Toronto Meetup
September 27, 2006
Here we go again!
We have such a stellar bunch of people coming up for Call for Help next week we really thought we should do a meetup.
Tuesday, October 3, we’ll be recording Inside the Net live from the downstairs dining room at No Regrets in Liberty Village, T.O. The festivities and no-host food and drink start at 6:30p. Come by to meet:
- Amber MacArthur
- Cali Lewis and Neal Campbell of GeekBrief.tv
- Merlin Mann of 43 Folders (I think he’s coming up just to buy the new Sloan record)
- The Podcast Person of the Year (me!)
and I bet we can talk some other Call for Helpers into stopping by.
RSVP at Upcoming.org - you’ll find directions and maps there, too. See you there!
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September 21, 2006
Ad Age Interview
September 12, 2006
There’s a nice interview with me about TWiT taking advertising in this week’s Advertising Age magazine.
Thanks to the author, Abbey Klaassen
for making me sound coherent!
It’s Showtime
September 12, 2006
I’m in the front row at Yerba Buena Center to see what spectacle Apple has whipped up. (Sometimes it pays to be late. I arrived five minutes before the start and Apple PR found me a seat up front!) It’s a very full house with lots of network cameras crews and the usual giant screen. They’re playing the Bob Dylan iTunes ad and here comes Steve, dressed in his usual blue jeans. This time a gray button down shirt has replaced the black turtle neck. He seems his usual relaxed self.
- 70 percent market share, 60 million shipped. Accessories include ipod toilet paper holder. Joke?
- 70 percent of cars in US offer iPod connectvity.
- IPod shoe has sold 450.000 units in 90 days.
- Screen 60% brighter
- Battery 75% longer: 6.5 hours on the 80GB model
- New headphones … Still ear buds though - we’ll see if they sound better
- Now gapless song playback available on iPod
- Alphabetic searches - that’s a nice feature
- Games will now be sold for all 5th generation and later iPods, including Bejeweled, Cubis, Mah Jong, Mini Golf, Zuma, Tetris, Pac-Man, and Texas Hold ‘em. Support from EA and others. $4.99 each. They look (and sound) pretty good
- New lower prices; $249 for the 30GB model, $349 for 80GB
- Shipping today
- Aluminium and thinner - looks like a tiny iPod mini
- Colors include blue, pink, green, silver, and black. 24 hour battery life, gapless playback, new headphones
- Price/capacity: $149/2GB, $199/4, $249/8GB (8GB in black only)
- New smaller charger for all iPods (extra)
- 10 million Shuffles sold
- 2nd generation. It’s the picayno! About the size of a quarter. Aluminium. Clip built-in. This IS the SNL skit!
- Mini dock with USB 2
- 1GB world’s smallest MP3 player. $79. Ships in October.
- 88% market share. 1.5 billion songs sold.
- #5 music store after Walmart. Best Buy, Target, and Amazon. And on track to pass Amazon early next year.
- New views: Standard List, Album, and cover flow. Cover flow is like flipping through CDs, playlists, and videos.
- Album cover art for all albums will be available free even if you rip your own as long as you have an iTunes account.
- 45 million TV shows purchased. 220 shows available from over 40 networks. Adding NFL highlights.
- New video resolution 640 x 480 for all videos!
- Built-in iPod management including firmware updates and configuration.
- IPod will be able to move purchases to other computers authorized to same account.
- Adding movies to iTune store
- Walt Disney, Pixar, Touchstone. Miramax only
- 75 films at launch
- Released same day as DVD release
- $12.99 for pre-order and first day sale. $14.99 afterward
- $9.99 for catalog films
- All video downloads are 640×480. “Near DVD quality” You can start watching as it downloads. Same usage rights as TV. International sales next year.
- Wireless interconnect between computer and TV. Looks like a half height Mac mini. Code name iTV
- Built in power supply. WiFi. USB 2. Ethernet. HDMI. Component. Stereo analog and TOS link digital audio
- No internal storage. It’s essentially a WiFi/network interface to audio and video.
- Enhanced Front Row interface to iTunes. Podcast support. MacBreak should look very nice on this. He’s showing Rocketboom.
- Works with iTunes Macs or PCs. iPhoto on Mac.
- $299 Available Q1 2007
The Windmill
September 10, 2006
OK - you wanted another one. Here’s an amazing position from 1925. The Mexican Grandmaster Carlos Torre-Repetto is white. He’s playing one of the all time great chess players, and long time World Champion, Emmanuel Lasker. In this position Torre finds a brilliant sacrifice which leads to an attack known forever as “The Windmill.” Find the move and you’ll know why…
Teenager Spoor
September 10, 2006
Chess Training
September 9, 2006
Susan Polgar, former Women’s World Champion, recommended this book in her class on the last Geek Cruise. She oughta know. She and her two sisters are all chess Grandmasters thanks to her father’s teaching methods. He was a fairly weak player at the time, but he was able to turn them into great chess players by drilling them with thousands of chess positions like those in this book.
He believed, and an article in last month’s Scientific American confirms, that the key to expertise in any field is “effortful study,” pushing yourself to go slightly beyond your comfort zone. It’s not, as I always thought, a question of playing a lot of games. Studying the positions in a book like this is much more efficient. Experts guess that it takes 10 years of such study, and a grasp of 50,000-100,000 chess positions to make a Grandmaster. This book is a good starting point. 300 key positions. Polgar recommended going through it at least twice. I’m about a third of the way through and loving it - each position is a minature work of art.
As an added bonus, it has perhaps the most stunningly bad cover in the history of chess books.
Here’s a neat position from the book. The game is Antoshin-Rabar 1964 and white has a killer move. Can you find it? It’s quite beautiful.
Signs of Our Times
September 9, 2006
The Return of the Jumping Monkey
September 6, 2006
While Amber is gearing up for her new job at Citytv she’s going to take four weeks off from our podcast, Inside the Net. That’s the bad news. The good news is that Megan Morrone has agreed to fill in!
Many of you will remember Megan from her stint on The Screen Savers and as co-author of my 2004 Technology Almanac. She left TechTV
in 2003 to have a baby (the lovely Annabella) and around a year ago had twin boys: Huck and Milo. As you might imagine, she’s been pretty busy with the mommy duties, but she’s kept her hand in by writing for microsoft.com and her blog, Jumping Monkeys. Until now, she’s been too busy to show up on any of my podcasts (despite the fact that she lives less than a mile from the TWiT offices), but starting next week, Megan’s back baby.
She’ll start Tuesday when we interview John Buckman of Magnatune and Bookmooch on Inside the Net. And now that I’ve got her I don’t plan to let her get away. Once Amber returns to the show (if all goes well that will be October 10) I’m hoping to create a podcast just for Megan.
So welcome back yet another TechTV veteran. We’ve missed her, and we’re so glad she’s back. And Annabella, Milo, and Huck, you can have your mommy back soon. But not too soon!
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Radio Leo (press play)- TWiT 142: I Like Big Pockets
- Daily Giz Wiz 566: Magellan's Eagle Creek Travel Alarm
- Munchcast 30: Mom's Home Cookin'
- Jumping Monkeys 45: Dr. Ruthann Russo
- Windows Weekly 58: Mission Accomplished
- Leo Laporte - The Tech Guy 453
- Daily Giz Wiz 565: Snappy Video Snapshot
- Security Now 143: YubiKey - Sponsored by Astaro Corp.
- Leo Laporte - The Tech Guy 452
- Daily Giz Wiz 564: The Socket Pocket
Flickr Photos
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Swag
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