The web is all a twitter about a tablet they think Apple is going to announce this month.  They have also been saying a tablets been coming for years.  This is the same thing that happen with the iPhone, the difference here, is Apple has nothing to revolutionize by making a tablet.  Look at the iPod.  Companies were making mp3 players, but Apple came in and did it better.  Same thing with the cell phones.  They revolutionized both industries.  How will this work with the tablet?  Are they going to revolutionize the Kindle market, or the Windows tablet market?  Either one you choose, they have already done it with the iPhone.  The iPhone is a tablet, its just small.  So maybe as @FrankSnyder pointed out its going to be a dock for the iPhone.  This is all great and wonderful, but the iPhone doesn’t multi-task.  Why do you need a 10inch single processing low power machine.?

Nothing about this whole tablet thing makes sense.  Apple doesn’t officially have any events coming up.  Everything online right now about the tablet is speculation.  I say its not going to happen.  I don’t see a market to for Apple to revolutionize.

Update:  Looks like there is going to be an Apple Event on Jan. 27th.  I’m still saying the tablet isn’t coming.

I was listening to Twit this morning while they were discussing Apple Stores and why people go into them.  All of the speakers on Twit said people go to Apples Stores because they get to play with the computers and talk to knowledgeable people.   While this is true, but I think the main reason is that Apple computers are different from what most people are used to.  They get to break away from Windows and try something new.  Then if they like it, they can purchase it right there.  I don’t think its the fact that the computers are there to use, but more the fact that the computers are different.

This also got me thinking, what if there was a Linux Shop.  A place with computers set up running different kinds of distributions, showing off Open Office, InkSkape, The Gimp, and many other open source programs.  It would be just like an Apple Store, but for open source.  Computers could be sold at a cheap price because of the free operating systems.  The employees could answer Linux questions, and help new comers.  I think this sounds like a good idea, but not a good business idea.  Maybe something Makers Local could do.

The other day I noticed my iPod was almost filled up, but should have only been about %50.  So I decided to give Rockbox a try, and manage my own music directory.  I figured it would be easy to just use rsync to synce the Music on my computer with the music on my iPod.  Installation was easy as pie and after a reboot I was using Rockbox.  I immediately went to look for a podcast menu.  To my surprise there was nothing in rockbox for podcasting.  After doing a little Googling I ran across a way to insert a menu into the batabase section.  Which gave me a listing of “All Podcasts”, “New Podcasts”, and “Old Podcasts”.  This was kind of cool, I was able to modify the interface to my liking.  But when I clicked on “All Podcasts” saw about half what I was suppose to.  This was because some podcasters don’t modify the ID3 tags correctly.  After modifying the tags accordingly I still didn’t have all of them.  This was because the database had to be updated.  All this and I finally got podcasts to show up, only to find out bookmarking only works on playlists which I couldn’t get working, other than the dynamic one, which consists of my current directory.  GAAAA!!!!!!!!

List of Suck for Rockbox

• No podcasting support out of the box.
• Bookmarking works on playlists, though I can’t verify that because I wasn’t ever able to save a playlist and go back play it again.
• Battery didn’t seem to charge while plugged in and syncing.
• Rockbox can’t sleep, only turn off, so you have to wait for it to boot before it can play your track.  Though you can make it continue on start up, which is nice.
• Every game/app has a different way to exit, and doesn’t ever tell you what it is.

Basically if you want to just play music, you might find this useful.  Though in my weekend of playing with it, I found it to have a huge learning curve.  I’ve gone back to gPodder and gtkpod.  That is until my iPod breaks, in which case I will look for a different podcast device.

So last night I decided to update my iPhone to the newest firmware. Well it all went find but one part. Because I bought the iPhone with no intension of using it as a phone I have to activate it with third party software. Here comes the problem. After updating the firmware to 1.1.1 and getting RW access to the file system, I installed ssh. Great right? The thing is, I need my phone to connect to the wifi so that I can ssh into it. Now in order to connect to wifi I need to activate the phone, but to activate the phone I need to ssh into it. Nice isn’t it. I don’t know if other people are having this problem as no can seem to help me.

Looks like the same Tiff exploit that was used to downgrade the PSP from 2.0 to 1.5 firmware, is going to be used to run code on the iPhone. This news is kind of funny since Sony fixed the Tiff buffer overflow problem a year and a half ago. Guess Apple didn’t get that memo. Ups!!!

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