2nd Generation iPod Touch

I recently bought 16 Gb version of iPod Touch (1st gen) on eBay. What a fun little device. After 2.0 firmware you can install all kinds of fun applications and many are free! Despite all the cool factor of this very useful little gadget, I had a ton of complains about it's software limitations (music player for one is lobotomized: almost zero tweaks, just 4 dumb buttons and volume which is impossible to control precisely). But my today's blog is not about this. New version of iPod touch came out last week, and I couldn't resist it. It had few useful things that 1st player was missing. Namely actual physical volume buttons and built in speaker. I see many people don't understand what speaker is for, but I think it's a must! I'm not talking about blasting music on the train, no. When I'm at home I'm using it too, and I don't want to play games with my headphones on. Want to show cool video clip to your friends without sharing ear infection? :) There you go. Like to use alarm clock but don't want to sleep in the headphones? Very useful! And now calendar reminders finally make sense. Don't get me wrong, I'd still use headphones to listen to the music or watch movies on the train/plane.
There's however a HUGE bug in the 2nd Gen iPod Touch, and it's a deal breaker. Get this, WiFi DOES NOT WORK with many routers that use WPA/WPA2 security. Actually it's a bug in 2.1.1 firmware and it also affects 1st gen iPods. Difference is that you can't use older firmware on the new iPod. I spent about 3 hours, torturing my D-Link 4300 router, trying all kinds of settings and combinations, changing WPA password, no matter what I did it would not connect. Every other WiFi device I have works flawlessly. When I disabled wireless security, iPod was able to connect, but it's not an option. I went to apple forums, and it's a riot out there, so many people are having this issue. Someone suggested to do a Network Reset (it's an option in iPod settings). Surprisingly it helped me connect to my network once, and then it was no go again. I hope Apple is paying attention. If firmware is not fixed, I'm returning my iPod within a week...
Besides firmware bug, there's another issue with new iPod Touch. It seems they changed something so older chargers no longer work! I had no problems using my really old Apple made AC charger from 4th Gen iPod until I got new iPod Touch. Even 1st gen worked. Now it displays "Charging device is not supported" or similar message. It's not a huge deal to me, but people who bough $300+ Bose docking systems feel the pain... I wonder if there was any technical reason Apple did this, are they just being @ssholes and trying to squeeze more money out of consumer by making us buy new chargers...
Oh yeah one more thing. New iPod includes Nike + transceiver chip. Sorry but I have strong optionion about this one... I mean they actually had a chance to include bluetooth chip, but chose some proprietary technology that less than 3% of us use so some overpriced sneakers can now talk to the iPod. Instead we could've used wireless bluetooth headphones, or a bluetooth GPS reciever, maybe even a keyboard. Thanks alot Steve.
But what can you do. With GPS and Bluetooth iPod touch would've been COMPLETE. Since we don't live in the perfect world, I'm accepting what I have, proiding WiFi issue is fixed soon.

RAM holds data even after power is off, helps to break disk encryption

A group of Princeton researchers discovered a clever way to break virtually any disk encryption with help of an... air duster and a screwdriver! Secret lies in the little know fact that computer RAM memory doesn't actually loose all of it's data instantly after a power off! I was amazed to find out that some RAM chips will hold it's contents for seconds or even minutes after they stop receiving any power. And data doesn't fade all at once, but gradually. What's even more is that if you cool RAM chip down it can keep it's contents intact much much longer. And this can be achieved by a household air duster.
Now I'm getting to the breaking encryption part. Thing is that decryption key is stored in the RAM. So by dumping and analyzing RAM's contents one can find this key and decrypt contents of the hard drive. This method is not 100% effective, as it assumes that user already entered password before memory contents were wiped out.
Check out the video!

HD DVD dead and buried, format war is over

From engadget.com

It's official. Toshiba just made a statement saying, " it will no longer develop, manufacture and market HD DVD players and recorders." Cessation of the player and recorders are targeted for March 2008. Volume production of HD DVD disk drives for PCs and games will end in the same time frame. However, Atsutoshi Nishida, President and CEO of Toshiba Corporation did say that Toshiba will, "continue to assess the position of notebook PCs with integrated HD DVD drives." That's it folks, the format war is over, Blu-ray has won. Full press release after the break.

Read more: Two years of battle between HD DVD and Blu-ray: a retrospective

More nails into HD-DVD coffin

Netflix and Best Buy announced that they will not be carrying HD-DVD titles going forward, only Blue-Ray. While current inventory will remain for a while, nothing new will be added. This is another good news for consumers (well maybe not those who bought HD-DVD player) in HD format war. One format, means less confusion, more devices and better prices. Looks like Amazon is also liquidating it's HD-DVD players and movies, I've seen ongoing sales for 50% off. Microsoft also just announced slashing of the prices for HD-DVD drive for XBox 360. I wouldn't buy it if I were you ;) It is very unlikely now that HD-DVD will make a glorious come back. I'd be shocked if it did.

Evil empire is destined to fail

After January's announcement from both Warner Music Group and Sony about plans to drop DRM protection from their online music sale, Apple iTunes is THE ONLY company out there that still carries DRM infested music, and has no plans about removing it. iTunes - change or die!
DRM-free music can be purchased at Amazon's digital music store right now :)

Greedy bastards

Ok this is a straight re-post of the original article at gizmodo
I just had to pass it along...


The RIAA always claims that its looking out for the livelihood of artists when it sues the hell out of alleged pirates, but in reality it's really fighting to keep record industry executives rich by defending an outdated and unsustainable business model. While before the PR team at least made an attempt to make it seem like artists were priority #1, they seem to have given up: the RIAA is now trying to cut down artist's royalties on digital downloads.

Yes, the RIAA doesn't think the record companies are making enough and that musicians are clearly making too much. I mean, they get 13% now. Like they deserve 13% for writing and creating the music that people are paying for. Hogwash! Someone had to, you know, encode it. That's worth at least 40%. And hey, these shoes don't shine themselves! So they're pushing to get that rate cut down to a shameful 9%, giving artists even less of a slice of the pie than before.

Of course, Apple, Napster and other large online retailers make the RIAA look like a charity in comparison, with Apple pushing to cut the royalty rate down to an insulting 4%. Yes, Apple wants artists to get a 4% of wholesale royalty rate. Really looking out for those artists, aren't you Steve?

If there was ever a time for a band to try going completely independent, this is it. Why give over 90% of your income away to greedy sleazebags when you can sell your music online without the middleman? This industry needs to be burned to the ground and built back up again; it's broken and it seems less and less likely that it'll be able to be fixed. [Hollywood Reporter via Slashdot]

Thoughts on megapixels

I've been reading in the tech news about new Kodak's 5MP tiny censor. It's actually small enough for the cell phone cameras. So I thought to myself, great this means I would be able to take 5 Megapixel snapshot, but what about crappy lens? I haven't heard about many scientific breakthroughs in optical lens quality, so new phones will get great censor but old crappy piece of glass. Will this make pictures look better? Yes! I believe it will. What is the best camera in the world?

Human eye of course (well maybe certain animal's too). You have an amazing sensor (retina) with about 105 million photosensitive cells (100 million monochrome and 5 million color), most powerful in the world video processor (visual cortex of the brain), and really small lens. Image that you normally see is blurry, with lots of noise (veins) and a huge blind spot. Yet you see a crystal clear image thanks to our brain. It processes, fixes and enhances everything that eye sees. Same thing is done by the camera's CPU. The better this CPU is and more information it has to work with (megapixels) the greater resulting image will be. So I think that new 5Mp cell phone cameras will take great images even with the same crappy lenses on them. Of course not better than SLR with a good lens and same or better resolution, but still it might actually threaten point and shoot digital camera market.