iPad Addons I want to see

The iPad is out. I wont repeat all its lovely features, you can always check them out at the Apple web site. I personally like it, a lot of grumbling is going on about how closed it is. Gadget geeks compare it to a laptop which it isn't and complain about its closedness and no multitasking. These critics are missing the point, the iPad is an appliance, that does all the functions it offers in an intuitive seamless simple way. When you buy a TV, you don't expect to hack it. The same applies to a washing machine, you don't want to tweak its spin cycle. The iPad will apeal to the greater non technical masses and I feel it will be a big success especially at the very reasonable price point of around $500.

There are some add ons that I would love to see on the iPad, among them are powerful but tiny speakers, the sort Bose excels at. The speakers in Apple laptops are ok, but I need a powerful bass and high decibels of sound for my music.

It would be great if my iPad can act as my master remote, I got my TV remote, receiver remote, DVD system remote, satellite receiver remote all lying next to me. I want to get rid of these and just have my iPad be my remote with a simple interface and some TV programs pulled of the web to not only select the channel I want to view but which programs I want to see.

A high powered projector would be awesome too, I can display the movies I play on the wall with the high powered speakers blasting away in 5.1 emulated surround sound.

I want a printer on the iPad. I even figured out a way of putting one on it. You place your specially treated sheet of paper on the screen, and then the screen blasts the paper with laser or ultraviolet and it imprints on the paper. Voila, instant software printer. (If anyone takes this idea and makes it a product, I want my cut)

I want a scanner on my iPad. Again the concept is simple, just place your paper on the screen and the paper is scanned in your iPad. Now how to do it is slightly tricky, but I am sure the geniuses at Apple can figure it out.

Put in a Camera for all the Internet geeks complaining and crying for one. I personally can't see myself or other taking the iPad and pointing it at something or someone to take a picture, it would look very silly, but the masses have spoken so give them a camera.

One thing I do want is the iPad to be waterproof, so I can read it while floating in my swimming pool, or in my bathtub. I also need the iPad to be buoyant, so in case I let go of it, I don't want it to sink to the bottom of the pool and have me diving for it.

Twitter is Frozen

Twitter has not been updating for the last 3 hours. It seems a lot of other users are experiencing the same. Twitter has dispatched its army of techies to fix it. More from Twitter's blog here.

My First Computer

Here is an ad for my first computer:



They say you never forget your first time, oh wait, they meant something else.

If you want to learn more about the Commodore Vic 20, check it out here.

Can Someone explain this ad for me ?

It has got Bill Gates and Jerry Seinfield meeting in a mall, after that I don't get it.

Modern Day Antiques

This weekend I was clearing up some junk treasures from one of the rooms in the house. I found a lot of things that I threw away like old CDs, VHS movies and dead computers. I also found some modern day antiques that would make any gadget junky proud to have.

Among the finds was this revolutionary Sony Mavica FD88 camera that boasted 1.3 Megapixels in picture resolution. The great thing about this camera was not the resolution but that it used floppy disks as its media to store photos. No fiddling with parallel ports or installing cards on your PC, just slide the floppy in and you can see the pictures. It was also high priced at the time. It cost me over KD 300.



Another camera that I found was the first model for the Casio Exilim, in addition to taking 1 MP pictures, it could also play MP3 files.


Front View


Back View

I also found this mirror silver Nokia Phone that was a big hit when it first came out. In addition to its small size, it had all the features of a larger Nokia phone with a fashionable mirror finish. It cost me 400 KD at the time.

Best Coffee Machine in the World

I was at a meeting held in a hotel and as part of the catering they had a Nespresso machine.

I had machine coffee before it was usually bitter and tasted like puddle water but I did not mind, as long as it had a strong caffeine kick. Nespresso is different. Nespresso comes with these small tin pouches that are colored according to the strength of the coffee you want. You insert the pouch in the slot just aboove the spout and press the button. After you press the button, the rest is magic. Neon lights flash, the machine hums, the pouch is punctured and blasted with a powerful stream of steam, and into your cup pours coffee. Even before you drink your coffee, the smell of freshly made coffee is all over the room, so strong you could taste it. Tasting the coffee, all your senses tingle. The feeling is so good, it probably is banned in a few backward countries.

Words cannot describe it, but here is a picture of this particular Nespresso machine.

iPhone 3G prices all over the world

Stolen Copied from here.

Want an iPhone 3G?

I got 5087 of them and more on the way. Check it out here.

iPod Touch Upgrade - Success and Amazement

I signed up to the iTunes store after it accepted my Kuwait credit card. Only apps are available for Kuwait currently. I managed to download 2 applications; Twitterific that allows you to tweet from your iPhone or iPod Touch, and Apple Remote which I felt was cool but did not really know how good it was.

I synced my iPod touch and then fingered around my iPod and could not find those apps installed there. I read up and found out that I needed to upgrade my iPod touch to version 2.0 of the firmware. I hit the "check for update" a million times and every time it told me the iTunes store was not available. It appears that after Apple introduced the iPhone 3G yesterday, iTunes could not handle all this traffic hitting its web servers, so I just gave up.

This morning I woke up and before anything, I turned on my comp and hit the upgrade button again. Success! This time I downloaded the new 2.0 firmware via iTunes and installed it. The whole process took just a little short of 1 hour on a 1 Mbps connection.

Twitterific was installed, and Apple Remote. I tweeted in twitter, and started Apple remote.

The Apple Remote app is mindblowingly amazing. What it does is it lists out all your iTunes library on your iPod Touch (and iPhone) and you select the song that you want. That song is played on your PC's speakers and you get to hear it. What is amazing is that as long as both your PC and iPod are both connected you can control the music played anywhere you are.

I got a nice set of speakers for my PC, but with this new capability I am going to buy a monster pair of speakers with trunk sized subwoofers so I can listen to my music anywhere in the house.

iTunes Update

After my last post and after downloading iTunes 7.7, I browsed around the iTunes store and I could not find any music or movies to download, just Applications.

iTunes Accepts Kuwaiti Visa Cards

I just read Loco's post about iTunes Speaking Arabic so I started my iTunes and entered my info including my Kuwait Gulf Bank Visa card. It refused it, saying my secuirty code was wrong, I tried again and got refused again. I reviewed my info and it turns out I entered a few numbers wrong. After fixing it, I tried again and I got an iTunes acount now.

Now I am going to max out my account with all the iTunes goodies.

PS

I tried downloading a game for my iPod Touch and it said I need iTunes 7.7, it sent me to the Apple site but the download thingie would not appear, probably because all these iPhone 3G need it and there are too many people downloading. No Worries, I googled "iTunes 7.7" and found a link on download.com here.

How to Add More Speed Dials in Opera (For Opera 9.5 or greater)

One of the coolest things about Opera is the speed dial where you are presented with a quick shortcut to your favorite destiantions every time you open a new tab or window in Opera. The Speed Dial displays a 3 x 3 mini image of your favorite web sites to allow you to quickly jump to those sites.



I always wanted to include more sites so I found this little tweak that allows you to increase the number of speed dials. like this:



You can do this as follows:

1. Find out where your Opera Directory is located on your computer by going to Help -> About Opera


2. find the Opera directory and open it.


3. Find the speeddial.ini file


4. copy the speedial.ini file to a backup file like speeddial.ini.backup (always back up any settings files just in case something might go wrong)


5. Close your opera browser (very important)


6. Open the speeddial.ini file in and text editor and add the following lines to your speeddial.ini
   
   [Size]
   Rows=4
   Columns=4
   
   save the file of course.


7. Start Opera again and you have more speed dials to add more of your favorite links there.

This hint was taken from Operawatch.com and from Remco's web page

If you want more speed and beauty from your browser, you can get Opera here:

The ABC of Technology

Here is a nice picture of the ABC of Technology today, stolen borrowed from haha.nu

Now what would the Kuwaiti one be ?

I reserve D for Don Veto - Reviews and Words of Wisdom

You can choose any other free letters. Maybe I will make a nice graphics once we complete the whole alphabet.

Long Busy Week

It has been a long busy week and I have not updated my blog as much as I would like to. I hope to get a good night sleep today and update it tommorow with some interesting posts. I bought an HTC Touch Diamond and have been trying it out for the last week. I also had a lot of interesting email conversation with my friend MQ about the Diamond versus the iPhone. I will post these emails after I edit all the typos and make it readable.

Here is a short clip of the HTC Diamond being used for sending a text message:

My Macbook Air got eGO

Earth as seen from Mars

This is how Earth looks from Mars, just a small speck of dust in a huge dark sky. I always thought we would look much bigger.



For more information, have a look at NASA's Site.

Mars Looks Like Kuwait

Kuwait



Mars



No, this is not the Kuwait desert, this is a picture of Mars recently taken by the Phoenix Mars Lander. More informtation from NASA can be found here.

That got me thinking, what is the difference between Mars and Kuwait.

Mars is mostly desert, so is Kuwait.
Men are from Mars, Kuwait has got men also.
The Mars landscape looks a lot like Kuwait, Kuwait looks like Kuwait.
Scientists suspect the possibilty of life in Mars, I am still looking for life in Kuwait.
Walking around Mars without a space suit can kill you. Walking outside in Kuwait for extended periods under the hot sun can kill you.
Mars has dust storms, Kuwait has dust storms.


Note to NASA, save yourself some money and come look at Kuwait instead of going all the way to Mars.

Intlxpatr went to Google, and all I got was this lousy postcard

Intlxpatr, our dear blogging friend, had breakfast at Google in Cupertino this morning and all I got from Google was this lousy postcard:

.

It was not a post card from Sergey saying to me, "wishing you where here", but rather it had a PIN that I needed to enter into my AdSense account to confirm my Kuwait Address.

Welll at least I was remembered. I hope.

Mac OS X Under the hood

While browsing around the Terminal on the Macbook, I "discovered" that the Mac OSX has pre-installed:

perl
Ruby
python,
Apache,
X11

stuff I thought you could only find in Unix boxes, and Linux, I knew the engine underneath was Unix, but I thought it might have been sanitized so average users would not hurt themselves or their systems. One thing that is missing is a C complier that allows you to compile open source software, but that can easily be downloaded from the Apple Developers Connection. You need to register first, and I am not sure if you need to pay or it is free.

Bluetooth Eavesdropping

Now that everyone in Kuwait is rushing to get a bluetooth headset so that they can drive and talk on their mobile while driving, here is a little hack that allows you to listen in on people talking on their mobile when using bluetooth headsets.



So be careful, don't reveal any dark sinister secrets when you talk on your bluetooth.

PS

to be fair, some Linux know how is needed, a little bit of IP background and a some knowledge of Antennas, so maybe not everyone will try that hack.