There’s a new fish plaque in town: the Flying Sphagetti Monster.

The big flaw in ThinkSecret’s fun-spoiling story that next week’s special event will about PowerBooks and Power Macs, is that Apple doesn’t hold special media events for these kind of upgrades.

Incremental upgrades of existing products are usually ushered in with a press release, or a Macworld mention at best.

Oh, and now ThinkSecret’s saying it is about the iPod, but not the video iPod. New iPod–but not video–on next week’s itinerary.

Sorry, but I’m not convinced.

There aren’t a lot of protective cases for the iPod nano in stores just yet. So here are some options for building your own. There’s a range of materials to choose from: gum wrappers, pleather or paper — whatever tickles your fancy.

Londoner Graham Bower has some plausible video iPod predictions, as well as nifty Photoshop mockups of the rumored device.

In Bower’s view, Apple needs to differentiate the 60/80 Gbyte iPod from lower-capacity, music-only offerings, and that’s done by adding video.

The video iPod will sync music, photos and home movies (“home movies away from home”), as well as play short music videos and video podcasts downloaded from the iTMS.

Other predictions include an onscreen keyboard, controlled by the click wheel; a return to the original iPod design (polycarbonate front, metal back); video playback in landscape mode; and a revolving click wheel to control playback when the iPod is held horizontally.

Paul Gillibrand’s Apple brunch. It’s the full monty!

Se the full Flickr set, including the interactive plan.

(Via Fscklog)

Apple will introduce a major product on October 12 — and it may be the long-awaited video iPod.

The company on Tuesday sent out invites to an event at the plush California Theater in San Jose, where Steve Jobs and Bono introduced the U2 iPod last year.

“Join Apple for ‘One More Thing…'” the invite says, refering to Steve Jobs’ famous line before he unveils a major product.

The invite gives no clue about the product, but AppleInsider — a somewhat reliable rumor site — says it’s a video-capable iPod.

The new iPod will be 60 Gbytes and sport a large, high-resolution color screen.

“The release of the iPod video is expected to be accompanied by a ‘major update’ to Apple’s iTunes music store that will include a significant number of music videos and other short video content,” AppleInsider says.

The site says a video-cpable Airport Express is also in the works.

Luxpro, the Taiwanese company that knocked off the iPod shuffle, has a new product: the Pico.

Sell your old iPhone 15 Pro to Cult of Mac. We buy back iPhone 15 Pro. Get immediate cash. Save your old iPhone 15 Pro from landfill.

via GIPHY

https://giphy.com/gifs/AppleTV-apple-tv-app-3WCNY2RhcmnwGbKbCi

Uncyclopedia shows how to upgrade the nano to 200 Gbytes! But be warned: “We found in our benchmarking results that the addition of the ATA hard drive adversely affected battery life.”

The quExp widget is handy for keeping track of the enourmous amounts dropped at the Apple Store, as Macfeber’s Roger ?erg notes.

To match his car stereo, iLounge forum member ryno3xx inverted his iPod’s screen. It took “Much Patience,” he writes.

“The hardest part was separating the existing polarizing filter from the LCD, as it is hard and the LCD brittle, but when all is said and done it’s a pretty sweet looking mod.”

Here’s how he did it:

I got my filter at polarization.com

The mod is quite simple. After first realizing that anything you do to your iPod with a razor blade can cause you great sadness and monetary loss, consider the following:

1) disassemble iPod (see other posts for photo how-to, warnings, etc.)
2) remove screen
3) take Xacto knife, razor blade ( shaped like /___\ is best), etc. to remove black foam border. do not discard or damage. you’ll use it later.
4) use blade at as small an angle as possible to surface (near parallel) to remove top film. It is ~1mm thick. There are two surfaces, The outer one is the polarization filter, the inner is simply a clear film, likely an adhesion layer. Remove both. Be patient. The Filter is a rather tough material, the LCD is brittle. Too much pressure will break the LCD.

***never pull filter away from LCD. doing so will create a vacuum, bring all liquid***
***crystal to the middle, and ruin your LCD indefinitely****

5) use *mild* solvent to remove any adhesive glue left behind
6) reassemble iPod, not into its case, but just enough that it works.
7) take new polarizer filter and place over display
8) rotate to get desired effect.
9) cut out and place on screen
10) place black foam removed earlier back in place (failing to do so will let the backlight escape thru the casing.)
reassemble iPod

Who says the iPod nano is all delicate and wimpy?

Over at MacMerc, a fellow called jonknee describes how he put his new nano through the wash.

At first, the nano appeared dead, but it slowly revived and is now mostly back to normal.

“After waiting another day, the nano dried completely and at this time you can’t even tell it ever got wet (and soaped up, spun etc). The screen now looks perfect. Very impressive!” he writes.

Girl hacker Neisha Erin Stadelhofer managed to get Mac OS 7.5 running on her PSP. She loaded a 680×0 emulator on top of an x86 emulator. It’s not exactly snappy: it takes four hours to boot up.

Artist David Ellis specializes in installing turntables in unlikely places, like tree trunks.

Ellis’ Drum Painting Project mixes analog record players with speakers made of cow, deer, and sheep hide.

Here’s a surprisingly affective music video for a song called Jed’s Other Poem (Beautiful Ground) by the band Granddaddy.

Made on an Apple II, it consists only of the lyrics scrolling across the screen in ways that illustrate the song.

Finally, a free demo version of DOOM 3 is available from Aspyr. Weighing 463-MBytes, the demo allows a single-player to move through three levels of the first chapter.

A bittorrent version is also available.

Here’s the best teardown pictures of the nano so far, courtesy of Japan’s PC Watch.

The iPod nano is flying off store shelves, says Wall Street bank Piper Jaffray.

As reported in Forbes:

Available for six days, the music player is seeing high demand, based on a survey of 20 Apple retail stores, Piper Jaffray said. “No store that we checked with had black 4-gigabyte nanos in stock.”

In the New York Times, Dacid Pogue says the nano will effect Apple’s market share of MP3 players. Writes Pogue:

Apple’s market share won’t stay at 80 percent. It’s about to go up.

If you doubt it, then you haven’t yet handled the iPod Nano: a tiny, flat, shiny wafer of powerful sound that Apple unveiled last week. Beware, however: to see one is to want one. If you hope to resist, lash your credit card to your wallet like Odysseus to the mast.

SafariStand is a free plug-in for Safari that adds a tabs sidebar for displaying thumbnails of open tabs in a left-hand sidebar.

Developed in Japan, the programmer says:

“English documentation is not available yet. But User Interface is almost English.”

Spotted on Flickr, a homemade iPod speaker system from someone called ianbrown42 (surely not the great Ian Brown):

“These are remote iPod speakers I scratch-built for my wife’s iPod shuffle. It’s all scientific glass and aluminium construction. The sub-woofer is an inverted glass dome, and a fresnel lens from a rail-car. The guts of the thing is borrowed from a stock computer amp, whilst the speakers themselves are Apple Pro’s.”

“You can see from this alternate view that the tripod legs are made from aluminium garden trowles, polished up.

You can see the CD player I used to test it in the bottom right corner – this thing is huge, and weighs a ton (15 kilos).

The sound is pretty good, as you would expect of apple speakers, but the sub-woofer thumps a bit. Overall a fun project!”

From Pixel y Dixel in Madrid, a striking image of a lamppost and flags.

3000 x 2000 version here.

A picture at Mac Essentials shows the perils of children and markers.

New to me: collectors of Mac boxes.

SpyMac recently posted a picture of one of its members’ extensive collections, which led me to discover dozens more:

Here’s a few of the box collectors on SpyMac.

you sure do keep boxes for a long time

Most of my mac boxs

What does “throw away” mean?

iPod Boxes

Mac Boxes

My boxes

The Mac Compact Belgium website claims to showcase “the most important collection of Belgium.”

“You could grow this collection!” says the mysterious collector. “Phone me 0472 26 39 90”

Here’s a bigger picture.

(Via LinkMachineGo)

A trial version of the CherryOS Mac emulator is once again available for download from the Maui X-Stream website.

The $50 Windows software purportedly emulates a G4 processor, allowing a Windows XP machine to run Mac OS X.

The CherryOS was a source of some controversy last year.

It’s initial release last October was greeted with a mixture of excitement and skepticism, given the claims of its supposed developer, programmer Arben Kryeziu.

Kryeziu claimed to have written the complex application from scratch in just four months, and that it performed almost as fast as the host processor — two pretty unlikely claims.

Then programmers discovered CherryOS contained unacknowledged code from a similar open source project, PearPC. Under the rules of PearPC’s license, any borrowed code should be acknowledged.

Kryeziu denied using PearPC code and promised the software would be rereleased in Q1 2005. It seems he kept his promise — at least part of it.

The CherryOS still contains PearPC code, according to a report at BetaNews:

“CherryOS boots up in the exact same manner as PearPC, and its error messages and source files are nearly identical. The emulator also includes MacOnLinuxVideo, which is the same driver used by PearPC to speed up graphics. The CherryOS configuration file also closely mirrors that used by PearPC.

According to tests by BetaNews, CherryOS launches a second process and covers the window within its own display. Thus, when CherryOS is running, a second taskbar entry appears without icon.”

From the Middle East section of the “iPods Around the World” gallery at the iPodLounge.

There are several striking images in the gallery, like this shot of an iPod in the gun barrel of a tank, and this iPod and a refueling jet fighter.