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This morning the US/Canada Apple store was down (apple.com/store). It came right back up with no differences. Everything seems yo be the same. Perhaps it was just some normal maintenance, or maybe….

Notice that there is a small gap in between the two rows of products in the center of the page.

Could this be a minor mistake as they altered the code to allow a third row of products? The new updates I predicted in my last post?

When Apple moved to the new version of their site at the announcement of the iPhone, all pages were updated for the new style- except the store. It still has plain gray boxes while other pages, such as the “Mac” page to the right, have a nice gradient and larger size.

Could all these things be signs that Apple is preparing to update the store? Maybe, say, for an August 7th product transition?

On the 25th, Apple mentioned “product transition” in a conference call. The main two theories are that this means: A) 6th-gen iPods B) New iMacs.

Almost unanimously, the analysts are predicting a product shakeup, specifically in the iPod family. Ars says multitouch is coming, Forbes suggests that Apple tipped its hand to upcoming product changes, and Apple Insider has Ben Reitzes, who was the first analyst to question the low guidance, suggesting that an iMac redesign or “ultra-portable” may be in the works.
But the majority of analysts say it’s the iPod that Apple will focus on. The iPod has been waiting in the wings, watching the iPhone and OS X get all kinds of pretty updates, and call it what you want– the halo effect or trickle down– the iPod is ready for a refresh. ThinkSecret comes right out and says it: we’ll see a 6G iPod as early as the first half of August.
- Quoted From http://www.tuaw.com/2007/07/27/the-ipod-and-the-product-transition/

But personally, I think this is going to be much, much more. Continue reading »

Today, there are over 540,000 words in the English language: 5 times the number in Shakespeare’s time. I find this amazing. As slang and new terms like “cool”, “Internet”, “blogs”, and “Google” are officially accepted, it not only complicates our lives, but enriches them. It is predicted that by 2049, the computation power of a single, ordinary laptop will exceed that of the entire human race. Combined. Kind of hard to believe, especially considering that every 8 seconds 34 children are born, and that number just keeps climbing. At this rate, the human race won’t fit on 2 Earths by 2049.
Continue reading »

About noon yesterday (I left the night before) I got back from my short trip to Chicago, Illinois. I took a lot of photos, so check out the album at Pakman20.com/photos. I think from this trip I’ve learned 3 main things:

1. Ohio has very clean restrooms in their new, big, shiny, standardized rest stops.
2. Although the Sears Tower is higher than the John Hancock Building, the Hancock has a much better tour in their observatory and is presented much better. It’s cleaner, newer, has more information, and is designed well.
3. Straws can be made out of paper and still be durable.
   When I visited Shedd’s Aquarium in Chicago I noticed that is was very energy efficient/environmentally friendly. There were almost as many recycling bins as garbage cans, the back of every map and brochure had “please recycle” written all over it, even the bathrooms had replaced the expensive, tree killing paper towels with high efficiency blow dryers- each equipped with an LCD display that cycled through advertisements and reminders to recycle. But by far the coolest things were the straws at the restaurant and food court. Like the cardboard tube at the center of a roll of paper towels or wrapping paper, they were made not of plastic but recycled cardboard spiraled into a tube. Of course they looked and sounded cool, but I thought they might be a little weak in actual use. To my surprise, they were just as strong as plastic even after sitting in a glass of Coke for a little over a half hour, a feat that would rot any ordinary roll or paper into a deliciously feeble pulp. A cardboard straw is just as good as any plastic straw, except better for the environment. The wrappers identified them as “earth friendly straws” from aardvarkstraws.com. Now if only I could get these at my local Shop Rite…

Tremulous is not only unquestionably the best free game I’ve ever played, but right up there on my list with other games that I’ve payed for. It’s a great fps (first person shooter) with a little bit of rts (real time strategy) thrown in. You choose your side: humans or aliens (I’m always a human) and play away online. Even compared to non-free games, it looks great. Not top-of-the-line, but still great.

If you play as a human, you start out with only a rifle. You have to hunt down the aliens, and each time you kill one you get “credits”. You can use these credits to buy new armor, weapons, etc. Each time you die, you loose everything except your credits. But that’s not all. There’s also a lot of strategy involved. The humans have to protect their reactor, the main core of their base. The reactor provides power for other structures, such as respawn points (telenodes), medistations (heals you), armories, and turrets. If the aliens destroy your reactor of all of your telenodes, you loose.

The aliens, meanwhile, have to protect their “overminds”, the alien equivalent of a reactor, eggs (like telenodes), and so on. Aliens don’t have credits, though. Each time they get a kill they can evolve one step higher. The more they evolve, the bigger, stronger, and faster they get.

Tremulous is awesome. Even if it doesn’t sound like fun to you, trust me, try it. It’s free, so what do you have to loose? The music in that promo video is kinda weird, though.

Official Site: Tremulous.net
Windows and Linux versions: http://tremulous.net/files/ (get the ’stand alone’ version, at the top of the list)
Mac Version: http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/games/action_adventure/tremulous.html (universal binary)

I was reading The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW.com) and I came across this. They mentioned it because of Independence day, but even though the 4th has passed it’s still a cool screensaver, and it’s free.

It does a great job of rendering not only the fireworks, but also the smoke, moon, stars, clouds, ground (with the occasional mountain in the background) and wind, all fully customizable in it’s options menu. Throughout the whole thing, it pans and zooms through the explosions. It can even do the fireworks sounds, although I’m not sure why anybody would want sounds in their screensaver so I personally turned that off.

This is replacing “Fenêtres Volantes” as my permanent screensaver.

But, unfortunately, it’s mac only.

Hey, today’s random fact of the day is so long that it doesn’t display correctly in the toolbar. It looks fine in the Pakman20.com homepage, though. Just wanted to let people with my toolbar know that I’m working on the problem.

The now famous Hollywood sign originally read “Hollywoodland” as an advertisement in 1923 for a new housing development. It was only intended to last a year or so, but survived for much longer. In 1939 it’s maintenance officially ended and it began to fall apart. 10 years later, the Hollywood Chamber of Congress took control. They removed the last four letters and the lights that had lined each letter. Years later, they replaced the whole structure with a more permanent one made of Australian steel, which still stands today. Learn more about the Hollywood sign here.

If you ask me, that’s a pretty good random fact of the day.