Kim Bach . Org

Slashdot | Wii Will Have an Updatable Linux OS

I think my jaw just hit the floor!!!

Hands on the Wii | CNET News.com

YUMMY YUMMY I WANT WII IN MY TUMMY!!!

I’m ordering a classset!

Yesterday I went to see the movie The Science of Sleep, directed and written by Michel Gondry, the fantastic French director, and my expectations were quite elevated!

For those who’ve never heard of Michel Gondry, just dig in your memory for the GREATEST music videos EVER made, and the top 10 will be dominated by his works.

He is best know for his works with Björk, Chemical Brothers, Foo Fighters, Kylie Minouge(!) and of course: The White Stripes.

Just one comment to the movie: “MICHEL GONDRY VOUS ETES GENIAL”. This is the greatest movie of creative vision since Brazil, I simply love it. It’s such a tribute to the creative mind and life in general – and I ended up with a tear in my eye because of the beautiful ending, that was a dream or was it?

I will go see it again and again and can’t wait until it is released on DVD.

It also made me realise how much I miss Paris, the scene where they’re dumping a TV in Canal St. Martin, my favorite spot on the planet, is priceless, and I also miss the love of my life (so far)! Now the tears are turning into a river! Quote: Once a woman has decided to dump you, she CAN’T change her mind! Unquote. I NEED TO GET OVER HER, and HER as well! Isis where are you?

10 stars out of 6 possible!

BTW! I’m in love – should I go seek out my love consultant, or maybe hire a new one (I already know who that should be!)?

Yesterday was a very special day in Copenhagen. A new bridge crossing the harbour between Kalvebod Brygge and Islands Brygge was opened, and this bridge is exclusively for pedestrians and bikes.

I have no idea how long time it has been since the last bridge crossing the harbour, so close to the city centre, was opened, but it was way too long time ago.

There are way too few bridges across the Copenhagen harbour, so having a new one is great. After the bridge was opened the rapper Per Vers took stage to give, amongst others, his interpretation of Benny Andersen’s “Verdensborger” (World citizen), the title of this post is a quote from the lyrics, it’s difficult to translate, but Dannebrog is the name of the Danish national flag, brog rhymes with “bro” which means bridge, so the literal translation is: “I’m not passionate (buring for) about Dannebrog (the Danish flag) – I’m passionate about building bridges (e.g. bridging gaps). I’m a citizen of the world (verdensborger)”. Oh well! Lost in translation! I hope it made any sense.

Anyway a great performance by Per Vers, who’s scoring a small hit with his song “Black Power”, which is a great track.

I couldn’t have put it any better! We need more mental, racial and physical bridges.

In keeping with tradition, I’m commenting on new Apple product announcements, and since Steve Jobs did a presentation yesterday, my post is overdue.

We’ve come to expect consumer product announcements from Apple in the fall, and in plenty time for the holiday season. This year was no exception.

So what did we get this time?

Minor updates to the iPod product line, and a brand new iPod shuffle, that looks really really cool, and at $79 it’s great value, and it’s now truly wearable, and sports an integrated clip. I really, really want one. I would have liked wireless (Bluetooth) or an integrated USB, eliminating the need to carry a cable, but that would have hurt estetics.

The iPod nano was also updated (or re-mastered as Apple puts it so brillantly), now looking much like the Mini. Aluminium is back in fashion with Apple, and I like it, the green nano is tempting (surprise I’m a sucker for green), now if it only came in a 8 gig version.

iTunes was given a make-over with version 7. At first I didn’t find the new look too attractive, but I guess that this a preview of what Leopard will look like, and it is actually quite attractive – it grows on me. The inclusion of “cover flow” is great, but I expect that Apple will be getting a lot of flak over the way they implemented the download of cover art, by requiring that you have an active iTunes account.

I predict that Apple will remove the requirement to register with iTunes for the cover download feature to work, quite soon, but I’m sure that Apple has increased their iTunes user base by some percentage points before then. iTunes is a Trojan, Apple knows it, and they will keep trying to leverage it, like Steve Jobs said at a presentation “we now have x millions active accounts in iTunes – and they come with credit cards!”.

The big content announcement was that you now can buy movies on iTunes, so far only in the US store, the rest of the world might follow in 2007. Apple has also increased the quality of the video you can purchase by a factor 4 to VGA quality, approaching DVD quality.

Apple is also selling games for the iPod 5th Gen, this hints that Apple is opening the iPod platform for 3rd party development, this is a very welcome development.

The big hardware news was, breaking with the tradition of not commenting on unreleased products, the announcement of a digital set-top box code-named the iTV. The iTV is a “real” digital set-top box, it looks like it’s a thin iTunes/FrontRow streaming client, think of it as “AirVideo” or “AirPort Express/Video”. Apple seems to be skipping analogue all together for their entertainment centre strategy, this makes good sense, and was somewhat what I expected, but it’s still somewhat visionary and definitely an example of different thinking, and I applaud the boldness of Apple here. I’m looking forward to more details on this cool new product.

The reason information about the iTV has been disclosed at the late prototype stage, could be in order to deter people from investing in Windows Media Centre solutions, that supports old style broadcast. No other company in the industry has the infrastructure, and deals with content providers in-place. It can only be a hit, but Apple should consider a much lower price point than $299, this is the hardware that could take iTunes to the next level, yet another Trojan from Apple.

iTV is the way TV should be, bringing you in control, but I think that the Mac mini is more for me. I like the concept of a general computer at the centre of my digital media, and the Mac mini is already up to the task. Again I’m looking forward to hearing more details. Will the iTV for instance be a gaming platform? The availability of games on iTunes hints at that. Then again: it looks as if Apple is going to use the same old dogmatic remote from the newest Macs, and that they will not be introducing a game navigation feature, like a click wheel.

The new products, and a Steve Jobs looking a little more enthusiastic than during the WWDC Keynote, made me wonder if Apple should change it’s name to Apple Consumer Corporation. Apple: I need a sub-note book with record breaking long battery life, PLEASE remain a Computer company.

Hands-on with the Sony Mylo – Engadget

Engadget has gotten their hands on a Sony mylo, and it looks quite cool.

But this feature is probably more annoying than useful…

Kirk to Enterprise, I’ve lost my rave light. Can you please beam down a Mylo? The purple-blue Wi-Fi light pulses when you’re connected to a hotspot.

However: KEWL! Where can I get one?

Microsoft’s Zune aims to be social butterfly | CNET News.com

CNET (and the rest of the web), is filled with details about Microsofts Zune soon to be released portable digital media player.

The information has been made available due to a FCC filing.

Some of the details are interesting. Here’s a quote from the CNET article.

Zune owners can act as their own DJ, sending streaming music content to up to four other devices, according to documents filed with the Federal Communications Commission . With the device’s wireless networking abilities turned on, people can send and receive photos, as well as “promotional copies of songs, albums and playlists,” according to the filing, made public Thursday.

I think this is a killer feature, and it sounds exactly like some of the ideas I’ve had previously.

But will people actually use it? Bluetooth hasn’t emerged as a social technology, in my experience very few people actually enable Bluetooth except for use with wireless headsets.

I envision that I can surf the local wireless “radios”, listening in to what people in the near proximity is listening to, without their knowledge.

Unfortunately I think that Zune will come with major security features, making it impossible to surf the airwaves freely.

I hope that the specifications for this wireless technology will be open, so that it can find it’s way into other consumer products, I’d love to be able to hook my player up to a stereo without the need for cables.

I actually expected Apple to be first to market with something like this, but when they join in, I definitely expect that they will come up with a solution, that is easier to use than anything Microsoft can come up with. Something that is as simple to use as shared music in iTunes is what I want, actually that’s exactly what I want!

BusinessWeek Online: A Quantum Leap for Cell Phones

BusinessWeek Online is reporting on new ideas in cell-phone design.

The cell-phone business is ready for some change, and it’s been a while since we had any real innovation in the field of cell-phone design. For instance my new Nokia 6070 is just a rip-off on the Sony Ericsson T and K designs, being labelled as a “timeless design” by Nokia.

The design concept shown in the picture (linked from BusinessWeek Online) is by Pilotfish and Synaptics, and it uses a gesture driven UI, eliminating the need for buttons (hmm…”able to recognise body-parts”). For more design concepts, BWO has a slide show.

To me it seems that nothing really innovating in cell-phone design has happened, since Nokia made the antenna “go poooff”.

I remember at CeBIT 2000, in the euphoria of the golden age of cell-phones and .com optimism, where Ericsson were show-casing some futuristic design concepts. I especially remember a cell phone concept, that had a folding keypad, it looked sort of like a two eliptical hinged dog-tags, that you could slide apart, that I’d buy. The only other thing I REALLY noticed at the Ericsson booth was a Japanesse guy taking LOTS of pictures.

Just about then the .com bubble burst, and the business went into serious consolidation mode, cranking out one boring design after another.

But now change is coming, cell-phones and gadgets will become fashion items, Vertu – Nokia’s luxury division, for instance, is reporting problems meeting demand for their “bling-bling” luxury phones.

Last year I also had some ideas for designs for portable digital media players, e.g. embedding them into earings, I’d also like to see a transparent design, looking much like the “iPod shuffle sports casing” (picture linked from apple.com).

I actually did an experiment, having a flash-memory chip encased into glass. Unfortunately it proved too heavy to use as an ear-ring, and the heat “fried” the electronics, but it could make a nice pendant, and I think it looked cool.

Cell-phone makers: you’re welcome to steal my ideas, “If you build it I’ll come”: (Skype-Hype and my dream device).

Photo: Sony’s Mylo | CNET News.com

Sony will begin selling a cool new gadget called the Mylo (”my life online”) in September 2006 according to CNET News.com.

The Mylo is a compact Wi-Fi enabled (802.11b) communications device with Instant Messenging (Yahoo! and Google), Web Browser, Media Player and Skype clients build right in.

You can slide the screen, to reveal a keyboard, that, thank’s to the PSP like formfactor, is quite big.

Nice concept, but I agree with the comment made on the CNET review site, that Sony should just add these features to the PSP, or at least price this gadget much lower than the suggested $350.

I really, really like the form factor of the Mylo, personally I think that the PSP is too big, but as a cell phone/PDA replacement, the Mylo is ahead of it’s time.

I find it likely that I’ll continue to carry at least three digital devices for quite some time, I’d consider replacing my cell phone with a compact combined Wi-Fi/GSM phone like the one Accton and Skype we’re talking about last year.

But for music nothing on the market beats my iPod nano, and for photography no cell phone can compete with my Canon iXUS i5.

:: macnyt :: danmark :: Sig goddag til Melinda

Melinda er en smækker CoreSolo sag, med et godt hjerte (Mac OS X).

Catwalken er den boks der nu bliver delegeret til kælderen, size does matter!