Technology posts

The Apple iPad has been jailbroken according to notorious hacker, MuscleNerd, who published this video showing the achievement. A member of the infamous iPhone Dev Team, the developer took just one day to crack Apple security, which he managed through use of a variant of the existing iPhone OS 3.1.3 jailbreak. Most jailbreaks use vulnerabilities either in Safari or the OS itself to grant unrestricted access, this is thought to have been the M.O. for this break-in. What’s it mean? For most of us, not too much, but if you want to install software other than that available from the App Store then…

iTunes keeps cosying-up to Facebook, the world’s largest social network. Now it seems Apple plans to support Facebook Connect, enabling a wave of networking opportunities for music fans. Apple has been promoting iTunes through Facebook for ages. Its UK iTunes Festival last year offered free tickets, music and other promotions to customers via Facebook, and in the US the iTunes team have been developing its own Facebook presence, adding polls, featured items and more. Integration between Facebook and iTunes already lets you share songs on iTunes via Facebook, though this only lets you…

Sure to be making waves this morning here’s a YouTube clip that’s spreading like a wildfire across the Apple blog-o-sphere, generating yelps of pain as it does just that. Pain? Sure, a little, that’s because the man in this clip is the CEO of a blender company called Blendtec, and this clip (the latest in a series of uber-blend-attacks) shows us what happens when you throw an iPad into a blender. Sure so what let’s cut to the chase and the question: does Apple’s hot new tablet computer offering play nice with a Blendtec blender? Does it blend? Yes, yes it does. And somewhere an Apple fanboi…

Hard-working disassembly sleuths at iFixIT spent their Easter weekend tearing an iPad apart to explore the Apple-designed A4 processor which powers the device. iSuppli tore an A4 chip apart (above), revealing it to be an ARM processor featuring package-on-package construction to improve the speed and efficiency of internal processes. Inside they found the RAM modules sit close by the processor, a move which speeds access to memory, cuts power consumption and reduces latency….

If you’ve got any spare change left after the long Easter iPad launch weekend, Apple has another surprise on the way – new model MacBooks are on the way. All Apple’s mobile Macs are expected to see an upgrade, including the MacBook, MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. Expect much better battery life, up to 640GB drives, and new (and faster) Intel processors. …

While 50GB on one disc seemed pretty incredible just a few short years ago, some enterprising scienticians are set to make your dual-layer copy of Click look downright quaint. A new version the Blu-Ray disc called BDXL (get it!?) is on the way and promises 128GB of storage space for writable discs. The new tech, which uses three or four layers instead of one or two, is aimed mainly at corporate users looking for a robust backup solution and lonely geeks with terrabytes of smutty films. Okay fine, only one of things is true. Before you get too excited about having all three Lord of the Rings movies on one…

Adobe’s Flash plugin has become a stalwart in online multimedia content with a massive install base, so why is it suddenly the least popular kid on the block? Back when Netscape ruled the web and Microsoft was the pretentious young upstart nipping at its heels, HTML was the most dominant form of content on the web by a huge margin. Nothing about video, audio or multimedia content made it appealing to work with or serve to visitors, but the demand was great, so great that what ended up happening was inevitable, if not entirely predictable. How Flash Rose To Dominance By version 5 Internet Explorer had…

I’m not going to make a joke about how nobody reads books anymore. But I might end up making some jokes about how nobody’s going to read Vooks, either. What’s a Vook? I thought you’d never ask. No, it’s not a big sweaty Slavic man cursing through his moustache. The posted video describes the Vook experience as…well, basically, an experience. ‘Vook weaves together content from incredible writers and professionally shot and edited videos by filmmakers,’ says Yahoo News about the technology. …Right. ‘Weaving’. ‘Blending’. ‘Seamlessly integrating two mediums’….

I could make jokes about this all day, so before I do, please bear in mind that this is actually a pretty good idea: Australian company Simativa has developed underwear that texts when you poop. I can explain, I swear. The SIMsystem, as it’s officially known, is actually targeted at the elderly (SIM is Smart Incontinence Management) and lets caregivers know via SMS message when it’s time to get their hands dirty. It can even broadcast the ‘event’ over a facility’s entire paging system. Classy. The diagram below shows you how it works, though I suppose it’s pretty self-explanitory….

You thought the way the Solar Pebble slapped the sun around was pretty cool, right? Right? Here’s another great way we mancreatures are bringing the sun to its knees as a sustainable energy source. That is, sustainable until the sun explodes in like 5 billion years. But that’s irrelevant. Until then, we have the Sundolier! ‘Bah! I’ve seen this before,’ you say. You would. And, granted, from these photos, the Sundolier would appear at first to be a fairly typical skylight. But let’s not get our lines crossed here – first of all, this thing’s a freaking robot that sits on your roof. …Yeah,…