Microsoft Brings Back Ultimate Steal Offer

Microsoft has brought back the Ultimate Steal program for college students.  Microsoft stated the Ultimate Steal program was such a success that they are adding more products to the promotion, including Office Viso Professional and Vista Ultimate Upgrades for 55.95 and 64.95 respectivly.  Microsoft seems pretty intent on keeping college student using Windows OS by giving them cheap or free access to most of their software.  Combined with the Microsoft DreamSpark program launched last year, students have access to thousands of dollars of software for a fraction of the cost.  For any college student this is a great way to get access to the software you need and save money.  The Ultimate Steal website can be found here and there has not been an end date set yet.

Weekend Fun: Face Your Manga

Face Your Manga is a flash based website that lets you go through a series of options in their editor program to create your own Manga Avatar that resembles yourself or just a fun character.  

Manga are Japanese comic books. Manga is often made into Japanese cartoons, or Anime. The art in Manga has a very definite look to it and is often referred to as “Manga Style.”  via: about

The online program has a large variety of options and the images can get petty specific to looking like anyone you want.  I created an example avatar to show a basic one you can create.  You can do anything from a simple design to something far out and abstract. Face Your Manga takes the avatar one step further of other avatar programs by allowing you to turn your manga into art.  Downloading the avatar is free, but you also have the option of purchasing a print your creation to use as artwork or a gift.  A nice addition if you happen to create something you really like. 

Muxtape Under Attack?

The RIAA is at it again, this time they're going after internet radio.  Recently Muxtape, from our weekend time waster, posted this message on their website.

On Muxtape's blog they assure that there has been no formal complaint by any artist or record company about their service, and that the website will be up and running soon.  Muxtape is a relitivley small music website, it seems strange that the RIAA would go after them, but it seems no website is too small for the RIAA to try to destroy it. 

If the RIAA and record companies alike would only embrace digital music there would be a lot less problems.  Sites like Muxtape are so popular because they make music easy, fun, and enjoyable for everyone.  With a service this great why wouldn't the music industy come up with it's own version?  Muxtape is not any complex system or new idea, and it is something that the record company could use to boost their own sales rather than just try to destroy it.  Technology changes industries everyday, and big companies need to begin to embrace change rather than try to create laws banning it.    

Now Part of Regator.com

Technology Should Be Simple is now part of the Regator blog network.  Regator.com is a blogosphere organizer that categorizes blogs and makes them searchable from their website.  It's intended to make it easier for people to find new blogs to read or blog posts on things they are interested in.  In there own words:

Regator is a website that gathers the world’s best blog posts and organizes them in a way that makes it easy to find the things you need—and fun to discover the things you never knew you wanted. It’s here to help you find, discuss, share, rate, and organize information on the topics you care about.

 I suggest you take a look at Regator.  It has a clean interface and makes the world of blogs much more organized.  Many websites that do things similar tend to get overwhelmed and bogged down by so many blogs.  Regator has managed to stay neat, organized, and easy to use. 

Steve's Letter on the MobileMe Problem

MobileMe is a service that Apple launched with the iPhone 3G release.  It was a replacement for the old .Mac service.  The basic idea was the ability to bring push email to the iPhone and make it possible to sync your calendar, mail, contact, and other information across multiple computer and devices.  For example, if you made a calendar event of your iPhone, the same change would take place on your desktop computer's calendar.  The idea was simple enough but the implementation wasn't.  MobileMe was a disaster when it was released.  The servers were overwhelmed, it ran sluggish or not at all at times.  Apple is going to be quick to fix this though and has already restructured and taken steps to get MobileMe back on track.  Steve Jobs has already issued his own words on the subject.  Here is the internal letter that Steve Jobs wrote

Team,

The launch of MobileMe was not our finest hour.  There are several things we could have done better:

– MobileMe was simply not up to Apple’s standards – it clearly needed more time and testing.

– Rather than launch MobileMe as a monolithic service, we could have launched over-the-air syncing with iPhone to begin with, followed by the web applications one by one – Mail first, followed 30 days later (if things went well with Mail) by Calendar, then 30 days later by Contacts.

– It was a mistake to launch MobileMe at the same time as iPhone 3G, iPhone 2.0 software and the App Store.  We all had more than enough to do, and MobileMe could have been delayed without consequence.

We are taking many steps to learn from this experience so that we can grow MobileMe into a service that our customers will love.  One step that I can share with you today is that the MobileMe team will now report to Eddy Cue, who will lead all of our internet services – iTunes, the App Store and, starting today, MobileMe.  Eddy’s new title will be Vice President, Internet Services and he will now report directly to me.

The MobileMe launch clearly demonstrates that we have more to learn about Internet services.  And learn we will.  The vision of MobileMe is both exciting and ambitious, and we will press on to make it a service we are all proud of by the end of this year.

Steve

Once's Apple gets their MobileMe service back and running and working up to Apple standards it should make the iPhone and Mac Computers much more appealing.

via: Boy Genius Report

New Look: What Do You Think?

I updated the website last night with a new two-column set up and new content in the footer.  It's a work in process, with more updates to come.  The goal was to make the main content of the blog easier to read and more prevalent on the page, without the distraction of links and advertisements.  I'll  be posting a how-to on adding the new footer in the coming days.  Let me know what you think of new design in the comments.

Olympic Gadget: A Look At the Evolution of the Torch

The 2008 Olympics Games begin August 8th in Beijing, and the New York Times has an article on the evolution of the Olympic torch starting with Berlin 1936.  It's interesting to see how many different changes there has been to the torch and how many different styles there are.  I think my favorite is the Sydney 2000 torch.  Take a look at the entire collection here. 
via: Gizmodo

YouTube Acquires Omnisio

A while back I mentioned Omnisio in a weekend fun blog post.  The websites allows users to upload flash videos (the kind used by YouTube and many other video sharing sites) and edit them with some basic editing functions.  YouTube announced that is has acquired Omnisio, which should add some interesting functionality to the YouTube platform.  YouTube is already the online center for people that want to share their video creations but with Omnisio, people can actually edit their videos and create new videos directly on the YouTube websites.  This would make YouTube the one-stop spot of all your video needs, short of actually being able to record the video for you.  This ease and conviencence will make it possible for more people to share videos and generate more people going to YouTube.