Author: Toby Leftly

Facebook is ramping up for some kind of announcement tomorrow, as press have been invited to Facebook HQ for an event. Facebook is building up their platform, recently introducing Places to compete with Foursquare. Some speculation about tomorrow’s event include: Facebook for iPad (at last!) Overhaul of Facebook Events (hinted at by the wording of the invite) Updates to the Places feature The announcement of the Facebook phone I’m personally betting against the Facebook phone, but I wouldn’t put it past them. I’d love to see a decent Facebook client for iPad, but I’ve been unimpressed with…

If you’re a gadget hound like me, you probably spent hours agonizing over the purchase of your TV. It’s one of the few purchases in your home most people don’t intend to replace every year or so, so you make your choice and dammit you live with it. But that 1080p flat screen TV you just bought is about to be obsoleted. BIG TIME. The BBC and Japanese opposite number NHK have completed trials of Super Hi-Vision broadcasts across the world at a jaw-dropping 7,680 x 4,320 pixel resolution. At sixteen times the quality of 1080p, this makes current high-def broadcasting look like analog television from 1965….

GoodReader, the iPad PDF viewer gets an important update today. The app now supports annotations, including notes and sketches. The app is considered by many to be a must-have for viewing documents on the go, and this addition will help users do more with their iPad besides consume content. The great news is that the notes and highlights are visible in the PDF document when you reopen it or when you transfer it to your computer. The bad news is that it does this by adding the information to the PDF file, meaning that if you forward the PDF to someone else, they have no way of viewing the document without…

After the reasonable success of Windows 7, and long after the train wreck that was Windows Vista, PC users are keeping it old school, sticking with Windows XP as their operating system of choice. If you use a computer for anything other than gaming or to see how many hertz you can eek out of the latest Intel CPU, you know the pain of change. Change means uncertainty, and the one thing people want from a device their business or personal communications rely on is certainty. As a nerd, Windows 7 is a modern, attractive and capable OS, but depending on the task XP is still more than enough for the majority of…

Twitter has finally began moving towards paying gigs, probably fed with being only worth a paltry $5 billion. But you might not like what they have in store. Currently, Twitter sells “promoted tweets” for around $100,000 each. These are sponsored tweets that appear at the top of search results, although the general consensus is that the system is experimental and not worth the investment. Well, now they have a new plan. Twitter is going to sell spots in their “who to follow” recommendation list. Twitter insists that relevance will be the key here, although this is obviously going to be the weak…

Yeah, we landed on the moon forty years ago. Yes, Bruce Willis and his daredevil team of drillers placed a nuclear missile at the center of an asteroid headed towards earth. But space still holds some mystery and romance for us, particularly the geeks. Space is still a long way from being a casual destination, with only 518 people having visited space in all of mankind’s history. So it’s remarkable and exciting to this day when a regular guy is able to reach out and touch space, almost literally. Luke Geissbuhler attached an HD video to a weather balloon and sent it into the air with the hopes that it would…

People love Facebook, but believe it or not there are actually some things it doesn’t do very well. Like messaging, for example. You’re logged into Facebook, playing Farmville or posting about how you think you have a case of the mondays. You decide to send me a message, and you’re logged in so you send me a Facebook message, because otherwise you’d have to log in to webmail too. I’m not logged into Facebook, so I receive an email notification that shows me your message. Rather than hit ‘reply’ I now have to log into Facebook to reply to your message. In case it’s not obvious, this process makes me want…

Steve Ballmer did not receive his maximum bonus this year because of missteps at Microsoft. The bald sweaty blob received a cash bonus of $670,000 at the end of June, but the payout is 50% less than his potential maximum bonus. Ballmer was apparently slapped on the wrist for failures such as the Kin and Microsoft’s failure to bring an iPad competitor to market. Ironically, despite these failures the blob was still able to raise Microsoft sales 7% to a record high of $62.5 billion. On top of the bonus, Ballmer received a total salary of $1.34 million, a 6% raise from 2009. While Microsoft is apparently…

Google just can’t leave anything alone. Give them two minutes with a computer and a couple of engineers and they’ll have reinvented something, made it better, quicker, smarter, easier. It’s what they do. So what have they been up to now, those nerdy rascals? Their latest means of improving the world is.. images. Fresh from their latest successes in speeding up the web via DNS and prioritizing our inboxes, Google is now looking at images as an area ripe for improvement. Since the inception of the web, the same formats have been used with little change. GIF was first, a small but low quality format designed…

It was only a matter of time, but one of the teams responsible for iPhone jailbreaking has hinted on Twitter that the new Apple TV is jailbreakable. Apparently there has been some discussion about the Apple TV, with many wondering it runs iOS, and if the version is similar or identical to that of the iPhone and iPad. The firmware used in the Apple TV is available online from Apple’s public servers, and two members of the iPhone Dev Team have confirmed that the SHAtter exploit is able to decrypt the Apple TV’s firmware keys. The other big news is that with Apple TV running iOS, the likelihood is that Apple…