This post is brought to you by Digiarty, creator of MacX DVD Ripper Pro.
Gonna watch some scary movies this Halloween? This week, leading multimedia software designer Digiarty is giving away for free its ultimate DVD ripper for Mac, MacX DVD Ripper Pro. You can rip all your horror DVDs to just about any file format for OS X and play your video nasties on any mobile device such as iPhone, iPad, iPad mini, Apple TV, or Android. And the MacX DVD Ripper Pro can rip all the latest encrypted and copy-protected DVDs as easily as a ghost can walk through a wall! This great offer lasts till November 4 — read on for details….
The iPad mini, announced today, is suddenly a fantastic gaming device. While the original iPad mini introduced a fantastic iPad form factor at 7.9 inches, the iPad 2-equivalent display and CPU just doesn’t quite cut it for higher-end gaming apps.
Of course, all of Apple’s iOS devices have been great for gaming ever since the App Store launched back in 2008. Games make up a huge portion of the 1,000,000 apps out there to date, and it’s not surprising anymore to see console-level gaming experiences show up on both iPad and iPhone.
The Hulu Plus app for iOS has been updated today with support for Google Chromecast. You’ll find a new ‘Cast’ button within the app that will stream your favorite shows to your television with the help of the $35 dongle.
“We know you’ve been enjoying the Hulu Plus app on Chromecast with your Android phones/tablets and iPads over the last few weeks. Today, we are excited to add the Chromecast integration for Hulu Plus to your iPhones.”
The addition of Chomecast integration will finally give iPhone users the ability to use their app as a custom remote. From the Hulu Plus ass you can control videos on Chromecast connected to your TV while also browsing the app on your iPhone to queue up your next choice. The update is available for free in the App Store.
Artist Johannes P. Osterhoff documents getting clean.
For a whole year, Johannes P. Osterhoff broadcast what came across his iPhone screen to an open internet page.
Anyone who stumbled onto his iPhone Live website could spy on how much beer he was drinking, who called him, what games he was playing, his email inbox, how long his showers took, see what gigs he had lined up, his Twitter exchanges and what his moods were. As you can imagine, there were some interesting consequences for his friends and a few worried conversations with his mom.
Calling himself an interface artist, this project was less playful than some of his previous efforts. It grew from being “concerned about the growing amount of personal data that was stored on smartphones and that users lose control over it,” he told Cult of Mac.
With the stranger-than-science fiction story of the National Security Agency coming to light at the tail end of his iPhone Live year, the experiment has added resonance. While Americans disapprove of surveillance programs – about 53% were against spying in a Gallup poll taken after the Edward Snowden story broke – our participation in social media and the traces we leave publicly has skyrocketed. In 2008, just 12 million of us were “heavy” social media users – now that figure is 71 million, or about six times as many people, according to Edison research. That’s a lot of status updates.
Osterhoff’s wife, Mi Sun, goes live.
The Peek-A-Boo Challenge
In a way, Osterhoff is simply going bigger with what we all do, every day. You may laugh at lifecasters, but that’s what you do with every tweet, Facebook update, FourSquare check-in and Flickr snap. We don’t do it for money, though — and maybe we should stop sneering at those who do. At least they get paid for it. We do it to stay in touch. To prove we matter.
Osterhoff’s unease – and impetus – for the project came with the realization that “interaction with our smartphones serves the companies who provide platforms and apps more than it serves us, the actual users and the originators of information and data.” He wanted to share his information but keep control over what he was providing. This proved his biggest challenge.
When the project captured media attention, there were a flurry of visitors peering into his daily life on the web. Osterhoff tried to shield his friends and acquaintances from making unwanted cameos. He rigged up his jailbroken phone so that every time he hit the “home” button it would take a screen shot and upload it online. This gave him the flexibility to avoid capturing anything that might be better left private.
“Luckily apps provided me with more freedom than I had expected,” he said. “If I did not want to show the content of an email for example, I usually navigated back and showed the folder structure of my inbox instead. On the other hand, I wanted to entertain my visitors, so I used Camera+, Instagram, Google Maps more frequently to tell stories about my life. I would not have done this without an audience.”
His beer consumption prompted a few calls from mom.
When Your Peeps Want More Privacy
Osterhoff’s wife, Mi Sun, gladly participated in the project. The pair even enjoyed documenting their trip to Korea, “staging” the more interesting and photogenic parts of the journey to keep friends and family in the loop, he said. His mom, who voiced concern initially about the project, checked up on him after she thought he’d logged too many beers the night before — but she did like being able to stay abreast of his everyday doings any time she wanted. For his friends, it was different.
“I received less text messages then I did before the performance,” Osterhoff remarked. “My friends preferred to call me directly. The topic then would not be tracked and the call would only be listed in the call history.”
Life After the Truman Show
He logged in 13.575 screenshots of his home screen during the project, where anyone could participate by using his phone number at the top of the site or sending him an email. Osterhoff took the performance live, too, participating in events like Berlin’s Transmediale Festival where his iPhone screen was projected behind him as people live tweeted or emailed him comments and questions.
The apps taking up most of the limelight were Instagram, Mail, Phone and Safari, with a few guest spots from players like Pizza.de, Shazam, Cut The Rope, Angry Birds and Ikea. After an initial burst of energy, Osterhoff’s postings fell off about two-thirds of the way through the show. A broken dock connector (lint turned out to be the culprit) meant he had to cool his heels and wait for a replacement part to finish the experiment.
So, what happens after you’ve bared all for a year?
“Currently, using my iPhone feels pretty boring,” Osterhoff told us a few weeks after the end of the experiment. “I realized that I did a lot of stuff only due to the performance — tracking my showers, beers and mood for example. I have already stopped doing that, since it is pointless without an audience.” He’s back to heavy usage of the basics, namely: calls, Mobile Safari and Google Maps.
Osterhoff hasn’t walked out on lifecasting altogether, though. His latest project, called “Dear Jeff Bezos,” also centers around privacy by documenting what he’s reading on an Amazon Kindle. He jailbroke the device so that it every time he sets a bookmark, it sends an email to the Amazon CEO.
“Not so long ago it was very simple to read a book in private, Osterhoff said. “Companies like Amazon are interested in exclusive ownership of data, because with this exclusivity comes value. As a user of such services, one loses not only control but also authorship of the data one generated. To make the data I generate public is to devalue it. This is why I prefer to share data in an open format.”
The iPhone Live project also exposed his own ignorance – when a friend asked him over Twitter about spy operation PRISM, Osterhoff mistakenly replied on screen about the puzzle game of the same name. Perhaps too engrossed in tracking his own doings – using apps like iBeer, Mr.Mood and ShowerTimer – he hadn’t paid that much attention to the news.
Still, broadcasting our own data may be the way to go. “Screenshots contain a lot of information for humans, but it is still difficult to extract machine-readable data from them,” he said. “So actually, iPhone live also shows how we could share information with friends only and make it difficult for others, such as the NSA, to extract meaningful data.”
Google stock has risen 13% today, surpassing $1,000 for the first time ever. It comes a day after the search giant announced its earnings for last quarter, which beat Wall Street expectations thanks to a surge in mobile and video advertising that helped increase quarterly revenue by 23%.
If you love the Amazon Video app on your iPhone or iPad all the more now that it can stream AirPlay video to your Apple TV, great news: a new update to the app has just made AirPlay even better.
Gaming headsets are quite the rage lately, with products from Turtle Beach, Logitech, and Sony gracing any decent gaming aisle at your favorite retailer.
Siberia Elite Gaming Headset by SteelSeries Category: Headsets Works With: Mac, iPhone, Android, PCs Price: $199.00
SteelSeries has a long history of providing high quality gaming peripherals, like mice, keyboards, and controllers, for the high-end PC gaming market. They’ve recently made some fantastic forays into iOS gaming peripherals, as well, like the SteelSeries Free controller for iPad and iPhone.
These Siberia Elites, then, have a fantastic pedigree at a fairly competitive price, and I’ve fallen in love with their sound, build quality, and fancy extras.
No matter what you think of Apple’s new iPhone 5c case — and, just for the record, I think it’s an eyesore — I think we can all at least agree that it ooks an awful lot like Mattel’s famous game, Connect Four. If only it actually worked that way…
Well, now it does, thanks to a clever app called Flipcase.
Further evidence to suggest that the new iPhones are almost ready for their long-awaited debut on China Mobile — the world’s largest carrier — has surfaced today after both the iPhone 5s and the iPhone 5c gained regulatory approval for the carrier’s TD-LTE network.
Although Doctor Who is now a cherished cultural icon, that wasn’t always the case. In fact, many episodes of Doctor Who’s earliest adventures have been lost, thanks to the BBC’s tendency to simply record over the archival tapes. Occasionally, though, “lost” episodes are found, either because someone at home recorded the episodes by pointing a camera at their screens, or because the BBC shipped a copy of the tape to some international affiliate.
That’s how two lost stories from Doctor Who were just recovered. The BBC just discovered a small cache of Second Doctor episodes in Nigeria. And they’re now available on iTunes!
