In “The Proposal,” Sandra Bullock plays a Canadian-born, bulletproof book editor who finds herself stuck in Sitka, Alaska while waiting to marry her assistant to get a green card.
After her cell phone gets stolen by an eagle, she picks up a replacement at the town general store — what could be more Alaska? — and then goes to the only Internet cafe around.
And has to answer all of her 37 urgent messages with a handful of dimes on a coin-operated modem system — via a iMac G3. This in stark contrast to the late-model iMac she had in her New York fiefdom.
It was one of the only bits in the movie that made me smile. I kind of wish I hadn’t sold mine, old as it was…
‘Tis the season: Italian magazines are chock full of ads for this sleek iPod dock and bedside lamp called “Diva.”
Designed by Dante Donegani and Giovanni Lauda for Italian firm Rotaliana, it’s an LED light and music system whose polycarbonate, anodized aluminum curves are all in the right places.
Clutter phobes will appreciate the retractable docking station and arm for the light. The docking station, suitable for iPods and iPhones, has four 6-watt speakers, plus an FM radio and USB socket if you’d rather play music from a flash drive. The whole shebang can be commanded via an infrared remote control. She comes in black, gray or white.
At €360 euro (circa $535) one would have to offer molto proof of saintly behavior to Santa for this one.
Adobe made its position on the unavailability of Flash for the iPhone clear Monday with a snippily worded announcement that points the finger squarely at Apple for any iPhone user who might end up at the ‘getflash’ web page.
But an interesting comment on the Reddit thread about the long-standing brouhaha makes it appear the Adobe folks might doth protest too much. Flash would suck the iPhone’s battery dry in less than an hour.
This is a hard one to watch: a 1984 Mac 512K meets its end in an industrial microwave oven.
Watch as it goes up in flames -- then witness the after effects of the burning on the keyboard, screen.
It’s the work of Dovetastic, aka Kenny Irwin, who has been zapping everything from 1960s telephones to gas masks in the microwave on YouTube since February 2006.
Ouch. After it comes out of the oven, hours later, it keeps sizzling!
Need a stiff drink to get that happy face in charred plastic out from under my eyelids before it haunts me forever.
Here’s what might happen if Apple invented an iPhone called the 4G Talk. Except, unlike what you would expect from Apple, it talks and doesn’t have anything nice to say.
Put your headphones on — as it taunts the poor guy trying to use it, the phone also doesn’t say stuff you’d want your co-workers to overhear.
Props to spoofsters Back of the Class for giving it an Apple-like voice.
Hat-tip to CoM reader Robot Emperor for sending it our way.
When you actually get around to printing out the photos taken on your iPhone you can slide them into this handmade frame from Italy, which can go vertical or horizontal.
Made out of wood, so no one will try to swipe your pic, thinking it’s your phone.
The art of automata is all about making beautiful mechanical objects out of wood and other materials.
When Murtaza Lakdawala discovered automata, he also got inspiration for a neat project: a hand-cranked rotating stand for his iPhone. And this is the result.
Although the $9,995 price tag was one of the reasons the computer Lisa didn’t sell well, showing some love for Lisa in T-shirt form will only set you back $32.
Often considered one of Apple’s flops, the ill-starred Lisa was the first computer on the consumer market with a graphical user interface (GUI) but despite this innovation the high cost, lack of software programs and general sluggishness led it to the computer graveyard in 1983 after two years and 100,000 units sold.
Bruce Tognazzini, the interface guru at Apple once said, “The Lisa was a great machine. We just couldn’t sell any.”
Show that you agree with this T-shirt, available on Etsy.
With over 75 gazillion apps in the iTunes App Store now having generated more than Umpteen billion downloads, it might seem a tad preposterous to try and pick the 10 with the most beautiful GUIs.
But we’ve never let being a tad preposterous stop us before and we’re not saying these are the 10 most beautiful apps in the App Store — we’re just saying these 10 are beautiful. In almost every case, too, they have other redeeming features that make them worth checking out if you don’t have them already.
And don’t forget to let us know in comments if you’ve found something useful and beautiful that we may have missed here.
Classics is the, uh, classic reader app that lets you experience some of the greatest works of literature ever produced — in a digital format that’s so natural and so obvious, it just feels right. Meticulous care has been given to the typography and illustration of works such as Alice in Wonderland, The Art of War, Paradise Lost and many more, with sensual touches like realistic 3D page flips, a satin bookmark to remember where you left off reading and a beautiful woodgrain bookcase to store your collection.
Your kids won’t remember the day you made them wear the “cheese” body suit instead of the one with the cute felt Mac on it, but if you work it out right, a happy face photo in the Mac version and a stroppy pout in the cheese may hang around long enough to traumatize them.
Imagine the fun if you have twins: you could spark lifelong arguments about which one you have favored since infancy.
Handmade felt designs on 100% cotton, available in black, white or red.
$36 for the pair on Etsy.
McDonald’s Italy just launched a new, limited-edition hamburger called the Mac. It boasts “stone baked bread, Emmental cheese, choice beef, tomato and lettuce.”
The tag line above says “Discover our new creation available from September 16.”
Don’t tell Apple, they might not like that “il Mac,” as it’s called in Italian in exactly the same way as the computer, is ready for speedy, cheap consumption.
What is it? It’s one of my all-time favourite Menu Bar apps, and was recently updated to work with Snow Leopard. I’m delighted to have just re-installed it after a spell of trying to live without it.
The app is called I Love Stars, and I prefer it over ever other iTunes helper I’ve tried. And I’ve tried quite a few.
Big thanks to raneko on Flickr for creating this delightful video reminder of what life used to be like.
Yes kids, back in the Dark Ages, before the Coming of the Internet, your mums and dads used to use computers like this. Before your cloud-based storage and your Dropbox accounts and your Evernote applications and your mythical GDrive – before all of that, we used floppy disks.
They were awful, awful things.
This video shows you why. And also demonstrates quite nicely why, on his return to Apple after the years of exile at NeXT, Steve Jobs ditched floppy drives as soon as he possibly could. The rest is history, and in some cases, rodent cages.
It’s as if a virtual curtain came down before today’s “It’s Only Rock n’ Roll” event, about which there has been much speculation about what to expect…
For those of us who aren’t in San Francisco, or maybe weren’t VIP enough to be invited, it’ll be interesting to see what appears on the Apple store after the presser…
OK, this one’s a bit niche, but some of you might find it useful. For the benefit who’d rather read than watch a video, here’s an explanation.
Many of you will already be familiar with OS X’s built-in zoom feature (which you can reach via the Mouse or Trackpad prefs in Snow Leopard). Hold down Control (by default; you can change it to Option or Command if you wish), then two-finger scroll up or down on your trackpad, or use a mouse wheel if you have one. Your display will zoom smoothly in and out.
And many of you will also have heard about the new QuickTime screencast recording feature in Snow Leopard, which offers does a fine job but lacks the bells and whistles found in full-scale screencasting apps like ScreenFlow.
Combine the two, and you have a neat way of calling out or highlighting details while using QuickTime to record a screencast.
