With all the talk about the latest gadgets and products from Apple the following parody is a welcome break from all the drama. Even if your Spanish is a bit rusty (or non-existent) you will get the picture, and most likely have a good laugh. I sure did!

Make sure to have a look at the manual (1.46MB). Page 5-8 are in English. Enjoy!

The new MacBook Air featured at the MacWorld 2008 is the thinnest notepad ever built. It’s a full-size notebook encased in a 0.16 to 0.76 inch of sleek, sturdy anodized aluminum. And at just 3.0 pounds, you can almost put it in your pocket…

It comes with a 13,3″ screen with 1280-by-800 resolution, Intel Core Duo, 2GB RAM, 80GB storage, a built in web cam and Wi-Fi/Bluetooth wireless networking and then some…. It even claims to last 5 hours running on batteries while working.

Very nice looking “gadget”, but I still want an iMac for my birthday

The music industry is likely to replace the copy protection (DRM) with digital watermarks.
Recently the worlds 4 main record companies have all started selling digital music without Digital Rights Management (DRM). Amazon’s MP3 service is the first company out offering MP3’s from all 4. But even though the DRM is gone it doesn’t mean the companies are opening the doors for unlimited copying.

That being said, there’s no real copy protection any more. But if you share your newly bought MP3 in a file sharing network (P2P) it’s not unlikely that the file can be tracked back to the initial buyer through a hidden number placed in a digital watermark inside the file.

According to Wired, none of them has taken it to this level yet. Sony only uses “anonymous” watermarks that only gives some information about the “spread”. Warner and EMI have not yet implemented watermarks. Attorney Fred Von Lohmann at Electronic Frontier Foundation says to Wired that anonymous watermarks may be used to filter content by the ISP’s, given the record industry gets their way.

Mitaka is an application (software) for visualizing theoretical, computational, and observational astronomical data, developed by the Four Dimensional Digital Universe (4D2U) project of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan (NAOJ). Users can seamlessly navigate across the universe from Earth to the edges of the known universe.

Mitaka is optimized for 3D visualizations on multiple screens at the 4D2U theater in NAOJ’s Mitaka headquarters. However, it can also be used on a single Windows PC.

After reading the on-line tutorial for a few minutes, even my kids started exploring the universe. Fun and interesting was their response. Give it a try and download the latest release found a bit down on the front page. A few issues and suggestions are found in the FAQ.

Comedian/Film-maker Mark Malkoff’s New York City apartment had to be fumigated. All of his friends have tiny studio apartments. Hotels in New York are insanely expensive. Left with few living options, Mark thought it would be fun and make an interesting video to move into an IKEA store where he’d live and sleep for a week. Never in a million years did he think IKEA would go for it, but miraculously they have a agreed.

Mark moved in early morning Monday January 7th to the IKEA in Paramus, New Jersey and will stay for the week through Saturday January 12th. You can follow his daily routine on marklivesinikea.com.