More from our Greek friend Anthony (see below). Not only is Anthony’s house in Athens filled with Macs, his wife Christine made him some Mac knitwear to wow Athens with.
Above is his handmade waistcoat featuring the famous Apple logo. Below is Anthony’s Mac sweater with the Happy Mac on the front and Sad Mac at back.
Link to Anthony’s cult of mac Flickr set documenting more of his Apple obsession.
Anthony Sigalas, a Mac nut par excellence from Athens, Greece, has filled his home with Macs. The pictures below, lifted from his Flickr set “My Mac Home,” shows that every corner of every room has a Mac.
Here’s the workspace with His and Hers MacBooks, plus a Mac Mini under the telly.
Here’s the view from the bed: a 20” iMac. Anthony writes: “It’s the mac that wakes us (via Aurora and iTunes) and put us to sleep (via Sofa Control, VLC and our favorite TV Shows and old Greek Movies). Furthermore its huge internal hard drive houses our music library (iTunes), our photo library (iPhoto) and a large collection of movie files. All in all a worthy media extender for the bedroom.”
Check out the cool Greek interface:
And then there’s a 12” iBook G4 in the “office room” that acts as a backup server, a wireless print server and a fax.
Alexander Amosu, a London entrepreneur known as “King of the Ring” for making a bundle on urban ringtones, has introduced a line of gold-plated iPods. The 24 carat iPods cost $600 for a 30-Gbyte version and $800 for the 80-Gbyte model.
According to Amosu’s site, the ringtone millionaire is branching into gold- and diamond-encrusted phones and iPods for “the rich, famous and sophisticated.”
He wanted to be the first person to have a dedicated website for high end customised mobiles phones with gold, white gold and various colours of diamonds.
His words are “to have an exclusive phone that cost more than anyone else is like having a Bentley rather than Ford, the type of phone you have speaks allot (sic) about your lifestyle and ambition. That’s why celebrities, footballers, actors and millionaires get their phone from me”
A giant, five-story Apple retailer just opened opposite the biggest, swankiest plaza in Milan and look what they have displayed in the window — my crummy books!
The Apple stores here in the states won’t carry the books because they only sell “how-to” titles. We were told the decision went “right to the top.” We suspect you-know-who doesn’t like the jokey “Cult of…” titles. Clearly not a problem across the pond.
Gary Allen at IFOAppleStore reports:
The grand opening of the five-story Mondadori Multicenter in central Milan (Italy) was important enough for Apple’s CEO of Italy operations to attend, perhaps because the store includes a large Apple sales area. Enzo Biagini viewed the 1,200 square-foot space on the second level that includes displays of laptops, iMacs, MacPros and Cinema displays, as detailed in a story and photos on the setteB.IT Web site. The interior design includes white-painted walls and wood display furniture similar to U.S. Apple stores.
Check out the Genius Bar — now serving coffee and fine food!
(Ignore the HP kit in the pic below. Apparently the store sells all kinds of junk.)
Pictures by SetteB.it.
Sometimes, users of high-end, professional software despair when Apple buys the company that makes it. Stu Maschwitz, one of the founders of <a href=”https://www.theorphanage.com/”>The Orphanage</a>, a San Francisco FX studio responsible for Sin City, The Host, and a bunch of others, explains:
When you buy expensive software from small companies, you effectively become best friends with the development team. You know them by first names and you send them holiday cards. You have a folder full of emails from and to them. Apple, however, mistakenly applies the same strategy of black-box secrecy that works so well for iPods and iPhones to its Pro Apps division as well, cutting off developers from users and vise versa. I have struggled with this enough that my company, The Orphanage, no longer has any special relationship with Apple. It’s just too much of a one-way street. I can’t buy my bread-and-butter tools from someone who can’t conduct an open conversation with me (under NDA of course) about the future of the product.
Maschwitz’s post is about the new Color tool in Final Cut Pro, and though he has misgivings about what used to be a separate app from a small, friendly company going behind the Apple firewall, all in all he’s delighted with the outcome.
I hate to admit this, but my kids hate Macs.
Despite forcing them to dress as iPods at Macworld* the little chickens aren’t in love with beautiful Apple hardware.
Even though the house is filled with wonderful Macs, the kids prefer an old ThinkPad we have kicking around for playing Club Penguin and other online games .
Why, I hear you ask?
“It is much faster,” says son number one, Milo, seen here giving his Mac user salute.
They couldn’t give a hoot about the elegant interface or the better quality of QuickTime video. All they care about is the responsiveness of the Flash games they’re addicted to.
Worse thing is they have a point. As my esteemed colleague Paul Boutin pointed out many years ago, Windows machines are much faster on the Web than Macs.
*Actually my wife’s idea. I was mortified.
I found this striking picture of a Mursi tribeswoman at iLounge’s “iPods Around the World” gallery, but there’s very little information about it.
The caption simply says: Female member of Mursi tribe in Southern Ethiopia. Unfortunately, there’s no other information, but a quick Google search reveals:
We’d been hearing for days about the Mursi tribe–the one where women split their lower lip and insert a round metal plate. As we were repeatedly told, the Mursi are neither fun nor friendly. And while they’ve kept their distance from the outside world–largely in part because their territory is a vast expanse of remote national park–they nevertheless have turned their small contact with foreigners into an art form of extortion. Pictures equal money. No exceptions. (from Gabriel Openshaw).
Hacking stories bore me to tears, but the cleverly named “pwn-2-own” hacking competition (Hack a honeypot MacBook, get it as the prize) is getting such attention, it’s worth pointing to some of the better reporting on the subject:
Dan Goodin at The Register:
A New York-based security researcher spent less than 12 hours to identify and exploit a zero-day vulnerability in Apple’s Safari browser that allowed him to remotely gain full user rights to the hacked machine. The feat came during the second and final day of the CanSecWest “pwn-2-own” contest in which participants are able to walk away with a fully-patched MacBook Pro if they are first able to hack it.
…Dai Zovi, who is not attending the conference, was recruited on Thursday night by Shane Macaulay, a friend and conference attendee. The ease Dai Zovi found in pwning the machine was all the more remarkable, given an update Apple pushed out yesterday patching 25 Mac security holes. Macaulay described Dai Zovi’s vulnerability as a client-side javascript error that executed arbitrary code when Safari visited a booby-trapped website.
Turn off Java; to be safe, until Dino lets us say more, turn off everything else too. Or live dangerously like me.
… huge numbers of pundits and anonymous nerds on the Internet will decry Apple’s lack of security and how unfair it is that Microsoft, which expands so much effort on security, is perceived as having a less secure OS. Meanwhile, Mac users will rationalize the situation, including me.
Silicon Valley’s hometown paper, the San Jose Mercury News, says Steve Jobs is unlikely to face criminal or civil charges in Apple’s options backdating scandal.
A close review of the events that led to the controversial grant reveals that the backdating emerged from a good-faith, although clumsy, attempt by Apple’s board of directors to reward its star chief executive for resurrecting a moribund company.
The Merc’s story details a series of stock grants given to Jobs by Apple’s board between 1999 and 2003. The grants were often generous (and one was a record breaker) but because of fluctuations in Apple’s stock price, Jobs’ grants were often underwater. Several times, Jobs gave the underwater grants back, and the board gave him new ones.
However, according to the Merc, Jobs sometimes spent weeks negotiating the price of these new options, which affected their value. Jobs held out for the lowest price, and sometimes the board backdated the options to keep their price low.
The upshot is that neither Jobs nor the board were very good at picking the right number of options at the right price. If Jobs had simply kept all his grants, instead of constantly swapping them for new ones, they would be worth considerably more:
… Last year, Jobs handed back to Apple 4.6 million of his restricted shares – worth $295 million – to pay the taxes on them. His remaining restricted shares are now worth about $494 million.
But given the rise in Apple’s stock over the past four years, even that turned out to be a bad deal for the iconic CEO. Had he held on to all of his options, they would be worth about $4 billion right now, even if the 2001 grant had been given the December date.
An iBone from Flickr user laughtonb.
Instructables: Build a periscope for your MacBook’s built-in iSight camera for filming lectures or talks.
Check out this bizarre video of a elderly woman in Moscow surfing the net on a brand new MacBook. It appears that the guys who shot the video were so surprised to see her, they tried to sneak a peek at her screen — but she shooed them off. Anyone speak Russian?
UPDATE: Olegs Straume writes:
Realy nice video
The guy wasn’t so nice to her – at first The guy in a black jacket says her “don’t worry i’ll just take a picture” than the man who is filming this scene says to his friend – “I think shee is watching some Porno” – “i’ll go and check” – when he got closer to her she answered “What? – Is it Interesting” ( Russians say that – when they are not so happy) – so the guy anwsered laughing “Sorry” on the way back he says “She was surfing”¦ (some kind of) “WISE SURFACE” (or something like that i didn’t hear well – thats it
Sorry about my bad English literacy
Reuters | Apple seen having upper hand in music negotiations:
NEW YORK, April 20 (Reuters) – When Apple sits for contract negotiations with the major record companies over the next month, it will probably seek further concessions from them on selling music without copy-protection software.
AppleInsider | Target stores to pick up Apple TV:
Big-box retailer Target is poised to become just the second third-party retailer to market Apple Inc.’s new Apple TV device at its brick-and-mortar retail stores, AppleInsider has learned.
Fortune | Inside China’s PC frenzy:
While MP3 players are everywhere, and imitations of an Apple iPod Nano go for about $50 (a two gigabyte model with a larger screen than Apple (Charts, Fortune 500) offers), if you want the genuine article you’ll get fleeced. For an 80 gigabyte black iPod like one Amazon sells for $330, one salesman quotes me a price of about $700. As for PCs, Apple’s presence here is minimal.
Gartner pegs Apple’s current U.S. market share at 5 percent — a whopping 30 percent increase of the 4 percent figure estimated for the first quarter of 2006. According to the research firm, this makes Apple’s market share the fastest growing among PC vendors in the U.S, with Toshiba following closely at 26.8 percent growth. Dell, meanwhile, saw a 15.5 percent decrease in market share, though it retained its spot as top PC vendor in the U.S.
Sara Blask, staff writer at the Iceland Review, lost her iPod in the parking lot of Iceland’s maximum security prison in a town called Litla Hraun. It was found and returned her. The story’s a little convoluted, and it doesn’t explain how a white iPod was found in the snow, but basically:
“Turns out his mom works at Litla Hraun and found the iPod amidst snow and garbage in the prison’s parking lot. After a couple weeks no one claimed it, so she gave it to her son (the one who emailed me), who charged it up and saw that it was called “Sara Blask.” He plugged my name into Google, found my website, and emailed me.”
Actually, more interesting is the Iceland Review site, which is nicely designed and full of great photography. I love how the site is so white. Very Icelandic.
(Via TUAW)
Adobe’s scary new mascot for CS3.
Accessory makers must be predicting a bonanza of iPod proportions for the iPhone — Japanese case makers are already rolling out protective cases for the iPhone, due in late June.
On show at a Japanese electronics and components fair; a rubbery prophylactic, a see-through hard case and a faux-sneaker design.
There are 4,000 accessories for the iPod, a market worth at least $1 billion a year.
Link.
(Via MacFeber)
Owners of a shiny new AppleTV who are also fans of obscure foreign TV shows like Life on Mars or Doctor Who Series 3 might be interested in VisualHub.
VisualHub is a $23 video converter that transforms popular BitTorrent formats (DivX, XviD, AVI, all forms of MPEG) to MP4 format — which play nice on the AppleTV or video iPods.
VisualHub can batch process files and automatically add them to iTunes. It offers encoding up to 720p and claims to be much faster than QuickTime Pro.
For Windows users, there’s Videora AppleTV Converter, a free video converter designed especially for the AppleTV.
When combined with Videora, a file search and download program, video can be automatically found, downloaded and converted for the AppleTV using BitTorrent and RSS, according to the site. This must be the killer app for AppleTV — if it works. I’m downloading it right now to find out.
Anyone tried it?
Apple’s executives raked it in last year, and Steve Jobs took his customary $1 in salary.
According to an SEC filing reported by Marketwatch:
“¢ Chief Financial Officer Peter Oppenheimer realized $56 million in value from the exercise of options during 2006. Oppenheimer also received a $615,000 salary, a $450,000 bonus and restricted stock valued at $14 million.
“¢ Chief Operating Officer Timothy D. Cook received restricted stock valued at $22 million, a salary of $697,000 and a $525,000 bonus for 2006.
“¢ Jobs has received the majority of his compensation through an equity grant and isn’t eligible for a bonus, according to Monday’s filing. He doesn’t receive any other compensation, the company said.
Thomas Fitzgerald spent some quality time with his AppleTV and wrote up this thorough and interesting review. His conclusion? It’s a great product, well thought out and executed.
It is the Apple TV’s integration with iTunes that makes it a truly fantastic product. Again it’s the little things. When you watch something on your iPod, and then sync it, it knows your playback position. When you watch a podcast, (if you set it to sync only recent episodes) it removes it and sends the next episode (but cleverly it waits till you have watched it to the end before it does so) Synching seems to happen often and as soon as you change something it will sync. It’s pretty impressive and seamless. Another cool thing is that if you have slideshows set up in iPhoto when you sync your photos it remembers the music you had set with that slide show. I know it’s simple little thing, but it just struck me as being indicative of the seamless integration across all Apple’s products, that competitors just can’t or don’t want to achieve.
…Even if you live outside the US and don’t have access to movies and TV shows on iTunes there are plenty of ways to get content onto the Apple TV. Two must have pieces of software are mediafork (aka handbrake) and visual hub. Visual hub does an excellent job of transcoding all those divx movies you may have acquired through whatever method you may have acquired them (and I’ll make no comment or suggestions on that topic) with no significant loss in quality, which is a pretty impressive feat. Media fork does a similar job with DVDs.
The record companies are selling more and more music online, but they’re paying scant attention to digital packaging: there’s no good album covers for online music.
That’s the conclusion of Adrian Shaughnessy at Design Observer, who’s spent the last few months researching online alternatives to album art. And unfortunately, there aren’t any.
As downloading threatens to become the main distribution method for recorded music, it is widely believed that the album cover will be replaced by some new online format perhaps animated that will make CD packaging redundant. Well, I might be missing something, but I’ve found nothing in the digital arena that offers a viable alternative to a well-designed CD or vinyl album cover. Instead, I’ve discovered a grim-faced resistance movement amongst dozens of tiny record labels determined to hang onto physical packaging and expressive cover art, no matter what.
CoverFlow in iTunes — which displays a JPEG of the album when a song is playing — is a start. The artwork is static and there’s no lyrics or band bios, but the artwork certainly helps navigate the music collection. It also makes the music feel like a collection, rather than just a bunch of files.
There are signs that the record companies are looking at iTunes and the iPod as a platform for designers to play with.
George White, Warner Music Group’s senior VP of strategy and product development, put together a digital packaging demo for Apple to re-imagine album artwork as more than a JPEG on an iPod.
“We’ve been looking at a few technologies (for digital album art), and have been trying to bring these to Apple, to encourage them to bring that level of experience to the iPod,” says White. “A very simple demonstration that we’ve done takes the Gnarls Barkley liner notes and does a fly-through (using Adobe Flash Lite). You’re actually moving through the lyrics and artwork. It’s sort of like a theme park ride through the album. It’s really, really cool-looking on an iPod.”
(Apple did not respond to questions about whether it’s considering any of Warner Music Group’s suggestions.)
White also pointed to Warner’s Wamo pack, which gave Japanese cell phone users digital albums with ringtones, video, full tracks and artist interviews. Wamo packs aren’t new — they launched overseas a year ago. But White says Warner plans to produce more of these bundles. He also mentioned that while Wamo packs use Synchronized Multimedia Integration Language, or SMIL, for their interactive menus, Adobe’s Flash Lite would be a better candidate for “the level of sophistication people expect from Warner Music Group’s artists.”
(Adobe confirmed that Warner’s iPod/Flash Lite demonstrations had taken place, but said that the company “has not announced any joint plans for Flash or Flash Lite to be used in next-generation digital albums.”)
There’s a new version of Final Cut Studio in town.
Apple persuaded the Coen Brothers — creators of some of my favorite flicks — to talk it up. The shilling is a bit tiresome though. The Final Cut show reel is better fun.
Details of a homemade iPod Hi-Fi system:
After pricing everything out, I decided to build a single mono channel to see how it sounded. $100 for the amp, $100 for the speaker parts, $100 for wood (real oak, just couldn’t use that compressed saw dust stuff). I ordered the parts and went to work. After about two weeks of working in the evenings this is what I came up with.
… Even though it is monaural, the sound is unbelievable. I thought about building the second channel, but so far I’m happy with this.
The speaker is a Dayton III design:
The Dayton III is a 2-way, dual woofer loudspeaker using the Dayton 6-1/2″ paper cone woofer and 1-1/8″ silk dome tweeter. These drivers have been the subject of a lot of discussion on the Parts Express Tech Talk board because they are among the “best bang for the buck” in low price loudspeaker drivers. This woofer is able to produce exceptionally low bass for a given box size and the tweeter produces clean, clear highs. When you hear these speakers you won’t believe that the total cost for drivers and crossover components is under $150/PAIR!
The New York Times has a roundup of three vacuum tube amplifiers for the iPod:
BOTH the Cocoon and the Fatman come with a pair of white cotton gloves, to be worn to protect the high-gloss metal surfaces from fingerprints during handling. To assemble and try out both machines, I donned a set of the gloves, as did a friend who helped me.
There’s several new screenshots lighting up the internet that are purportedly taken from a new Leopard build (9A410).
Posted to Hackintosh, MacRumors, Flickr and elsewhere, the screenshots show a new, simple UI that’s darker and sharper than the current — note the corners of windows are no longer rounded. There’s less brushed metal, more soothing grey.
The screenshots on Flickr look much more like the current UI (Tiger) ,except Mail now has a metallic look.
But there’s something fishy about them. The interface is too plain and stripped back.
Many on the MacRumors’ forums think the screens are fake, and one poster on Flickr is sure about it.:
“Fake! Fake! Fake!
I write themes for OSX. And, I can tell you how this was most probably done:
The file Extras.rsrc still kinda works in the betas for 10.5 although, I hope that it will be removed before release.
Anyway, Installer based themes (though out of favor in 10.4) still work by replacing Extras.rsrc among other files.
Someone swapped out the normal Extras.rsrc and took some screen shots. Since most of the guts of 10.5 do not depend upon Extras.rsrc anymore, I am confident that 10.5 would run with a 10.4 Extras file for now.
Note that you do not see any signs of resolution independence! That is what would break this fake theme (since res independence calls to images not stored in Extras.rsrc).”
More screens after the jump