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Saw this outside my school…

Steve jobs goes onstage at exactly 10.01am PDT. He gets his “partner in crime” Steve Wozniak to stand up. He starts off with updating people about Apple retail, showing them the new Paris store and showing a badass new Apple store in China with kick ass circular glass entrance! Informing us that there are 300 Apple stores in 10 countries (11 soon with addition of spain). Says that some days over 1 million people come in! Doing one to ones, about 80000 a week.

After he finishes talking about stores, he starts talking about iOS, says how its a revolution in apps. How many iOS devices shipped since launch? 120 million. New iOS activations a day? 230,000~ (doesn’t include updates). 6.5 billion downloaded apps from appstore. 200 apps a second are being download. 25,00 iPad apps.

iOS 4.1, whats new?

• Bugs fixed (Bluetooth, 3G, etc). High Dynamic Range Photos. HD video upload via wifi. Game Center. TV Show rentals.
• HDR takes 3 photos that are high, low and normal exposure photos, combines them to create a HDR photo (which looks awesome)!
• Game Center is a api for devs and a app for users, multi-player games, challenge friends, a loner? auto-matches people! Match scores and see what people are playing! Mike something-something from Epic, comes on stage. Uses unreal engine (like gears of war). Showcases “Project Sword”, looks cool.

Steve Job says he’s got a “surprise” for us. Sneak peek of iOS 4.2. Brings everything to iPad. wireless printing.

Airplay. Stream videos, songs and photos to devices via wifi. Now showcase multitasking on iPad. Everything we’ve seen on iPhone iOS 4.

• Now move on to iPods. 275 million iPods sold. Secret to iPod’s success? Constantly upgrading. This year they’ve gone “crazy”. New redesigns to all iPods models! New iPod shuffle is smaller than 2nd gen, has buttons, voiceover and playlists, genius mixes, 15 hours of music, 5 different colours. $49 pricetag.
• iPod Nano is small, has multi-touch screen, very small, has a clip. 46% smaller, 42% lighter. Volume buttons. Voice over. Radio. Nike+. 24 hours battery life. Can over icons. Can change screen orientation. 7 colours. $149 for 8gb model, $179 for 16gb model.
• iPod Touch is the most popular iPod ever. Became #1 portable game player in the world, out sells Nintendo and Sony combined. New iPod Touch is thiner. small top and bottom. Has retina display (4x pixels, 326ppi, 24 bit colour, LED blacklight). Apple A4 Ship. 3-axis Gyro. Has front facing camera, will now have facetime (between iPhones and iPod Touches)! Back camera with HD Video. 40 hours of music playback! 8gb for  $229, 32gb for $299, 64gb for $399.
• All shipping next week! (can pre-order atm)

iTunes, downloaded 11.7 billion songs downed. 450 million tv shows download. 1oo million movies. 35 million books. 160 million accounts with credit card. iTunes 10. New logo. Ditched CD. Discovery, introduces ‘Ping’, Facebook and twitter meets iTunes, a music social network, can follow people, custom top 10s, what concerts one is going to, has a feed, Social music discovery, privacy, approved followers, circle of friends. Ping on computer and on appstore.

One more thing hobby… Apple TV, not a big hit, but users love them. Want Movies and TV on demand, want HD, lower prices, don’t want a computer on tv. Don’t want to manage storage. Don’t want to sync. Want it to be silent, cool and small. This what they’ve learned. New Apple TV is smaller. 4th size of old ATV. On back, power cord, HDMI, Audio and ethernet cable. Has wifi. Comes with remote. all HD. All rentals, no purchases. Rental price is cheap! All streaming to it. Stunning photo slideshows. $4.99 for first run HD movies, same release! 99c for HD TV shows, no commercials including ABC and Fox. Also has support for netflick subscription. YouTube and Flickr and Radio and podcasts and MobileMe. Simple UI. Has previews. All info like IMDB. Stream, via AirPlay, content from iOS device to Apple TV. Pricetag is $99

For zee movie:

01 Beck (as SEX BOB-OMB) – We Are SEX BOB-OMB
02 Plumtree - Scott Pilgrim
03 Frank Black – I Heard Ramona Sing
04 Beachwood Sparks – By Your Side
05 Black Lips – O Katrina!
06 Broken Social Scene (as Crash and the Boys) – I’m So Sad, So Very, Very Sad
07 Broken Social Scene (as Crash and the Boys) – We Hate You Please Die
08 Beck (as SEX BOB-OMB) – “Garbage Truck
09 T. Rex – Teenage Dream
10 The Bluetones - Sleazy Bed Track
11 Blood Red Shoes – It’s Getting Boring by the Sea
12 Metric – Black Sheep
13 Beck (as SEX BOB-OMB) – Threshold
14 Broken Social Scene – Anthems for a Seventeen-Year-Old Girl
15 The Rolling Stones – Under My Thumb
16 Beck – Ramona (Acoustic)
17 Beck – Ramona
18 Beck (as SEX BOB-OMB) – Summertime
19 Brian LeBarton: Threshold 8 Bit

And for zee game, you can listen and view all tracks here: http://www.spinner.com/new-releases#/9

Right, so it was my 18th yesterday. I got a whole load of cards, all funny and personalized, however they were all hallmark or similar branded. One you can look at, keep on a shelf for 2 weeks and trash (we all do it), yet one card I received really stood out to me. My friend Siobhan (http://koelphotoblog.wordpress.com/) gave me an awesome card, not just because she drove out just to give it to me even after her friends bailed, not just cause she wrote it in pirate speak (Pirate themed party), not because it woulda taken a long time to make,  but because it was just so damn cool! I mean this is the coolest, nicest card I’ve gotten.

BAM! It was only a matter of time before google stuck its hand in the phone markets and now, prepare to gawk! Google Voice is giving free calls to the USA and Canada at the moment, got relatives or friends over there? You’re sorted!

But what about everywhere else? Well you have to pay a tiny-weeny amount to call there, which varies on country and if its a mobile or landline. Heres a list of the rates: https://www.google.com/voice/rates

Now because Google loves Ireland (boy does it), here are the Irish rates:

its a mere freakin’ 2 cent to call a landline in Ireland! Even better, it seems Google give you a full free $0.10 to play with when you sign up or start using voice!

Now how do you use Google Voice and avail of this awesomeness? Hop over to gmail.com, login or sign up, once you’re logged in, on the left hand sidebar, there’ll be a section entitled “Chat”, click that mofo, a it will dropdown to reveal the voice option, you’ll have to install a plugin first and restart your browser, after that go back to the Chat option in gmail, click it again, click the Voice button and on the right hand side of the window the dial pad will pad will appear and HEY PRESTO, you’re prank calling businesses in the states for free! I tested it out and rang a GameStop in Torronto, froze and hung up when they actually picked up! So yeah it works! Also if you upgrade, you also get all neat features like sending texts or SMS’s to phones, a voicemail, a custom number so people can ring you and more!

This kind of technology is called VOIP or ‘Voice over Internet Protocol’, its for  transferring voice or audio over the internet, through a gateway and to a phone. For a long time Skype and other companies were doing this, so really its nothing new, but free calls to the USA and Canada is BIG!

Links:

• Gmail
• Google Voice
• Google Voice Rates

Ok, I mean, how is it still working?!?? My friend Kevin’s iPod touch is bing held together with duct-tape and love and its still working, have you ever seen a more destroyed device? Worse still he constantly uses regularly and just simple shrugs off the damage and says “Yeah, I can can’t see or do anything on the bottom half of the screen”.

<facepalm></facepalm>

Look how beautiful, robust, secure, portable and scalable it is.

Hey, what are you guys up to?

We are just enjoying some porn.

So it is being reported that the CAO website is down due to a “cyber attack”. That’s bull, the site is down because thousands and thousands of students are trying to get onto to see if they screwed up their future and the idiot people who run the site didn’t build the server to be able to take that many people, so it crashed. Its not a DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack people, the CAO web people didn’t think their server and hosting through. Looks like of you want your results right now, you’ll have to fork out €1.50 for a paper…

In other news newspaper sales are expected to be at an all time high today…

So I’m beginning to write this post on the bus on its way to the Glucksman gallery (http://www.glucksman.org). Its pouring rain outside and I know nothing about this this exhibit bar its name “Mixtapes” and I’m getting a free poster (I have Twitter to thank for that one). Now I’ve never properly gone to an art exhibit, well that said when I was young I think my mom took me to ones once or twice, but I used to use the exhibit pieces as climbing obstacles, which promptly ended my artistic and cultural up bringing.

So I swing upon the big glass door of the Glucksman and trek up the stairs. I meet with the dude at the desk and he tells me the sceal with it. The ‘Mixtapes’ exhibit is contemporary art which focuses on the age old relationship between music and art presenting us with a new, colourful and thought provoking angles to said relationship. Now this contemporary art is not the kind where some punter puts a chewing gum wrapper on a stand with a net over it and says it represents oppression of free speech in botts-god-knows-where! Hard to believe I’ve heard of cases like this. If art isn’t your thing, which admittedly it isn’t my thing either (bar the styling of Salvador Dali), you will still find this exhibit awesome still!

To go through the exhibit piece-by-piece and attempt to forge stereotypical stuck-up-snooty-art-critic comments doesn’t do this exhibit justice. We have to admit that words can never fully convey art and this exhibit does a pretty damn good job of proving this point. I will however say my favourite 2 pieces are the “We Built This City (Don’t You Remember?)(2010) an installation by Dennis McNulty which consists of 8 ‘big f**k off’ mirrors, structured to resemble a bass bin, one of these ‘big f**k off’ mirrors has a projection of video of 2 Dublin bands playing. I think the surrealism of this piece is what caught my attention. Second is the “Dancehall Danceoff” by Sarah Doyle, which is actually really cool and it involves YouTube, basically what this artist did was get videos of girls dancing on YouTube and watercolour painted them and created an animation of them dancing. I like it more for the concept of involving the Internet.

So really if art is your thing, if art isn’t your thing, if you are passing the Glucksman or you are, in my case anyway, avoiding Latin, check out the ‘Mixtapes’ exhibit, its free entry, but a fiver donation never went astray, plus you’ll also find out about upcoming events like gigs and exhibits.

Wild Internet user fled….