Now, we get to know that they shutdown because acquired by Apple, and probably they were too busy counting their millions to send a warning to their customers. Bastards.

Windows assumes that it's the local time. If it's 12:30, it assumes that it's 12:30 in your time zone.

The rest of the operating systems instead assumes that the time is in Coordinated Universal Time, which is definitely a much better choice: knowing that this is a standard, is a breeze to change time zone or daylight saving time change.

For example, if you have two Windows on the same computer, both have no way of knowing whether the DST is set, then would both change the time for DST, causing endless problems. However, if the base is UTC time, there is no way to be wrong; = UTC +2 Daylight Saving Time, Standard Time = UTC +1

So, we set Windows to use UTC as the time base:

We can create a new text file with Notepad and write this text:

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\TimeZoneInformation]
“RealTimeIsUniversal”=dword:00000001

after saving, change the file extension to. reg and run it. That's it!

Or you can use Regedit and go to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\TimeZoneInformation and create a new 32 bit DWORD entry called RealTimeIsUniversal and set it to 1

Otherwise, you can download the REG file that I created for you

Once I edited my video, I exported it and I was shocked: lots of compression artifacts, terrible to watch in HD! In the shadows, the faces of people, there were those huge ugly pixels.

How the hell is this possible??

I went immediately to see the original recordings, and those artifacts were not present. So I went to see the files that iMovie creates as intermediaries for faster processing, and those were perfect.

So, I think, I've chosen a low compression bitrate. I choose an absurdly high bitrate and I got with a 1 gigabyte-per-minute video. With the usual compression artifacts.

Out of curiosity I import the project in Final Cut Pro X, and export it with the same settings

I get a small file, without those ugly compression artifacts.

Here is a comparison of the same frame with the same export settings from iMovie and Final Cut Pro X:

Here is the original video

My conclusion is that iMovie intentionally reduces the quality of exported video to avoid a professional use...

A few days ago in Google Play appeared iMessage for Android.

It's not a fake app, it actually works: the problem is how it works.

Since Apple doesn't allow chat between other brands' devices, messages are sent to a Mac Mini located in China, and then sent to the final destination.

The app is free and doesn't show any ads. They don't have a way to make money from this app, yet this "Daniel Zweigart" pays at least $100/month to house his Mac Mini in an internet datacenter: how he could pay for it?

There are two ways:

1. he is a philantropist and does it for the glory
2. it's a smart way to steal your Apple ID

Now, if your Apple ID, is "fake" like mine, registered without a credit card just for downloading the free single of the week from iTunes, there are no problems.

If your Apple ID is real, stealing the password leads to problems like those:

• They can buy apps for thousands of dollars, especially if those apps are made by their "friends"
• They can see all your iPhone photos
• They can block your iPhone just for fun, making a nice $600 decoration for your shelf
• They can reset your iPhone, losing all your data
• They can delete all your data from your Mac, as happened to that Wired journalist who lost years of personal photos
• They can see your passwords if you were crazy enough to sync the keychain on the cloud
• They can see your iWork documents, if you saved on the cloud
• They can send spam to your iMessage friends
• They can impersonate yourself and scam your iMessage friends
• and so on...

Ps: works perfectly on BlackBerry 10, but it's not available on BlackBerry World. If you want to download it, connect your Google Play account on barinstall.com

Will be anounced iOS 7, maybe an iPhone 6 or 5S, but my eye got hit by this banner.

It just says: "X"

No 10.9, no other felins , just a wave.

In my opinion, since all the felins name are ran out (they can't name it "Cat", after having it named "Tiger", "Lion", "Panther"), what will happen is a "perpetual version" of OS X, called just "X".

No annual updates, new features will gradually appear.

"But in this way they won't make money by selling the operating system!", you might say.

No problem, just ask the marketing department to think some dumb reasons to block old Macs, like they just did with the 2007 Mac Pro ($8000): it can't run OS X 10.8 officially, or with 2006 iMac that even can't run OS X 10.7. In this way, instead having people buying a $20 annual upgrade, they have to buy a new $1500 Mac every 4-5 years.

Update:

My prediction was wrong, it was announced OS X 10.9 Mavericks. Yet we don't know price and which models are supported.

In the beginning I thought it was some exotic operating system or some crawling bot, seeing that it had a very low share... then I discovered the truth: it's Chrome for iOS!

In fact, the user of Chrome for iOS is:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 5_1_1 like Mac OS X; en)
AppleWebKit/534.46.0 (KHTML, like Gecko) CriOS/19.0.1084.60
Mobile/9B206 Safari/7534.48.3

While I was watching it, the music was familiar... I already heard it dozens of time while I was editing one of my videos... do they use a Kevin MacLeod track? No, the track is short, they had to repeat it (poorly placing it, you can hear the overlap). No, I can't believe it! They used THAT jingle!

Yes, it is! They used the Apple iMovie audio library, this file: /Library/Audio/Apple Loops/Apple/iLife Sound Effects/Jingles/Half Dome Long.caf! (Listen and compare)

An accidentally way to confirm the fact that there isn't a single decent video editing software on Windows... (for me Adobe is dead, after what they did to me last month... but I will talk about this another time)

There is a rumor that says that they will add it back soon, but I think they removed for another reason: the duplicates are found and removed automatically.(Unfortunately just from the library, but not from the hard disk). Here are my findings.

Using dupeGuru I found about 160 duplicates, but, none of them can be found in iTunes, even if they are in the hard drive.

Look: I have two identical copies of the same song on my hdd (same artist, same bitrate, same duration, different album), but when I search it in iTunes I can't find it.

It looks like iTunes found duplicated songs and removed them from the library (without removing them from the hard drive, though).

Maybe that's why tools that scan the iTunes library file won't find duplicates, while tools that ignore the library file and scan the folder will find a lot of them. I arrived to the conclusion that iTunes will "hide" songs if it thinks that it's an exact duplicate.

More proof. I got two identical songs from iTunes Store in 2010 (The same song in two different albums) One of them is on the HDD but can't be found in iTunes

Or, again:

But, when there are too many differences, like 1 second in duration, or an "à" that become an "a", the entry is kept:

That's why Apple "removed" the "find duplicates" menu: it's done silently and automatically - no need to search for them. (Though, the file gets "lost" in the HDD, wasting space...)

I made a title template to be used with Final Cut Pro X. 

You can see an example of its use in this video.

Unfortunately, there is a little problem. It looks like it's not possible to insert sound effects in a Final Cut Pro X title or generator, so you should insert the Achievement Unlocked "ding" manually. The mp3 is included in the zip, you just have to insert when the title is displayed.

Download it now

Copy it  in /Users/yourname/Movies/Motion Templates.localized/Titles.localized

For a better effect you should use the font used by Microsoft in the XBOX: Convection Regular. There are two ways to get it. One is buy it for $49. The other way is...

For promoting it, they placed on the official website this image (already replaced):

I don't know what you think about it, but I find it very hilarious!

Have you ever seen a company that places their own phone with competitors phones, keeping it in a corner, half hidden, maybe too shy for a direct match, with the competitor names written in a BIG WHITE font, and their "Windows Phone 7" in grey, much smaller, as a remind to its lesser success??

Of course, after that someone let them know the problem, they switched the image with an inverted one, but it's still a big gaffe.

I'll continue to criticize: when the Nokia Lumia 900 was launched, there were rumours about the upgrade path to Windows Phone 8. Current devices won't be upgradable, the rumor said.

Of course if it was true, the sales of the Nokia Lumia would have been hurted a lot, so, Microsoft promptly denied the rumour, promising the upgrade.

What happened last week? Windows Phone 8 was announced and the upgrade won't be available.

A great way to thank faithful customers, right?

Ok, but this data is only about apps that use Flurry.

If an app doesn't spy the user behaviour with it, does not count!

And then, it's possible to directly use Google Analytics in Android apps, why I should use Flurry?

Moral: beware of stats published by an Apple fanboy, the data has been analyzed with closed eyes.

Of course, I bought a generic one, since it's ridiculous that a white plastic slab with 30 cents of electronics inside is sold for 30 euro.

Sunday I had the great idea to update the OS to iOS 5 and I was really amused to discover that EVERY USB battery charger of mine won't work anymore, including quality ones, from HP and BlackBerry.

What would have happened if any other electronics company behaved in the same way? If for example Samsung after an update did the same??? Everyone would have got angry and nobody would have ever bought a phone from them!

Why they should inhibit the usage of generic chargers? What are they waiting to place a standard micro usb connector as every other brand in the world is doing? Isn't much more convenient have a charger in the bedroon, one on the table, one at work and one in the car? Or we just have to be satisfied with the bundled charger?

Reading this story makes me wonder: what is the point to use a special connector instead of using the micro usb, (which can also bring HDMI signals, with MHL) that it's a standard, it's cheaper, it's used by the rest of the world, and it's required to use in the European community??

Option A: in this way they can sell for 20 bucks the data cable (real price: $1)

Option B: in this way they can sell for 30 bucks the plastic dock with no electronic parts inside and which still requires the $20 data cable to work (probably the beautiful box it's more expensive to make than the dock)

Option C: in this way they can make millions with the "made per iPhone" certified accessories, like radios and so on

Option D: in this way they can make millions selling another adapter to who already owns the dock connector accessories

Option E: all the other options

Thanks to the new Mattel Apptivity toys, your dream can become true! (video in the link)

Those toys have contact points on the back, to interact with some games, so by placing an Hot Wheels car on the screen it will be posible to drive it, or slice fruits in Fruit Ninja, or eat om-nom candies in Cut the Rope; or crush your opponents in a Wrestling match by hitting the screen with the bundled figure.

Letting play a kid with a toy car on a 600 bucks screen looks like an AWESOME idea, I wonder why nobody ever thought about it 

Then I decided to restart to Windows, and I noticed the first odd thing: instead of the Windows 7 boot animation, there was the Windows Vista one ... what???

Is that possible??

I open Chrome to look for some solution on the internet and here is the second horror that I see: the taskbar is no longer visible. Parallels had changed some setting to not to keep it on top. Probably they did it to give Windows programs a nicer look under OS X, but now Windows is unusable, not to mention that Windows 7 does not have that setting anymore, and can not restore it to its original state (unless you use an unofficial patch).

As angry as an hungry monkey, I continued to search a solution to restore the Windows 7 animation instead of the Vista one. It seems to happen when the bootloader does not have a default language setting. Just type in as an administrator:

bcdboot %WinDir% /l it-IT

and it should work! It should, because iI get an error that "Windows can not find a Windows installation". What? In fact, from the control panel, in the boot options, there is no operating system!

Enraged like a gorilla, I immediately uninstall the Parallels Tools, but on reboot I still get see the same problem. So, I open the system restore to revert to a working state. Too bad! I got this error:

(This version of system recovery is not compatible with the Windows version that you are trying to recover)

That error appears even before Windows starts, so there is no way to continue or ignore it...

I took the installation DVD and... surprise? I can not even reinstall! I have to format the disk and start over!

Moral: here are 100 (or less) reasons for not using Parallels

1. The "trial" version does not access internet
2. It installs the boot loader for Vista on Windows 7
3. For installing the Parallels tools I haven't been asked for the administrator password. They used an undocumented and risky way to install them
4. The taskbar is hidden without an option to restore it to its original state
5. The startup time for Windows increases considerably
6. The Mac startup time increases considerably
7. In the Windows start menu you will find all the Mac applications
8. They made heavy changes to the system without asking or at least explain what they will do
9. In Windows, files are associated with Mac programs (eg: Windows tries to open a JPG with Mac Photoshop)
10. The hard drive is littered with all those hateful resource forks (.dsstore)
11. It gives 1GB RAM to Windows x64: not enough
12. Uninstalling on Mac leaves a lot of leftover files
13. In the end it is better to reboot and have a decent speed than using it slower and virtualized
14. Thanks to its permanent changes, you'll have to reformat Windows, losing all data

I cannot think of other reasons, is enough for now

well, actually I saw just one reason to buy an iPad, but I liked to write an article named "10 reasons to...", or "10 ways to..." 

Here it is:

$499 to let your cat have fun it's well worthy

And the cat is having fun! Great, we can save money on a cat-sitter!

It's great that the iPad display is scratch-proof!

...

From many months ago, almost any blog that i follow through RSS, is writing rumors about the Apple table, showing photoshopped images, lists of presumed functionality, and much more...

Well... I just don't see why they see this awesomeness in a tablet. If you want a tablet to be operated with fingers, just to go on the Internet, there is already the JooJoo. You want to read books around? There is the Kindle, the Nook, and many others.

If we want a desktop replacement computer, there is already a solution from at least 5-6 years. Take my HP TC4400 Tablet. With a Core2Duo CPU, has a QWERTY keyboard, a 12" antiglare screen that can fold on itself, docking station connector, can use an external battery, and it is well contained in a light magnesium alloy case. I use it weekly to teach Japanese (Italian only, for now): with the pen, i can highlight and write on my slides very conveniently. And it's awesome to be used on a lap, with the Windows 7 handwriting recognition, that can even read my very bad calligraphy!

I don't see the awesomeness of a tablet that is in late of years with the competitors.

But maybe, as an Apple fanboy friend of mine said when I showed him my HP tablet, this would be a worldwide success only when Apple will "take inspiration" and removing function by it...

However, iType (what an original name!), is very easy to use, just slide the iPhone in, and use it anywhere, at school, on the bus, in the car while driving, and everywhere you'd like to improve your texting abilities, thanks to its small size:

Oh no! A little bit big!

Anyway, i see a great thing on the background, a musical keyboard for the iPhone! Oh! It would be great to compose and play songs on it! Great for musicians! It is the iDiscover, here is a detailed picture:

According to Engadget, this keyboard can also be used as a MIDI peripheral, to be used to compose music on Mac and PCs! 

The price? Still unknown... (but i suppose that it will be hundreds of dollars, like the majority of "premium" addons for the iPhone )

Uhm... where i saw this design? It looks so similar... to a mobile on sale from some time... let's try to merge the drawings:

Creative Zii in red, Apple iPhone in blue

So cool! The Zii is almost compatible with iPhone covers! What a smart move! It's a pity that they placed the camera in the wrong place... it's a matter of millimeters, otherwise they could write on the box: "New! Compatible with Apple iPhone covers!"

Also, the logo looks similar to another logo... and the name also is similar; Zii... Zii... it resembles another name, become famous 2-3 years ago:

Wow, Creative has been so... creative!

Today, on the official Microsoft Windows blog, there is a strange post:

You can save $3367 if you choose a PC instead of a Mac

What??? Ok, Macs are expensive, but, is possible that there can be a such difference? I can't believe, even if i am a Windows-fanboy

Let's see what comparison they have done:

Ok, Macs are more expensive, but just a few hundred dollars...

What's wrong:

1. You cannot compare a normal Pc with a Mac Pro (will you compare a Chevrolet Aveo with a Dodge RAM??)
2. The 5-years MobileMe subscription (why do that without an iPhone???)
3. Mac users are buying Office for $149, Pc users does not buy Office for $680 (source)
4. Mac users chooses all kinds of protection plans, PC users just a basic one

This is like comparing "apples" with oranges!

Why Microsoft did not add to the Mac expenses also an iPhone with a biennal AT&T contract, and an iPod, and other accessories?