Apple to own TiVo?

The rumors are starting already. I don't know that Reuters and CNN would report pure rumors though. TiVo is in dire need of somebody saving their dying butts, and who better than Apple themselves?! The possibilities are astounding especially after considering what Apple did for the music industry with their iTunes Music Store. And with Steve Jobs heralding this year as the “year of High Definition” in his last keynote it makes the possibilities even more incredible. TiVo’s ailing stock has jumped 17% based purely on this speculation!

New pods have landed!

In an effort to build an even more unstoppable digital music player line-up Apple revised their iPods today. They now sell as follows;

Shuffle 512MB $99
Shuffle 1GB $149
Mini 4GB $199
Mini 6GB $249
iPod 20GB $299
iPod Photo 30GB $349
iPod Photo 60GB $449

Most notable is how the ‘old’ 40 gig model has been dropped in favor of a 30 gig iPod Photo. The rumor sites were reporting that the mini would get a new color screen which turned out to be false, but it seems like an inevitable progression of the line-up I think. Apple has also chosen to omit the Firewire cable from the pack-in accessories leaving only the USB 2.0 one. Not something I would be too fond of as a Mac user, but understandable from a marketing standpoint. And for those bargain shoppers out there, you can get the ‘old’ 40 and 60 gig iPod Photos for $379 and $479 respectively in the Apple Store Sale section. That’s quite a drop from their original $499 and $599 prices. Some have speculated that this might be due to slow sales of the Photo models, but who cares? They’re cheaper, get some!

Do Panic

Not so much news as it is a free advertisement (to both readers of this blog out there) for a great Mac-centric software company. Panic Inc, is a company that puts out some great software. Not only does it work well, but it looks great doing it. The user interface of their applications is clean and simple to navigate which should be the aim of any application. I’m a frequent user of their Candybar, Transit and Unison products, so obviously I like them, and continue to be a satisfied customer. They recently updated their FTP app Transit to version 3 which is why I was at their site thinking about their products. I don’t know why, since the apps work well enough already, but I can’t wait for the next release of Candybar and Unison. Companies like Panic are the reason I love the Macintosh platform.

Virus Writers Use RARs

It seems virus writers aren't as dumb as most IT people would hope. Most networks, including the one where I work, block out emails containing ZIP files. So what do virus authors do? They stuff their work into a RAR archive instead! And Symantec, Norton and McAfee collectively pull their hair out working overtime to fix it.

They're Back!!

I knew this day would come, but the wonders of Safari and Firefox kept me in denial. Pop-ups, or pop-unders for some, are back with a vengeance.
I noticed this recently with my favorite icon site xicons.com. It’s part of my morning links, and every time I came to its tab a pop-under would do it's business all over my desktop. Apparently you can turn off Java or JavaScript to get rid of the problem under Safari, but that means you’ll often get an error message telling you about the Java plug-in you seem to be missing. In Firefox you can use an extension called Flashblocker which is said to get rid of the ads at the expense of blocking any legitimate flash you might try to view. At least with the extension you get no error messages time and time again.
At any rate, I hope Apple puts out an update to Safari soon since I prefer using that over Firefox on the Mac. Either that or I just boycott xicons until a fix is available…