Yes, yesterday was officially Pi day (3/14), but it's 2 AM on the 15th, so technically its not Pi day anymore. Yesterday a few notable things happened, Apple put their first full length movie on iTunes, Disney's High School Musical (for $2.99), then took it down, then put it back up (for $9.99). I suppose they haven't quite worked out all of the kinks in the movie system yet. I don't know about you, but 10 dollars for a 400 x 250 pixel movie? Yikes... don't think so. I came across a little project that was kind of interesting, a motorized, optically tracked turret appropriately named, TheSentryGun.

The idea of this project was to create a fully-automated sentry gun, capable of picking out a human target and accurately tracking and shooting him or her in the heart. Really, the idea was to find a cool robotics project for the summer while I was working at an advertising agency, and I'd only ever seen sentry guns in movies (like Congo) and video games (Half-Life 1, Half-Life 2, Team Fortress Classic).

I guess the creator of the project searched for another similar project but didn't find one... On to more interesting things, Google released "Google Mars" which allows people to explore Mars in a similar fashion to Google Earth. Neat concept, but not really all that useful. I suppose it has novelty factor. Also a distro of Linux titled, Kororaa was released. This distro is in very early stage of development, but it uses the Xgl interface which is very fluid and has very flashy window effects. Not to mention 3D manilpulation of the desktops. Try the Live CD, it's pretty cool. Last but not least the feature of the post. FOTP: GIMP "The GNU Image Manipulation Program" The GNU Image Manipulation Program or just GIMP is an open source free software bitmap graphics editor, a program for creating and processing raster graphics. It also has some support for vector graphics. The project was started in 1995 by Spencer Kimball and Peter Mattis and is now maintained by a group of volunteers; it is licensed under the GNU General Public License. This program has a lot of support and a lot of plugins, it also, IMO a GOOD Open Source alternative to Photoshop. For the latest tech news, visit digg.com. -Tom

“We do not have any plans to take WoW to Xbox 360,” Blizzard COO Paul Sams told MCV. “WoW is built as a PC gaming experience. Porting PC games to console often compromises games, and we’d never allow the WoW gameplay experience to suffer.”

That’s ok, I suppose, I couldn’t really see how World of Warcraft gameplay would be a whole lot of fun on the Xbox anyways, but what do I know. And finally, today the Catholic Church just got a little bit more classical, as in classical music. Pope Benedict XVI got an iPod on Friday. FOTP: TagWorld.com “Think MySpace, on fire, going 150 MPH though a school zone, being chased by ninjas.” (Thanks Bungie) I haven’t personally signed up for a TagWorld account yet, but the Web 2.0 App looks freakin’ cool. Drag and drop interface, and so much more customizability than MySpace, but yet organization that doesn’t leave you searching the page for the person’s info. PLUS VERYTHING IS TAGGED. This makes searching so easy. If you have a social life, dump MySpace and get to TagWorld -Tom

"Hype is the awkward and desperate attempt to convince journalists that what you've made is worth the misery of having to review it." -Federico Fellini Well, two days ago, Apple had a press conference to show off the new products. Lots of hype was circling the convention, and Apple flew people in from many parts of the country just to see these 'new' products. Images surfaced on the internet about 2 weeks ago that were supposedly leaked from the Apple factory showing a full sized iPod video. Later then, a video showing someone creating the 'image' with photography and Photoshop. However, there were discrepancies between the actual image and the image in the video, so this gave new hope to the image actually being a leak. Then the day before the Apple announcement, AOTS admitted to creating the video of the faked image, and I believe the original also... "Way too meta..." Well, the new products Apple did actually announce included the iPod HiFi, and the Leather iPod Case, and I suppose most importantly the Intel iMac and Intel Mac mini. For me, these didn't really live up to the hype (that was mostly created by rumors). Besides, Apple's jump into the iPod accessories market is about 3 years too late, and the products that were introduced, IMO are overpriced and not original. As of today however, Apple has filed for a wide laptop touchpad patent from the US Patent office, Apple has a way of filing for patents that have anything to do with touch or interface. All we can hope for is a touchable iPod... And for the last bit of Apple news the Mac II computer is 19 years old today. You could buy one of these in 1987 for $5,498 (1 MB of RAM, a floppy drive, and a 40MB SCSI hard disk). FOTP: Digg.com and Wikipedia.org Digg: "If you like tech news, you'll love Digg.com" Digg was created as an experiment in November 2004 by Kevin Rose, Owen Byrne, Ron Gorodetzky, and Jay Adelson (who serves as CEO), all of whom play an active role in the management of the site. This site is a where members choose what news stories belong on the front page by "Digg"ing a story. The more diggs, the story will stay on the front page. Wikipedia: "The Encyclopedia for the Internet, if you haven't used it, you need to." If you can think it, it's probably on here (Example: Digg). This is the definition of Wikipedia, from Wikipedia, hence all of the links. Wikipedia is a multilingualWeb-based free-contentencyclopedia. It exists as a wiki, written collaboratively by volunteers, allowing most articles to be changed by anyone with access to a web browser and an Internet connection. -Tom