I have read alot recently about iphone apps really taking off.  I guess they sell for anywhere from free to ten dollars, I dont have an iphone yet so I cant comment on what apps I like but I know there are some pretty neat ones out there.  I think theres one that turns the iphone into a wind tunnel or something and a silly one that ifart which is like a digital whoopy cushion.. could be fun.  Some of these developers are making a significant amount of money of these app sales and sounds like there has been a boom in the number of people developing these applications.  So much so that Apple has had problems with keeping up with developer applications.  Everyone wants to jump on this band wagon.  Sounds like you need to invest in the developer contract to sell this at the appstore and get approval as well as needing a mac to develop.  Still some people are making millions apparently and start up companies are focusing strictly on developing these applications.  It will be interesting to see how this compares when the android hits the market with its open source idealogy which should make for some intresting phone competition to Apple.  Im still using my Blackberry untill a smaller iphone comes out :P.

There is an interesting article today on wired.com about iphone sales in Japan being so bad that they are now giving the iphone away for free.  It seems there is a few reasons for this including the data plan is really bad and a cultural difference.  Its no secret the Japans technology is far more advanced the its US counterpart, a perfect example of this is their cellphone market.  Popular cellphones in Japan can view TV, video and music, video camera, 5MP camera as well as being great for text messaging.  While over here we favor an easy to use UI and sleek designs over full features and brand names that are popular among peers.  I think it really comes down to a different culture wanting different things for their phones.  However it would be nice to see some more options and more feature rich cellphones available in the US and Canada.

I havent been downloading wallpaper like I used to several years ago but am thinking I should go scouring for some new sources.  One of my favorite digital art sources is shadowness.com in particular the work done by 7shadows.  Links to his work are here.  People are always asking where I get my wallpapers from so I thought I would share.  The screenshot of my fluxbox desktop in one of my earlier posts features one of these wallpapers.  Thanks for the amazing work 7shadows.

One of the biggest features of the PS3 at least for me is the ability to share your media library to the PS3 and display it on your TV in full HD quality!  How do you do this ?  Well in my case my media files, music, photos and movies are stored on my linux system.  After some searching around I found a Linux utility, ushare which allows me to do this.  Ushare will allow you to share your media files to the PS3 using the UPnP protocol and act as a media server.  The same thing can be done in Windows Media player if you are so inclined.

The install on Fedora was as simple as “yum install ushare” and then run the server and point it to your media files.  Eg “ushare -c /media”.  You just have to run the “search for media servers” on your PS3 and there you go… all your photos, music and movies on your TV.   Only drawback I found was that using the wireless was too slow and caused slowdown when watching divx movies so I have opted for using a 100 Mbit cable connection which works flawlessly for video playback.  Even dvd playback works fine and loads fast.  A Gigabit LAN would be ideal for this kinda setup but for now I am happy.

I have always had a passion for customizing my desktops whether it was hacking Windows XP to show custom boot screens or lately being addicted to Linux Open GL Beryl desktops.  After deciding I wanted a more performance orientated experience i have decide to use Fluxbox a fork of the old Blackbox window manager for Linux.  I have to say I am very pleased with the relative ease of use considering its not as intuitive as Gnome or KDE but if you have used Blackbox its got a lot more features built in.  It didnt take too long before I had a desktop experience I could use and grow to love.

The only extras I am using are Eterm for my transparent console and conky for a snapshot of my system stats.  CPU and memory load are a lot lower as expected compared to using the heavy eye candy, Beryl which means I can do more !!  I have 12 workspaces now which is a bit overkill but nice.