New York, News, technology
How to Get Girls With Your Gadgets
Carmel Lobello :: Tuesday, June 8th, 2010 2:44 pm
Top Secret Tip: If you play your cards right, your gadgets can help get you laid. In celebration of New York’s Internet Week, Death + Taxes is jumping on the Geek Train by looking back at the Masters of Gadgetry for lessons on how to get girls with your gadgets. Check out the list after the jump: MORE »
News, technology
iPhone 4G Meets Tired Warning
Carmel Lobello :: Monday, June 7th, 2010 10:02 am
It’s Monday June 7th, and everyone is waiting excitedly for Steve Jobs to unveil the new iPhone this morning—the one with the front facing camera, higher res screen, bigger battery and flash that Gizmodo heroically spoiled for us back in April.
If your excitement is getting the better of you, NewYorkTimes.com is running a great distractionary article on the front page about the negative side effects of technology, particularly smart phones and tablets. I scanned the entire article on my iPhone, and I thought it was great, even though its main thrust was to outline all of the risks of our quickening immersion into personal computing technology- something that a lot of us already (very) casually lament. Since most of your attention spans are probably too short to read the whole piece, here’s the hyper-abbreviated version: MORE »
News, technology
Does Apple Have the Wrong Idea About the Future of Music?
Alex Moore :: Wednesday, June 2nd, 2010 10:30 am
The music streaming service Lala was shut down yesterday as Apple promised it would be, just five months after acquiring it for $80 million, raising speculation as to what Apple plans to do with the technology.
Do you miss it? Neither do we. We thought Lala’s pay-per-stream subscription service was convoluted and over-complicated. Which is why we fear that for once Apple may have the wrong idea about the future of music. MORE »
News
Summer of Death 2010 Edition
Stephen Blackwell :: Tuesday, June 1st, 2010 3:00 pm
On the heels of the Gary Coleman and Dennis Hopper deaths last week, The Awl, our greatest culture blog, is contemplating reprising the “Summer of Death” in 2010 lest another media company snatch it up as their, um, IP.
Though the “Summer of Death” became shorthand to describe the throngs of celebrity deaths that occurred last summer, The Awl was the media outlet to “bestow its appellation.”
The Hopper death, as an American, is particularly wrenching, existentially. There’s no new America to be discovered. There are no Easy Riders out there waiting to be made. All we get are documentaries covering the evils wrought by our corporations or our food industry. I get the whole “Americans are citizens of the world” thing, but whenever Vice produce documentaries about bands touring other countries the results are non-magical and boring. Hopper’s death should make us contemplate the people who have had a lasting impact on our culture. And when they might be dying. MORE »
News
New iPad Competitor Has Us Scratching Our Heads
Alex Moore :: Tuesday, June 1st, 2010 1:00 pm
One day after Apple announced that it sold 2 million iPads in its first 2 months on the market, we finally have an announcement about the first real competitor to the iPad.
Is it an offering from Sony, Hewlett Packard, Samsung, or Google? Nope. It’s from a much less famous Taiwanese company called Asus (rhymes with anus), it’s called an “Eee Pad” (rhymes with your puppy’s Wee Wee Pad) and it’s being presented here not by the company’s CEO, but by a couple of anonymous hotties who seem to have turned this tablet into the world’s most expensive Etch-A-Sketch.
Has the whole world gone crazy? Maybe not. The thing actually sounds pretty cool. MORE »
News
New iPhone: June 7
Alex Moore :: Wednesday, April 28th, 2010 2:30 pm
Mashable is reporting that the new iPhone will likely be released on June 7.
“Apple just put up details about its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) on its site,” the tech blog says. “Given the recent iPhone 4G leak and Apple’s usual timing when it comes to iPhone announcements, it’s very likely that Apple will officially announce the next version of iPhone at the conference, which is being held from June 7-11 in San Francisco.” MORE »
News
The Jason Chen Raid: Does Steve Jobs Hate Blogs?
Alex Moore :: Monday, April 26th, 2010 7:45 pm
iPhonegate got more interesting on Monday, as Gizmodo editor John Chen’s computers were seized by police under warrant from a Superior Court Judge in San Mateo County. But more interesting is the philosophical question this raises about Apple’s relationship to technology: does Steve Jobs hate blogs? MORE »
Apple
The Price of Losing an iPhone
Stephen Blackwell :: Tuesday, April 20th, 2010 6:00 pm
On Thursday, July 16th, 2009, Sun Danyong threw himself from a window in his apartment. People kill themselves for all sorts of reasons: depression, mourning, melancholia, addiction, and so on. Danyong jumped out of a window for a different reason. About a week before he decided to take his life, he had lost an iPhone. MORE »
News
Steve Jobs Made into Monologue
Shannon Hassett :: Thursday, March 4th, 2010 11:40 am
The question is not whether there will be a play about Steve Jobs, but if it will have a bigger audience than the unveiling of the iPad. It won’t, but at least the monologue will be performed by Mike Daisey, who looks decidedly more Chris Farley than an awkward Jobs. The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs posits the brain behind Apple as a modern day Willy Wonka “whose personal obsessions profoundly affect our everyday lives.” It will also make light of the company’s factories in China, a technological twist Daisey got experience exploiting in his production of 21 Dog Years: Doing Time @ Amazon.com. The show will run from January 14 through February 27 of 2011 at the Berkeley Repertory Theater, so we’re sure to be reading the playbill on our iPads as Jobs remains in hiding an hour away.
News
Fiction Lovers: A Kindle, an iPad and a Hard Place
Shannon Hassett :: Monday, February 8th, 2010 3:15 pm
It’s a confusing time to be a book, and maybe even more so a reader. Digital or hard copy? Kindle or iPad? Moral opposition to digitalization of literature, or admission of defeat and support of (now) underdog Kindle? Is Kindle playing the underdog card unjustly? The answers offer no sigh of relief, posing questions that simply delve deeper into the the world of digital books and leave paper bound backers with nowhere to turn but the one place from which they hoped to hide. MORE »
Apple, News
Mad TV Sort of Predicts the Future, Apple Continues to Take Over the World
Amy Laviero :: Friday, February 5th, 2010 1:15 pm
I don’t think Mad TV, the red-headed stepchild of sketch comedies, has ever been funny. I never understood Ms. Swan and thought Stewart was just plain creepy. Regardless, it seems as though it inadvertently predicted the future back in ‘05 with the i-Pad sketch. MORE »
News
iTunes Slowly Taking Over
Isaac Lekach :: Thursday, December 10th, 2009 1:30 pm
How long until we start referring to Steve Jobs as Big Brother? Oh, I kid. Apple’s latest acquisition isn’t that subversive. Click here to read the full report. If you’re familiar with Pitchfork, which you probably do, you’re already familiar with the web-based music servicing Lala. Well, Apple owns it now. Smart right? Swallow the competition Jobs! All this begs the question, where was Bill Gates when Apple was just a fledgling brand? Way to blow that one Willy.
