Ale & Pie

After a long wait Google Latitude finally approved for iPhone

Adam — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 15:44:32 -0500

Back in February 2009, Google announced it would soon have an iPhone version of its location based social networking app, Latitude, which was already running on other mobile platforms, including their own Android operating system.

It never appeared as promised after the Apple gang rejected it from the App Store. According to Apple, it unnecessarily duplicated functionality of the native Google Maps app and would thus "create user confusion."

Well, just as they did with another contentious Google app, Google Voice, which was also initially rejected by Apple, only to be approved almost a year later after being faced with an investigation by the FCC, Apple has finally approved Google Latitude for iOS devices.

Google Latitude allows you and your friends share your locations on a map. It's available for free in the Apple App Store.

iPad 2 Rumours Start Rolling In

Adam — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 15:37:22 -0500

Reuters is claiming to have new information regarding the next iteration of Apple's iPad.

They are claiming that a source has told them to expect the new iPad in April. It will have two cameras, as the current iPhone does, one on the back for taking photos, and another forward-facing for Apple's Facetime protocol, to allow video chat. This really isn't too much of a surprise, as Apple always adds features to its products slowly as they are embraced by the public, and likes to bring its products' features into alignment with each other.

What is most interesting about the Reuters report is the claim that Apple is working on new sizes of the iPad.

Back in October, at Apple's earnings call, Steve Jobs took some digs at the 7" tablet market, calling them 'tweeners' and suggesting they were 'dead on arrival'. He even made flippant remarks about having to shave your fingers down to work on their small sized screen. He asserts that tablet makers are going for the 7" size in order to compete with the price point that Apple can offer on a 10" tablet due to their economies of scale. So it would be a bit of a surprise if Apple did start offering a smaller tablet - certainly this soon in the game - though Steve Jobs is a master of misdirection, so one can never know!

Also on the iPad front, iPad 2 cases have started to appear in the supply chain, and they seem to corroborate the rear facing camera rumours, but also offer tantalizing evidence that the new iPad may get an SD card slot, which all the current Apple notebooks offer, and possibly even a USB port. It should be noted however, that case makers have jumped the gun before and have had to recall or redesign cases when Apple's final shipping products just didn't fit.

Are you interested in picking up an iPad? Are any of these rumours compelling enough to make you wait? Would you want a 7" iPad? Or is Steve Jobs right about them being just too small?

Beer: The Ultimate Social Lubricant

Adam — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 17:47:28 -0500

When I was in school, they liked to teach us that society developed around the practice of farming to grow grains for bread.

Nowadays, attention has turned to the notion that it was beer, not bread, that the grains were being grown for.

It is, for example, much easier to make beer by accident than bread. Beer can almost happen by itself. Some grains could have gotten wet, and fermented with wild yeasts in the sun. Perhaps the resulting grain was consumed or some wacky experimenter drank the liquid, either way, the result was inebriation. After seeing this effect occur several times, two and two were put together and the conclusion that wet grain = get drunk was reached.

And of course, at the time, being drunk was thought to be a divine, spiritual state. Therefore, growing grains to make beer, was an obvious conclusion. The oldest recipe ever found was a recipe for beer.

A 6000 year old Sumerian beer recipe.

And then from there, it wasn't a big step to form the grains into a loaf and bake it, thus deriving bread.

As Live Science reports, while not too new, evidence of this theory is mounting.

I love Ramen! And I love Robots!

Adam — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 11:51:35 -0400

Ramen is tasty and robots are cool.

So how can you go wrong with a ramen-making robot?

A robot maker in Japan has put two robotic arms to work making ramen. It's proving to be a big hit and customers say it tastes as good as human made ramen. Fun!

Finally! Deep Fried Beer!

Adam — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 18:29:31 -0400

A dude in Texas has a patent pending on deep fried beer.

Mark Zable seals the beer in salty, ravioli-like packages of pastry and deep fries it for 20 seconds; just long enough to fry the dough, but not cook the beer.

Apparently the taste is something like eating a pretzel after taking a swig of beer, which begs the question "why not just eat a pretzel and take a swig of beer?".

[Telegraph]

Tractor Beam Breakthrough

Adam — Thu, 9 Sep 2010 12:31:50 -0400

Andrei Rhode and his team at the Australian National University have managed to move objects using a laser.

It has been done before using optical tweezers, but only with objects as small as bacteria and just a few millimetres.

With the new technique, the Australians have been able to move glass objects hundreds of times bigger than bacteria over 5 feet (they were only stopped, apparently by the size of the table they were using).

Shining the laser on the objects creates a warm outer layer and a cooler interior that can be moved on different angles, by slightly penetrating the outer layer, to move the object around.

Pop Sci says the technique could be used in applications to move hazardous matter around or in biological research.

[PopSci]

Calculator Porn!

Adam — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 08:35:12 -0400

Emil Dudek, from South Wales, UK, has started an online museum of vintage calculators, on the Vintage Technology site he runs, by cataloging his 583 calculators - that's quite a collection he's got!

He says he hopes to eventually have the 3,000 to 5,000 calculators that were made in the '70s catalogued and online.

It's a fun walk down memory lane to see some of the calculators I remember from my earliest years.

[via Wired]

Hyde Park

Adam — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 20:18:06 -0400

Hyde Park, London

Apple and the Most Advanced Injection-Molding Machine

Adam — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 15:51:50 -0400

Continuing with the tale of Apple's investment in the exclusive rights to use Liquidmetal in consumer electronics, the Cult of Mac is bringing us even more titillating details.

It seems it will also allow them to use what's being billed as ""the most advanced injection-molding machine ever made." Currently the machine is only a prototype, but it's expected Apple is going to order more of them.

"The most advanced injection-molding machine ever".

Not too long ago, Apple moved to a unibody design, with the products being laser cut from a single piece of metal or plastic, for most of their products. The advantages of this over the traditional method of sandwiching layers together, is greater strength, less product waste, and tighter component tolerances.

Clearly, being able to use injection molding, like one would with plastics, with the high-tech alloy, Liquidmetal, allows them to continue even further down this path, providing cost savings, while at the same time being able to make lighter, stronger, longer lasting products.

[Cult of Mac]

John Mellencamp Says the Internet's Like An Atomic Bomb

Adam — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 11:22:38 -0400

Once again, ignorance wrapped up in the guise of controversy.

Has-been musician, John (Cougar) Mellencamp has recently been quoted as saying, "I think the Internet is the most dangerous thing invented since the atomic bomb. It's destroyed the music business. It's going to destroy the movie business," while at the same time acknowledging the fact that technology could slow rock 'n' roll's inevitable death.

He goes on to illuminate his ignorance on the subject by mentioning how he listened to a remastered Beatles CD then compared it to the files on an iPod. Of the experience he says, "you could barely even recognize it as the same song. You could tell it was those guys singing, but the warmth and quality of what the artist intended for us to hear was so vastly different."

Now there are a couple of major problems with this statement. First of all, is he talking about the encoding of the CD? And was this iPod plugged into a sound system or is he talking about listening through little earbuds?

The Beatles music has never been for sale on iTunes, so clearly the problem is not iTunes, but rather whoever encoded the files for the iPod. I think one would be hard pressed to tell the difference between a 320 or 256 kbps AAC file and the original CD. Or it could even be encoded using Apple Lossless format or even just ripped as an .aiff or .wav, in which case there would be virtually no difference at all. So the problem is most definitely not the iPod.

On the other hand, if he's referring to listening through the little earbuds, well that same problem could have been said since the dawn of the first Walkman, so nothing has changed there.

Mellencamp shows he's clearly unable or unwilling to make this distinction which is quite disappointing considering he's supposed to be a savvy musician.

Sure illegal downloading and listening through tiny little electronic speakers, and so on, has downgraded our music experience to a large degree, but just as free music has hurt the business side of things, it has also opened up so much more music to people than ever before. Music is being appreciated more often by more people.

The only real issue is that the industry has failed to find a way to capitalize on it, so we get knee jerk ignorance from people like Mellencamp, and flailing tactics by groups like RIAA.