DRM-Curious? You Can Create An UltraViolet Account Now

aaa9You may remember the "one DRM to rule them all" we heard about last year, UltraViolet. It's essentially a DRM scheme that all the heavy hitters are getting behind, from device makers to content creators to distributors. Everyone, that is, except for one 800-pound media gorilla: Apple. The last we heard of it was over a year ago, with nary a peep since then except the odd mention here or there. But it seems that the sleeping giant wakes, as they've opened up registration for UltraViolet accounts. I've gone ahead and made one so you don't have to if you just want to see what it looks like in there.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/O3tRPxzKAIA/

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Apple Launches 30-Pin to USB iPhone Adapter for EU Compliance

Last year, the European Commission decreed that all future cellphones would have but one kind of charger. No longer would we see different cables for Nokia, Sony, and Samsung. Instead, there would be one charger to rule them all: Micro USB. Which of course led everybody to wonder if Apple would play ball. There was of [...]

Source: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/10/apple-launches-30-pin-to-usb-iphone-adapter-for-eu-compliance/

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Banshee music player now works in Windows, supports Amazon MP3 downloads

A few moments ago, version 2 of the Banshee music player for Linux was released, bringing with it a whole slew of new features, and the addition of an official -- but alpha-quality -- Windows build. The Mac OS X build of version 2 is due later today.

The most notable new feature is support for the Amazon MP3 store -- you can buy and download music from within Banshee -- but unfortunately it's only available in the Linux build at the moment (OS X and Windows support are planned, however). There have also been some significant improvements to artist, album, and queue interactions -- and yes, you can finally right click a track, album or artist and select 'play after' to insert it into the queue.

Beyond actual playback, the user interface has been tidied up -- it now looks a whole lot smarter -- and the Ubuntu One Music Store and SoundMenu extensions have been made official. For a complete list of changes, additions and bug fixes, check the change log.

When Windows support initially appeared in February, we found it rough around the edges and fraught with stability issues. With version 2, Banshee for Windows is still a bit unstable, but it's shaping up to be a good alternative to Winamp, iTunes, or whatever other music library manager you use. It's almost as attractive as its GNOMEish brother, too!

Download Banshee 2 for Linux and Windows (Mac OS X coming soon)

Banshee music player now works in Windows, supports Amazon MP3 downloads originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 06 Apr 2011 11:35:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2011/04/06/banshee-music-player-now-works-in-windows-supports-amazon-mp3-d/

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Toyota pulls Cydia theme and ads to appease Apple

Apple asks Toyota to remove jailbreak Cydia theme
In news that will no doubt shake the very bedrock of your belief system, Apple has asked Toyota to remove its Scion theme and its advertising from ModMyi, a Cydia repository. The Scion theme has been available for weeks, but after it received a ton of press in the last couple of days, Apple finally lashed out.

It's not like we should be surprised, considering Apple has claimed in the past that jailbreaking is illegal -- but at the same time, did the Cupertino cronies hear about the ruling that made circumventing DRM, and thus jailbreaking, legal? Anyway, whether Toyota was supporting illegal, legal, or deliciously gray and ambiguous, activity, it doesn't matter: Apple asked Toyota to remove the theme, and Toyota graciously bent over and capitulated.

This story raises a much more interesting topic, though: this is the first time a multinational company has publicly acknowledged and embraced the jailbreak community. Considering jailbreaking is technically legal, and Cydia's creator, Jay Freeman, estimates that up to 9% of OS devices are jailbroken, it simply makes good, commercial sense to target jailbreakers with ads. Toyota was simply trying to make some money, for shame!

As long as Apple continues to throw around its increasingly-expansive mass, the legality of jailbreaking will continue to be inconsequential. It will be interesting to see if another big company dares embrace the jailbreak community after this, too.

Toyota pulls Cydia theme and ads to appease Apple originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 06 Apr 2011 05:25:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2011/04/06/toyota-pulls-ios-jailbreak-theme-and-ads-to-appease-apple/

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Piezoelectric system turns your balmy breath into pungent power

Researchers at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have come up with a way to produce electricity from just about the most renewable source known to man -- his own breath. It's all thanks to a plastic microbelt developed by engineers Xudong Wang, Chengliang Sun and Jian Shi. Made of a material known as polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF), this belt produces an electric charge whenever low-speed airflow passes over it and causes it to vibrate -- a result of that vaunted piezoelectric effect. Eventually, Wang and his team were able to tinker with their system to the point where it could produce enough current to charge small electronic devices. "The airflow of normal human respiration is typically below about two meters per second," Wang explained. "We calculated that if we could make this material thin enough, small vibrations could produce a microwatt of electrical energy that could be useful for sensors or other devices implanted in the face." The researchers say their technology could be used to power smaller biomedical devices like blood monitors and pacemaker batteries, which typically don't demand vast amounts of energy. No word yet on when this system could make its way to the mainstream, but we'll be waiting with bated breath.

Piezoelectric system turns your balmy breath into pungent power originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 05 Oct 2011 04:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://feeds.engadget.com/~r/weblogsinc/engadget/~3/uuSJdPxFgl4/

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Google holds back on open-sourcing Honeycomb, heralds massive shift for Android

Android Honeycomb
Google, in an interesting but not entirely unexpected twist, will not be open-sourcing Android 3.0 Honeycomb for the foreseeable future.

Historically, Android is usually open-sourced via the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) a few days or weeks after the code is finalized. While this departure from the norm won't affect OEMs like HTC and Motorola that have access to internal builds of Android, small-time developers will likely have to wait months before rolling their own distributions.

As to why Google is holding back Honeycomb, its reasons are actually rather rational. Honeycomb, while originally intended to run on all mobile form factors, is only ready for deployment on tablets. "To make our schedule to ship the tablet, we made some design tradeoffs," says Andy Rubin, the head of Google's Android group. "We didn't want to think about what it would take for the same software to run on phones. It would have required a lot of additional resources and extended our schedule beyond what we thought was reasonable. So we took a shortcut."

In other words, Google wants to prevent OEMs and homebrew developers like Cyanogen from rolling their own smartphone versions of Honeycomb -- it doesn't want to see the same bitter-tasting tabletified bastardization that occurred with Android 2.1 and 2.2 last year.

Continue reading Google holds back on open-sourcing Honeycomb, heralds massive shift for Android

Google holds back on open-sourcing Honeycomb, heralds massive shift for Android originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 25 Mar 2011 07:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2011/03/25/google-holds-back-on-open-sourcing-honeycomb-heralds-shift-android/

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