Kyle Wiens, the CEO of iFixit, is launching an online community focused on fixing high-tech products rather than throwing them away.
Best known for its awesome teardowns, the Mac-oriented repair company iFixit is launching a online community devoted to fixing high-tech products, rather than tossing them away.
“The world has a problem with rapidly consuming devices and tossing them aside, ignoring long-term environmental impact,” said iFixit CEO Kyle Wiens on the company’s blog. “With your help, we are going to change that. I’m confident that we can change our culture of ephemeral ownership.”
Currently in private beta, iFixit Answers looks like a cross between a forum and a wiki. In a blog post announcing the launch, Wiens outlines four points that should be of interest to all publishers focused on building productive online communities:
It’s important that posts get more useful over time. It’s not uncommon for a traditional repair forum response to become the canonical source for an answer to a problem, only to get outdated and stagnant as technology changes.
It’s important that we recognize expertise. It matters if the author of an answer is a professional technician, or has helped 200 people fix their problems.
It’s important to make helping people fun. There’s a rush that comes from helping someone solve a tricky problem, being recognized by people for the research you put into a question before asking it, or testing your hardware diagnosis mettle against others.
And most important, we need to close the feedback loop between the people answering questions and those asking them. Repairing things is uniquely tangible — when you use a solution proposed by someone, you know for a fact whether or not it worked. Finding out that the answer you gave someone actually fixed their problem is one of the greatest feelings in the world.
It’ll be very interesting how iFixit makes good on these points. The future on online publishing is nurturing community, and Wiens has nailed some of the key points. We’ll be keeping a close on the project.
It’s been said countless times: one indicator of Apple’s superiority over Microsoft and Dell (and other major computer and electronics manufacturers that are — for the most part — associated with Windows) is the fact that Apple inspires creativity in the general populace on a scale that dwarfs the influence of any other computer-oriented company you’d care to name.
Some evidence of this can be found in the following gallery of 10 simply awesome wallpapers themed around nothing more complicated than the Apple logo. Perhaps you know others in this specific genre that belong in this class — we invite you to let us know about it in comments below.
And if you can find anything comparable out there built around a logo from Microsoft, Windows, Dell, HP, etc., do let us know about that, too.
When a gadget has a doppelganger, the differences between the two are automatically thrown into sharp relief. Because Seagate’s DockStar runs on Pogoplug technology and uses the Pogoplug interface, our review of Cloud Engine’s Pogoplug a few weeks back pretty much covers the DockStar completely.
The DockStar performs the same exact function as the Pogoplug: it’s an instant, easy-to-use internet connection for any hard drive. Transfer files to a USB thumb drive or portable drive, plug it into the DockStar, then access the files from anywhere on the Internet. But there are three differences between the two products — one of them a big catch.
The Pogoplug from CloudEngines looks like a boring power adapter, but it’s a fantastic little gizmo that turns any USB hard drive into your own little cloud server accessible over the Internet.
Just stick a router and USB hard drive into the $99 Pogoplug, plug it into the wall and baboom — instant cloud. Which means I can dump my important files and media onto a drive, and as long as I’m online, I can access those files, anywhere, anytime.
A picture from PeopleofWalmart.com. The caption reads: "Yes you see that correctly. It is an old man with big supple delicious looking breast implants."
The cruel but funny People of Walmart website is looking for a developer to create an iPhone app for the website.
If you’re interested in making an iPhone app to make fun of misfits — and possibly get sued for publishing their unauthorized photographs — contact People of Walmart at info@peopleofwalmart.com.
Surely you’ve seen the viral website, which publishes candid-camera style pictures of the various meth tweakers, rednecks, and other sundry weirdos that frequent the nation’s largest retailer, along with cruelly funny captions.
Just a few weeks old, the site is often down due to server overload. The developers are also looking for a new host that can cope with the traffic.
ID Software’s browser-based shooter Quake Live is finally available for Mac users — mostly.
An update to the game’s servers means the game can be played on Safari on the Mac, but not Firefox.
“This update is Safari only, but we’ve pushed a ticket with the folks at Mozilla and hope to have the Firefox build fixed very shortly,” ID says.
Based on the popular Quake 3 Arena, Quake Live is a free, browser-based shoot-em-up. It features more than 40 arenas and five game modes, including duel, capture the flag and group deathmatch. Players can frag each other or computer-controlled bots, and can be matched according to skill level. The game requires a plugin to play. It is not Flash based.
The game went online earlier this year, but Windows only. It’s been wildly popular: more than 113,000 player accounts were created in the first six hours.
Here’s a clever way to use Twitter to get attention for a new iPhone app — get Twitter users to tweet about a MacBook prize giveaway.
Taptaptap is giving away a $6,000 custom MacBook to a lucky follower of the company’s Twitter stream, drawn at random.
The competition is hotting up as Twitter users retweet the details and the promotion spreads virally. More than 10,500 people have entered so far, less than a day after the competition opened.
To enter, users must follow Taptaptap’s Twitter stream, and then broadcast details of the competition by updating their Twitter status with the competition URL: http://tweetblast.taptaptap.com. The winner will be drawn at random on August 27.
The competition is to promote Taptaptap’s new app called Convert, a unit calculator that costs $1 (launch special).
The winner will get a brand new ColorWare Stealth MacBook Pro — a limited edition MacBook Pro that’s been customized with a soft-touch, matt black coating. Only 10 made, says ColorWare, and worth $5,999.
If you enter, keep an eye on your Twitter account. The winner will notified with a direct message. If they don’t respond within a week, a new winner will be chosen.
Pay no attention to the glitches and errors! We’re moving to a new host.
I’m in New York with my family on a work vacation (I work, they vacation), and have just spent a miserable week sweating in my skivvies in a hot, humid Harlem apartment trying to move this site to a new host.
You may have suffered from a few database errors this week and last. It was so bad on Thursday, a couple of readers on Twitter suspected we were under DDoS attack, like Twitter itself that day. We weren’t, but we were being hit by spam bots — and still are. There was a big spike in spam traffic last week and a huge one this week. See the chart below.
Whether the spam is causing the database errors or not, I don’t know. I suspect it’s a combination of the spam, the growing traffic and the crumminess of the current host. As we’ve grown, we’ve attracted hack attacks that infected the site with spam and Windows viruses. The support has been hopeless, which is what you get with the cheapest hosting plan on the planet. It’s time to move up to a bigger, better host.
We’re moving to Laughing Squid of San Francisco. It’s a local, independently owned firm, run with quiet competence by the redoubtable Scott Beale (Here’s Scott’s great Laughing Squad blog). Laughing Squid is home to a lot of companies and people I like and admire. It’s plugged into the tech and arts community, and renowned for its support and reliability.
I did most of the moving work myself, so fully expect it to melt down. In fact, I’ll flip out if it works. If you’re reading this, it must have worked. So fingers crossed, and please let us know if you spot anything that needs fixing. Thanks for your patience.
Porno director Matt Morningwood sent us some video and stills from the first XXX adult movie scene shot using an iPhone 3GS. I’ve posted them after the jump. Be warned, they are definitely not safe for work (NSFW).
Shot for porno publisher Pink Visual, the scene features “popular cougars” Lexi LaMour and Diamond Foxxx, plus a pizza delivery guy. It will be first published as a webisode on MilfSeeker.com (NSFW).
In the scene, LaMour and Foxxx order a pizza — “extra sausage” of course — before getting busy with the pizza boy.
The video quality is pretty good. Morningwood shot the video “tallscreen” — IE. in portrait format.
“As an iPhone user myself, I really like watching the footage on my phone and would think other users would too,” says Morningwood. “So yeah, we plan on doing it again… even if it’s just for my own enjoyment. We’ll still shoot with our normal HD gear, the iPhone would be in addition.”
Porno actress Jaelyn Fox at the Pink Visual booth during the AVN Expo in Las Vegas in 2008.
An adult video company has found a way to get porn onto the iPhone despite Apple’s restrictions on XXX apps.
Pink Visual has shot what it claims to be the first porn scene using an iPhone 3GS.
“We figured this was the next logical step in our ongoing fascination with the iPhone,” said Pink Visual spokeswoman Kim Kysar in a statement. “I think it’s safe to say we are the most ‘iPhone-centric’ porn company around.”
Based in the San Fernando Valley (or Porn Valley), the company’s slogan is: “We innovate, you masturbate.”
The new scene features “popular cougars” Lexi LaMour and Diamond Foxxx, Pink Visual said, and is being published as a webisode on MilfSeeker.com (Definitely NSFW).
The scene was shot by director Matt Morningwood, who said it was easy to shoot with the iPhone. The 3GS gave the scene a certain ‘cinema verite’ and was easier to get into tight spots than a big HD camera.
“If anything, it was too easy to shoot with the iPhone,” Morningwood said. “I’m used to HD cameras, boom mics, and all sorts of other peripherals being part of the deal. The only thing that was difficult was holding the phone steady with two knockout blonde cougars getting naked and going at in front of the camera.”
Pink Visual is considering making iPhone footage a regular feature of its productions.
“The nature of the footage definitely augments the immediacy and realness of the scene,” Kysar said. “Shooting content on the iPhone is a viable option, and something special we can add to the mix now and again.”
If you’re looking for an interesting portal into the iTunes App Store’s 65,000+ titles with as little risk as possible, www.appgiveaway.com may be a resource worth checking out.
The website, which launched this spring and is gaining traffic steadily, posts descriptions of 5 – 8 apps per day in different categories (games, entertainment, utilities, business, etc.) and gives promo codes away randomly to users who register and indicate their interest in particular apps.
The site was originally conceived as a marketing vehicle for app developers, with the enticement for iPhone and iPod Touch users who like the idea of possibly getting a paid app for free.
“We seek out developers and they also find us,” said Al Lijee, an AppGiveAway spokesman, adding, “Developers have been kind and posted us in forums and are linking back to us from their websites.”
Posted apps currently get between 40 – 70 people registering for promo giveaways, Lijee told Cult of Mac, and the site gives away around 30 codes for each app it features.
Two weeks after an iPhone 3GS was dropped in a swimming pool while recording video, the phone is still frickin’ working says its owner.
“I’m talking to you on it now,” says Khena Kara, the iPhone’s owner, speaking from his home in Nashville, TN. “It’s still going strong.”
Kara’s iPhone 3GS gained internet fame after Kara accidentally dropped it in a swimming pool while recording a video. The iPhone kept recording as it sank to the bottom, and as he fished it out. “It still frickin’ works!” he says in surprise as he pulls the iPhone from the pool. Kara posted the footage to YouTube, and it spread fast on blogs and Twitter. It has now been watched more that 500,000 times.
“Yes, it’s real,” says Kara of the video. “It was the pool in my subdivision.”
Above is a video still of Kara taken from the iPhone video right after it was fished from the pool. And below it is a new picture of Kara taken with the same iPhone.
The new picture’s metadata appears to back up Kara’s story.
Apple’s iPhone has recently become the most popular camera on Flickr, one of the Internet’s most well-regarded photo sharing social media sites.
Expressed in “percent of members” terms, the iPhone has lately bested two models of Canon’s EOS Digital Rebel, of which the XTi had long been the clear favorite choice of Flickr members.
UPDATE: Since this post was originally published, the Flickr site’s graph has been changed, and now shows the iPhone is the #2 camera among Flickr members, resting just behind the Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi, which has apparently enjoyed a bump in popularity for which the previously published graph did not account.
[Thanks Rafael, for the heads-up on the graph change!]
Among popular camera phones, the iPhone has outdistanced its rivals since its release two years ago and recently widened the gap between its nearest competitor, the Nokia N95, by a huge margin.
The data is to be taken with a grain of salt as anecdotal and largely unscientific, but it is interesting to note such graphic evidence of popularity for a phone camera that had been denigrated by many as one of the most pitiable features of Apple’s popular smartphone.
Apple recently upgraded the specs on the iPhone camera, giving it a boost in pixel capacity and adding both variable focus and video capabilities, which should only increase its attractiveness going forward.
What it is: iPlay Music, a Mountain View, CA company, produces music learning software and operates a web-based store in the iTunes mold that just launched an innovative Chords for iTunes app that gives musicians an easy way to synchronize music in an iTunes library with a Quicktime video showing the chords to play along with a particular song.
Why it’s cool: The Chords for iTunes app is a promising tool for learning to play popular songs, whether you are a guitarist or keyboard player, and offers easy to read visual cues to the chords of songs such as Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay, Proud Mary, Refugee, When I Come Around, and more.
At present there are but 26 songs available to download for free, but the iPlayMusic Store offers a host of additional paid downloads that teach everything from 12 Bar Blues to Reggae strumming to Swing and Rock chord formations. The catalog of downloadable lessons is a bit thin in the early going, but many of the basics that underly a strong foundation in musicianship are covered and for those just beginning to learn an instrument, iPlay Music products and services are well worth checking out.
A couple of cool features of the software allow you to slow down a song while remaining in pitch so you can play along at the speed you need to learn the song, and an Export to iPod feature, that allows you to put the lessons on your iPod or iPhone so you can take them with you on the go.
Where to Get It: All the info you need is available on the web at the iPlay Music site. The Chords for iTunes (Beta) app is a free download, and many of the lessons available on the iPlay Music Store are available for free as well.
Most paid content sells for 99¢ and multi-lesson packages and Family Packs can go for up to $29.95.
Pay no attention to the glitches and errors! We’re moving to a new host.
If you’re looking for an interesting portal into the iTunes App Store’s 
What it is: iPlay Music, a Mountain View, CA company, produces music learning software and operates a web-based store in the iTunes mold that just launched an innovative Chords for iTunes app that gives musicians an easy way to synchronize music in an iTunes library with a Quicktime video showing the chords to play along with a particular song.
