Category Archives: That’s Janky

Motorola and Apple are huge players in the portable technology industry. Motorola is hugely popular for their mobile phones. Apple has dominated the market with their DAP’s (digital audio player). What happens when these two companies combine forces? Disappointment. After disappointment comes name calling. Is this kindergarten?

I’m not one to follow the he-says-she-says BS that goes on, but this one wowed me. Ed Zander’s words towards Apple’s newest iPod “Screw the Nano”. Knowing that the Nano does not have threads, Ed was not implying that the Nano be twisted into a piece of wood.

I’m going to speculate a few things here now. The iPod Nano holds 1,000 songs, and Zander said “What the hell does the nano do? Who listens to 1,000 songs? People are going to want devices that do more than just play music”. Thing is, that iTunes phone, the Motorola ROKR, only holds 100 songs. The Nano was released on the same day that the ROKR was debuted, and the ROKR took a blatant second place. The iPod Nano blindsided us, nobody had any idea that a smaller, color iPod Mini killer was to be announced.

Motorola and Apple’s combined phone efforts were talked about, written about, and forged about. The phone was hyped up so much that when we found that only a mere hundred songs would sit on the phone, everyone turned their attention to the pencil thin iPod Nano. That’s where I think Ed Zander lost his temper, and whipped out his Philips screwdriver.

If you looked at the picture below and thought, “a new PC backpack,” you would only be half right. It’s a power generating backpack. I really want one so I can stand atop a bench and yell “I have the power!!!”

The backpack, as light as a candybar, takes the motions of your body and converts it into electricty. Your iPod, laptop, cell phone, PDA or whatever electronic device you can’t leave home without will never wuss out on you again. All you need to do is take a walk and poof, instant electricty.

It reminds me a bit of Berkeley’s BLEEX backpack which gave its wearer super strength.

I will say as great and green of an idea as this backpack is, it is definitly a fashion fopaux. I mean, c’mon how cool does this guy look?

Each day I watch a bit of news, and am in disbelief. Stars are flying their private jets out, and personally helping out with their own two hands. Oprah even fought her way into the superdome, where she was seen holding a filter over her nose and mouth. With things this bad, people need to help out. Our buddies over at PayPal aren’t doing a good job at that.

They froze the account of www.somethingawful.com, who raised almost $30K in 9 hours. This not only hindered the site to give the money to Red Cross, but also halted all other donations. In a time of need, PayPal sure was happy they didn’t startup business in New Orleans. Later, PayPal reps told Somethingawful that they needed to wait 3-5 business days, and that Red Cross could not accept the money, United Way was the only allowable donation party for PayPal.

Bad news on PayPal’s part. All (most of) the donations were refunded, to hopefully be donated. All this while people starve, dehydrate, and suffer. Way to go PayPal. Let’s hope SomethingAwful happens to PayPal, or at least smacks ‘em upside their dumb head.

RCA has a bookshelf system that will now transfer CD’s directly to your mp3 player. “Three easy steps are all it takes to move your favorite music from CD to a portable digital music player…” claims RCA.

Reasons this idea is good: No need for a PC, no need to download songs, and it’s the first I’ve seen of this kind.

Reasons this idea is bad: Continue reading →

‘The music industry’. Enter that string of words into my brain’s thesaurus and I’d spit out: evil, greedy, selfish, money hoarding animals that have made me suffer therefore now it’s their turn.

I fantasized about a driver’s license in 1994, a year before I turned 16, so I would be able to drive to the different Warehouse Music stores in order to browse through the used CD sections. Paying $17.99 for a new CD was near impossible living off of $20.00 per week for lunch and allowance, used CDs were half the price but availability was issue.

The fact that those CDs I poured my high school savings into contained only 2-3 enjoyable tracks bundled in between ‘filler’ songs, often left me with a sour taste in my mouth. The late 90’s was ‘The Music Industry’s’ hay day, funded by suckers such as yours truly. Come to think of it, from the dawn of recorded audio until Napster, was the Music Industry’s hay day.

P2P (peer to peer) file-sharing, pioneered by Napster and followed by a slew of others such as Morphious, Limewire, WinMx, Kazaa, BearShare, etc…, put up a huge middle finger to $17.99 CDs and the record labels who took advantage of me. I downloaded songs day and night, skipping class to find a song that I had only heard once Continue reading →