Apple Releases iTunes 9.2.1 and iOS 4.0.1

After all the iPhone 4 antennagate drama, Apple finally sends out news about their latest iTunes and iOS release. As you can see in the screenshot on the left, the iOS update only has one update, being this: “Improves the formula to determine how many bars of signal strength to display.” Sounds pretty straightforward, so I’d skip the explaining part. Whether it contains unicorn dust or other magical potion is beyond the update text.

Read full article at thepoc.net: Apple updates iTunes and other Apple ramblings

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I admit I am a cheapskate, that’s why I wait there like a scavenger for a free app to drop their prices down to free, so I could devour each of them wholly.

Of course it’s legal. They are the ones who made their softwares free, but recently, there’ve been too much price drops, it came to a point when it’s super annoying.

This is a phenomenon that mimic’s iShoot’s move to have their app a “Lite” version, thus giving more exposure to the main, full-featured app. Some of the apps really got my attention, the negative way. They are somewhat hideous and I really asked myself if I’d really pay a dollar for something as clunky as what I saw in the App Store. The only app I won’t badmouth about is iSteam. My parents and relatives love it. I even saw my grand-aunt’s saliva on the home button (yeah I know, it’s disgusting) as she blows that part for more steam (Kirei had a lot of cleaning up to do before I even touch her).

I also like the fish-catching app, “Gone Fishin’”. My brothers and sisters piled up just to catch a glimpse of that big catch.

Maybe I’m just annoyed because of this trend in the App Store gets more tacky than expected…

Or maybe this is what I deserve for being a cheapskate (How I wish Philippine itunes members could use Paypal as payment, arghhh!).

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Yeah right. I’m announcing it alright. So what’s special with this day? Nothing really. Just normal work (I’m even earlier than usual), normal food, normal ride to work. Work work work. I don’t usually celebrate “that day” because, aside from the fact that I’m allergic with it, it’s usually in-between paydays (and as much as I wanna get payday loans, I don’t), so I’m always penniless during those times, or just don’t have enough cash to celebrate the damn day.

Hopefully next year, I’d celebrate this day abroad, of course on a trip. So far, I’m not planning to go abroad to work or stay for good. I’m thinking of going to either Singapore or Thailand. Maybe the US also, just to have the feel of going there. It’s a possibility, actually, for me to go there next year. If “the offer” is still there, I might be there.

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First-off, for the guy who posted this dumb question in Yahoo! Answers, why the hell should you think that Filipinos are copycats? I hate the title because it’s so demeaning, I have to post it here.

It’s not us being copycats or us being original thinkers that determines the “rightness” of being us as a race, but depriving the simple gesture of thanking your country for giving you freedom to see / experience things outside the Philippines is the most wrong thing you could do as a citizen. You are supposed to be smart because of your country. You’re using the internet and post bulls**t comments because your country allows you to be free. What f****ing more can you ask for?

To put things in perspective, if I tell you you are being a moronic copycat of a US citizen for thinking we don’t do good movies, would you be elated and be more moronic along the way, will you be busy being defensive, or will you improve things in you, starting from preventing your stupid Yahoo! questions from having “copycats” and “Filipino” in them?

Honestly, in this global world, original is outdated. Execution always matters, and being patriotic is the least thing you could do to your country that’s better than paying fastfood value added taxes. If being patriotic seems to also be a copycat’s way because the Japanese already have that, would you not need them? If we have superheroes to copy just to jade the masses’ thoughts from being negative about us being Filipinos, do you think it’s a good thing? If you think putting Filipino identification to every thing we do is stereotypical and unoriginal, then you should be living in your own pot-enhanced dimension or some fast-paced planet that takes only two days to get obsolete.

Technorati Tags: philippines, superheroes

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This is, yet again, one of the most stupid (I did it right this time… of course I know there’re no such words as “stupider” and “stupidest”…) news to ever come out first this year. Imagine a visionary organization built to unify the world through technology, building cheap but very functional laptops for kids who can’t afford to buy those stylish portables. Of course, we’re sure they need money to fuel the production of these devices, but to encourage governments to spend money to hook kids up to technology (rather than spending them in colossal mansions and round-the-clock around-the-world trips) is one great feat.

I’m talking about the One-Laptop-Per-Child project.

The first time I’ve heard about this was when I was in college. I guess about three years ago. Now that it’s making big buzzes and a lot of countries are ordering millions of units, a few jerks enter the scene.

Including this bigger a$$ (from Engadget.com): Nigerian firm wins interim injunction against OLPC, asks for $20M in damages

Like, come on! $20-frickin-million? I guess some people are too smart to either bend the law to their side (e.g. this Nigerian firm) for a super-obvious patent (Like if I mistakenly put the characters there, I get sued?!? How the hell should I position the characters, then?) or be that already-filthy-rich company seeking for more government money (e.g. Microsoft, and Intel), making it harder for these near-to-kind-hearted companies to give third-graders access to Google and Wikipedia.

Technorati Tags: classmate pc, engadget, olpc

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It’s kinda sad that the websites here in the Philippines with the highest traffic are entertainment “blogs”, like Starmometer and PEP.ph. What happened to news sites like inquirer.net? Is the Filipino webizen becoming more and more into stupid stuff?

OK, call me discriminating, but engaging yourself on “crafted” reality made by our media is, in my opinion, the “stupidest” thing I’ve ever heard! In this country, credibility of showbiz reporters is based on how much libel cases they have under their belt. High ratings for news and current affairs is based on how controversial a celebrity is (or at this prime moment of the network wars, on how dirty the ratings game is played).

Take for example the two sites I just gave you. If you understand Tagalog and read the comments below, they sound worse than YouTube cyberbullies. They talk like activists and religious leaders, but if you remind yourself you’re reading an entertainment blog, you’ll find it very stupid, so stupid I want to smack my knuckles on each of their faces! (And I mean it!)

C’mon people! Be smarter! One channel whines about unfair ratings, the other about game show scams. Can’t you see you’re being manipulated by these networks to build some sort of instant fans club? You’re not being thanked for their ratings, they are thanking you for nothing. They’re even so ungrateful they give you crap news and absurd fantasy plots, and even waste your time debating about these crappy networks. Not to mention they always put you in the illusion that you might be your rich neighbor’s missing daughter / son. It’s only here in the Philippines where you have fans clubs for networks, e.g. the Kapusos, and the Kapamilyas. Can’t you guys just frickin’ watch the tube and stop wasting Philippine bandwidth for rubbish?!?

If I were you, I’d just go to greenpinoy.com. It may be a joke site, but people there are a lot smarter (light years smarter, actually) than your average entertainment blog troll.

Technorati Tags: entertainment, greenpinoy, pep, starmometer

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In traditiion of the early 90’s (Philippine quake in 1990 and Mt. Pinatubo Eruption in 1991) and last year’s (Wowowee tragedy and Manny Pacquiao’s big-headedness) back to back tragedies, comes the new string of natural discomforts. First, last Tuesday’s Manila trench earthquake, and now, our supposedly Senator Trillanes hast plotted a coup against our President.

First off, who voted for this guy and put him in office to do this? Isn’t he powerful enough to legislate the welfare of Philippine soldiers? Is the general welfare of the Filipino people his main concern? What does this Trillanes character had to do with abducting hotels?

And then this video came out: Drama in the Philippines

Awww… how “horrible” can this thing get? Well, a tank came in and machine guns were fired. How barbaric isn’t it?

Now, let me turn your heads towards Iraq and Yugoslavia and… oh there’s a lot to mention.

Actually, no one was hurt in the Makati City Trillanes incident. That’s the worst you could get from a crazy / coward senator. Just exactly what the country needs. Along with Guingona and Lim, they make up the legendary “Coup Pals”.

Technorati Tags: drama, philippines, trillanes

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Ever since I installed the latest Leopard update, my laptop kept on crashing and crashing and crashing, until it takes the sanity out of me. How can Mac OS X be this unstable?

First off, I have a legal copy of OSX (from Developer Connection), installed it in Bella, the MBP, and everything went smoothly. It even imported my old account with no difficulty whatsoever. Everything was fine, and all the UI flair smoothly rendered on my screen.

But now, after I updated to 10.5.1, I had “n” crashes (I can’t count them anymore) wasting precious coding and debugging time. What’s more is my laptop just dies, with no warning whatsoever, in the middle of me using it. Of course I’m expecting Apple to fix these stuff, and they should, because that’s what they did on Tiger when I first had this laptop last year. Wifi software was f***ed up, to the point that I needed to connect using a LAN cable just to prevent the new system from crashing. But this one is worse! I mean the laptop literally shuts down without any transition or even a few seconds of delay.

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Most people would find it cheap for a yuppie to be updated in showbiz happenings. Well, I don’t really mind people who think like so because I find showbiz news (which is like an oxymoron) more entertaining and intriguing than the shows they belong to. And here in the Philippines, the premiere source of showbiz news, aside from primetime and late night news (which sucks, by the way) is PEP.ph (Philippine Entertainment Portal). For two months, I’ve been receiving updates from their RSS feed, and just two months ago, their feeds went loco and seems to hang my RSS Reader (well, until they fixed a few code in it). I was hoping that the PEPers would notice it during the week. When the week ended, I thought maybe at the end of the month. When September ended, I thought I should write to those poor web guys about the state of their Breaking News RSS feed.

Also, I have trace memory of me sending a message to the team (through their Contact Us page, which I can’t find now) about the entire RSS issue, and perhaps doing too much javascript on each of their article (when you do a right click, maybe, to create a new tab opening the page, a popup appears saying you can’t mess with their content). I mean hell! How are people able to quote their articles if we can’t even copy their contents. And most websites nowadays doesn’t have to worry about this, considering that I myself can still copy content from any articles they have, and quote them. These PEP guys should worry more about gathering and distributing content rather than throttling traffic, etc.

Also, one of my rants about websites like PEP.ph, and GMANews.tv is that they keep on changing their content, thus losing this impression that they really are reliable and sources of error-proof / libel-proof content, getting it right the first time they send it out, just like in newspapers and magazines.

Well, as of press time, the RSS URL here still doesn’t work. It seems like doing an infinite loop or something.

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I can still remember Steve Jobs comparing iPhone with the other Smartphones in the market. How can he be so deceptive? And with all this iPhone hype, all we get is the same old big brother they’ve shown thirteen years ago.

The most frustrating part of buying an iPhone is it being solely tied to wireless provider AT&T, which not only narrows down the type of provider that could give you iPhone services, but also the country where you can actually use an iPhone. And yes, Jobs already announced before that Asia will be getting the iPhone early next year. We are now in a globalized community, and how do you think Asians and the rest of the world would react to this? Not to mention a few iPhone-ers who have been complaining about the bills that AT&T are imposing on them. Seems like the iPhone is not that of a smart choice.

Lately, we were disturbed by Apple’s announcement that unlocked iPhones could be expensive bricks in the future after the new firmware update. OK, we get the “no warranty for tampered iPhones” bit in the contract, but to actually let the gadget be ruined by this software update is totally irresponsible, albeit, big-brother-ish for all owners. Instead of preventing not to destroy the iPhone, Apple has actually, and “bravely”, faced all the anger that the entire Apple-converts community could give in exchange of locking their customers around the neck, and carrying them around as Apple wanted like helpless chihuahuas. I get the if-I-buy-a-Mac-I-need-Mac-OS-X bit, but at least they should at least give more effort on researching how to make iPhones work on any telco providng the standards the iPhone supports. If the feature can’t be supported because of lack of support by the telco, just disable it…

Not ruin the entire thing for making it work! Apple can’t even assume that the entire package works, even on a majority of users. As if everyone likes AT&T or something.

Seriously!

You must know by now why I’m angry. (Cry out loud!)

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