There have been reports that the Bluetooth subsystem is broken in phones unlocked using the software method detailed here. These reports are correct – the way the instructions were written, the Bluetooth system would hang forever when you tried to turn it on. The Spinner of Death would sit there and grimly rotate until the battery ran down, but Bluetooth will never ever turn on.

This is easy to fix. Just remove the /private/etc/termcap file from your iPhone. Back it up first (really, you should have a copy since you needed to download it to unlock your phone, but check to be safe) and then just delete it. Then go to your Settings – General – Bluetooth and turn the system on – it will snap to life in about 5 seconds. You don’t even need to reboot.

The termcap file is needed to run minicom – so if you ever want to run minicom again, you will need to put the file back. When you are done, remember to delete it once more. There is a conflict in the TTY assignment to the Bluetooth stack as long as the file is in place. I have updated the unlocking page to reflect this.

To reiterate – delete the /private/etc/termcap file to restore the Bluetooth functions. And don’t worry about the file not being there – you put it there in the first place, and the phone doesn’t need it in any way for normal operations.

Some people who are all in a panic want to know how they can be sure that they will not accidentally update their iPhones with the 1.1.1 software release. Easy as pie – Apple never updates anything without asking the owner. Just go to the preferences in your copy of iTunes and under the “General” tab look for the checkbox at the very bottom of the screen:

Just make sure the “Check for updates automatically” box is set to off, and you are in business. Your iPhone will not update until you hit the “Check for update” button on your iPhone interface, and even then will ask you before installing. Keep the auto checks off and wait until you are sure there is an upgrade path before you take the plunge.

People are well used to the idea of trading a bit of privacy for increased functionality – far from raising a hue and cry, people actually like the targeted ads from Google. Better yet, they use them. But this goodwill towards a fairly obvious erosion of privacy is predicated on two things:

1 – People like and trust Google

2 – Google ads are not completely fucking creepy

Which brings us driectly to “The Pudding”. These guys are going to try and sell free internet telephony – paying for it by listening in to your calls and popping ads onto your screen based on your conversation. Honestly, I don’t get this one at all – Skype is essentially free for ‘puter to ‘puter calls, and dirt cheap to jump out to real numbers. The Pudding hopes to lure users away from this entrenched – and mostly free – incumbent by offering the same thing but while eavesdropping on your calls. Stranger yet, they are trying to spin the lurking as a good thing, saying it makes your conversation more exciting.

Er, yeah.

I really really really hope that this fails miserably. I mean, come on.

Sheesh.

Slavering hordes of people unable to think for themselves – everyone from otherwise respectable bloggers to morons in the mainstream press – are parroting the “warning” from Apple that an upcoming (end of this week, probably) firmware upgrade for the iPhone will brick your beloved little handset if you unlocked it – rendering it inoperable forever because you dared try to use it in a free-market scenario and outside of the clutches of AT&T.

Bah.

Stop and think about it. The iPhone is a teeny tiny OSX computer, running the BSD unix file subsystem that is common to every Mac. Like your Mac, it has files and folders. Unlocking your iPhone involves the following:

1 – setting your “nck” counter to zero

2 – setting your “seczones” to null

3 – replacing your lockdown file

4 – adding a couple of files to the user storage space with standard unix file management commands

In other words, all that you are doing here is editing some files, moving a couple of others, and running a program or two. And – more to the point – not only could you put everything back if you wanted, using iTunes to “restore” your iPod to it’s factory state does a complete wipe of both the memory and file system and puts everything back to the way it was when it came home from the store.

Armed with this knowledge, there are only two possibilities when evaluating Phil Schiller’s “your iPhone is going to be a brick” statement:

He is blowing smoke, trying to keep AT&T happy. The telecom monolith hates that people get to take their phones home and activate the things themselves. And they are starting to drop hints that they think Apple has somehow screwed them over by selling a phone that people with brains can use however the hell they want. Either Phil is saying what the cellular brigands want to hear, confident that they will buy it despite the fact that it makes no technical sense, or …

Apple has designed this next update to seek out unlocked phones and do something to them to shut them down forever. This would be evil of the first degree, and would put a lot of long-time (and rabid) customers into “fuck you, I am never buying an Apple product again” mode.

I would go way way way out on a limb and say that number two is very unlikely. Not only because I want to believe that Apple is not evil like their brethren up in Redmond – and yes, I do want to believe this – but because it would be quasi-illegal and it would make a bald-faced lie of their statement that the iTunes “restore” function will always return an iPhone to its out-of-the-box state. In a lawsuit-happy U.S. of A. that is probably not a good place to be going. The smart money is on this being much ado about nothing.

But … what if I am wrong, and this is the worst sort of evil, designed to fuck you over for having a brain cell or two? What happens then?

Well, nothing. Just don’t take the damn update. Apple products always ask you before updating, and all you have to do is say “no”. All that this update really does is let you buy songs from the iTunes store wirelessly when you are at Starbucks. In the states. So anyone who is outside of the U.S. – which is proably a huge percentage of the people with unlocked phones – has no reason to take it anyway. And if you do live in the states, well, wouldn’t you rather have a proper phone than worry about buying songs over the air at Starbucks? Of course you would – dumb question. Just skip the upgrade. If for some reason you really need to buy songs over the air at the coffee shop, then just wait until the unlocking brigade tests the update out for you. Then you can make an informed decision – one based on fact and not some hype-laden bullshit.

As always, using your head goes a long way.

Best. Ecards. Ever.

I have pimped the Grow games in this space on numerous occasions – usually pointing back to Grow RPG as the premium example of the genre and the peak of the series so far. Until now, that is … Grow Island seems to be the next “leap forward” in this area, and (unless I am completely mistaken) offers multiple levels of gameplay. That is an assumption at this point because (a) I haven’t had time to find the solution to the first level, and (b) my skills with the cursed pictographs of the devil language are not sufficiently advanced enough to puzzle out the complete instructions.

But I just know that you can get to that second set of icons … I know this in my heart.

Recently I lamented the fact that it is getting harder and harder to find a reset tool paper clip when you need one – something that the folks at Apple also noticed and are planning to address by including a paper clip with every iPhone (you need it to eject the SIM card).

However, there is a quick and easy substitute close at hand – the post of an earring, which works pretty much perfectly. I don’t know why I never thought if this before, but when someone pointed it out to me this week I had one of those “holy shit, that’s awesome” kind of moments.

Tunecore is the company that does a lot of the “grunt work” to get content from music labels up and onto the various online retail stores – iTunes, Rhapsody, etc. That isn’t overly interesting in itself, but what is interesting is that they have a FAQ page that gives a lot of insight into how this stuff works behind the scenes, vis-a-vis where the money goes and what the royalties are like. If you are a nerd for this sort of thing, it is an interesting read.

The Littlest Birds by The Be Good Tanyas. It’s sweet and raw and pretty and gutsy and fragile all at once. Kind of like a first kiss. Or a first break-up. Just listen – you’ll figure out what I mean. I hope.

I have made a few changes to the “Unlock Your iPhone” page, so they are probably worth mentioning here. To wit:

One – I have gone back to using the INdependence to put SSH on the phone. A lot of people are reporting that (like iFuntastic) AppTapp is now putting their phones into an endless reboot. At this point I am recommending that you not use AppTapp, no matter how cool it sounds.

Two – Because of this, I have now included a copy of minicom in the set of files (it was installed by AppTapp as part of the “community items”) and modified the instructions to include copying minicom with SFTP and setting the security so you can run it. Also, i stuck the directory creation for usr/local/etc into the SFTP instructions – it is much easier to do there.

Three – Some people were having a problem with minicom trying to load an xterm-color profile when they first executed it. I have written a profile to deal with this and added it to the termcap file in the archive – if you were one of those people, get the new files and try again.

Four – People were losing their SSH sessions due to the iPhone locking down after the factory timeout kicked in – I have specifically mentioned changing this in the instructions now

Five – Apparently, it was not obvious that you need to leave your phone out of jail until you are actually done working with it, so I have been a little more specific there.

Have fun!

Government Cheese by The Rainmakers. There probably aren’t many people who remember the bizarre offshoot of Reaganomics that inspired the title of this song … hell, there probably aren’t that many people who remember Reaganomics, period. Time flies, I guess. But the point of this song remains as sharp today as it did in the 80s. Just peek in the door of your local bingo hall to see what I mean.

And yeah, this was actually the Awesome Yet Underrated Song Of Last Week. I just didn’t have time to post it.

One of the best Homestar Runner updates to come down the pike in just about forever. It’s brilliant, provided you are hip to both Limozeen and Sloshy and are old enough to remember the Second Coming Of Alternative Music.

The “Google Office” suite will get another leg to stand on this week. The guys with All The Money In The World recently bought Tonic Systems, who just happens to have an on-line presentation editor. The word I get is that the Google version will be called Presently, filling out the Powerpoint slot in the Google Office line up. Watch for it this week …

Have you ever wanted to make a temporary web page in a real hurry – just some simple text and maybe a link or two, just some information you would like to make public and pervasive for a short time? Maybe directions to a cottage, or a group shopping list for a pot-luck, or whatever.

You’re in luck – Jottit is exactly what you need. You can whip up a simple web page in a minute or two, publish the URL, and even make the whole mess private, semi-private, or completely public. The interface is really simple, so you can whip up a site from maybe the road from a smartphone, or when you are poaching computer time from a public access point, or whatever. Everything beyond the creation interface is completely seamless – you create the page and send it off for hosting all in one easy step.

You might consider this the flip-side of Mailinator, or see it as something completely unrelated, but either way it is a wonderful little concept, and a nice piece of execution. If you want to know more about it you can check out the backstory here, or you can just jump right in. Enjoy!

“Better than Steve” dropped a line to say that Canadian users can also use an unlocked iPhone on the Telus network if they still have the staatic IP information that was issued along with the Telus SIM card. The unlocking guide has been updated to reflect this. Thanks, Better than Steve!

Although, really, no one is better than Steve …

UPDATE: You probably want to stay away from this supposed one-step solution that runs from your phone instead of via SSH – for every one person that this worked for, there are 15 others who ended up doing a “recover and restore” and starting from scratch. Not recommended.

A couple of people pointed out that there was now a free “one-step” solution, a la iPhoneSIMFree, and all of my typing and SSHing was just overly complicated. However, the “one-step” solution only automates the stuff after you use Installer to put the BSD system on your ophone (so there is still a bunch of work in the first three steps) and the server that was hosting it is now down for the count. The whole thing may have just been a prank, who knows. But for now, your best bet is to take your time and walk through the process here. Have fun.

NOTE: if you just came here to get the step-by-step instructions on how to use your own SIM card in an iPhone, and don’t care about the interesting alternative methods, then just click on “Unlock Your iPhone” in the “Pages” box to the left, or follow the link in “Method 4″. Heathens.

Now that the prices on the iPhone have dropped (according to normal business practices and the well-understood concepts of Moore’s law, neither of which were enough for the morons who bought early and then bitched about it) there are more and more people who are willing to spend the dough to get one on the hopes that they can unlock the thing and use it with a carrier other than AT&T. The fact that only one U.S. cellular carrier has the product at this point leaves a vast and disgruntled constituency of unsatisfied and would-be owners – owners who are now starting to feel their oats and want to do something.

If you are one of those people then you have come to the right place. Here, without further preamble, is the more-or-less complete guide to getting an iPhone to run with a SIM card from a different cellular carrier. There are four different methods, all with differing possible results and ramifications, but they are (mostly, see below) free and you can pick and choose how you want to go about this.

Most of these methods will involve some manual dicking around at the terminal or in an SSH session – activities that outlets like CNet and Ziff-Davis would call “mastering arcane command-line gymnastics” – but really it is just typing so don’t panic. Hell, it’s not even typing, most of it is fucking copy and paste so there is nothing close to “gymnastics” at all. But it is worth pointing out that Cnet and Ziff-Davis are both mostly staffed by idiots.

REMEMBER: If you buy and iPhone and use any of these steps and you brick the thing, it’s not my fault. You go into this with your eyes wide open. And remember, spelling counts. On with the show!

METHOD 1: Use the Phone Activation Server software to turn on the phone with no extra mumbo jumbo. This is the least likely to work for you, since it requires having a “test” SIM from your cellular carrier – one that has no platform specific information on it. If you aren’t sure if you have one of these SIMs, then you probably don’t. On the other hand, even if are lacking in one of these special SIM cards, this method still turns on all of the non-phone functions of the iPhone, essentially making it a more expensive version of the iPod touch, which is really pretty dumb. The complete details of this method – along with all of the associated software – have been previously documented here, but beyond it’s value as an academic exercise I would no longer recommend bothering with this.

METHOD 2: Use a valid AT&T SIM card from a different “pay-as-you-go” provider. This is far and away the easiest method, and it does not involve anything that be considered illegal or even remotely dodgy. All you have to do is get your butt to an Apple store, buy an iPhone, and then stop off and get a SIM card from a “virtual” cellular provider that uses the AT&T network. There are a number of these, and you might want to do some research to find the best one, but if you are in a hurry then 7-11 Cellular (yes, that 7-11) is the way to go. The actual method is as follows (assuming you did get your card at 7-11, otherwise you need to modify it accordingly):

Buy an iPhone.

Stop at 7-11 and get a pay-as-you-go starter package – this will have a SIM card and a value card that allows you to put some minutes on your phone.

While still in the United States, unpack your iPhone, plug it into your computer, and activate it with iTunes. When you get to the part where iTunes asks you for your billing info, put in a nonsense Social Security number (you will have to fill out all the other fields).

When you hit okay, iTunes will magically take you to the “activate this phone as a pay-as-you-go device” screen. Follow the instructions, pop in your 7-11 SIM card, add your minutes, and away you go.

There are two things that are worth pointing out here. One, if you aren’t from the U.S.A then you pretty much need a laptop and a way to get online while traveling – the part where you need to be in the states when you activate is non-negotiable. Also, you will need to go back to the states anytime you want to buy more minutes, although you can add those minutes anywhere you fancy. And finally, using pay-as-you-go minutes while roaming is pretty expensive, so you might not want to use the phone part all that much if you are from outside of the U.S.A. If you live in the great 48, however, this is probably the quickest and safest way to go.

METHOD 3: There is an outfit selling a ninety-nine dollar “unlocker” called iPhoneSIMfree. It works, which is great, but it is also really sleazy – not because it unlocks the phone and pisses AT&T off, but because it is essentially just a shell for a group of public domain hacks, all of which were published under various public licenses. This means not only are they available for free elsewhere, but the SIMfree creeps are violating those licenses by refusing to acknowledge them. If you want to pay $99 dollars for this, feel free, but I definitely advise you not to for two reasons: One, you are giving your money to assholes, and two, I have collected all of the aforementioned tools right here and put them together as …

METHOD 4: Using the various public tools – which get better and better with each passing hour – is not all that hard and is easy enough for pretty much anyone to do. If you can copy and paste, read directions, and count to 8 then you are in business here. I have gathered all of the necessary bits of code and put them into easy to grab archives, and linked directly to the tools you need to apply them. I am posting the whole mess on it’s own page instead of in the main body of this august blog so that people searching for help can find it more easily. If you are ready, just click on the “Unlock Your iPhone” link over to the left in the “Pages” box, or follow this link right here. The oyster awaits …

Bloxorz is one of the best little puzzle games that I have ever seen, period. The rules are simple, it’s nicely intuitive, and the challenge builds from “this is how it works. newbie” to “good luck, sucker” in an invitingly quick progression. It also has a passcode system so you can play a little bit at a time and pick up in progress later – nice touch when you just don’t have the time in your schedule to play a “real” game. I haven’t touched WoW or Guitar Hero in more than two weeks, so being able to take 2 minutes out of a packed day to play one level of this is a nice – and desperately necessary – way to reset the brain.

The “end-over-end” block movement gives me a vague reminder of a game or toy that I had as a kid, but I can’t for the life of me remember what it was. It also makes me think that a physical version of this would have a delightful tactile component, but I guess we can’t have everything. Enjoy.

1977: The year of the last execution by guillotine in France.

So Apple gave in to the legions of wankers and announced a $100 rebate to people who had already purchased an iPhone. I guess on the face of things this is good business – they reacted swiftly, humbly, and in a concrete way … but I still think that the “you snooze you lose” policy should be in place here. Kudos to Steve for doing something to maintain the good karma of the whole launch announcement, but I certainly wouldn’t have done it.

UPDATE: The wailing and moaning has not abated in any noticeable way since Steve ponied up the hundred bucks. The only difference now is that people are bitching because the rebate is a store credit and not cash up front. Jeezus. Get a fucking grip, people!

Sama dropped a quick note to point out that Apple does offer 14-day price protection, which is pretty much the same as any other store anywhere. If you bought your iPhone in the last 14 days, you can get the difference back. Hopefully this will just go away now.

The moaning and complaining about the iPhone price cut continues pretty much unabated. IRC was an veritable hotbed of discontent last night, raging sea of righteous indignation and pissy foot-stomping. My favourite was a guy on NewNet who came up with this timeless gem:

I don’t have a ton of cash to burn, I could have used that $200.

Sorry, dumbass, you obviously did have that cash to burn and you happily burned it on an iPhone. Willingly and of your own volition. No one forced you, no one coerced you, Steve Jobs didn’t show up at your house and twist your fucking arm. You bought the damn thing and you probably lorded it around, reveling in your status as one of the “cool kids” with a shiny new toy that other people either couldn’t afford or couldn’t get. Now you aren’t so special. Well, tough.

The other thing that seems to be really sticking in people’s craw is paying 99 cents for a ringtone despite having already purchased the song for regular ol’ listening. Does this really surprise you? There are two different licenses in play here, and the greedy bastards at the record labels are not going to give up on a chance for free money. They enforce this all over the world – if you are one of the legions of ringtone buyers in Europe or Japan and you pay $1.65 for a ringtone, you don’t get the whole song – just a low-fi sample, one that is usually re-recorded by some studio guy with a keyboard to make sure that the record label gets maximum profits. If you want the whole song, you have to buy it or pirate it separately. Now it is true that this new development also makes it harder to put ringtones on your iPhone yourself (the new version of iTunes overwrites the ringtone database without checking to see if you have modified it yourself) but I am sure that will be corrected by the Ambrosia guys shortly. In the meantime, I wholeheartedly agree with this guy who puts forth the argument that Apple might not want you to use your own ringtones, and for very good reason.

Some burning questions and some less-than-reverent answers following an Apple event that lived up to pretty much all the hype:

Why would anyone want an iPhone without the phone?

Because an iPod with a touch screen and an Apple GUI and WiFi is the fucking bomb, that’s why. Apple noticed that a not-insignificant number of people buying iPhones were activating them as “pay as you go” phones and then never bothering to buy any minutes. These are people who either would not or could not get onto the AT&T network but were still willing to shell out premium bucks to get the best digital music player / portable WiFi computer on the market. So people were already buying this product, sorta. This just makes it easier.

Why no “Mail” icon?

Sharpies in the crowd are wondering why the “killer app” of the internet isn’t on the new iPod when it is one of the non-phone functions of the iPhone … and at first blush, this would seem to be a huge oversight. The reality, however, is that people tend to stick to webmail when they are connecting up via WiFi down at the bookstore or the cafe or the airport or what-have-you. Using a dedicated email client via WiFi is often a drag because you cant hit an SMTP box for your outbound traffic – relaying is pretty much verboten these days. The “Mail” client is actually in the phone, just not activated at this point. If there is enough call for it, you can assume that it will be turned on by an iTunes update at some point in the future. For now, however, Safari is your mail client.

What happened to 3G, smart guy?

Dunno. As late as two hours before the presser things were still being hammered out. Whatever happened, it’s clear that Steve wasn’t pleased with it … he made sure to get a couple of shots in during his time on stage.

How do I choose between the honking big “Classic” and the “Touch”?

It’s funny – I used to be a slut for more storage in my iPod. I still carry the first-gen 10GB iPod, and have always said that I would upgrade when the first models came out with more than 100GB. Now, though, I think I can live without the ginormous hard drive and stick with the cool WiFi features instead. Really, if you cant manage to have all the music you need at any given time in 10GB or less, you must be either (a) a mental defective, or (b) named Bruce Mowat. The 160GB Classic is very cool, but unless you have some strange need to carry a LOT of video at any given time or need a specialized portable hard drive solution, get the 16GB Touch. Trust me.

A price cut means sales are sucking, right?

Um, no. A price cut means that Apple – like any smart company – decided that they could charge a massive premium for the product when it first came out because the demand was high enough to warrant it. And since they sold every single phone they had in the first weekend, I would say that they were right. Sales are fine, but you want to keep them fine – and now that the “first blush” market is more or less exhausted, they are bringing the price down to a more mainstream level.

I bought an iPhone for $599! How can Apple screw me like this?

Get a grip. You gladly paid six hundred bucks, and you probably stood in line to do it, so shut your hole. Every tech product in the history of the world has gotten cheaper as it progresses through it’s life span – R&D costs get recouped, new parts get cheaper as more manufacturing facilities become available, it’s just the way the business works. When the PlayStation 2 came out it was just under 400 bucks – now you can get it for $129 including 2 controllers, a game, a memory card, and (for all I know) a puppy. Better yet, 42″ plasma televisions used to be seventeen grand. Now they give the fuckers away when you rent an apartment. If you didn’t think that $599 was a fair price at the time then you should have used your brain and waited. Moron.

Who is this Enderle person, anyway?

Rob Enderle is the hack journalist’s best friend. He is the head of a “research group” that consists of, well, him – but once in a while he trots out his brother as the author of some “study”, which is even more pathetic and amusing. He can always be counted on to put out officious-sounding statements that have no basis in anything resembling facts or actual technical knowledge, and any writer or editor that allows his crap to pass into print as “analysis” should be fired for being an incompetent boob. Although I have to admit, he does make for some awesome blog fodder.

7: The number of new Starbucks locations that open every day.

The “overpriced” and “overhyped” (thank you, Rob Enderle) iPhone was the top selling smartphone again in July, the latest month that sales figures are available for.

If you use a Blackberry with anything approaching some semblance of regularity, you will know one thing with a deep and unwavering certainty – the Blackberry does mobile email almost flawlessly, with and ease and transparency that is absolutely admirable. You will also have a vague and unsettling suspicion of something else – that every other function of the Blackberry looks and feels like shit in comparison.

This suspicion turns into a concrete and unshakable conviction if you use an iPhone for a few days and then go back to a Blackberry. The staggering contrast in ease of use and general functionality is so stark that the wonderful immediacy of NTP’s RIM’s email solution suddenly becomes something you can live without. You are more than willing to wait for the iPhone to hit a POP or IMAP server every couple of minutes – a delay that becomes even less of a quibble when you see how well Apple’s phone handles attachments, the one thing that the Blackberry is still struggling with when it comes to mobile mail.

The gang up at RIM needs to get their mitts on a couple of iPhones and sit down with them and take a hard look at what the user experience is like when all of the people who work on a device actually talk to each other … maintaining both a constant UI philosophy and and ongoing commitment to bona fide integration from one function to the next. The RIM people are a clever crowd, and – unless their surname happens to be Balsillie – generally nice people, but they need to wake up. It’s time to start designing things from a “how will the user do cool things?” standpoint instead of their current “what cool things can we make the device do?” point of view. The difference there might seem subtle, but the changes in the final product are of brobdingnagian proportions.

Later today (that’s Wednesday, September 5, 2007 for those who look at this years from now) there will be an Apple event. On the surface, that doesn’t seem like such a big deal. There are lots of Apple events – every time there is a speed bump on an iMac or a slightly bigger hard drive in a MacBook or a new colour of iPod or maybe when Steve blows his nose there is an “event”.

This one, however, will be different. If you have the time and the foresight to be watching the news from the west coast at 1:00 p.m. EDT (or 10:00 a.m. PDT if you are lucky enough to be there) then you are going to be genuinely excited by what you see. Unless, of course, you are in the “digital lifestyle” marketing departments at Microsoft or Sony … then, well, maybe you aren’t going to be excited as much as you are depressed and vaguely sick.

And, just to make things even better, there is a possibility of not just one but two awesome things happening 12 short hours from now.

What is going to happen is an iPod announcement that will make you say “I want one. Now. How much? Who cares, give it to me.” And if you are a company that recently jumped off the iTunes gravy train because greed got the better of you (*cough cough NBC cough*) you are going to look – and feel – pretty fucking stupid.

What might happen after that is an interesting announcement about the iPhone – one that frees it from the ancient and horribly low-tech “Edge” network and opens it up to the glory that is the 3G architecture. If this happens – and it is still an “if” at this point, with some wrangling and jockeying going on even at this late hour – then Rogers Communications is also going to look pretty fucking stupid, giving NBC some company in the “we got what we deserve for being greedy assholes” brigade.

Anytime that a team from the University of Michigan loses at something – anything – it makes me pretty happy. When that team is their football team, it makes me exceptionally happy. And when the University of Michigan football team loses to a bunch of no-name hilljacks from Boone, North Carolina … well, we are talking unbridled bliss, something on the order of what you would feel if you won the lottery on the same day that George W. Bush contracted a lingering and extremely painful terminal disease.

It’s almost … palpable.

194: The average power consumption (in watts) of the Xbox 360 Elite.

A couple of items of interest and/or clarification from the whole NBC/ iTunes rift:

Regarding the “passive voice”: For those of you that asked, the use of the passive voice in NBC’s statement (”it is estimated that the typical iPod contains a significant amount of illegally downloaded material”) means that it is unsubstantiated bullshit, and they can distance themselves from it if anyone in the mainstream media (unlikely – see below) challenges them for actual data.

NBC’s reach into the media: Most media mentions of this particular development were regurgitations of this AP news feed – a feed that is curious in the fact that it is short on details and contains a final paragraph that could have been penned by NBC. My favourite line is “NBC Universal also wants iTunes to stiffen anti-piracy provisions so computer users would not have easy access to illegal downloads” which is hilarious in it’s inanity. What would NBC Universal have Apple do to stop computer users from using their machines to download items that are freely available? Have iTunes cripple all other surfing functions of the machine? Stop users from installing 3rd party software? Maybe install extra spyware functions (hello, Microsoft!) to tattle on users who download what NBC considers questionable content? If this really was NBC’s position, then Apple was doubly justified in telling them to fuck right off.

Unbelievable.