Find Ghosts? There's an app for that!

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Mark and Wes at the LeCheval Vietnamese Restaurant in Walnut Creek, CA .

Sites of Interest:

• Mark used his iPhone to test the restaurant for ghosts using GhostRecorder.
  
  
• Creative Labs introduces Zii Plaszma, the StemCell Computing Platform.
  
  
• Early BART ticket counterfeiting. Cap'n Crunch caught doing this.
  
  
• Hackers counterfeiting San Francisco parking meter cards.
  
  
• O.R.B. Bluetooth Ear Ring: wear it as a ring on your finger, open it into a Bluetooth headset.
  
  
• How the old Napster worked. Shawn Fanning's latest venture.
  
  
• Steve Jobs spotted at the Apple campus and backstage at a Coldplay concert.
  
  
• Various rumors of new iPod Touch and Apple Tablet devices.
  
  
• Build an appliance or your own custom Linux distro with Suse Studio.
  
  
• Sprint buys Virgin Mobile.
  
  
• Microsoft, Yahoo! agree on Internet search partnership.
  
  
• Jerry Springer plays Billy Flynn in the musical "Chicago" in London and maybe Broadway.
  
  
• David Pogue's "Take Back the Beep" campaign, and his book "The World According to Twitter".
  
  
• Apple releases a software update for the iPhone SMS security problem.
  
  
• Skype As We Know It May Not Exist Much Longer, eBay Says. Mark always thought eBay purchasing Skype was a stupid idea and this story is only part of the problem. Meg Whitman was the CEO of eBay when they bought Skype, so Mark wonders whether she should be campaigning for California governor.
  
  
• Wes likes the IPEVO Wi-Fi phone for Skype.
  
  

Wes' iPhone Applications of the week:

• Lunar Module 3d - unique lunar-lander style game that mixes classic arcade action with realistic environments.
  
  
• Currency Calculator - multifunctional calculator which allows you to work with multiple currencies. All currency ratios are provided by a professional currency exchange rate provider.
  
  
• AP Mobile - Select news from local newspapers and broadcasters and combine it with the best of the AP's videos, photo galleries, and national and international coverage. Has rare push notifications for important stories.
  
  
• Tweetie + Boxcar - Wes likes this combination so he can use his favorite Twitter app, yet still get push notifications.
  
  

Mark's iPhone Applications of the week:

• Star Walk and Pocket Universe - On an iPhone 3GS, these use the GPS, compass, and accelerometers to let you aim your iPhone in any direction and height, and they will show you what is in the sky at that point plus a lot more info.
  
  
• B&N eReader - eBook reader from Barnes and Noble. Buy digital books and download them to the reader.
  
  
• TripIt - forward your travel confirmation emails and TripIt creates a master itinerary for your trip, with detailed information about flights, hotels, rental cars and much more.
  
  
• Sudoku Grab - capture a Sudoku puzzle from a newspaper or book using the iPhone's camera. Solve it on the iPhone, or let the app solve it for you.
  
  

Full Metal Chopsticks

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Mark and Wes at the Ohgane Korean BBQ in Oakland, CA .

Sites of Interest:

• Amazon CEO apologizes for removing George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm digital books from Kindle machines that had already purchased them.
  
  
• History of Amazon Acquisitions and Investments, including Zappos.com for $920 million.
  
  
• An old article about the history of Novell Netware, showing its importance at the time.
  
  
• iPhone factory worker committed suicide (or was pushed?) after being interrogated (tortured?) about a missing prototype.
  
  
• Plastic Logic will ship an ebook reader using AT&T cellular data service.
  
  
• New version of Palm Pre webOS lets it sync with iTunes again, and the legal fight begins.
  
  
• A Blackberry firmware update offered by UAE mobile carrier Etisalat was designed to spy on users.
  
  
• Mark thinks this and this are a lot worse than a country spying on Blackberries.
  
  
• CEO of AT&T said iPhone will not always be exclusive with them.
  
  
• Google maps had the moon for some time, and now the Google Earth program can be used to view the moon.
  
  
• Top 20 signs you are a twitter addict.
  
  
• Disney Japan will offer micro-SD versions of movies along with the DVDs.
  
  
• Best T-Shirt of the month: Amish Gone Wild.
  
  
• Microsoft announces Windows 7 RTM gold master disc.
  
  
• A history and evaluation of IBM's System R and SQL
  
  
• Wes likes the O'Reilly "Head First"series of technical books.
  
  
• Wes' stupid Blackberry can't even run the FartBot iPhone app.
  
  
• iPhone Fart App Legal War on the Daily Show.
  
  
• Accidents related to factory robots.
  
  
• Robot Cannon Goes Berserk, Kills 9.
  
  
• IBM PS/2 personal computers with MicroChannel Architecture.
  
  
• Rumors that the next iPod Touch will be just like the iPhone, but without the phone.
  
  

Wes' iPhone/Blackberry Applications of the week:

• Later Dude Pro - Blackberry app to create call back reminders.
  
  
• Cube - single player and multiplayer first person shooter that provides satisfying and fast oldskool gameplay; kind of like Quake.
  
  

Mark's iPhone Applications of the week:

• SimplyTweet - Mark's favorite Twitter app this week (he always changes his mind). Includes push notification for your Reply and Direct tweets.
  
  
• BoxCar - Provides push notifications for Reply and Direct tweets, but that's all it does. Useful if your favorite twitter app doesn't already have this function.
  

• iGPUtrace - For iPhone 3GS only because it uses the new GPU and the compass. Just a demo of what the GPU can do, but fun to play with because it demos a virtual reality by moving the iPhone around in front of you.
  
  
• RedLaser - realtime barcode scanner, supports all standard UPC and EAN barcodes and looks up the products in a database. (Mark said it was a jailbreak app and it is, but he found out that it has also been in the App Store for a while so anyone can buy it.)
  
  

Is your iPhone 3GS Broken?

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Mark and Wes at the Korean Bulgogi House in Concord, CA .

Sites of Interest:

• Mark mentioned hostgator.com for hosting WordPress blogs and many other types of web pages and services.
  
  
• Wes' stupid Blackberry can't even run basic iPhone apps like these: Fartoscopes, Big Mouth, and TubaFollow.
  
  
• Zoho has free and low-cost productivity, collaboration, and business apps. They just added a way to export your Access databases to the web.
  
  
• Rear Admiral Dr. Grace Murray Hopper was the first woman to receive a Ph.D. in Mathematics and is also credited with having written the first high-level language compiler, and for leading the effort to develop the COBOL programming language.
  
  
• History of Borland International, and Will The Real Frank Borland Please Stand Up?
  
  
• Fancy fast food: yeah, it's still bad for you, but look see how good it can look!
  
  
• Universal/TuneCore deal opens major doors for indie artists.
  
  
• Peter Pancreas Pimple still uses WebTV.
  
  
• VLC media player 1.0 officially released after more than 10 years of work.
  
  
• The Story of the Fail Whale, and the Fail Whale in Pop Culture.
  
  
• Why are SMS messages limited to 160 characters?
  
  
• History and myths about why railroad tracks are the gauge they are.
  
  
• Cheap Trick brings back the 8-track.
  
  
• Radio Station Broadcast Cartridges are similar to 8-track tapes.
  
  
• YouTube videos of the Star Spangled banner played on a Louisville Slugger baseball bat and on a ukulele. Explanation of the electronic bat.
  
  
• Pandora lives! SoundExchange cuts deal on webcasting rates.
  
  
• Google Chrome OS vs. Android on notebooks.
  
  

Wes' iPhone Application of the week:

• ModBox Module Player - universal Tracker Format Player that plays Amiga and PC module computer music, e.g. Protracker, Fasttracker, Screamtracker.
  
  
• The Sexy Ladies of SHOW -brings you the incredibly beautiful women from the pages of SHOW magazine.
  
  
• Babe on a Beam - balance the little cutey on the beam and unlock new powers. But go easy with those controls... it's a long way down!
  
  
• Linux Cheat Sheet - a quick reference guide for all the Linux command lines necessarily to manage a Linux server.
  
  

Mark's iPhone Applications of the week:

• iTwitter - Full-featured Twitter app including filtered groups; can do everything in landscape.
  
  
• TweetDeck - Also full-featured Twitter app with filtering; won't do landscape; synchronizes filters with TweetDeck for desktop machines.
  
  
• Epocrates - Information on 3,300+ drugs, including dosing, adverse reactions, pricing and pictures, interactions, pill identification.
  
  
• Run Pee Mobile - tells you which points in a movie you can safely "run" and "pee" without missing a hugely important plot point.