If you’re reading this, you probably know that today was iPhone announcement day for the Cupertino crew. Jobs and Co. announced their fancy new device, the iPhone 4, and we were on hand to get all the dirt. Of course, by on-hand, we mean tirelessly refreshing the blogs to gleam what juicy mobile nuggets we could. Except Demers. He’s a curmudgeonly fellow who is content with his Android. Guess he didn’t want to be one of the cool kids.

Otherwise, we talk a little about All Things Digital, or D8 as it’s called, the yearly tech roast where CEOs are posed tough questions for all the world to judge. Ballmer was there, as well as the Black Turtleneck himself, so you know it was bound to be a good time. Of course, you won’t really know how good until you listen in — either here, or at the Not So Much News!

Length: 35:02
Close: Merry Men — Robin Hood (2010) OST
Download: 33.6 MB
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Lots to talk about on today’s episode compadres, so lets get right into it. It’s not like you care about the bodies Anand’s been shuttling to the dump, or the toxic chemicals Demers has been leaching into our water supply anyhow. I’m just a class act, as usual.

• Anand gets his grubby paws on a MAGICAL and REVOLUTIONARY device, and now he’s started wearing turtlenecks and talking funny. I think he’s balding too.
• A friend of ours gave me a bricked T-Mobile G1 to try and resuscitate. It still doesn’t work. I feel like less of a man now.
• The AppleTV might be getting a refresh, complete with iPhone innards and cloud based storage. It may also be able to synthesize food, though “Tea. Earl Gray. Hot” support has yet to be confirmed.
• J. Allard, father of the Xbox, and Robbie Back, father of Anand’s illegitimate son, have left Microsoft leaving resident lunatic Ballmer in charge. Both shaped the current state of the company’s Entertainment and Devices division, and it’s unknown where the company’s now headed. Good then we’re around to DEBATE and SPECULATE. Sadly, that won’t bring our dear Courier back.
• Finally, things get serious as we talk Foxconn, the largest manufacturer of tech products in the world. Sure, all your Apple, HP, Nokia and Dell wares are made here, but it turns out the people doing the building are overworked, underpaid, and now committing suicide. A factory in China…who would’ve thought? Companies are pledging to fix the situation, but is it all talk? (Spoiler: Demers says yes)

And that’s that. We’re proud of today’s episode, like all the others, so listen here, or at the Not So Much News!

Length: 37:16
Close: Born Unto Trouble — Red Dead Redemption OST
Download: 35.8 MB
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Our 42nd episode, and we don’t make a single Hitchiker’s joke. Quite frankly, I’m a little offended. I feel like we’ve failed as geeks. Luckily, we’ve got Comic Captain Matt Demers to keep us on course — this episode is all him. Listen as we wax eloquently about Iron Man 2, and all it’s triumphs and foibles, along with some other eReadery goodness too. We’ve also mixed the format up a little bit, so hopefully things will be a little more fun. And if not, Anand’s got some kneecaps to break. Namely, yours. Never doubt us. Meanwhile…

• According to Amerika, we’re just a hotbed of pirates — almost as bad as Russia, or even China. Canada: just a whole bunch of mans, pirating.
• iPads go up for preorder, Rogers decides 99.8% of customers don’t want unlimited data plans. Right.
• Nintendo says Apple, not Sony, is the real target these days. Never mind Apple’s relatively minuscule gaming market share or lack of first party titles — they’re the guys to beat

And that’s that. Listen here, or at the Not So Much News!

Length: 31:44
Close: I Am Trying to Break Your Heart — Wilco
Download: 30.5 MB
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Another crazy week in tech means I’ve gone a little crazy myself. The sun is out, Summer’s practically here, and I haven’t yet threatened to shove Anand or Demers out an airlock yet. Relish those little victories. And now, the news:

• Some dude got a little too tipsy, and just happened to lose his prototype iPhone in a San Jose bar. Gizmodo’s done the full tear down, and needless to say, this guy probably isn’t an Apple employee any longer.
• Microsoft jumped into the phone biz early last week with it’s Kin One and Kin Two, a set of dumphones aimed at the Urban Outfitters Hipster demographic, which I DID NOT KNOW EXISTED.
• Palm might be sold, and we will all weep WebOS-sized tears
• NVIDIA and Intel aren’t getting along right now, which means Apple has to use Intel chips and NVIDIA graphics. That also means Apple had to develop it’s own version of Optimus, the smart, graphic-switching technology. Shocking!
• Finally, Infinity Ward is falling apart, Gears of War is coming out, and Pokemon Light and Dark/Sun and Moon/Black and White were announced last week.

Listen here, or at the Not So Much News!

Length: 39:32
Close: Miles Runs the Voodoo Down – Miles Davis
Download: 38.0 MB
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I’m convinced that, if Apple ever ceased to exist, we would have nothing to talk about. I mean, it’s not like there’s real tech news going on elsewhere, right? But that’s not the pont! iPhone OS 4.0 is here, and myself, Captain Capacitor and Mike the TV are here to lead you safely through this brave, new tech world. Or not, since we all seem to have some choice words on the matter. You’ll just have to tune your fancy old radios to our broadcast to find out.

As well, we’ve got a few science-related nuggets for you, with Morocco planning to turn half its country to solar by 2020, and Anand’s trip to see Hubble in 3D. Because, as we all know, there’s really no other way to truly view a space telescope.

Listen here, or at the Not So Much News!

Length: 36:28
Close: Nausea – Beck
Download: 33.2 MB
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Things were slow this week. I watched a squirrel gather nuts in my backyard for a half hour, and then emptied a jar of honey, just for a good measure. There just really wasn’t much to report on.

I mean, this thing called the iPad came out, but who cares? No one. There really wasn’t much news coverage. It was pretty low-key as far as launches go. I’m not really sure what we talked about on this episode anyhow, so you’ll have to listen in to find out. I think our good friend Stephen Hanbury might have made an appearance. I was too busy tying my shoes in different lacing patterns.

I hope you know we’re kidding. There’s 40 minutes of pure, iPady goodness in here, with everything we hated, and everything we liked. It’s a wellspring of information, so if you don’t know what all the hype is about, we’ve got you covered. Listen here, or at the Not So Much News!

Length: 41:10
Close: More than a feeling – Boston
Download: 39.5 MB
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We seem to be on a roll here, because it’s episode 33, and we’ve got yet another guest. This time it’s columnist extraordinaire Matt Demers, who has, in fact, graced our fine podcast before on a few select episodes. His self-imposed exile is over now, however, so he joins myself and THE RAM this week for more crazy hi-jinks and shenanigans.

Things are looking pretty light this week, so here goes:

• Ars Technica is pleading you not block their ads. Apparently that – surprise – prevents online sites from earning money! Demers weighs in.
• The Oscars went down last night. We talk a few of our favourite films, and what should/shouldn’t have won – for a little while, at least. We’re still a tech podcast. For the most part.
• Is Google’s Android fragmenting its OS, and as a result, it’s market share? It’s more interesting than it sounds, I swear. At least listen for the shiny, Apple-related mention.
• In what is probably the most pressing question of this episode: how long did Frodo’s journey take in the Lord of the Rings? I wish I could entice you to listen and find out, but we didn’t know either. It’s actually three. Damn.

Listen here, or at the Not So Much News!

Length: 34:23
Close: The New Dork – Entrepreneur State of Mind
Download: 33.0 MB
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We’re a few days late, but we trust you’ll forgive us. The extra time was spent sorting a bag of M&M’s based on flavour. It’s the sort of thing required when trying to get a SUPERSTAR SCREENWRITER like DANNY VIOLA on the show.

Luckily, we won out in the end, and our good friend Danny is the second guest on our fine little series. As if we weren’t already HILARIOUS ENOUGH, Danny brings a little extra wit, and a lot more chest hair than you’re used to. In fact, some might believe a gorilla is guesting on the show. However, this is not the case — the zoo has stopped returning our calls.

What’s in this week’s latte of wisdom?

• Apple lays the smack down on HTC, serving the asian company with not one, not two, but TWENTY patent violations. Juicy details include infringement upon the iPhone’s slide-to-lock functionality and multitasking. Watch out, Android.
• Sony, in a gaffe of millennial proportions, sends Playstation phats to the year 1999. The problem first appeared on February 29th. Which is, in fact, the problem.
• Infinity Ward’s bigwigs are out job-hunting, and Activision’s floating Death Star is to blame.
• A new Halo: Reach multiplayer beta trailer has been released, and by jove, is it ever filled with GRADE A CERTIFIED AWESOME.
• Our on-air adventure with Chatroulette, Trust us, it’s as bad as it sounds. But also HILARIOUS.

And that’s that. Danny’s exemplary performance has saved him from the stake — this time. He’s still a witch, after all, and must be burned eventually.

Listen here, or at the Not So Much News!

Length: 29:28
Close: Prelude – Christophe Beck (The Lightning Thief OST)
Download: 28.3 MB
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Episode 31, and the apocalypse has yet to arrive. Quite frankly, I’m a little disappointed. Nevertheless, we must soldier on here at podcast HQ, and solider on we shall. Some strands of thinking from today’s off-the-cuff adventure include:

• Anand plays the Heavy Rain demo, and, unsurprisingly, we talk about it.
• I go to a swanky Microsoft Silverlight party and, unsurprisingly, talk about it.
• I run out of water mid-way through the podcast. This was not discussed.
• Microsoft and Yahoo are now some giant search conglomerate, which means Cylons are not far behind.
• The internet killed Gordon Lightfoot for a few hours last Thursday. Hoaxes can be dangerous, kids.
• Finally, it’s New Year’s Eve, and HTML5 is the innocent little baby preparing to beat Old Man Flash into submission — OR IS IT?

Length: 30:40
Close: Panoramic – Atticus Ross (Book of Eli OST)
Download: 29.4 MB
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Life after the iPad. Things are strange. Food tastes differently. I can’t look at my wife the same anymore. She doesn’t even have GPS. Sigh.

Alas, we’ve managed to lurch forward here at the Not So Horrible podcast, as me and Anand take a look at life in the AfterPad. Adobe’s had some choice words for the Turtlenecks over in Cupertino, who are none to pleased at the lack of Flash support. Fujitsu, meanwhile, claims the iPad trademark is rightfully theirs. It’s the sort of stuff Judge Reinhold would be all over.

But in other, non-Apple news:

• REM may be the only ones to put a man on the moon any time soon — Obama’s restructuring NASA’s funding, and the space agency is none too pleased
• Ubisoft’s approach to DRM? The internet. You’re going to have to be online to play, folks. I don’t know if this counts as a solution.
• Mass Effect 2 is out. Gamers, rejoice!
• Twitter and texting, brking ur grmmr? That’s what some University Prof’s think. I guess they weren’t reading The Star six years ago when they wrote the exact same article.

And that’s that. Quite frankly, I’m glad all this Apple business is over and done with. However, there will always be a part of me that wishes my wife could speak to satellites. You’re safe for now, TomTom.

Length: 38:32
Close: The Illusive Man – Mass Effect 2 OST
Download: 37.0 MB
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CAUTION: REALITY DISTORTION FIELD AHEAD

This is a warning. If you do not like Apple, or do not wish to further indulge in the Padocalypse, then proceed no further. Here be dragons. And crushed dreams. And, of course, the iPad.

This is Apple’s “latest creation,” a 9.7 inch tablet that is, in essence, eight iPhones taped together. Notable features include:

• A capacitative, multi-touch screen — perfect to showcase your grubby fingerprints to friends and family
• A custom, Apple-made 1GHz A4 chip, whatever that means. Moles are investigating.
• FLAVOURS, as long as your idea of flavours is 16, 32 or 64GB
• Wifi in all models, and 3G in the more expensive kind, with GPS, internal compass and ALL THAT JAZZ
• iPhone OS 3.2 — pretend you have invented an anti-shrink ray device, and amaze your friends with your “new, larger phone”
• Fancy applications, from the likes of EA, the New York Times and a mobile version of iWork
• eBooks, in an iTunes like platform. Which, by the way, also includes an actual mobile iTunes.

AND SO MUCH MORE. Which, of course, we talk about. Because it wouldn’t be a product release party if me and Anand didn’t tear it to shreds, and give you the lowdown on what we love and hate. After all, it’s just the sort of stuff we like to touch upon. Ahem.

Length: 32:42
Close: Demon Days [Instrumental] – Gorillaz
Download: 31.4 MB
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In case you’ve been living in a fridge, you might not know that me and the Captain have been pretty psyched about that whole CES thing. The Consumer Electronics Show, held each year in Las Vegas, showcases the newest and coolest technology set to hit the market in the next few weeks, months and years. While I’ve blogged about it a few times this week, the show is finally over, which means we can both return to our regularly scheduled sleeping patterns. It probably doesn’t help that Las Vegas is three hours in the past.

Big themes this year?

• 3D. Everyone and their dog had some sort of 3D setup this year, with everything from televisions to games all showing off the newest industry craze — or, in our case, fad. Also, we talk about our hatred for clunky 3D eyewear.
• E-readers. This e-ink business has finally reached critical mass, with all sorts of people pushing out e-readers left, right and center. Big companies — Hearst and their Skiff come to mind — and small companies alike are trying to make e-readers more accessible to the masses, while building on the Kindle’s success. Exciting times.
• Tablets. Apple is set to release a tablet. It will change the world. Cancer will be cured, the starving will be fed, and the masses will rejoice. But don’t expect everyone else to take that news lying down. Microsoft has partnered with the likes of HP to put out a fancy new Slate device, while Dell is contemplating their own. By the way, what’s the difference between a tablet and a slate anyhow?

Oh, and there’s some MAG impressions to be had at the end of the ‘cast too, courtesy our new Forward Thinking segment. For all the usual fun and games, listen in to our CES recap, both here and at the Not So Much News!

Length: 36:17
Close: Discombobulate – Hans Zimmer (Sherlock Holmes OST)
Download: 34.8 MB
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I fear that my iPod is in its death throes. It’s doing that thing where it clicks a little bit here and there; I think it would rather be a woodpecker than a hard drive. Today, songs that normally contained music suddenly had none, and I would be booted back to the album menu with nary a sound. It’s depressing.

It still works for now, however, but sporadically. What a shame that every Apple product I’ve owned has begun to fall apart after a year. Convenient, considering it’s just outside of warranty range.

For the sake of irony, I should note that my Sony Walkman still plays CDs like it’s 1996.

The iPhone is dead. The iPhone remains dead. And we have killed it. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was fastest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our Palms: who will wipe this circuitry off us? What Recycle Bin is there for us to clean ourselves? What websites of atonement, what sacred apps shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?

This week is a most glorious week, as myself and Igor plot the demise of the industry leading iPhone. There will be Palm Pre’s involved. Possibly new Samsung devices. Point is, it’s going to be a party, and there’s tons of great things to talk about, SUCH AS:

• Apple introduces some fancy, schmancy new devices, which really aren’t all they’re cracked up to be. Spec bumps and a sub-par camera sensors? Count me in!
• ATI turns heads with a whole new line of 5xxx series Radeon graphics cards – cards that can power up to six displays at once.
• Bell and Telus continues to screw us poor Canadian broadband users, with a large rusty rake. The rake also has spikes, and is possibly coated with battery acid.
• Palm release something called the Pixi. It is like a Pre but smaller, and tastes like chocolate.
• Anand sings 50′s showtunes in the style of Robert Plant which is being streamed on Youtube right now

Download [35.5mb]

At what point does being different mean eschewing common sense?

Rambling aside, the decisions Apple makes at times completely baffle me. Take the new, unibody Macbook Pro, for example. One of the machine’s big selling points was the ease with which it could be upgraded, by even the most technologically challenged among us. The bottom of the laptop has a magnetic latch, which, when removed, reveals both the battery and hard drive – easily accessible to the intrepid user.

I decided the time was right to finally move into the 500GB club. After all, my collection of vintage cartoons was growing pretty steadily, and there’s only so much softcore Swedish pornography a hard drive can fit. Only one screw is needed to free the hard drive from its Apple-chic clutches. Or so you’d think.

Before this whole upgrade began, I can honestly say that I had never even heard of a Torx T6 screw bit. Quite frankly, the name of it reminds of me of robots, or some foreign kitchen appliance that will probably achieve sentience and become our new overlord one day. The point is, this incredibly small screw is what’s required to mount the damn drive inside the machine. And damn, if it wasn’t impossible to find somewhere that sold these; in the end, it took two trips to Rona and Home Hardware just to get what I needed.

Well done, Apple; so much for simplicity. Your desire to be different has backfired into the realm of stupidity.

—-

While I don’t think I was prepared to do entire backup and reformat at the beginning of the week, things have actually gone far better than I had hoped. In a moment of quick thinking, I cracked open my 2.5” external HDD, and harvested the SATA to USB connector that it runs on to pull the files off my old internal. As you can imagine, this saved a great deal of backup/reloading time, and meant that my Swedish softcore collection was, thankfully, working again by bedtime.

This also meant that I’ve had a nice array of 2.5” HDDs splayed across my desk for the better part of the weekend. It’s been a matter of making sure my data is safe and sound, and then zeroing out the drives for a nice, fresh start.

Maybe now I’ll finally have the room I need for all my pictures, and the chance to give my Flickr a much-needed update too.