Check out the first Photoshop icon. It is literally a photo shop (a 1-hour photo shop, that is).
(via Cocoia)

A Melbourne-based team is in the process of developing a chip capable of short-range (10 meters) wireless transmissions with data throughput of up to 5Gbps. The team is about a year away from marketing the chip.

This sort of technology could open some interesting possibilities with iPods and iPhones and their interaction with other devices.
via The Age

This morning, EyeTV notified me that there is an update. Here is a link to the details - Update EyeTV 3. Bug fixes include:

An occasional hang when exporting to Apple TV and iPod formats has been resolved.

A problem when trying to activate tvtv service after upgrading from EyeTV 2 has been resolved.

EyeTV now returns to the main library when a shared archive is unmounted.

Closed Captions are no longer drawn over editing controls.

Fixed a problem where Wi-Fi Access was not working after launching EyeTV with the EyeTV Archive located on an external hard disk.

A problem where the EyeTV software activation code was not stored when running the Setup Assistant on Standard Accounts on Leopard has been resolved.

A problem creating Smart Playlists that contain the slash character “/” has been fixed.

Smart Guide filters are no longer case sensitive.

A problem playing back certain ISDB-T recordings has been fixed.

Wi-Fi Access: Shared recordings with long Episode info weren’t being displayed properly on iPod touch and iPhone.

A problem with the Editor keyboard shortcuts not working has been resolved.

When switching to Front Row 2 under Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, EyeTV no longer exits full screen mode.

Smart Playlists now support searching by show content genre.

A problem where the timeline overlay showed the original length for edited and compacted recordings has been fixed.

A TitanTV error when installing the EyeTV 3 Upgrade over EyeTV 2.5.2 has been eliminated.

A crash when deleting a recording after making a clip has been fixed.

DVB-T reception in the VHF frequency band with DiBcom-based receivers such as EyeTV for DTT Stick and EyeTV Diversity has been improved.

A group of Princeton computer scientists has published a paper(pdf) demonstrating a method for accessing a computer’s memory to gain access to encryption keys. Contrary to popular belief, RAM contents are not immediately erased once a computer is shut down. It can take 2.5 to 35 seconds for the data to fade away. This time can be extended by exposing the RAM chip to extremely cold temperatures.

Microsoft’s BitLocker, Apple’s FileVault, TrueCrypt and dm-crypt all seem to be vulnerable to this method of attack.

There seems to be no easy fix for these problems. Fundamentally, disk encryption programs now have nowhere safe to store their keys. Today’s Trusted Computing hardware does not seem to help; for example, we can defeat BitLocker despite its use of a Trusted Platform Module.(#)

via ars

Paramount Home Entertainment has become the sixth and final major motion picture studio to commit to the Blu-ray format. Universal made the same commitment a couple days following Toshiba’s official statement concerning their backing out of HD DVD support.

“We are pleased that the industry is moving to a single high-definition format, as we believe it is in the best interest of the consumer,” the statement reads. “As we look to (begin) releasing our titles on Blu-ray, we will monitor consumer adoption and determine our release plans accordingly.”

via The Hollywood Reporter

Fossil introduced two new limited edition watches - a men’s Superman collectible watch (LL1037) with a limited run of only 1,000 pieces and a Batman Dark Knight collectible watch (LL1040) with a limited run of only 2,000 pieces. I thought the last superman watch was nice, but this new one looks as good or better. If you are interested in either of these, don’t wait too long to pick one up. The last Superman collectible watch sold out very quickly.

Read the rest for the bestselling Superman and Batman DVDs.
Read the rest of this entry »

Do balloons sound like a feasible solution for the infrastructure of a wireless network? I don’t think so, but a company called Space Data is trying exactly that — sending up many transceiver-equipped balloons every day, in order to create a large-scale wireless network.

While the balloons are cheap and disposable at $50 a pop, the transceivers they carry are worth about $1,500. Once a transceiver is released from its balloon to parachute back to earth, there’s no way to predict where it will land. So Space Data has hired 20 hobbyists with GPS devices to track them down.(via The Wall Street Journal)

For those of you who bought a library of HD DVDs before Toshiba jumped ship, Wired has a nice write-up detailing what is involved in converting an HD DVD to Blu-ray format.

Below is an HD DVD ROM and some Blu-ray burners and media to get you started.

$299.99 - Verbatim 25GB 2X BD-R(Blu-ray) White Surface with Hard Coat 25 Packs Disc - OEM — 4 hours ago

$179.99 - RiDATA 25GB 2X BD-R(Blu-ray) Inkjet Printable 25 Packs Disc - Retail — 4 hours ago

$10.99 - Verbatim 25GB 4X BD-R(Blu-ray) Single Disc - Retail — 4 hours ago

$8.99 - RiDATA 25GB 2X BD-R(Blu-ray) Single Disc - OEM — 4 hours ago

$7.99 - Verbatim 25GB 2X BD-R(Blu-ray) Single Branded Disc - Retail — 4 hours ago

$13.99 - RiDATA 25GB 2X BD-RE(Blu-ray) Single Disc - OEM — 4 hours ago

$15.99 - LG 25GB 2X BD-RE(Blu-ray) Single Disc - Retail — 4 hours ago

$15.99 - Verbatim 25GB 2X BD-RE(Blu-ray) Single Branded Disc - OEM — 4 hours ago

$14.99 - TDK 25GB 2X BD-RE(Blu-ray) Single Disc - Retail — 4 hours ago

The new version of HandBrake will now read from the MPEG transport streams that EyeTV captures in HD. WooHoo! It was a bit frustrating that the previous version wouldn’t accept these high quality files.

HandBrake will also detelecine your videos if that is something you need.

HandBrake 0.9.2 has been released with many improvements, but it is compatible with Leopard only. This is my main conversion utility for creating iPod compatible video files. It’s fast and the files it produces look great.

Apple fans will be delighted over:

• Dolby Digital 5.1 (AC3) sound in MP4 files, for a true DVD experience on the AppleTV and in Perian.
• Multi-track audio support for Apple devices
• iPhone-compatible anamorphic video at its full size

Power users will find:

• Variable frame rate encoding with detelecine filtering
• More flexible, “loose” anamorphic video
• MP4 optimization for progressive web downloads
• Dynamic range compression for encoding from AC3 audio
• Robust program and transport stream support

Speed freaks will squee at:

• A fresher, faster version of x264
• Tuning of FIFO sizes by processor count

And everyone should enjoy the increased stability brought by:

• Better handling of audio discontinuities
• Better handling of DVD read errors
• Work-arounds for missing end-of-cell markers
• Recovery when streams have signal loss
• Better synced chapter markers
• Better handling of B-Frames
• No more cutting off the very ends of films
• No more lost subtitles or chapter markers
• No more crashes in 2-pass encoding