First Thing. iPod. 336,000 sold last quarter. Market share is 31%. Today they are making it even better. Voice Recording. Device from Belkin. You can record 670 hours on a 40 GB ipod. You can also use it for photo syncing. Syncs with iPhoto. And there’s a new iPod ad comimg out tonight.

Next, iTunes. Talks about what they’ve done with it. “It’s good karma.” They’ve sold over 13 million songs in less than 6 months. Sell around 600,000 songs per week. Nielsen says iTunes market share was 70% of all legal music downloads last week. Now, the next generation of iTunes. New features:

• More Music. 400,000 by end of the month.
• Signed up over 200 independent labels.
• Audiobooks on iTunes music store from Audible.
• Over 5000 books.
• Includes Public Radio
• Gift Certificates
• Allowance – You can set up an allowance for your kids.
• One more feature… that people never thought would happen until hell froze over…
• iTunes now runs on Windows. Same interface and everything.
• “Probably the best windows ap ever written.”
• Runs on xp and 2000. All the same features as the mac version.

He gives a demo on Windows. It’s so funny watching Steve. I have to admit he’s a great salesman. Even if sometimes I think he sounds like someone on an infomercial. (but wait… there’s more…)

Right now I’m posting from one of the iMacs at the Apple store while I wait for the show to start. There’s a few people here, though not as many as for things like MacWorld. If I’m able to split my attention I’ll post updates as I see them.

It’s like a big PDA for kids, except it’s for games. It’s the Pixter 2.0. This thing looks so damn cool. It’s even got wireless so they can talk with other Pixters. The page over on Amazon has a bit more information on it. I want to get one for my nephew I think. And maybe one for me too.

How come they couldn’t have keen toys like this when I was a kid?

You may not have realized it, but I was sitting two cars back for about five minutes before you even pulled up. I was waiting for the person who pulled out to put her stuff in the car and then pulled up closer, at the same time that you pulled over to try and get into that spot. I was not trying to be an asshole. Though you wouldn’t even open your window to discuss it. You were just content to back up until you were just about touching my car and sit there.

And I wasn’t even going to play the disabled card. Even though I’d been trying to find a spot within a block of me for an hour and was starting to get a bit frustrated. Ugs, I hate street cleaning day. It brings out the best in us. And I forgot how hellish it can be when school is in session.

Be careful who you shake hands with. They may be a penis snatcher.

Suspected Penis Snatcher Beaten to Death

BANJUL, Gambia (Reuters) – A 28-year-old man accused of stealing a man’s penis through sorcery was beaten to death in the West African country of Gambia, police said.

A police spokesman told Reuters that Baba Jallow was killed Thursday by about 10 people in the town of Serekunda, nine miles from the capital Banjul.

Reports of penis snatching are not uncommon in West Africa, with purported victims claiming that alleged sorcerers simply touched them to make their genitals shrink or disappear in order to extort cash in the promise of a cure.[Yahoo! News]

The report goes on to say that because of this many men in Serekunda are afraid to shake hands. Now the big question is this. Can’t they just like, look and see that it isn’t really gone?

Scoble asks “Why do Bloggers prefer Macs?” and offers a few different ideas.

So, I’ve theorized a few reasons why BloggerCon attendees overwhelmingly were Mac users.

1. Corporate culture. (The early days at Apple and Microsoft and why it matters even today).
2. Attendees came from certain self-selected niches. (Press, creatives, academics).
3. The “think different” factor (Apple vs. Microsoft marketing).
4. Apple’s “sharing” culture (donations to schools).

[The Scobleizer Weblog]

I actually think there’s one other factor. The four above are some of it. But there are some other things going on. First, OS X and its Unix roots. This was one of the things that initially attracted me. I come from the Unix world initially and I was really curious about what Apple was doing. At this point I’ve been immensely happy with what they’ve done. This is probably the second most stable computer I’ve owned. The first being an old MSDOS box I had years ago. OS X has attracted other people like me. I know a lot of sysadmins who have them now. It’s like having a portable workstation with you that has all the tools you’re used to. It’s also familiar to anyone who’s been doing web stuff on a unix box running Apache. It even comes with apache all set to go.

I think Apple is going to start to turn things around a bit. I don’t think they will ever necessarily be as big as MS. I don’t think they need to be. But I do think you’re going to see more and more people looking at Macs as a real option instead of just something for graphics people.

Anime News Network reports on the next Miyazaki film for Disney to bring over to the States: Porco Rosso.

Disney’s English dub of Hayao Miyazaki’s Porco Rosso will premiere next Tuesday, October 14th at the Austin Film Festival. Produced by John Lasseter and directed by Tony Bancroft, the dub features Michael Keaton as Porco Rosso, Cary Elwes as Donald Curtis, Kimberly Williams-Paisleyas Fio, and Susan Egan as Gina. [Nausicaa.net][ via ANN]

I’m pretty psyched. I’ve got the R2 release of this, but I wouldn’t mind having a copy of the dub so that I could share it with my nephew (young kids don’t quite get the whole sub vs dub thing :)).

Be prepared. For the next couple of weeks I’m sure there will be lots of computing news about Panther, the next version of OS X. For those of you who are running Jaguar (OS X 10.2) and wondering if this update is worth the $129 pricetag, I have to give a big big YES.

So what’s so great about it? Even though it’s just going from 10.2 to 10.3 Apple has really crammed a lot into this release. Now there’s a lot of stuff on their list that I think should have been there to begin with, but there’s a lot of other stuff there too. One thing they seem to be doing is paying attention to the unix world. Here’s just some of the apps that i’ve noticed on OS X client (some of these were there before I believe, but I know others weren’t.):

• fetchmail
• procmail
• postfix
• python
• ruby
• tcl

One feature I’ve been liking is in Mail.app’s support of S/MIME. I now have a certificate and sign all my emails with it. I’ve even tried out the encryption features of it and it’s pretty keen. The other is Expose. Expose is a program for working lots of windows on your desktop (read the above link for a much better explaination than I could give). When I first read about it, I thought it sounded a little unimpressive, like just another kind of application switcher. It that, but it’s probably one of the best ones I’ve used, it’s just too cool.

For a roundup of a bunch of other cool things, check out this article over at O’Reilly’s MacDevCenter about 10 cool in Panther.

I’d like to send a big THANK YOU out to my friend Emilily (btw, her most recent post about school is great). Yesterday she came over and helped me clean and do laundry in exchange for dinner and taxi service from me. I hate asking for help, but can cope with it a bit more when I can offer something in return.

Also, a secondary THANKS goes out to Ethan, cause he helped out immensely by giving her a lift home cause I was almost falling asleep on the couch after the movie.

I’m still alive. I haven’t gotten ‘the call’. I’ve just been busy dealing with real life. I’m hoping to have a bit more time this weekend to post because right now I have safari open with a whole bunch of things I want to post about.