Cult of Mac

Of all the eccentric Mac-lover accessories out there, these clocks might be some of the most phoned-in I’ve ever seen: they’re basically just old Apple keyboards clawed out of an electronics dump with their keys shaken loose and stuffed with cheap horological guts.

Even so, I’m sort of tempted by the iMac Bondi Blue Clock: it seems like just yesterday when I was bringing one back home for the first time. Oh, how time passes for an Apple fan.

What do the crafters at Geekware do with all of the keys they’ve got left over after they make a clock? No surprise there, really: they try to convince you they’re jewelry. Again, I’m guilty here of thinking these Apple key cufflinks are absolutely ridiculous and yet kind of wanting to own a pair.

When a pair of rugged adventurists decides to trek 700km across a frozen lake in Siberia, chronicle the expedition in a daily blog complete with photos and videos — and share it all on the Internet — it should come as no surprise when Apple hardware and software features prominently among their gear.

Vašek Sůra and Pavel Blažek set out from the southern end of Lake Baikal in Siberia on February 23 in temperatures dipping below -20℃ to become the first Czech team to make a winter crossing of the lake. They marked their crossing of 500km Monday in stylish fashion. “Please, don’t judge us too harsh,” Sůra wrote in their blog, “after all, we’ve been here for almost three weeks and we need to entertain ourselves somehow :-)”

Last Friday, they posted about the gear they are using on the expedition, undertaken by just the two men with no kites, dogs or outside support to assist the trek or help them with their nearly 200lbs. (each) of supplies. Among the Apple gear is a MacBook Air (128 GB, solid-state drive, 2 GB). They use a satellite modem operating on the Immarsat network to upload and download to the Internet. Their Apple software includes OS Snow Leopard, iWork and iLife tools, and to process the photos Sůra uses Aperture.

The day they were hoping to post a video commemorating the 400km point they ran into some problems getting the camcorder to communicate with the laptop. “Vasek thought that there’s something wrong with the laptop,” wrote Sůra, “but as we have a Mac here with us, I was sure it cannot be in the laptop – nothing can ever be wrong with Mac!”

Of course it was the USB cable.

About a hundred years ago, while I was still a Windows user and thought that a Mac was what you covered in a cheese and slurped down for lunch, I whiled away way too much time playing a DOS-based artillery duel game called Scorched Earth. Dot Matrix Interactive Designs have created their own version in the extremely polished, multiplayer KIL.A.TON — and it’s even more of a blast to play.

If there’s a good thing about the recession, it seems to be bringing some fine Apple memorabilia out of storerooms and closets.

Cliff and Dick Huston — ex-Apple engineers, for the record employees 27 and 25 — have decided to part with a treasure trove of Cupertino collectibles by auctioning them on eBay.

How many iPads did Apple sell over the weekend? One estimate puts it at 152,000 – that’s actually down from the initial excitement when some pegged pre-sales at 20,000 per hour.

By Sunday, the rate of sales had fallen to 1,000 per hour, according to Venezualan-based blogger and analyst Daniel Tello. Tello estimates 120,000 iPads were pre-ordered on the first day due to “pure overexcited fanboism.” Tello based his estimates on the order ID numbers submitted to Investor Village’s AAPL Sanity Board.

You’re all going crazy with your iPad ordering. Meanwhile, over on Vimeo, BrewBeau has some craziness of his own going on.

BrewBeau writes: “I’m a recent PC convert who waited patiently while Apple worked out the kinks with their latest iMac release of the 27″ Intel powered 2.8GHz quad core i7 iMac. It’s a thing of beauty and I wanted to relay my experience of getting my new machine.”

His video is one of the following:

• a respectful homage to the classic Mac unboxing genre
• a piece of insightful investigative journalism from a Windows user trying to exposé the Cultish behavior of Mac users
• a creepy, insidious poke into the mind of a man obsessed by sex and technology; there are experts who call it “sextology” (see Note below)
• funny as hell

Whatever. You watch it and make up your own mind:

(Note: This is a lie.)

Are Microsoft employees “nuts for the iPhone?” According to a Wall Street Journal piece, yup… and that’s starting to cause some problems at Redmond as they prepare to roll-out their own would-be iPhone OS killer, Windows Phone 7.

Essentially, everyone within Microsoft knows that their current smartphone operating system, Windows Mobile 6.5, chonks hoad. Microsoft employees are technology lovers, and so they have naturally gravitated to the best smartphone out there. Microsoft’s done its best to stem the tide of Microsoft employees defecting to the iPhone, initiating a policy early last year that prevents employees from expensing any non-Windows phone, but it hasn’t had as much effect as you’d think.

Now, Windows Phone 7 is on the horizon, and by all accounts, the war against iPhones within Microsoft’s campus is heating up, with several employees feeling the need to hide their Apple handsets from their managers.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcvN-eVfR4s

Gary Katz, patron saint of kids and parents stuck indoors with his iPhone theater in a box, has now developed a download version. (The mail-order version cost $20.)

For just $12 you get high-quality images and a choice of walls, ceilings, roofs and curtains and plus extras for a touch of customization.

It comes with instructions, you provide the laser printer, safety scissors, glue and shoebox.  In about an hour, it’s showtime!

In the Hackintosh community, the MSI Wind is somewhat legendary for being the first netbook out there that could essentially run OS X out of the box, with all features working and no hardware hacking required.

Now it looks like the venerable Wind has another Apple bragging point: with its keyboard ripped out and its display replaced with a touchscreen and reversed, the MSI Wind U100 makes a good poor man’s substitute for the iPad.

Sure, it doesn’t use the iPhone OS — it’s running Snow Leopard 10.6.2 — and it’s got some rough edges (it can only be turned on and off by wiggling a little paperclip in a hole), but if you were hoping that Steve Jobs was going to announce a MacTablet on January 27th instead of a big iPhone, this might be just the project to devote your weekend to.

Although most famously known for his system-crushing, next-gen 3D engines, id software’s John Carmack has been a passionate enthusiast of iPhone app development. He’s personally cited the platform as a return to the older school of game design, where a single enthusiast can turn out a great game in a matter of a couple months, and id software’s (excellent) iPhone ports of Wolfenstein 3D and Doom were basically pet projects of Carmack himself.

No surprise, then, that Carmack is interested in the iPad. Speaking to Kotaku, Carmack said: “”Apple doesn’t give us anything ahead of time either, so haven’t put hands on it ourselves, but we certainly are expecting to try to have our Rage title for the iPhone, iPad, whatever, working across there.”

Rage is id’s upcoming post-apocalyptic, Mad Max inspired FPS and racing game, the first title to be released running id’s bleeding edge id Tech 5 engine. I’m not buying that the iPad has the oomph to run Rage at all: rather, I imagine that he is talking about bringing a spin-off title to the iPhone and iPad, similarly to the way Doom Resurrection brought Doom 3 to the App Store.

Either way, it’s exciting news, and Carmack remains as mouthbreathingly charming as an uber-dork as he could possibly be: the id software founder says that, given his druthers, he wants to budget a couple of months into every year where he can just disappear into his programming lair and code iPhone games.

When the iPad was first announced, Apple promised that the process for signing up for 3G service would eschew the iPhone’s Mephistophelean contract with AT&T. Instead, it would be simple, allowing end users to sign up and cancel their 3G service on a month-by-month basis.

If these screenshots of the iPad’s Settings panel are anything to go by, Apple’s been just as good as their word here. It’s hard to imagine, in fact, how signing up for 3G could be any simpler: you don’t even have to deal with AT&T.

Apparently, all you do to sign up for 3G is open up the iPad’s settings, plunk in your credit card information and then specify your order size: 250MB of data per month for only $14.99, all-you-can-gobble for $29.99. Simple! And if you sign up for the 250MB plan, you’ll get three alerts — 20 percent, 10 percent and empty — to let you know when you’re running low on data and affording you the option to top up with some more.

This is about as painless as it gets. I just hope international telecoms follow AT&T’s lead here and keep it simple, stupid. There’s just no room in my budget for yet another two-year data contract at this point.

[via Gadget Lab]

Our Monday giveaway is looking pretty good! This week we’re giving away eight apps aimed at keeping you entertained to six random Twitter Tweeters.

Make sure you follow @cultofmac on Twitter and tweet this to be entered to win a sweet app bundle of fun:

All the true gamers go to @cultofmac for Monday Giveaways! #cultofmac

Contest ends today at 8pm EST and we’ll announce the winners on Twitter tomorrow. Here’s the app bundle with description excerpts from the App Store:

We all know the wait for the iPad, at least in the U.S., will be over on April 3, right? Wrong. True connoisseurs know they need to wait until June 1, when Mervis Diamond Importers will unleash the hideous and despicable Diamond iPad on the world. It’s a bejeweled and bedazzled monstrosity boasting 11.43 carats worth of diamonds to make your magical technology device far more ugly and way more likely to cut your fingers as you watch a movie or read a book on it. All for the low price of $20,000 and your dignity.

For the truly elite only. Do you have enough cash and little enough common sense to go for it?

Mervis via Gizmodo

If – like me – your fridge is black, then these shiny iPhone app fridge magnets from Jailbreak Collective will look very smart indeed displayed on the door.

Just 13 bucks gets you a set of these icon almost-replicas. I say almost because if you look carefully, you’ll see they’re not identical to the Apple originals. But they’re close enough.

Only problem is, they look so smart on a decent black background that it’ll be a shame to spoil the effect by using them to hold shopping lists, receipts, and all that other fridge/paper junk you use fridge magnets for.

Might be worth getting an extra fridge just for these then.

(Via geek.com.)

Soft Sailor is a tech blog I’ve not encountered before, but today I stumbled across a very odd post indeed. Published just yesterday, it recommends downloading something a little bit unusual: Internet Explorer 5.2.3.

Which is only, let’s see now… about seven years old.

The author Dragos Pirvu writes:

“Although it’s not that popular on Mac computers, Internet Explorer is also available on Apple’s Mac OS X platform and it’s doing a fairly good job.”

And what’s more:

“Although it does have some security leaks, some Mac OS X developers are still using Internet Explorer to create CSS files and others.”

So that’s it. While the rest of us have needlessly upgraded to all this new-fangled stuff like Safari and Firefox, it’s the CSS devs who have faithfully – yet secretively – kept IE5 alive as a CSS editor. Who knew?

If you’re in the market for an iPad — and you know you are, because it’s killer — you’re probably wondering which model to buy.

Naturally, you’re looking at the cheapest $499 iPad, which has Wi-Fi only, but you’re thinking you might also want 3G. After all, you can pay-as-you-go for data, and who knows when you might need it? And what about storage?

I’ve though it through, and concluded that most people should buy the 32GB iPad with Wi-Fi + 3G, including the wireless keyboard. Here’s why:

We close out another week we three hardware deals. First up is a 3.06GHz Core 2 Duo iMac with a 22-inch screen and lots of extra goodies from ExperCom, including 8GB of RAM and three years of AppleCare – all for $1,399. Next up is a deal on a MacBook powered by a Core 2 Duo 2.26GHz processor, along with 4GB of RAM and a 640GB hard drive. Lastly, we have an iPod Classic with 120GB of storage for $189 from the Apple Store.

Along the way, we check out more deals on an Airport Extreme router, the latest batch of App Store Freebies and other items aimed at Apple fans. As always, details on our featured items, as well as many other products, are available on the CoM “Daily Deals” page coming up right after the jump.

It’s time for our weekly digest of tiny iPhone reviews, courtesy of iPhoneTiny.com, with some extra commentary exclusive to Cult of Mac.

This time, we review Air Assault, Bad Apples, Fire Drop Free, Ghost Capture – Free, Heli Rescue, Internet Radio Box, Sunday Lawn, synthPond Lite, Tiki Totems, and Titanic Rescue.

This week, Consumer Reports published the results of their latest tech support survey, and no surprise here: Apple came out as the number one company in both laptops and desktops.

As usual, Consumer Reports asked 7,000 subscribers about their satisfaction with tech related dealings with various companies. At the end of the day, Apple scored 86 points out of 100 in laptops, and 87 points out of 100 in desktops. What’s amazing is that second place didn’t even come close to challenging Apple’s tech support dominance: in the laptops category, Lenovo was 23 points behind, and in the desktops category, Dell was 55 points behind.

Good for Apple, but if anything, this is just confirmation of what we knew already: if you control both your hardware and your software, you’re going to have better luck responding to customer problems.

U.S. bookseller Barnes & Noble claims to be unconcerned about the iPad’s threat against their own e-reader, the Nook. Indeed, they are so excited about the possibilities of the iPad that they are now promising iPad owners that they can expect to download their own free Barnes & Noble e-reading software just around the time of the iPad’s launch, which will allow individuals to buy any of more than a million eBooks as an in-app purchase.

In truth, it makes sense: the Nook’s not really doing much business, and the iPad is going to be huge. Unlike the closed ecosystems of other e-readers, Barnes & Noble can launch all feet in and essentially parasite off of the iPad’s success.

The question is: will Apple allow Barnes & Noble and Amazon to open competing e-book stores? I tend to doubt it: Apple’s taken strong stances in the past against the duplication of functionality, and they are going to want to keep a stranglehold on the iPad e-book marketplace, the same way they control the iPod’s music and video marketplace. The more booksellers on the iPad, the better from a consumer perspective… but I really worry that Apple’s going to stamp down hard not just on commercial e-reader apps, but fantastic existing apps like Stanza.

Did you buy an iPad when Apple began pre-sales this morning? If so, you weren’t alone. Indeed, Apple may have sold 20,000 iPads per hour, leading one commentator to suggest the Cupertino, Calif. company was earning $10 million per hour on its new tablet device.

The estimate comes from Andrew Erlichson, CEO of Phanfare, a photo share site. Erlichson said he purchased two iPads and noted the order IDs.

Still confused about which iPad to pre-order? In collaboration with handsome Wilson Rothman, Gizmodo’s lovely own Rosa Golijan put together this handy, haiku-ified iPad buying guide which — while thoroughly tongue in cheek — more or less lines up with my own feelings on the matter: if you’re buying the iPad WiFi, there’s little reason to invest in more than the base model, while the 32GB iPad 3G will likely be the least regrettable purchase in the tablet’s first generation over the long term.

For years, the letter ‘i’ has been a goldmine for Apple; apply the letter to an ordinary object and you have lines outside your door waiting to buy the gadget. Apple may have to find another letter now that an Australian trade court sided with a handbag maker.

IP Australia, the government board that watches over trademarks, rejected Apple’s claim on the letter, noting the Cupertino, Calif. company didn’t prove “a person of ordinary intelligence and memory” would assume that just because a product carries the letter “i”, it was the brainchild of Steve Jobs. Although the case revolved around a laptop bag named DOPi — iPod backwards — the IP Australia judge, or registrar Michael Kirov (a self-proclaimed Apple fan) said that wasn’t enough to block sales.

Though a few early adopters have noted that the confirmation emails for pre-ordered iPads are slow, it looks like the in-store pick up option should be fun with some kind of launch fete in the works.

Via AleVH of Tech info team

The outcome of Apple and Nokia’s dueling patent infringement lawsuits could wait until mid-2012 for a verdict from the international trade court. The two companies swapped lawsuits in 2009, alleging the other with infringing key technologies.

The three-year timespan for the U.S. International Trade Commission sets the stage for what Reuters has characterized as “the spectre of a prolonged legal struggle.” In January, when the ITC launched a probe of Apple practices, CoM noted the legal battle could span three years. A month later, the ITC announced it had begun investigating Apple’s claims against the Finnish cell phone giant.