New Version of iTunes Released

Well, this one caught us on the hop – normally I just select “Check for iTunes Updates” out of habit and expect nothing, but today brought the 4.5 update.

What’s new? The most obvious addition is Party Shuffle – a little application for keeping your soirées rocking. By selecting tracks from your playlists and presenting them in a slightly simpler (presumably so even drunk people can operate it), slightly prettier interface (it’s for parties after all), you’ll never make a musical gaff at a party again. It even shows the last five tunes played and what’s coming up, so people can still bicker over the music choice – and you can even set it so that it plays high-rated songs more often.

Artists featured in the iTunes music store now have handy arrows next them – clicking on the arrows will take you to a handy area in the store with the option of buying more music.

Another new feature allows users to share playlists – you can share your favourite list with friends and people you’ve never met, accompanied with some spiffy artwork made up of a mosaic of sleeves from the tracks in your mix. This is done simply by choosing “Publish playlist to music store” from the file menu. iTunes users can rate each other’s mixes (be prepared to be insulted by people you’ve never met in ways you’d never dreamed of) and top lists are displayed in the iTunes store.

Cheekily, iTunes will now convert your Windows Media files to AAC, if you require – so now you can have music bought from other websites on your iPod.

The Windows version of 4.5 seems to make it a better behaved Windows application, which is welcomed after the first release ignored all the user interface guidelines.

So, not major update but adds a few interesting features for the youngsters – it’s still the best jukebox software out there, and that’s even without a music store in Europe to back it up.

iTunes

Elonex’s Wall-mounted Media Centre PC

Elonex have produced an all-in-one media centre that is so simple to install you just need to drill some holes in the wall and provide an aerial and power.

The eXtentia (UK£2114, €3162) is essentially a slim wall-mounted PC with a TFT display – the display is bright and clear and has a 17” diagonal viewing area, running at 1280 x 768 pixels.

The media centre will connect to your home network through its integrated 802.11g interface, or even plain old Ethernet. Interestingly, there’s a dial up modem on the motherboard, though this probably won’t see much action: if you’re going to hang something this expensive on the wall to watch your DVDs, no doubt your internet access will be broadband.

Also inside the eXtentia is a 3.2GHz Pentium 4 processor with 512mb of RAM. Both memory slots are full, so if you ever want to upgrade you’ll have to throw the original sticks out. The graphics card is a Radeon 9600 – which isn’t bad for a media centre, though it might struggle in a couple of years when playing new games.

Sound is stereo with the integrated speakers and sub-woofer – but since there’s a full set of 5.1 outputs, including optical, presented at the back you can plug it into your existing set-up. Other connections for getting media into and out of the PC include five USB ports, Firewire and a variety of AV ports for camcorders.

Control of the eXtentia is through a wireless keyboard and mouse, and more traditional infra-red remote control. There’s a handy 8-format memory card reader so that you can display photographs and transfer files form all your other devices – and let’s face it, you probably use at least four different card types.

The unit runs Microsoft’s Windows Media Centre, and this provides the user interface for recording TV programmes onto the 250gb hard disk.

We can look forward to seeing a lot more of these devices in the future – Sony have already had success with their Vaio lifstyle PC, whilst Dell and Gateway are offering more products that are aimed at domestic media use.

What’s not known though is if public are ready yet for a TV that needs service packs, a firewall and anti-virus software – perhaps media centres will come to use an embedded OS and be more like the TiVo.

Elonex

PalmOne’s New PDAs

PalmOne has released two new handhelds in their Zire range – the Zire 32 and 72.

The Zire 31, US$149 (€125) has a faster CPU than its predecessor and runs Palm OS 5.2. The PDA has a new-style controller on the front panel – allowing better navigation through documents, but also better for control whilst playing the growing range of Java games available. This controller, coupled with the new headphone jack and the mandatory expansion slot will ensure that buyers use the machine for playing media on the move.

Palm have included Bluetooth in their new Zire 72, US$299 (€251), allowing users to use an appropriate mobile phone to send messages on the move. The 72 is a somewhat striking Yves Klein blue colour – we can’t help but get the feeling that other colours might be in the pipeline.

The 64mb 72 also features a better digital camera than its 71 predecessor, sporting 1.2m pixels, backing that up with 2x digital zoom and 320 x 240 video capture. The camera has better integration with Palm applications than has been seen before – photographs can be attached to contacts and used as backdrops within programs.

But what about an update to the T3? Surely the Tungsten T4 (and Palm OS6) can’t be that far off?

The Palm 72

The Palm 31

The Text-Message Enabled Chandelier

The beautiful Swarovski SMS-enabled chandelierSwarovksi, an Austrian crystal group famed for their chandeliers (where else do you get yours anyway?) have demonstrated a chandelier that displays text messages sent to it from mobile phones.

The chandelier, called “Lolita” (oh no – that’s going to do strange things to the search engines) uses strings of LEDs hung in crystal cylinders. The rows of LEDs are then switched on and off in sequence to create a scrolling dot-matrix effect – rather like an extraordinarily posh and expensive version of those displays you get in cab office windows.

Swarovski

HP Announce New RPN Calculator – the HP33s

Good news calculator fans! HP have announced a new Reverse Polish Notation calculator – the HP33s. Priced at a very reasonable US$49 (€41) the non-graphic calculator is intended to replace the old 33sII. Purist are already bemoaning the inclusion of rubber keys on this new model, and sneering at it’s funky v-shaped styling.

It’s nice to know that the tradition of hearing “Can I borrow your calculator?” followed by confused swearing will continue for a while yet.

sheet data HP +++

HPCalc.org

Tactile Text Messages

Researchers at Bonn University have come up with a way of feeling text messages using a matrix of pins. Rather like the Braille readers used by blind and partially-sighted PC users, pins are raised and lowered, in patterns – but the system isn’t Braille for mobile phones yet.

Users program which patterns the phone makes to which keywords – examples given are a wave towards the user to indicate “I” and you a wave away from the user to indicate “you”.

It’s currently cumbersome, and of limited use (why not just look at your phone?), but the team feel it will have uses in art-installations or other more traditional feedback systems – such as steering wheels. There’s also no reason why the system can’t be refined so that blind users can read text messages.

If the array can be made small enough to work with mobile phones of 3g dimensions, this feedback system might be a great idea for giving access to PDAs for the blind.

Prof Eckmiller of Bonn University told the BBC: “Our major intention with this invention and development is to open up the sense of touch as a new channel for human communication, the sense of touch will in the future be added as the third communication channel to human communication technologies.”

Department of Neuroinformatics at Bonn

The Self-Censoring DVD Player

RCA, a Thomson brand, have launched a DVD player that can be programmed to skip content that viewers find unsuitable. The US$80 (€68) player contains software from ClearPlay that checks the inserted DVD against a database of titles and skips sections that may offend, based on a selection of filters. Because of this the player can only “protect” viewers from films it already knows about.

The player comes preinstalled with 100 filters for films such as Daredevil and Pirates of the Caribbean. Owners of the player can pay US$5 (€4.22) per month to receive internet updates, which they simply burn to a CD from their computer and then feed to the DVD player. So it looks like protecting the peoples’ moral sensibilities is a revenue stream in itself.

ClearPlay’s database currently contains filters for 500 popular films. ClearPlay, based in Salt Lake City, allow viewers to filter on four categories: violence, sex and nudity, language and (the intriguingly named) “other”. That’ll be drugs then. When a scene comes up that hits one of the filters, bad language is muted or the scene itself is skipped.

Studios don’t like the idea of a player that edits their films: “ClearPlay software edits movies to conform to ClearPlay’s vision of a movie instead of letting audiences see, and judge for themselves, what writers wrote, what actors said and what directors envisioned,” The Directors Guild of America said in a statement. “Ultimately, it is a violation of law and just wrong to profit from selling software that changes the intent of movies you didn’t create and don’t own.”

Apart from impending action because of this latest product, ClearPlay are currently being prosecuted in association with a video rental outfit in Colorado, “Clean Flicks” for editing films and then burning them back to DVD.

The censoring DVD player is an interesting and scary idea – and since it’s optional, then it only allows viewer’s to do what they’ve always done when watching films, skip the bits they find uncomforatble or inappropriate. In fact, I covered my eyes and stuck my fingers in my ears several times during Moulin Rouge, as it was so offensive.

The ClearPlay user-managed filter is a far better option than allowing regulators and broadcasters to censor films for viewers without consultation.

…though Channel 4’s “melon farmer” edit of Robocop should go down as a modern classic.

ClearPlay

“Fun you – melonfarmer!”

Print Your Own Games

Nintendo’s eReader, an optical card reader developed by Olympus using their “Dot Code” technology, is a small add-on for GBA users. Players can scan (hideously overpriced) trading cards into their GBA to play games and unlock extras. Each card has a dot code printed on it that stores a couple of kilobytes of code – that code can be an emulation of an early Game and Watch title, or it can even be a smart new umbrella for your Animal Crossing character.

Cards are the same shape and size as standard playing cards (though without the naked ladies on the back) and are available in packs of five or so based on popular Nintendo franchises: Animal Crossing and Pokémon unlock or upload new aspects to the games, or you can even upload the classic Donkey Kong 3 to your GameBoy Advance.

The dot codes use Reed Solomon error correction and now that the scheme has been worked out, homebrew coders can finally write their own games for easy distribution to GBA owners. Tim Schuerewegen cracked the code and is hosting an original game – BombSweeper. Coders interested in writing for the GBA can even use GNU GCC to compile code – plus the API for the GameBoy Advance is very well documented.

The eReader has been modestly successful, but never set the world alight. In fact, support for it seems to have been quietly dropped. Try plugging one into your GBA SP and you’ll see what I mean – it no longer fits. The link port on a SP is now on the opposite side of the console, so the eReader can’t slide fully into the cartridge slot.

Tim Schuerewegen’s page on the GBA

The eReader file format

Official eReader home page

Vocera’s Wireless Voice Communicator

Vocera have developed a wireless voice communicator, worn around your neck, that provides push-to-talk calls and voice recognition via wi-fi.

The communicator itself is tiny – 4.2” x 1.4”, because there’s just not much to the the device itself. To achieve the functionality, system is in two parts: the communicator badge, and the server side software that does all the hard work like recognising speech. Text messages and alerts can also be sent to the device – and read from the LCD on the back.

Vocera are concentrating on health care applications – the ease of use for the Voice Communicator and cost savings make it idea for deployment in hospitals, and it offers far more features than a pager.

Vocera’s voice communication system

World’s First Paper Optical Disk

It’s 51% paper, holds 25GB of data and it’s very, very clever. Sony and the Toppan Printing Company have developed a 1.1mm Blu-ray optical disk with some very exciting applications.

It’s cheap, allows very high quality printing on the label side, is more rigid than a standard disk and more secure, because you can just cut it up with a pair of scissors.

The disk is more rigid because the data layer allows for a thicker substrate, and so is more resistant to warping.

Japan Today