TapTapTap created a mosaic to celebrate 10,000 iPhone applications. Do you have them all?

You can purchase the overpriced poster for 50 dollars, if you’re made of money. But if you just wanna see the poster a high res copy can be found on flickr…where else?

[Source] The Unoffical Apple Weblog: LINK

When Apple first mentioned their upgrade I stood by my beliefs that this thing was too restricted. After all, who am I to sell my soul to AT&T? I’ve gotta stay true to T-Mobile.

Hearing about Android a few months ago helped, but being in New York City last week did not.

There were iPhones every where. And hundreds of people waiting in line to get their new phones activated in stores. God forbid someone try to unlock the 3G iPhone! [GASP]

Lifehacker had a good article the other day about why you should stay away from the iPhone, so that helped. But it really is the best phone out today. I’ve gotta be patient though…I know that Google won’t stand for this restricted phone.

In the back of my mind I’ve got to remember that Apple is the only company that a year ago could release a touchscreen super phone without 3G connection, without GPS, without a video camera, and without the ability to send picture messages and still sell tons of them to their loyal fan base.

They have earned that reputation, but I don’t want a crippled phone, I want everything it is capable of doing.

In my moments of weakness I have merely gone to the Apple website, then quickly read up on Android. I haven’t waited in line at an Apple store at 7 a.m. And I won’t.

Have you?

We talk to Peter about Engadget’s history, game consoles, the life of a pro blogger and more. Have a listen!

In the recent builds of Apple’s new operating system, Mac OS X Leopard, developers have started noticing that there is an option to format a partition using ZFS (Zettabyte file system). There is still no mention from Apple whether this will remain in the final builds, but the file system matches exactly Apple’s plans for Leopard. This article will explain you everything that you need to know about ZFS aswell as why I’m so exciting about its inclusion. Read on to learn more.

ZFS is an open source file system which was developed in November 2005 and maintained by Sun Microsystems. The best way to describe ZFS is the same way that Sun describes it: “It’s what Virtual Memory did for RAM, except that we did It for hard drives”. If we take a look back, virtual memory is the way that a computer manages the RAM that is installed into it. When an end-user install more RAM into the computer, he does not have to partition the RAM, nor tell the computer how much RAM he added. The whole virtual memory process does all these calculations, and the operating system and programs can easily request more RAM and get it without any effort.

But ZFS is more than that. It has many very cool features that will be useful to many people. Instead of trying to cram all of these in one short phrase, I’ll enumerate them into their own paragraphs:

ZFS is a 128-bit filesystem
Both NTFS (the filesystem that Windows XP uses) and HFS+ (the current OS X filesystem) have file limits of 16TiB. ZFS has no theoretical limit for a single file, but the whole filesystem can be as big as one zettabyte (a zettabyte is one million terabytes). This is proof that ZFS is a file system that can scale and is prepared for the future.

ZFS uses advanced hashing algorithms
We may not realize this, but the way that most common file systems are made is very unreliable for data integrity. As hard drives get bigger, more error-correction is used, and there is more possibility for data corruption which can lead to file loss and several other problems. In fact, today’s drives rely a lot on error-correction mechanisms daily. Sectors are lost all the time, and drives which are bigger than 250GB are doing data correction constantly. ZFS is the ideal file system for the bigger and bigger hard drives that we get to deal with.

ZFS supports storage pools
This feature works the same way that virtual memory works. If you want to add more capacity to the hard drive, you can simply add more drives. No need to deal with volumes or partitions. Just plug in and go. This means that if you had a Mac Pro with a single 250GB drive, and you would pick up a second 300GB drive, you could just plug in and you would have 550GB of disk space available to you! Naturally, you could choose to add additional drives as a separate volume; you would probably want to do this for external hard drives.

ZFS supports intelligent drive mirroring
If you want redundancy, you might probably use RAID1. RAID1 functions by writing the exact information to two drives at once. By having to wait for two drives to write the same information, RAID1 lowers the drive’s performance. On the contrary, ZFS’s mirroring actually speeds up the reading performance of the hard drive because it intelligently balances the load between two drives whenever a read command is issued. And, in addition, it also offers more robust protection from data corruption as it’s constantly checking the checksums of the files.

ZFS supports snapshots
This is the most important feature that ZFS has to offer for Leopard. We’ve seen Steve Jobs demo Leopard’s Time Machine software back in WWDC 2006. Time Machine gives the ability for users to restore a document to an earlier version. In essence, it’s adding a GUI to the snapshotting feature of ZFS. But the real interesting feature of ZFS is that it intelligently creates the snapshots. For example, a snapshop of a document will only take as much space as what you modify. If you modify only a few characters in a text file, the snapshot will take up only a few bytes. This is because ZFS uses the reference from the original file for its snapshots. Intelligent, eh?

ZFS is fast!
Yes, that’s what we all want! We want a snappier operating system and hearing more “boom”s from Steve Jobs. The current filesystem used on Mac OS X, HFS+, was originally developed for Mac OS 8.1 back in 1998. I think that we all agree that such a modern operating system such as Mac OS X could use a modern file system.

I hope that you’ve enjoyed this in-dept look at ZFS, for more information, please consult Sun’s own website about the file system at http://www.sun.com/software/solaris/zfs_learning_center.jsp
Sun’s website also contains great demonstration videos where they demonstrate the key features of ZFS. It’s worth a watch.

For full discussion of this and other topics, please visit our brand new Zamwi forums at: http://forums.zamwi.com/

Edit by Zach: Many people have realized that tech.zamwi.com wasn’t down by the Digg effect, nor even slow while being the most popular story on the front page of Digg. I’ve reveived a few emails asking where I was being hosted at, many people seem wanting to get away from bad webhosts.

I’m hosted by a friend who is in the process of developing a website as I type. The hosting service is superb, great performance, no downtime and excellent technical support.

If you want a reliable host contact him!

After picking up a Wii under a week ago I did not plan on spending tons of money on Black Friday, but as a tech enthusiast I had to get out and see the insanity. I did spend 30 dollars on six movies, a deal I could not refuse, but my most important work today came at Circuit City.

I went to check out CC’s 40 dollar 250GB external hard drive, but of course they were gone, so I checked out the zunes, where a guy was looking to pick either an iPod or a zune as a gift for himself. He was asking the employee about the differences, but he did not know enough, so I stepped in and answered his questions (which my earbud in my ear!).

After talking about 10 minutes he finally said to the employee “I’ll take an iPod.” Mission Complete.

Other than buying movies, missing out on a cheap external drive, and convincing someone to stay away from the zune, I went looking for some cheap Wii titles, which were no where to be found.

A pretty uneventful Black Friday for this tech blogger, either way I hope you enjoyed your day.

AppZapper

In the process of downloading tons of applications I have also removed lots of applications, and I could not imagine doing this without AppZapper. This program allows users to drag the icon of the application you wish to do and it properly uninstalls the app from your hard drive. I was not sure if it would be worth the $12.95, but allow me to assure you that it is worth the money.

Awaken

Before moving to school on Thursday I have been looking for a good App to wake me up in the morning. I am terrible at waking up and hate the loud siren noises of the everyday alarm clock. Awaken allows you to wake up or fall asleep to an iTunes playlist, podcast or song. The set up is great, easy to use and works perfect as an alarm clock. It will cost you though, for $8.95 this app can be yours for life.

DJay

I do not know about you, but every once in a while I get the strange craving to scratch some records. Now I am no disk jockey, and I do not own any records, but I do have a rather extensive iTunes library. DJay is freeware and has numerous features, it is a fun application for play around with, but certainly not for a hardcore DJ.

Hawkeye

It took me a while to determine whether Hawkeye was for me or not, but after using for a few days I have decided it will be perfect for college. Hawkeye allows users to prepare their media for other sources, DVD, PSP, iPod, etc. It is great for those who have lots of video, perhaps “Handbraked”, on their hard drives. The software is free, but limited to only four videos at once.

iAlertU

Another Application that I fealt was essential for school was some form of alarm. I have a lock for my laptop, but that does not stop people from messing with what is on my hard drive. iAlertU uses the motion detection on the new Mac laptops to set off an alarm when their is any movement of the laptop. It even takes a picture of the theif, you can see a video of iAlertU in action here, or download it for free here.

OurTunes

Sharing your library on iTunes is a huge deal for many, though moving these files back and forth is not easy. OurTunes allows users to download content shared through iTunes libraries and is completely free.

Senuti

If you can not share your library through a computer you can still share it through an iPod. Senuti is freeware that allows users to take songs from an iPod that is connected to a computer. This is never easy if you try to do it manually, but with this App you can sort through the content on the iPod.

UnRarX

I used to hate when I would download something that was in .RAR format, I never knew what to do with it before I found UnRarX. It is a simple application that extracts the contents of .RAR files and is completely free.

Q

All Mac users have heard of Parallels and Boot Camp, but another competitor in this form of software has to be Q. Q is open source software that lets users run various operating systems on their Mac through their program. One thing that makes Q stand out from its competitors is that it is completely ready to run Windows Vista.

Call Recorder

When I started podcasting I knew that I wanted to use Skype and record my conversations. I looked around for free software and tested a lot, most of it was Zapped, but when I came across Call Recorder and tested it out I knew that it was perfect for what I wanted to do. Call Recorder is just an add-on to Skype that has a record button, it saves your files as .mov, but it includes another program called Convert-to-MP3, which does just what it is called. If you would like to hear how good call recorder sounds check out my podcast, Sports Unlimited Weekly.

There are plently of great Mac applications out there, free ones, and Apps that are worth every penny. I hope my list has helped, but I want to know some of your favorites too.

I thought, if this video doesn’t get saved I’m going to be so mad…I rebooted opened the project and everything was gone…

If only I had Final Cut…

So just know that my hatred towards Microsoft is because I like quality, its not out of childishness.

I’ve been using Macs now for about 2 years, doing video through Final Cut in school and other places, and in my work on them I felt that I had to own one as soon as I could.

Knowing that I would eventually get a top of the line macbook pro, hopefully this summer, for college, I decided to settle with a desktop for right now. I bought the Mac mini mainly for when my family moved from Germany back to the U.S. since I would have a computer for about 2-3 months.

Since at this point I can’t afford a laptop for that time, with a little research on eBay I found out that I could get a cheap G4 Mac Mini, since the Intel Mini’s were just released. Call me crazy, but I love it!

Since I’ve had experience with Mac before making the switch has been a breeze, I’m using all my favorite apps, and working on linking my Dell and the mini together. My biggest concern right now is my media, which is all on my external hard drive connected to my Dell.

Soon enough I’m sure it will all be interconnected, I really like the G4 Mac Mini and am now a proud Mac owner!

After Apple made the switch to Intel, Dvorak published an article in PC magazine about how Apple is a hardware based company and his conspiracy theory stated that Apple will run Windows as an OS in the future. It might not look like Windows, it might look like Mac, but deep down, it would be Windows.

Today I found a brand spanking new Mac App, over at PaulStamatiou.com, an awesome tech blog, called Boot Camp… This app allows Windows to be run natively on an intel Mac, with out patches or hacking required…wow…

I’ll let you read Paul’s full article and check out boot camp for yourself. I’m just begging, that Dvorak will be wrong about his cooky conspiracy them seems to look closer and closer to a reality…

At my workplace I do a lot of testing new software as well as a lot with video, all based on a Mac! =D I get to use my own G4 Powerbook, which is great for using Final Cut. When I was asked to install iLife 06, I was thrilled because being in the market for a Mac I wanted to know if it was worth the money.

The install of iLife took about 20 minutes, because it had to load all of the new apps. I then had to update the software on each of the apps which took about another 5-10 minutes.

I decided to start with Garageband, since most of the other apps had stayed the same. I opened up Garageband and was greeted with a new start screen, I decided that I wanted to make a podcast, why not. So I messed around and created a little podcast, just with Garageband music.

Then I wanted to make a page for it so I clicked share, send to iWeb. Seems simple enough…

Getting this far was a breeze and it only got easier. iWeb, the new app in the iLife bundle, gave me a few templates to choose from for selecting my podcast page. I chose a very basic white one and went to work. I added some titles, changed the images, lined the text up differently and added an RSS feed within 5 minutes of bringing my podcast into iWeb.

Then I decided that I wanted to add more, so I messed around with iWeb some more and added an about me page, a blog, a movies page and tweaked a few other features. I wanted to see how everything lined up so i uploaded the files to my server, which can be found here.

Though very basic, iWeb is a great tool for podcasters, if you really aren’t after an great detail web 2.0 page for your podcast or blog then I highly recommend using iWeb. As for iLife the other apps run great. This week I’ll be looking more at iMovie and iPhoto, but really wanted to check out what Jobs was doing in his keynote, a few months ago!

…ehhh….I can’t wait to get an apple…..

Compression

Editing the video is probably the most important part of experience your audience gets, so ruining the experience with pixellation is something you never want to do…

I use Adobe Premiere Pro to edit Video Class, and to be honest exporting the project for the web from Premiere is terrible. I have never been able to get good quality video compression from Premiere. However using Final Cut Pro is a great alternate for editing and their compression settings are far better than Premiere’s.

If you are stuck with Premiere, export yourself a high quality version of the video and compress using a third-party software.

I use Sorenson Squeeze to compress my video works for the web. Squeeze features eight output formats while allowing the user to choose the settings in each format. I use their MP4 format with their 512K streaming option, however you can customize the compression settings in each format to suit your needs.

Once your settings are tweaked you can hit the SQUEEZE IT button and wait for the compression to finish.

Hello web…

Now that your video is compressed you can upload to your website with your FTP client. I do this first before entering into bigger and better things.

This usually ties up my browser for about 30 minutes, so its a good time to get a snack or go some where.

When you get your video on your website you should integrate it into a page, I do my HTML coding in Nvu, and just add the zamtv banner and a few links around each episode of video class.

Linking to the video is the next step, this is pretty obvious though. Video Class has its on page with the variety of ways to watch it, we’ll get into that further down the road.

Getting it out there…

This is also the most fun part for the producer of the work…getting your work out to a number of sources.

YouTube

Lets start with a popular host, YouTube. I use YouTube because it allows you to upload up to 100 MB video files, as many as you want, and its a great way to find videos. YouTube features thousands of videos and by adding tags you can be found on YouTube as well.

YouTube also allows integration into blogs and websites as well. We get a number of hits on Video Class from people adding the YouTube video code to their blog or MySpace.

Podcasting

If you’re doing video a podcast is a must! Initially when I started Video Class I’d upload the videos to my Podomatic account. Podomatic offers 250 MB of storage and 7.5 GB of monthly bandwidth for podcasters totally free…not bad.

But I’d have to sit there and wait for files to upload on my server, youtube and podomatic…lame.

This isn’t a tutorial on how to podcast, so I won’t get nitty-grittily (hah) into that…but having a site to host your podcast something every video host should do. Integrating RSS adds the lazy group of watchers, who don’t want to have to check for new episodes…its does it for them! Also having a podcast page allows users to comment on your works which adds more integration and an overall more personal feel to your content. But make sure your content is iPod-ready, download the podcast yourself and check it out.

iTunes

When you sign up for a podcast you will be emailed a link from iTunes, when you click this link it opens up iTunes and goes right to your podcast in the music store. By adding this link to your site you score users the direct location of your podcast…do it.

Video Bomb

Publicizing your video is a must. Videobomb.com offers a digg like style site strictly for video content. I add our shows to Video Bomb to share it with their users, I also add a Bomb us link in the zamtv/videoclass page.

Broadcast Machine

I recently stumbled upon a great video organizer, the broadcast machine. I thought I’d give it a try so I added our content to it and made a Video Class channel. After fooling around for a week, I decided to release the BM link on zamtv.

Broadcast machine organizes the content, it adds a description, copyright, RSS, donation buttons, and an overall professional feel.

The best part of all if using the broadcast machine to publish a channel for democracy tv, which is insanely easy.

Und das ist alles

Well there you have it, you now have what it takes to make video happen on your site for a cheap rate…make sure your content is web friendly though!

Podcast hosting can initially be confusing for the average user, but there are a number of services that make podcasting free and easy. I started doing podcasting all manually, coding the RSS myself, but then I realized that there were services that made podcasting much easier than all of this manual coding.

I did a lot of browsing until I found the best deal on the internet, Podomatic. Podomatic.com offers 250 MB free hosting and 7.5 GB monthly transfer…100% free!

This was far better than any other service that I was able to find so I signed up. Since that time I’m overcapped my free Podomatic hosting using 9 GB of my 7.5 GB bandwidth. I emailed Podomatic about this problem and they scored me a free Paypal donate button and gave me a seven day grace period…

Podomatic is great all around, they have great hosting plans and even better customer service.

I’ve decided to look deeper at everyone’s favorite search engine and I think I may have found what their up to…

Forget everything you know about tech for a minute…okay now that you’re thinking like Google you’re prepared for this article.

So what is Google up to in the future…first let’s look at what they have now:

GMail – I love GMail and tend to agree with Kevin Rose, I think their servers are fast. GMail rocks, I’m only using 85MB of my 2703MB (3%) of my inbox and it has changed the way I think about web based e-mail. I shouldn’t even have to do a review about GMail, because despite being Beta and invite only, everyone has GMail.

Picasa – Google’s answer to photos on the internet, Picasa offers not only picture sharing, but it also has a few built in features, such as: lighting and color effects, organizing labels, captions and print ordering options. So maybe its not Flickr, but Picasa is a decent piece of Google Software.

GTalk – Instant messaging in 1999 was about the same as GTalk. I downloaded it a while back and gave it a try, but GTalk doesn’t have anything on AIM or MSN Messenger. Though, not that GTalk is built into GMail, I think Google has started to show exactly what it plans on doing in the future.

Google Page Creator – AJAX integration brings Google Page Creator alive. Google lets you publish your works online with their Page Creator, you can instantly create quick and painless websites, the downside is there is no integration with blogger (which they run also) and your domain for your quickly made website is something like: zamwi.googlepages.com…lame…

Google also has a number of other software available, including Google Earth, Google Mars, Google Video, Google Reader, whatever…however the above software are really a part of the Google philosphy of web integration they plan on taking.

Whats to come from Google…

Google Calender – There’s been a few leaked screenshots of Google’s underdeveloped calender app, which actually looks pretty awesome. Personally I like 30Boxes myself, but can’t wait to see what Google does.

GDrive – Google obviously has server space and soon they’ll be throwing it right to you. If you’ve been keeping up with Tech News you may have seen the work that Google is doing on the GDrive which will enable users to save files on a Google server, just like they would be saving a file on their home computer, just select the GDrive…not too shabby.

Writely – Google has just bought out the popular online Word Processor client Writely, which allowed users just about the same set up as Microsoft Word, just built into a web browser.

The Master Plan

Google has some cool stuff, and some stuff that is absolute garbage, just look at GMail and GTalk, but by adding these two together within a web browser Google makes the millions of GMail users, GTalk users…and makes instant messenger in seperate programs a thing of the past. This is the start of the way Google is thinking.

Imagine elimating the computer and adding Google….this is virtually what Google wants to do. Why save files on your computer when you can save them on your GDrive, email the files easily through GMail integration, or just IM them to your GTalk pals. Then you can check you calender to make sure your schedule has an opening, publish your letters online and email and share it all through Google’s Apps, heck you could even publish it on your Google website.

How does Google think? Entirely web oriented!

Google doesn’t want to be Microsoft of Apple, they want to be Google, they think differently, they think internet…

It will be interesting to see if their way of thinking works with the average computer users, I’m excited, but hey I’m a geek!

Being a Senior in high school I need to rack up some dough for college next year, because after all in a few months I’ll be a poor college student, so I decided to have one of the coolest jobs offered where I live, the projectionist at the movie theatre.

Movie Arrival

When the movies get shipped in, fresh from Hollywood, then arrive in these junky old film cans, nearly every movie is in two cans, but longer ones are in three. In each can are the reels of film, usually divided into 5-6 reels. The reels each have an 11 second head on them, which is a countdown from 11 to the beginning of the movie. This is important for setting the film up on the machine.

Preparation

When the movies arrive at our theatre we have to prep them to make sure their suitable for playing later in the week. We go through each reel by hand and take not to any splices in the film and fix some of the problems. If it is a movie we are playing a number of times, or a longer movie, we’ll put three small reels on a big reel, which makes life a lot easier.

Action

Once the movie is prepped its ready to go! We set the film up in the machine and crank the reel by hand down to the beginning of the movie.

While the movie is playing the projectionists knows when to switch to the next reel when the cue mark, which is a tiny black circle outlined in yellow, appears in the right hand corner of the screen. The projectionist sets up the next reel at the number seven, and when he sees the first cue mark he turns on the machine. Seven seconds later the second cue mark appears and thats when the projectionist presses the dowser to change from machine 1 to machine 2.

Too simple…

Seem simple…its not really. When you change over a lot can go wrong. You have to have the film set up and the correct framing or else you could see the same shot on the screen twice. This can be fixed with the lever shown in the picture below.

The focus is also an issue too. When switching from a preview reel to a movie the projectionist often has to change lenses. In 35MM film there are two types of movies, scope (the wider movies) and flat (the more squared off screen). Going between flat and scope often makes the movie go out of focus.

More than that…

Sound is also something that the projectionist has to consider, at our theatre the sound is controlled through the sound tower, shown below.

However the overall volume for each movie is decided by the projectionist based on the genre of the movie or just their opinion on how loud it should be.

I know what your thinking, how can sound be picked up from film reels? Easier than you’d think. When the film blazes through the sprocket holders on each machine it also passes a little red laser which reads the film’s sound track on the left side of the film. So if the projectionist accidentally puts the sound to the right, no sound is heard but the crowd gets to see nifty audio waves.

Some facts

• Movies are played at 24 frames per second
• The projectionist has control over, focus, framing, sound, but not the light or contrast of the movie.
• Pausing a movie is virtually impossible, but it sounds funny when you try, like when you play sounds really slow.
• At our movie theatre, we play the National Anthem and are required to play the MPAA anti-piracy trailers.
• I spelled theatre the way I did not because I’m British, but because I think its cooler that way.

In Conclusion

Well I know that all theatres aren’t like this, in fact we’re a bit behind technology at my theatre, but I thought I’d enlighten you anyway.

Being a projectionist isn’t always fun, when you play movies over and over, even if their good, you can get bored really quick. Thats why I recommend getting yourself a good magazine.

You should also have a 5th Generation iPod too, I love to watch podcasts or The Office while something lame is playing. I hope you enjoyed reading how movie theatres function, so next time the movie is out of focus and you want to know how hard it is to focus a DVD, just remember that 35 MM film is a bit more complicated than you would think playing a movie should be!

You can see more pictures as well as notes on each picture on my flickr page.

I complained mostly about Digg’s users, because I felt that Digg was allowing too much freedom to everyone. You would see too many people slamming people and it just drove me crazy.

But with Digg’s new commenting system you can bury the lame comments and rate others comments. You can also respond to other comments. It really puts the community factor back into Digg.

One of my favorite new features is sorting the comments by their number of diggs and being able to bury junk comments, it was exactly what I was looking for. You can also turn on a profanity filter to further get rid of bad comments.