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This is the personal blog of Don McAllister, the host and producer of ScreenCastsOnline.

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Entries in Gadgets (67)

Wednesday
Dec272006

OMG - It's Gonna Blow!

mbpbattery.jpgMy 17" MacBook Pro has been behaving very strangely over the last few weeks but only when on battery power. It just seemed to shut itself down with no warning! Using it tonight, I heard a very strange pop and then 20 minutes later it shut itself down. When picking it up, I noticed something very strange underneath the MBP. Instead of the usual sleek, perfectly flat surface there was a weird bump. OMG - The battery had suddenly expanded and started the first stages of transforming itself into the Sydney Opera House. OK - perhaps not that dramatic but still quite a shock! I thought it was only the 15" batteries that had issues! Ah well, onto AppleCare tomorrow and hopefully they can ship me a new battery without sending the whole laptop off. Update - Well I got my MacBook Pro back today (5/1/2007) after it going into my local repair centre under Applecare. Took them a week including the New Year Break so not too bad. I didn't realise how much I'd miss it! Ah well, just in time for MacWorld!

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Wednesday
Nov292006

BitTorrent - Classic Disruptive Technology

What we’re facing now is not a concern about content, but about the methods to deliver the content. BitTorrent is the logical answer, and as a company, it’ll be interesting to see what they come up with.

blackrimglasses.com » Blog Archive » Finally a movie store that answers the bandwidth question

Ethans post matches my current thoughts on the rapidly escalating move to HD and the difficulties of providing content via a shiny disk.

With the current confusion in the market over which of the last physical distribution media will win (Blu-Ray or HD-DVD) consumers are left in the lurch without a clue as to which format to opt for.

The future is obviously downloadable content but available bandwidth is still a concern. Not so much the pipe into peoples homes as this will increase over time but from the source. The distribution of many copies of a HD movie or TV show from a single source doesn't scale very well without huge fat tubes at the central distribution point but even that is no guarantee of a good downloading experience.

BitTorrent and the implementation of the swarm technology enables enormous increases in download capacity by moving the distribution mechanism out into the cloud and letting each participant share the already downloaded parts of a file out to other downloaders. This parallel distribution of the many parts is the way of the future once the industry starts to harness the power of such distributed downloading and moves away from the concept that BitTorrent is bad and just for pirates.

Now imagine a vendor with the courage and vision to embrace the BitTorrent culture and have the clout and respect to bring the Studios and TV companies on board...

Imagine a vendor making enormous inroads into new areas of consumer electronics...

Imagine a vendor with millions of pre-installed clients across both Windows and Macs....

Imagine a vendor with a state of the art existing online store already implemented selling music, TV shows and Movies....

Imagine a vendor with a new operating system in development with some top secret features yet to be announced....

Hey Apple, how's the iTV and iTunes 8 coming along.

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Tuesday
Nov142006

I want my iTV!

The more I think about the introduction of the iTV, the more I think it's going to be a game changer. I've got a PVR and a Series 1 Tivo yet I'm still missing shows as I can't be bothered to use the crappy interface on the PVR and the Tivo picture quality is showing its age. I've got an elgato TV eye on the Mac which is a pleasure to use but the Mac isn't connected to the TV. I've got 3.5 gigabytes of video podcasts downloaded which I need to look at but I really can't watch them on my computer. I don't know if it's me but I just can't spend time watching video on the computer, I just feel I should be doing something else. I've got access to hundreds of Gigabytes of HD material on the Internet (I know, I know...) The iTV will pull all this together seamlessly and I'll be able to watch what I want, when I want all from the comfort of my couch on my HD TV. All we'll need is for more Video podcasts to create HD compatible content. I can't wait!

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Tuesday
Nov142006

Installing the Zune... sucked - Engadget

Oh dear! Am I surprised?

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Thursday
Nov022006

iPod Shuffle Design

I'm not really in the market for the new shuffle but you've just got to gasp at the amount of work Apple have put into these little beauties. Just astounding!

Yes, this is the bottom!

(Via TUAW.)

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