The touch screen iPod is more of a “When” than an “If”. There’s no doubt that we’ll see it eventually, but it could be as soon as next month if the information from Digitimes is correct. It claims that the Taiwanese manufacturer Wintek is churning out touch screens ready for an August release. Given the usual scarcity of Apple products at launch (yes, except the iPhone), a late summer release would give them time to ramp up production (and frenzied demand) in time for the holiday season. Digitimes fails to quote sources, but with all the speculation spinning around, there’s got to be something from Apple next month, right?

Sony has announced the updated version of its Playstation Portable, but it’s more PSP Lite than PSP 2. According to Engadget, the refreshed model is 19% slimmer and 33% lighter. Both battery life and game load times have been improved, probably due to the adding of a buffer to cache data from the UMD disc. The biggest news, however, is video out. Now you can hook the handheld up to a TV.Available in black, silver and Star Wars (there’s a picture of Darth Vader on the back) they are on sale September.

Nintendo, on the new balance board for the Wii console and the new active fit game, at the E3 games conference in Santa Monica.

They’ve done it again! The ‘will it blend’ guy shows us again how well his blender works on Apple’s lovely gadgets…

Now that’s just a waste

It’s taken a few days but the first unlocked iPhones are appearing in the UK.

Yesterday, The Register reported a UK firm was successfully unlocking the iphone to work within the UK and soon plan to release their software for around $50.

John McLaughlin, founder of Uniquephones, told IDG that his software engineers were working “around the clock” in order to bypass Apple’s restriction that ties activation of the iPhone to signing up to a two-year contract with AT&T.

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Speculation was rife this week that O2 was about to sign a deal for UK distribution of the hypefest which is the Apple iPhone, though on Monday it seemed that Vodafone would be getting the deal, and prior to that those in the know were saying Carphone Warehouse was a dead cert.

Make no mistake; Apple will be talking to all those people, as well as the other operators, and indeed anyone who will listen to their pitch that previous business models are dead, and the iPhone represents the future. Continue Reading »

In an early sign that perhaps the debut of Apple‘s (NASDAQ: AAPL) much-anticipated iPhone might not have been as big of a hit as it was cracked up to be, sales of the phone on eBay (NASDAQ: EBAY) have been disappointing for the entrepreneurs who waited in long lines hoping to cash in on the hype. Many sellers are breaking even or even losing money on their attempts to sell the phone on eBay.

But maybe this is actually a good sign. Overwhelming demand leading to huge windfalls for resellers would indicate that Apple was unprepared — After all, Apple gains nothing when its products are resold at huge mark-ups on the secondary market. According to the New York Times:

Demand for the phone was remarkably strong in the first days. Analysts estimate that Apple and AT&T stores have sold around 500,000 phones so far. One analyst ventured a guess as high as 700,000. But Apple appears to have anticipated demand and contracted with manufacturers in Asia to build far more. Apple has said it expects to sell as many as 10 million phones by the end of 2008.

Of course, the adequate supply at the retail level may rob Apple of the hype element of phones being resold on eBay.

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Network: Most of machines are running Mac OS X, some are running Windows XP

Server: Running latest Fedore Core 6. Two hard disks, one for operating system and file/web server(160G), another one stores hourly backup(200G)

Requirement: rpm-build, gcc, libid3tag, libid3tag-devel, gdbm-devel, howl-devel, zlib-devel, and of course mt-daap(SRPM)

A good article to start with can be found on sblog. However, to install/rebuild mt-daap is not that straight forward. I build mt-daap from SRPM file using rpmbuild, and it depends on libid3tag, libid3tag-devel, gdbm-devel, howl-devel packages. You can simply install libid3tag, libid3tag-devel, gdbm-devel from YUM repository, but FC abandoned howl-devel since version 5. Looking arround in google, I found following package from rpmfind

-rw-r–r– 1 root root 107131 Apr 12 11:27 howl-0.9.8-3.i386.rpm
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 121394 Apr 12 11:26 howl-devel-0.9.8-3.i386.rpm
-rw-r–r– 1 root root 86547 Apr 12 11:27 howl-libs-0.9.8-3.i386.rpm

they are coming from FC4 repository, but you are safe to use them for your FC6 box. Apart from this, you can follow the detailed instruction on sblog. It wouldnt take more than 30 minutes, and you will have a fantastic ITune server in your network
mt-daap on FreeBSD: http://www.elian.co.uk/2008/04/28/atomic-band-itune-server-v2/