Saturday, December 31, 2011

The Verge, tech site

I found a tech site I'd not been aware of: The Verge. It seems very solid. Here's their 2011 year in review article. And another interesting one: best writing of 2011. Phew, all I needed: more reading stuff!

Tuesday, December 27, 2011

Apple fined by Italy over misleading product guarantees

Apple fined by Italy over misleading product guarantees, article.

Apple is selling the Applecare service, which for a nice lump of money extends the guarantee to two years. But apparently in the Eu, including UK, electronic products already per law has two years of guarantee!
Well, that's friggin good to know!

Sunday, December 25, 2011

Play videos from your computer on your iPad

It seems that now it is not just updates which can be done wirelessly to the iPad, you can even play any music or video sitting on your computer! Well, sitting in iTunes, to be exact. (It works on Mac, I'm not sure about Windows.) That's amazing.
And more amazing yet, this one also works via the Internet. Although obviously if it is a long video it will take a while to download to the iPad, unless you have an exceptionally fast upload link from your computer. (Most Internet connections are much slower to upload than to download, I suspect this is to prevent too durn much file sharing using the ISP's bandwidth.)

I only found out about this because suddenly in the Video app on my iPad, a new tab appeared: "Sharing". I am not even sure if it's due to a software update very recently, or if it's due to a setting I changed somewhere. (Apple is way ahead with sharing apps, files, and streams, but the settings for this are spread over a dozen different apps and devices, very confusing.)

Digital prices

It's amazing how digital pricing shows better than ever how arbitrary prices really are. Some services charge eight dollars for a 24-hour movie rental. That's crazy when you often can buy it on disc for less. And then on the other hand, I have just signed up for a Kindle subscription (now on iOS too) for Fantasy And Science Fiction, a magazine, for 99 pence a month! Now that's what I call a reasonable price! Perhaps even too low for their own good, but we'll see how things shake out over the years.