Nicole Martinelli - page 25

City councils across the country are adopting the iPad, in the hopes that the magical device can help them go paperless and save money, but taxpayers are skeptical of the savings.

The just-proposed scheme in Aurora, east of Denver,  is pretty typical: the city council there wants to try out iPads to see if it can save printing out the information packets for meetings. The city currently spends about $900 per member every year to print, assemble and deliver the info packets to the 10 council members and the mayor for a total of around $9,900.

They’ve budgeted $729 for the iPads plus $180 per year for data plans, so by using iPads they would break even in about a year.

Residents, however, don’t appear to buy it. Some 62% responded “You’re kidding me. What a scam. Like they read all that stuff anyway” to a poll in the Aurora Sentinal, just 36% responded “Why not? Saves trees, saves money. Go for it.”

We know that all kids want for Christmas is an Apple device, it turns out adults do too.

According to a survey by the Consumer Electronics Association, people old enough to vote did put one thing first, though.

First, adults would like the holidays to bring happiness or peace. Then comes material desire:  a laptop. And third, an iPad.

Bringing family together, health and money trailed behind, though they did make it into the top ten at seven, eight and 10 respectively. (CEA didn’t disclose info on  sample size or makeup. Pet peeve alert!)

Hasbro Inc., maker of some of the world’s most popular toys, wants to bring 3D to your iPhone and iPod.

For about $30, their new goggle device called My3D promises to bring a new experience to your Apple devices.

It is kind of a shame the design is so clunky: it resembles a View-Master, which first brought the 3D experience to kids in 1939 and slunk off into the sunset due to declining sales in 2009.

Instead of those little plastic discs of the View-Master familiar to kids the world over, with My3D you’ll be able to download special apps from the iTunes store. Hasbro promises there will be a mix of gratis and paid content available — likely to include trailers and movie snippets following the 3D film trend.

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Friday we wrote about how to avoid getting your alarms messed up by the iPhone daylight savings bug when daylight savings changed over the weekend.

If you were affected by the bug, let us know what happened in the comments.

Late for work? Early to the gym? Missed your flight?

Small, portable, expensive and hard to trace. A young police officer in Samoa must have been thinking the same things most that most iPod thieves think when he devised a plan to get his hands on Apple’s portable music player.

And evidently that “gotta-have-it” impulse was strong enough not only to push him to cross the line between law enforcer and law breaker — but to plan a break-in to get the iPod from the office of the head of state.

23-year-old police officer Aumua Marcus Hunt first pleaded not guilty to one charge of theft, but then copped to stealing the iPod from the government office.

If you liked the idea of an iMac G3 coffee maker but held off spending a few hundred dollars because it only made coffee: listen up. Now you can make your morning cappuccino with it.

It’s the handiwork of Klaus Diebel at Kiwidee, who, not content to have made an subwoofer-amped stereo system with an iMac as well as the coffee maker, kept on DIYing.

The result? The iMac Coffee Edition was fitted with an injector system and a milk frother was added, so now it can make cappuccino.

If you want to avoid a rude wake up call this Monday morning, here’s how to make sure your iPhone alarm doesn’t falter when daylight savings ends in North America on Sunday, November 7.

The snafu appears to be a problem with the synchronization — while the iPhone updates itself to recognize the daylight savings change in your time zone,  it doesn’t update your alarm.

Specifically, it messes up repeating alarms set for anything other than “every day.” That means that your alarm will go off an hour late if you set it for “weekdays,” “weekends” or “every Monday,” for example.

It’s too late for Halloween, but there’s plenty of time to get a mask of your distorted mug taken with Apple’s Photo Booth to make a splash at carnival celebrations.

Brooklyn-based designer Mark Pernice first made these huge grimacing masks out of his own face working with F/X superstar sculptor Christian Hanson. People liked these disturbing, wearable doppplegangers so much that Pernice is stumping to raise money to make more masks.

The series of six masks his making this time will eventually end up in an exhibit– we’ll keep you posted on details — and if you pledge the most, he’ll make one of you.  Or your favorite pet, or maybe a relative.  (Kick in $20 to the cause and you get a poster of one of his masks).

Cult of Mac talked to Pernice about which figure in Apple history he’d most like to make a mask of and why he decided to dress up as Freddie Mercury this Halloween.

You might consider yourself at home with your Apple computer, but Johannes P. Osterhoff went so far as to build himself this little abode mimicking the OSX Home icon.

It’s the latest project from the eclectic Osterhoff — Cult of Mac last caught up with him for his iPhone William Tell 2.0 project — who built the mini-home, complete with door, shutters, and chimney then wore it around over the summer.

He shares with us the blueprints for making this Apple icon come to life and how carrying a house on your back can be the ultimate ice breaker.

Former vice president Al Gore recently spoke about another kind of inconvenient truth: his role as the last Mac standing in what became a PC White House during the Clinton administration.

Nowadays, Macs and PCs coexist in the inner sanctums of power — iPads abound for playing Pac Man or catching up on email — but back in the day it was much more an either/or proposition.

Mac Directory recently published an interview with Gore, where he touches on being the last Apple holdout in the West Wing, as well as the importance of Apple’s commitment to open source and how it may influence and help grow the Cupertino company.

A 24-year-old woman spotted an iPad left behind in an emergency waiting room and let her fingers do the walking.

At around 8:45 p.m., Jessica L. Andrews noticed Apple’s magical device sitting all alone in the waiting room of Hunterdon Medical Center in New Jersey after its owner went in for ER treatment. Andrews quickly slotted the handy tablet computer into her purse and left.

However, even if you need serious medical attention, you’re unlikely to forget your iPad altogether.

The iPad is reported to be the fastest-selling electronic device ever and government leaders aren’t being left behind.

British Prime Minister David Cameron is the latest world leader have an Apple iPad. Cameron was regaled with two iPads as housewarming presents when he took residence at No. 10 Downing Street.

Both business mogul Mike Faith and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg had the bright idea of sending over the tablet computer.

Cameron wanted Apple’s “magical device” enough to pay out of his own pocket for it (£429, about $650) and stock it with £164 (about $262) of books. The iPad sent over the pond from Bloomberg is still unopened in the box.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyFL_ZKgTaQ

Need to put a spring in your step on a fall Friday?

Check out this video by Japanese break beat duo Hifana, it came out awhile back but we think it’s awesome.

The idea? For an ad campaign to showcase the flexibility of Nike Free Run+ shoes in Japan, they DJs use the footwear to make music, contorting and twisting the shoes to get different sounds, then battle it out DJ style

A MacBook Pro is at the heart of the operation that one half of Hifana, Daito Manabe, set up to make some sweet footie music. Nike gives a nod to the Apple power behind the project with a blink-and-you-missed it shot of a pair of MBPs in the beginning of the video.

One tech-savvy 12-year-old girl spooked a would-be kidnapper by pretending to make a phone call on her iPod Touch.

Police in Delaware are still trying to track down the creep who tried to lure the girl into his van the other evening as she waited to be picked up outside Stanton Middle School.

She told police that a man in a white van pulled into the school driveway and told her to “get in the van.”

Cardboard boxes just don’t cut it for John Savio. His latest iPhone Halloween costume, 10 times the size of Apple’s iconic phone,  contains a 75-pound 40″ LED LCD panel.

It took him 40 hours — crammed into a three-day maker marathon — to make this fully-functional iPhone. This latest version is an upgrade from his 2007 iPhone costume, which rocked a 37” LCD and projected a looped video of iPhone screens from an iPod.

Like a lot of people, you have probably used the screen on your iPod as an impromptu flashlight.

Steven Spader is accused of using an iPod to guide him to victim Kimberly Cates, then hacking her to death with a machete.

One of the details to come out of the trial taking place in Mont Vernon, New Hampshire is how the 18-year-old Spader found his way through the one-story family house in the hours before dawn to reach his victims, Cates and her young daughter Jaime.

Red lanterns mark the launch of Apple’s online China store and the 37th international online store of the Cupertino company, stretching from Australia to Canada.

The latest online store promises to deliver all of Apple’s magical devices — including the iPhone 4 and the iPad — in time for the holidays, swathed in signature gift wrap.

“We are thrilled to open our newest online store in China,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s COO. “With personalized engraving, configure-to-order options and free shipping on everything, the Apple Store is a great destination for our customers in China.”

It also may cut down on the chaos Chinese customers experience while trying to get their hands on Apple’s must-have products if the reports of reservation scalpers for the iPhone 4 are anything to go by.

Apple’s trademarked phrase “There’s an app for that” became political cannon fodder after a Republican candidate called out a Democrat for breaking the rules of a televised debate by looking at a text message.

The best part?

Even though the device delivering that text-message bomb turned out to be a Droid, the Republican posted a doctored photo of his rival and an iPhone calling her an “iCheat.”

Clubbers at a Miami hotspot find out the dreaded answer to whether their names are on the guest list thanks to iPads.

Door staff at LIV at the Fontainbleau Hotel use Apple’s magical tablet to check guest lists, table reservations and organize their email lists.

Artists who have traded canvases for touch screens and brushes for the Brushes app will meet up at a Digital Art Conference in New York City this weekend.

The iAMDA (International Association of Mobile Digital  Artists) has organized its first ever MobileArtCon taking place at the New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), October 23-24.

Cult of Mac talked with artist and organizer Matthew Watkins — whom we featured when his iPhone art was the first to hang at an Apple reseller — about what to expect from this weekend meeting of digital artists.

When Steve Jobs announced at the Back to the Mac event that the iPhone 42 s video chat feature FaceTime would be spreading to all Macs, our thoughts naturally turned to porn.

While interactive video sex chats are nothing new, FaceTime brings portability and convenience or, as the Apple site touts it: “Now your smile goes even further” — so we wanted an opinion from iP4Play, the first porn service to target FaceTime when it was only available for the iPhone 4.

Cult of Mac spoke with Travis Falstad, managing director of iP4Play, about these exciting new developments and “porn-free” devices.

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Steve Jobs called it the “future of the MacBook” line, but are you ready to give up your MacBook Pro for these shiny newcomers?

The 11.6-inch starts at $999 for 64GB SSD space and the 13.3-inch starts at $1,299 for a 128GB hard drive, and jumps to $1,599 for a 256GB hard drive.

What’s better: thin and slim or the old workhorse?

Let us know what you think in the comments.

It’s either a dream or nightmare job: Microsoft taps you to come up with a campaign for the 2011 edition of Microsoft Office for Mac.

How do you make it cool? Avoid ridicule?

Director Dennis Liu took that challenge. The resulting teaser for the documentary series called “id3a01ogy” definitely answers the first question but may not be able to sidestep the latter.

Next time you go to the hospital, your doctor might whip out an iPad to show you X-rays,  check drug interactions or review your medical history.

These are just some of the uses doctors are finding for Apple’s handy tablet computer in the Chicago area where three local hospitals are iPad early adopters.

At MetroSouth Medical Center in Blue Island, the device “went through here like wildfire,” once doctors realized they could use the device to quickly access hospital records said Dr. Richard Watson, who works in the ER room. “At least half of our staff here in the emergency room has their own iPad and carries it and uses it.”

This chart tracks the dizzying rise of new products in Apple’s sales mix. Currently about 60% of Apple’s sales come from products that the Cupertino company launched in the last three years.

“This last quarter is not a holiday quarter. Now imagine what next quarter will look like on this chart,” writes Horace Dediu, who charted Apple’s sales in the graph for Asymco. “Think back to 2001 before the iPod. The orange band was all that Apple had.”

Source: Asymco