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Apple announced the 3G iPhone today. It’s a pretty small feature enhancement, only three new things:

• 3g Network
• GPS built in
• $200 for 8gb, $300 for 16gb

I think the best upgrade is the price. I was hoping for a lot more I guess, because that just doesn’t seem all that exciting. There are still a bunch of holes:

• No MMS support
• No stereo Bluetooth
• No video recording support

They basically just changed the chipset inside and called it a day. Whoopie.

UPDATE: The price is not cheaper in the long run, it’s a lot more expensive. The new iPhone 3G plan will cost me $75/mo, compared to $60/mo for the original. That means I would end up spending $160 more for the new iPhone over 2 years, versus the original.

After noticing some trouble with the twitter feed on ianneubert.com, I checked the site: istwitterdown.com and guess what it said?

I’m really tired of twitter being down all the time. I probably won’t be using it much longer.

I just read an article on Ars Technica about this little set top box from Roku. It lets you connect your Netflix subscription to your TV and watch any of the 10,000 streaming movies that Netflix has available. The unit only costs $99 and doesn’t require any changes to your Netflix subscription. You’re good to go with a basic $8.99/mo subscription.

The box appears to have all the ports (HDMI, component, and optical audio) necessary for HD content too! Although Netflix doesn’t have any streaming HD content yet.

Flash forward a few years from now, and I bet I’ll be able to get rid of my satellite or cable TV boxes and just stream everything via Netflix. Now, that would be awesome.

[ From Ars Technica ]

I’ve signed up for a twitter account again. Now that I use Facebook, it has some neat integration to control the current status messages that many people seem to be using nowadays. Now I can sync status updates across Facebook, Twitter, and my own web site. Sweet!

I’ve also removed the last.fm flash player from my site’s side panel. It felt like it was slowing down the site too much. I just replaced it with a simple link to “Listen to my music“.

A friend of mine asked me to help him fix his Windows machine from a virus that he got infected with. Since I switched to a Mac a couple years ago I really hadn’t thought much about viruses, they’ve really gotten pretty evil. This one compromised the machine and then tried to extort him to buy anti-virus software to cure it! Lol.

Anyway, as I was reinstalling Windows I got this screen:

It reads:

Surfing the Internet: safe, fast, and flexible

Windows XP includes the most secure version of Internet Explorer to date.

That’s reassuring.

If you are trying to figure out how to get your network working again after cloning a VMWare image from Ubuntu 8.04, I hope you find this post before you waste an hour trying to figure it out like I did.

After copying the VMWare files and launching the copied instance be sure to tell VMWare that you copied the image. This will generate a new MAC address for your cloned server. You will need to remove the networking udev rule though, in order for udev to figure out your new MAC address.

Just run this command:

sudo rm -rf /etc/udev/rules.d/70-persistent-net.rules

Then

sudo reboot

If you keep a base install image on hand (highly recommended!), be sure to remove that file before you start to make copies from it. Then you won’t run into this problem again!

I’ve blogged in the past about what I think about DRM. I just thought I’d point everyone to a real world example. Microsoft is dropping support for MSN Music effective August 31, 2008. After that point any music that you legally purchased from MSN Music will no longer be able to be played back on anything new.

What does that mean? If you can play it now, nothing will change. You’ll only notice when you buy a new computer or need to reinstall Windows and all of a sudden you can’t play back your music!

This is the worst problem with DRM, it’s easier and safer to pirate the stuff than it is to buy it legally. Thankfully the music industry has figured that out, and is now selling tunes without DRM. The movie industry hasn’t though, and until they do, I don’t think movie downloads are going anywhere.

[ From Wired News ]

Granted, it’s April 1st, but I’ve been lazy with my blogging lately. So here goes the March Hitz list, in April.

The first song on my list comes from the Foo Fighter’s new album called Echoes, Silence, Patience & Grace. The song is called The Pretender. As you can tell, if you have been following my music posts, I’m really into the alternative rock sound right now. Anything with a great guitar and drum riff, with memorable lyrics, I’m all over it.

I’ve listened to The Good Left Undone by Rise Against, more than the other songs on this month’s list. Again, the guitar riffs and easy to remember lyrics just get stuck in my head and won’t leave. I just wish I could get this song on Rock Band. Oh and by the way, if you haven’t played Rock Band yet, your missing out.

I found this next song on a KROQ playlist. It’s by Serj Tankian, and it’s called Empty Walls. This guy has some of the most unique music out there in the mainstream, if you ask me. He has a classical kind of sound to him, almost like a mix between a classical composer, Queen, and KISS. And how can you not be interested in a song made a guy that looks like this:

And finally, The Western World by Pennywise. While this song has been getting massive airplay, we wouldn’t know that right? Who listens to the radio anymore? I just wish I could find this song in a [CLEAN] version.

<rant>

I should start this mini review with a disclaimer: I had high hopes for 2K Sports’ MLB series after I read that EA’s Ben Brinkman (who had worked on MVP Baseball) was coming over to 2K to work on MLB. Unfortunately, now that I’ve been playing MLB 2K8 on my Xbox 360 for the past week and a half, I have to say that I’m extremely disappointed.

There are so many problems with this game it isn’t funny. I’m sick and tired of waiting all season for a new baseball game only to find that the new one is just as crappy as the last. Especially after they hype it up all year, talking about how great it’s going to be. This game gets an F in my book.

My personal commentary on the series is this: They’ve lost sight of what really matters in a baseball game, and that’s just freakin’ PLAYING BASEBALL. They spend way too much time on new features (like the stupid baseball card simulator) and making the uniforms ripple in the wind, and not enough time just making the game work. Until they refocus on game play, this series will continue to suck, year after year.

The good:

• Graphics look good
• Presentation looks nice as well
• Current rosters
• You can play baseball
• ESPN News is integrated into the bottom of the screen, just like a real broadcast

The bad:

• Tons and tons of bugs:
  • Mid-game announcements routinely get things wrong: like announcers talking about hitting an inside the park homer, yet I’ve never hit one
  • Presentation stats are often wrong: when I went to the post season in Franchise mode the first game showed that the pitchers had a 0-0 win-loss record (like they would in the first post season game), but they showed ERAs and strike outs from the regular season
  • Half the time the new pitching system won’t recognize my controller inputs and will fail to execute the second half of a pitch, resulting in an extremely annoying meatball
• The new pitching systems SUCKS big time. I’m almost always throwing meatballs.
• Base running controls suck more than they did last time, especially with more than one runner on base. I’m constantly sending runners to the wrong place. Oh and this time it takes twice as long for the runner to stop and go back to a base
• I still hit more homers and doubles than base hits
• The AI seems to throw way more strikes than balls
• That could be because its twice as hard to figure out if a pitch will be a ball than last time
• Fielding a player in the first couple seconds is weird, often I’ll be controlling the wrong guy by default and will miss a routine ground ball.
• After a visit to the mound I’ll hit A to skip the cutscene, but the game will both skip the cut scene and throw a meatball pitch down the center of the plate (when using the 2K7 pitching controls)

</rant>

Whoa, check out this crazy attempted landing of an A320 aircraft at Hamburg airport in Germany. It’s amazing the pilot got so close to the ground, he was way past the front of the runway by the time he touched down. According to someone in the comments the winds were clocked gusting to 150 mph (130 knots)!

More pictures at this German forum.

[ From Jeremy Zawodny's blog ]