iPad to the rescue

Cops using Will.i.am’s iPad to track down thief
[Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)]

Filed under: Odds and ends, iPad

It’s hard out there for a hip-hop star. Will.i.am of the Black Eyed Peas recently had a not so good, good night. Thieves broke into his parked Bentley and made off with $10,000 worth of loot including jewelry, other personal property and the singer’s shiny Apple iPad.

However, law enforcement officials have honed in on the the perpetrator using the iPad’s GPS functionality, and are close to making an arrest. The exact means they used for locating the iPad, however, is unknown — i.e., whether it was an app or MobileMe’s “Find My iPhone/iPad” feature.

Whether for a special event performance or music partnership, Apple has collaborated with many musicians in a variety of ways. Back in 2004 the Black Eyed Peas, and their hit “Let’s Get it Started,” were prominently featured in the launch of the iMac G5.

[via TMZ.com]

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I love that he not only got his stuff back but that the cops are looking for the perps, who are on the run. Any other mobile devices that help fight crime?

I sometimes wish there was an alternative to Best Buy

I had to buy a new TV so I headed down to the nearby Best Buy to check them out. I don’t really like Best Buy but they bought out my favorite electronics store, Magnolia. At least they now have a Magnolia store inside Best Buy where I can pretend it is like the old days.

After spending 15 minutes looking at the various sizes, I had a couple of questions. I wandered around in electronics – no one in a blue shirt. I walked through the nice Magnolia Store section – fake wood walls, nice comfy sofas – and not a single person from Best Buy.

I finally asked some people at the Comcast desk there if they could help. We both searched for someone. No luck.

She called in for help and then said perhaps she could help. Help she did and answered my questions. So I walked out of there with a nice new TV but not too happy. Best Buy continues to have the worst service if there is a question. I had hoped that incorporating Magnolia would at least give me some small amount of help/ Why have a high end section without anyone there?

And then I find out that the guy who put up that side-splitting, if NSFW, video is being canned by Best Buy. They asked him to resign and he smartly said no. Make them fire him.

There is nothing in the video that mentions Best Buy at all. At least now he says he can concentrate on his graphic stuff. Considering that his video got over a million views in a day indicates that this may be a much more useful thing for him to do. Heck, xtranormal.com should work with him because he just gave them a ton of free publicity.

Well, no service and no sense of humor – it has become apparent to me that I will look elsewhere for my electronics needs. Amazon does just as well with price and actually provides me with better service – by mail.

Faking Jobs for money and profit

Steve Jobs email: ‘Retire, relax, enjoy your family. It is just a phone. Not worth it.’
[Via MacDailyNews]

The iPhone 4 antenna issue is real. Th

The leaked Apple troubleshooting documents and job posting confirms what a lot of iPhone 4 owners are stating,” Matt Burns writes for TechCrunch. “Worse yet, a lot of owners are finding that bumpers — DIY or official ones — don’t totally solve the problem.”

“But Steve Jobs has some advice, ‘Retire, relax, enjoy your family. It is just a phone. Not worth it,’” Burns writes. “That’s what he supposedly emailed to one very irate iPhone 4 owner who, along with a few friends, are finding the iPhone 4 has major problems. Steve first tells the owner to calm down, then blames his problems on signal strength, and then finally states ‘[Apple] is working on it.’”

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This sounds pretty callous and not at all Apple-like. Jobs telling someone to not be upset when a $200 device does not work as advertised. MacDailyNews does have some hesitancy about the veracity of the exchange:

Are these emails really coming from Steve Jobs? The Steve Jobs? If so, Jobs’ attitude is not the attitude that made Apple great once and then great again. If blasé bullshit is all we have to look forward to, prepare to be scotch-taping all of your future Apple products to get them to work properly, too.

As Burns stated so clearly, “It’s really not too much to ask that a basic function like placing a phone call works reliably.”

“Retire, relax, enjoy your family. It is just a phone. Not worth it.” If Jobs really wrote that… just wow. To us, that sounds a lot less like advice to a justifiably upset customer (who, by the way, most likely can’t just retire on a whim, regardless of how much they might like to relax) and a lot more like something Jobs has lately been telling himself just before falling asleep at night.

Dear Steve, Apple customers should be getting satisfied beyond expectation, not retirement advice.

I had some also since the writer claimed to be a longtime fan of Apple but spelled it MAC. I know of absolutely no longtime fan who spells it that way but I do know a lot of Windows fans who do.

First, it appears that Steve Jobs never wrote “‘Retire, relax, enjoy your family. It is just a phone. Not worth it.” The emailer, Tom, apparently wrote those. I wonder if he wrote any of the other replies?

Second, it seems that the emails are a fake as discussed by several Apple sources. Engadget reported later:

Apple PR says recent Steve Jobs emails are fake
[Via Engadget]

If you’ve been anywhere near the internet in the past few hours, you’ve undoubtedly heard about a Steve Jobs email conversation in which he told an angry iPhone customer to “calm down” and that the iPhone 4 was “just a phone.” That email chain, which was published on Boy Genius Report earlier, was also reportedly shopped to AppleInsider a few days ago — for a price. Well, now Fortune is reporting that they’ve been told by a “a top Apple spokesman” that the emails are fake, and the exchange never happened. Of course, emails are notoriously easy to fake, and Apple has not been in the habit of commenting on its CEO’s online wanderings, so our ears pricked up when we saw this article. We’ve reached out to Apple and they have independently confirmed to us that the conversation is indeed a hoax. So as usual, take all of these Jobs-uncensored dialogues with a healthy grain of salt.

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Makes one wonder how much Boy Genius Report paid. Money well-spent for all the hits it probably got. Gossip always makes so much more money than factual presentations.

I hope the video is out soon

How to win a Nobel Prize: fail, persist, iterate
[Via Ars Technica]

To hear Oliver Smithies tell it, there was a direct line from one of his first lab projects to the experiments that won him a Nobel Prize. Smithies showed that it was possible to target genes for disruption in mice, a technique that has revolutionized genetics and provided information relevant to human health.

You wouldn’t have guessed it based on the first slide of his talk at the Lindau Nobel Laureates meeting taking place this week in Germany. The slide showed an early page from Smithies’ lab notebook of a failed attempt to isolate insulin, an experiment that he had dragged himself into the lab to perform on New Year’s Day.

By showing page after page of his notebook to the audience, Smithies gradually told the tale of how failing to purify insulin eventually led him to a successful scientific career.

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This sounds like a fascinating talk on a really interesting topic. I’m hoping it will be online soon at the Lindau site soon. This is a researcher who lived and worked from the very beginnings of modern biology through all the revolutions of molecular biology to provide us with invaluable tools that may yet change the definition of human disease.

Plus I love looking at other guy’s lab notebooks. Mine were always like some weird form of da Vinci’s – totally illegible to almost anyone without me there to interpret the ‘code.’ I have a theory that anyone with an exceptionally legible notebook is spending too much time writing down their experiments and not enough time doing them.