iMac, while it took nearly 10 minutes (OK, 9:45) on the Mini with 2GB of RAM.
Playing Quake 4 with framerate counter turned on also revealed hidden power. While the Mac Mini kept up with the action and detail by dropping frames—45fps average, down to 20fps during heavy fighting—the iMac mostly maintained a smooth 60fps, dipping into the 50s when things got rough.
No matter what your level of PC knowledge is, you realize that there are faster, beefier desktop systems. Apple itself has the $2500-and-up Mac Pro (with similar graphics card options and much more serious core processors), and if you really know what you’re doing, you can build or customize your own system anyway. In the Windows world, the options are almost limitless. Because of all of those other options, the number of people who will be ordering up an iMac for over $1800 will probably be small.
It also makes buying a Mini—and the necessary peripherals—less justifiable. The message, heard loud and clear in this time of financial strife, is that $1500 will get you a system that would have cost well over $2000 not long ago, and that spending less than that will mean compromises that might not hold you over for long enough. I know some of you think $1500 is too much money for a computer, and I can respect that. But for people with the right kind of budget, the new entry-level 24″ iMac is a smart buy. [Product Page]
In Summary
Low-end specifications have been notably boosted
Price has decreased—$300 per configuration—in spite of performance bumps
Very difficult to upgrade by hand, except for adding RAM
The included keyboard is trimmed down to its barest key set, but you can ask for one with a number pad at no extra cost
$1500 for the 24″ might still be considered pricey by some potential buyers, and the $1200 model doesn’t present as much value
Screen glare can be annoying, and the screen and back are easily smudged (see gallery)
Whether you have an iThing or not, you might use iTunes to manage music, listen to internet radio and podcasts, and buy music and video? If you do, here’s how to get it working—your way.
There was a time in the distant past when iTunes was a nice basic music manager for devices made by Creative and others, when DRM-laced music and video was just a dream in some lawyer’s eye. Now, after the explosion of iPhones and iPods and the proliferation of legal media downloading, iTunes has become a necessary choice for music and video organizing. But as much as the player has improved since 2001, it’s still annoyingly limited, throwing up barriers for enthusiasts and casual users alike. Lucky for us (and despite Apple’s lack of cooperation), plenty of hacks, tweaks and add-ons can help fill the gaps—for both Mac OS and Windows. Here are some of the best:
Sync With Whatever the Hell You Want
iTunes nowadays will only directly sync with Apple products, but we’re a gadget site, so we sought out a few apps to make syncing your iTunes library with other devices as painless as possible:
• iTunes Sync (Win): This tidy little app will sync your library with just about anything that Windows recognizes as a removable disk. The super-long supported device list only scratches the surface, but includes a lot of BlackBerry and Symbian phones—again, anything that your PC assigns a drive letter should work just fine.
• iTunes Agent: Almost the same as iTunes Sync. If that app fails you, you might have better luck with this.
• BlackBerry Media Sync (Mac/Win): Exactly what it sounds like, though Mac users will have to use a beta build.
• Pocket Tunes Sync (Win): If you can’t connect your WinMo or Palm handset to your PC as a mass storage device for some iTunes Sync or iTunes Agent love, this’ll do. Counter to the Dealzmodo Hack philosophy, though, it’s a paid app, so try the other stuff first.
Take Full Control
iTunes doesn’t provide many control options. Aside from the main window, you can manage iTunes from its compact mode, or in Windows, shunt the buttons to your Start Bar. That’s it! Unless you install these:
• You Control: Tunes (Mac): Places extremely comprehensive controls in your Menu Bar. It also recognizes keyboard shortcuts, which some people go inexplicably apeshit over, and can display pretty little toaster notifications.
• iTunes Remote Control (Mac): A simple app that controls iTunes over your network. Perfect if you use iTunes as a media server.
• FoxyTunes (Mac/Win/Lin): A Firefox extension that places buttons in your browser window, where your mouse probably spends most of its time anyway.
• Remote for iPhone/iPod Touch/Android: Your iPod, iPhone or G1 is now a fantastic iTunes remote. Congratulations.
Really, Truly Share Your Music
iTunes’ sharing abilities, which have been eroding since the day they were first introduced, are now officially lame. Third parties, that’s your cue:
• Simplify Media (Mac/Win/Lin): It’s hard to overstate how useful this is. Simplify Media shares your library so that you can access your music remotely, via iTunes or their fantastic iPhone client. You can also access friends’ libraries directly through iTunes, as if they were connected to your LAN. Downloading isn’t enabled, but Simplify more than makes up for that with dead-easy setup and reliable streaming.
• Mojo (Mac/Win): Simplify Media’s sketchy, somewhat unreliable cousin, Mojo lets you download as well as listen to other users’ music. My experience with the app has been a mixed, but when it works, it works well.
• LogMeIn Hamachi (Win, with Mac/Lin console options available for advanced users): Not the most obvious way to share iTunes libraries, but a surprisingly elegant one. Hamachi is a zero-config VPN service that can connect you to another computer over the internet as if it were on your home network. That means file sharing, LAN gaming and—of course—iTunes streaming, all working seamlessly.
Install Scripts, You Nerd
You can get a lot out of iTunes with a little AppleScript, and there might be something in this for you Windows nerds, too.
• Doug, of DougScripts.com, is the preeminent master of AppleScript arts, and he’s compiled 400+ scripts to manage your music and album art, download artist info or lyrics, or control pretty much anything else the iTunes touches—perfect for Foobar-loving, OCD-having power users. And don’t be off put by the word “script,” as Doug packages them with a neat little installer. Lifehacker compiled some of their favorites a while back, but it’s worth exploring the site on your own.
• AppleScript won’t do much good for Windows users. For you, the best options are Teridon’s iTunes Scripts. These are Perl scripts or small .exe files (recommended) that mimic some of Doug’s best: Dupe deletion, advanced artwork management and sophisticated playlisting to name a few.
Miscellaneous Add-ons
There are plenty of useful hacks and add-ons that don’t fit into the above categories. I can’t stress enough how useful it would be to look at Lifehacker’s fantastic list from a while back, but here are a few of my favorites, too:
• iTunes Folder Watch (Win): Monitors your music folders, automatically adding new files to iTunes.
• Last.fm/AudioScrobbler (Mac/Win/Lin): Integrates iTunes with the fantastic Last.fm social network, with a plugin to upload your listening stats. The standalone app plays nicely with iTunes as well, letting you rate and tag songs as they play.
• Dupin (Mac): A simple app for deleting library duplicates.
• CD Art Display (Win): Presents Now Playing info and cover art however your please. Lots of skins are available, it that’s your kind of thing.
• DockArt (Mac): Simple, but perfect, DockArt replaces the iTunes icon with album art.
If you’re feeling adventurous, test DVD Jon’s odd new media manager, doubleTwist. It’s not ready to replace iTunes yet, but it is, as Adrian put it, “extremely promising.”
Dealzmodo Hacks are intended to help you sustain your crippling gadget addiction through tighter times. If you come across any on your own that are particularly useful, send it to our tips line (Subject: Dealzmodo Hack). Check back every other Thursday for free DIY tricks to breathe new life into hardware that you already own.
I just bombarded Futurama’s co-creator David X. Cohen with some very important questions, including what he would name his Roomba, why he’s not afraid of robots and what Futurama’s chances are for renewal. (Spoiler: 50/50.)
Mouth: dry. Stomach: queasy. Head: racing. Not only is David X. Cohen the co-creator of one of my favorite shows of all time, he’s a fellow Berkeley computer science alum, fellow nerd, and a tremendously funny guy. He also holds the dream job—comedy writer and creator of a successful Sci Fi TV show. After fully preparing myself by watching the latest Futurama movie—Into the Wild Green Yonder—I had hours worth of questions for the man, but he only had 30 minutes.
I had to get the most important question on everyone’s minds out of the way: Will Futurama be coming back to Fox for a 6th season? Although Fox has indeed been making noises about the show’s return, Cohen said DVD sales of the fourth movie may be a deciding factor in whether or not the project would be profitable. Basically, we need to go out and buy the DVD and Blu-ray if we want to bring Futurama back. Cohen also revealed that although there is a fifty-fifty chance of the show returning, he has yet to hear more concrete details about it from Fox—according to him, though, “No news is good news.”
But how is the movie? In a word, good. In two words, very good. Into the Wild Green Yonder feels as if the Futurama writers used the first three movies as practice for getting back into the groove of writing Futurama episodes and was a final coda to the series. That’s not to say that the first three movies were bad—they were just different.
If the Bender-focused, first half hour of the movie were its own episode, it would solidly land in any “top ten funniest Futurama episodes of all times” list, hands down. However, because the next 58 minutes covered some very familiar, classic Futurama-esque territory, it made Into the Green Yonder feel like the one movie—out of the four—that connected the most with the series. But why this movie, why now?
Bringing this movie back to the feel of the series, as Cohen revealed, was somewhat intentional. For each one of the Futurama movies, the writers decided that they would cover one major area of Sci Fi. The latest one, like the series itself, is more of a large space opera that comfortably cradles you back into the company of the Futurama characters you grew to love. Cohen also pointed out that a scene in the newest movie—the one where Leela is giving out space coordinates—is probably one of the “most hardcore things they’ve done” in terms of showing respect for actual science.
It’s these science fans as well as the more hardcore viewers that would have noticed when Futurama’s writers give shout outs to real-world physics in their jokes—such as when the Professor invoked the observer effect after a horse race. This ability to mix humor with scientific intelligence is one of the greatest benefits of having so many smart writers on staff. The other benefit? The ability to actually have an interesting vision of the future.
And it’s this future that Fry’s trying to save once again. This could be why the Green Yonder felt like it was slightly retreading old territory. If you’ve seen some of Fry’s Nibblonian episodes, I’m sure you’re familiar with the basic premise—we get it: Fry’s special and he’s the only one who can save the universe. But that’s not to say there weren’t some great moments to be had during these 88 minutes. This is more akin to strolling down a familiar street you haven’t seen in years, examining which stores have changed and which haven’t, and reveling in the fact that you’re lucky enough to be back once more.
As the series draws to a (temporary) close, we wonder if we’ve learned the entirety of Fry’s origin story and how he came to be in the year 3000. Not to worry, Cohen assures that he is not finished with that tale quite yet. When asked how much of it was left—after the Nibblonian saga was finished and the “Lars” adventure in the first DVD movie—he responded that there is “one sentence,” uttered in the series that was left unaddressed. But it’s up to superfans to figure out which sentence, not to mention which episode, he is referring to.
Because David X. Cohen helped create the entire world and backstory of Futurama, he’s given a lot of thought to the future. Our future. Because he didn’t want to go to extremes and create either a utopia or a dystopia, Futurama’s universe is only about 50% realistic, according to Cohen. It does, however, borrow some ideas from our own world for both comedic and dramatic effect.
So what, if anything, in our real world future is David X. Cohen most afraid of? It isn’t robots, surprisingly enough. It’s stuff like nuclear bombs. Wars. And technology that kills people, fast. Things that—when taking the fact that Cohen grew up in the cold war and studied physics at Harvard into account—makes a lot of sense. But robots? Nope.
You would think that because Cohen is such a fan of robots, it would make sense that he’d own a Roomba. But he doesn’t. He laughs that Matt Groening gives him shit for this fact (if anyone should have a Roomba, it would be Cohen).
Is there any Futurama left to tell? Cohen thinks so. Besides further expanding on Fry’s origin story, he’s got plans to make the Planet Express crew exhibits in an alien zoo (among other things). However, beyond little ideas here and there, what’s currently occupying Cohen’s mind is how to escape from the crazy corner they’ve painted themselves into at the end of Green Yonder. Given Fox’s recent interest in bringing back the show for another season on television (50/50 chance!), it’s one mess Cohen will likely have to bend his way out of.
As for the Roomba, if Cohen ever were to get one, he’d name it Browser.
The Mac Mini is the greatest Mac that never was, always just a little too expensive and/or a little too underfeatured to be perfect. This time it’s closer than ever to perfection—but still falls short.
Sure, a $500 price tag would be great. But if we can’t get that, can’t we at least get an HDMI output? Dell, Acer and others now sell teeny desktops with HDMI outputs—some even have Blu-ray players. It’s pretty much the right thing to do at this time, but Apple’s not doing it. That’s not surprising: Apple is slower to adopt popular PC standards such as USB 2.0, the CD burner, and that Blu-ray drive. And the company itself is adamant that the Mini is seen as a desktop machine, not an entertainment PC. Some people believe Apple keeps HDMI out of the Mini to protect the HDMI-laden Apple TV. If true, it’s sad, because Apple TV just isn’t good enough to protect with the life of another product.
We can all agree that it’s nice to have a reasonably affordable Mac out there in the universe, and most of us can agree with Apple’s decision not to redesign the outer shell of the thing—it’s still attractively simple. But I want a Mac Mini in my living room, and I want it connected to a 50″ flat panel TV. With one cable. Why is that wrong?
The good news is, the new Mac Mini is a worthy little beast. In spite of its seemingly wimpy 2.0GHz dual-core processor, it keeps up with most of the basic stuff you can throw at it. The internal redesign of the Mac Mini is really about coupling that Core 2 Duo with Nvidia integrated graphics, and I have to say, it seems like that worked out nicely. It’s the same GeForce 9400M chipset we see in the MacBook, the MacBook Pro and, not coincidentally, the new iMac, and when it comes to rendering 1080p movies and playing a little Quake 4 on a 24″ monitor, it gets the job done.
It gets the job done when there’s enough RAM, that is. That extra 1GB stick actually doubles the 9400M’s shared memory from 128MB to 256MB, and when you’re playing games, you’ll notice that in the textures and motion smoothness. It’s hard to tell from the shots below, but textures appearing in Quake 4 on the 2GB Mini were much closer to those on the new iMac, which is far more powerful with a 2.66GHz dual-core processor and 4GB of RAM.
Quake 4 Demo
Mac Mini with 1GB of RAM vs 2009 iMac
Mac Mini with 2GB of RAM vs 2009 iMac
Nobody is going to use the Mini as their primary gaming machine—as you can see in my Xbench and Geekbench testing, the two Mini configs always trailed more expensive Mac systems, and in many tests fared the same or worse than their predecessors—but between the Core 2 Duo and the 9400M graphics, it’s a solid computer.
Xbench test results
Geekbench test results
The better news is, there’s no good reason to buy the more expensive $800 one. The $600 config comes with the same processor and DVD burner. As I insinuated, you should up the RAM to 2GB for $50 extra, but even then, your total shouldn’t exceed $650. Unfortunately, judging by this teardown and a chat I had with Apple, they intentionally made it hard for people to upgrade it themselves.
At that point, all the $800 model has going for it is a 320GB hard drive, and nobody pays $150 for a paltry 160GB of bonus storage. Going from a 160GB drive to a 320GB drive is like going from 40mph to 50mph on a 65mph interstate. Go get an external drive—it just now took me four seconds to spot this 1TB Iomega Prestige external drive on Amazon for $117! That Mini only has five freakin’ USB 2.0 jacks—let’s don’t be afraid to tie up one or two.
My feelings on the Mini end somewhat mixed. It’s now powerful enough to be a nice iPod-syncable movie ripper/server with the Front Row experience I can control from the couch. I can still set this up without spraining my brain, but there would be lots of compromises.
For instance, it would either take a cheap Y-cable for analog stereo out, or a Toslink-to-mini optical cable ($2.24 at Monoprice) that could connect to a receiver for surround sound. It would also take a video adapter of some kind. Many TVs have DVI or VGA inputs, and all now have HDMI inputs, so there are plenty of adapters you can get. There’s a Mini DVI-to-HDMI adapter ($9.88 at Monoprice), or an even snazzier Mini DisplayPort-to-HDMI plug, which Monoprice will sell for $14.25 sometime around March 15.
But you see where I’m going here, right? No matter how awesome Monoprice is when it comes to cables and adapters and crap, this is all spaghetti the Mini shouldn’t need. Apple: Where’s the flippin’ HDMI? You put not one but two video outputs on this thing, and yet I still need an adapter to plug it into anything but a $900 Apple monitor. Yes, thanks for including that Mini DVI to DVI adapter in the box, but I’m pretty sure that just proves my point. [Product Page]
In Summary
It’s nice and compact, just like its externally identical predecessors
The Nvidia GeForce 9400M integrated graphics do appear to make everything faster and smoother
Very difficult to upgrade by hand, but at least there’s a cheap RAM upgrade
No HDMI means it can’t be a great home-theater PC
Needs video adapters for most monitor or TV connection
The movie may not be the comic book, but I loved Watchmen. Great eye candy, awesome soundtrack, and it’s packed with pop culture references—and some of those made me think that Ozymandias is Steve Jobs.
WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD
You can check io9’s review here
I loved it. Guilty as charged.
I just sat there in good company, devouring candy with both my eyes and mouth, and spent three hours entertained; marveling at the perfect photography, the decay of the future-retro-New York, Rorschach, every little detail from Gibbons’ art in every frame, Rorschach, the awesome music making some of the scenes flow like Eddie Blake’s whiskey-thinned blood over the sidewalk, the raw violence, the cheesy love scene in Archie, Rorschach, and even Dr. Manhattan’s schlong.
And while the movie leaves a lot out from the comic book—stop with the graphic novel nonsense, they are called comic books—it also added things that the comic book didn’t have. Things that will please the geek in you, like the continuous references to pop culture. At least, I was in awe when I saw things like Nixon and Kissinger with all the generals, planning Nuclear Holocaust in Dr. Strangelove’s War Room.
But there’s a lot more hidden in there, lurking in the shadows. Specially, in what is referred to the villian/savior of the Earth: Ozymandias.
Adrian Veidt.
The supersmart CEO of a large corporation.
Who is a vegan.
And whose computer in his minimalist office is a Mac SE.
A Mac SE running the original Macintosh Operating System in inverted video mode.
Who is a fierce negotiator and businessman.
Who wears a black turtleneck (although with an 80s suit on top.)
Someone who is described as having a unique vision of the world.
Someone obsessed with design and details.
Someone who says he wants to change that world, who is determined to make things better.
Someone who, while watching the world coming to its end, just before saving it, is watching the Apple 1984 ad in one of the multiple TV screens in Karnak, his Antarctic secret base.
I mean… hello?
I know. Maybe I’m seeing a crazy conspiracy here, like Rorschach. Rorschach, by the way, was right.
So yes, I loved Watchmen the movie. And yes, as you can see, maybe I was too entertained seeing things and remembering details. After all, I know it by heart. I know every panel and some of the dialog by heart—I bought the original issues when I was in school back in the mid-80s, and have read them every year since then, like a ritual. I read them first when I was a kid who couldn’t get into the whole mental wanking that everyone talks about, going on for pages and pages of intellectual drivel: Watchmen’s deeeeeep meaning, Watchmen’s multiple layers of vanilla frosted complications, Watchmen’s political manifestos on a stick, Watchmen this, Watchmen that. I read them a few times then and read them a few years later, when I had enough experience to actually mentally wank about the deep meaning of it all—talking with friends about the futility of life on Earth, the manipulation of the masses, evil, good, and means justifying yadda yadda yadda and blah blah blah. Who cares.
In the end, I was just entertained by a nice story like I have been with the movie. That’s what the movie is: A great story.
So while I wish they actually made it into a five hour movie instead of three, and even though the ending is changed, and all that, the basics are all there. And when you pack the essence of such huge body of work with masterful craftmanship and cinematography, some great performances—Rorschach, I love you—and pepper it with a kick ass soundtrack that spawns from Bob Dylan to Leonard Cohen to Jimi Hendrix to Nina Simone to Janis Joplin to Billie Holiday and even a kickass version of Dylan’s Desolation Row by My Chemical Romance, I’m sold.
So yeah, Watchmen is not perfect. It’s not going to change your life, as some people expect. Yes, it doesn’t have the scope of the comic books, but who cares: Watchmen is a great ride that captures the essence of Moore and Gibbons work. And for that, I enjoyed like when I was a kid, back in 1986.
This week, Apple gave us minor hardware upgrades, while a little company made a linux tablet. This might leave you wishing for an Apple tablet, but that could be a stupid thing to ask for.
I mean, really, ask yourselves this: How would you use such a thing differently than a laptop? Tablets have typically been great in note taking environments as giant, battery-constrained, heavy digital notepads in the field for pro writers and medical types or soldiers or construction workers.
But for consumers, the most obvious path is the appliance route, making it a simple web browsing machine, with some basic mail and media playback. Things netbooks and laptops can handle and have been handling. I admit, a netbook type tablet is the right form factor for enjoying media casually, away from a desk or livingroom. It fits between — actually — a TV and a Notebook, and is more portable than either. That makes it ideal for reading certain media like electronic magazines (when they’re available) and TV shows, movies, and other video clips in portable places. What does this mean?
It means that a tablet is the perfect machine…for reading websites and movies on the toilet. And yeah, um, my laptop can do that already.
Let’s talk about the UI a bit more. If the machine has a pop up keyboard, like an iPhone, you can also assume it may have a pen, like all recent tablet prototypes and models have. Either, or both.
But both of those ideas kind of suck for people raised on true keyboards.
I was raised on a QWERTY and I’ve almost failed penmanship and aced typing class. And the trend is that more people focus on typing than cursive. And as far as using the pop up keyboard occasionally, I can use these fine. Very quickly in fact. But the majority of the world hates these too and typing all day on one of these could be maddening, even at a greater size, no matter how fluent you might get. Do you place it on the table every time you type so you can use it like a full sized keyboard? Or do you hold it in two hands, like and iPhone, and try to peck away, even though reaching across the layout of the QWERTY would be much harder on a bigger device with a bigger key set? None of the typing logistics really matter if this is mostly a media consumption device. But the net appliance theory doesn’t really work for me.
The cost of such a nice screen and the surrounding hardware is going to be at, oh, I’d guess $500, if not $700 more with Apple tax. That’s too much money for a machine that can’t run all the OS X apps out there on the desktop version, too much for what’s basically a giant ipod touch. It’s also more than a regular old hackintosh’d Dell netbook.
So it has to be a laptop variant, with all the power of an full OS X laptop to make a difference to me. There are two ways this can be done. The old way is to take OS X and slap on those UI components we talked about, the pen and soft keyboard, as well as some OCR software for translating your chicken scratch into text. That’s what Microsoft did, and well, how many Tablet PC users do you know? Not many, I bet!
The new way to make a tablet? Well, I have no idea what the new tablet UI is. And neither does anyone in computing. It’s going to come down to how the UI works and I can’t even imagine what it would be like.
If Apple is going to make a tablet, they’re not going to slap on some UI extensions, they’re going to figure out a way to really use the form factor and make it a remarkable useful and significantly different device that justifies the loss of the efficient hard keyboard and cost of the touchscreen while being competitive in price somehow with the subsidized mini-tablets that fit in your pocket, the iPhones. But somehow, I doubt there’s a paradigm shift here waiting to be unlocked, because again, the tablet isn’t just an old idea, its an ancient idea.
The aspirational design for the tablet is pretty straight forward, and has been around, depending on your definition, since the 1960s or WW2 or the late 1800s, depending on which patents you look at. Or longer if you consider the stone tablet. The idea has been there, and has been flawed when translated to our digital world and weird and not much beyond basically what I called it earlier: an oversized, battery constrained, expensive digital version of a paper notebook. But, with internet video. Not so great!
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
