I am sitting at Starbucks, and good gosh, there are so many people here with laptops. Not just that - two of them are iBooks. Darn it, I don’t feel special anymore…

Wait, wait… one of those guys looks like he is taking out an installation disk, and YES! Now I look carefully, there’s a big white box next to his chair! Hahah, he’s a newbie!

Wahahaha -

D: wait a minute…

that means that his iBook is probably faster and spiffier and - aargh,

spiraling into depression.. my lack of specialness is so acute…

Edit: waah.. we just got a rather rough earth quake.

Somebody’s wet dream just got made into a videogame, coming soon to the family-friendly Xbox 360!

I’m sounding snarky, but I actually think this is hi-larious, and plus  it’s got zombies in it so obviously I’m buying it. I can relate to a near-naked chick, no probs. I often find myself nearly naked and surrounded by zombies.

Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam masterpiece is easily one of the greatest films ever made. With career-defining performances from the likes of Martin Sheen, Marlon Brando, Dennis Hopper and Robert Duvall, Apocalypse Now captured the horrors of the war like no other movie. And now it has finally gotten the DVD collection it deserves. Apocalypse Now - The Complete Dossier ($14) is a two-disc special collector’s edition set with both the 1979 version and the 2001 version (digitally remastered with 49 minutes of previously unseen footage) of the film, along with tons of extras for anybody who loves the smell of napalm in the morning.

“After watching his father die in a duel against an unbeatable villian known only as ‘Justice,’ young Afro fixes his life on the study of swords and revenge. The tale of Afro Samurai is one of bloody hardship and pain. Along his solitary path of revenge for his murdered father, he sheds no tears and knows no love. Forever chased by powerful enemies in a lawless technology-speckled dystopia, he evades bullets and blade to reach his final prey: a man who will not die. But Afro will reach his quarry - even if it means painting a road of blood and brains from here to the bitter inevitable end.”

Gonzo is producing this story as a mini-series on Spike TV in fall 2006 and as a feature film in 2007.

Voice of Afro provided by Samuel L. Jackson.

Blu-ray Disc players and movies expected on sale later this year in Japan and the U.S. will share the same region code, Sony said Thursday.

(more…)

Buffalo is rolling out some serviceable 4-port USB hubs with roll-up-able cables. Just press the button and hope they retract.

The BHB4-U208 measures 98 x 16 x 33mm, weighs 50g and is supposed to be stylish as well, although i´m not sure how much you can really do to tart up a USB hub. Three ports are lined up on one side and one on the other, so you can separate your critical cable from the others. You get a choice of black, silver, white and blue, and the hubs will cost ¥2,650 when they go on sale next week or so.

Buffalo’s MCR-C8L/U2 will not only read just about any digital memory card you have, it’s also extremely svelte — about the size of a business card.

We won’t bore you with the list of compatible cards because it’s a good bet that if you have it, the MCR-C8L/U2 will read it. But if you want to check, have a look at the MT below. The 39 x 70 x 9mm, 20g readers will cost ¥2,173 when they go on sale at the end of the month.

Thursday, August 31 sees the residents of Tokyo officially enter the really, really high-tech age when NTT DoCoMo launches its first HSDPA service and handset, offering cellphone downloads at up to 3.6Mbps.

There’s a new service called Music Channel that schedules overnight downloads of radio-style shows that users can subscribe to, an IC card for various e-commerce and train pass functions, a 4-megapixel camera, a miniSD card slot, a music player and a service that allows for sending customised text messages to appear on the screen of other phones being called. It weighs 133g.

The HSDPA network currently covers central Tokyo and DoCoMo intends to blanket 90% of Japan’s population by March 2008. The downstream speed is impressive, although uploads peak at 384Kbps. Outside the so-called FOMA High Speed areas both up and down pipes can still stretch to 384Kbps. The amount of data that can be transmitted has also been increased from the current 3G 500KB limit to 5MB.

(Via DoCoMo)

I’m still skeptical of the need for high-speed data transfer on phones but the fact that DoCoMo offers flat-rate data plans and these new 5MB limits could change that.

With the launch of the PlayStation 3 approaching, some speculation about initial shipment volumes is inevitable thanks to the likely inability of stores to satisfy demand. But the guesswork has gotten off to an early start thanks to a misstep by a Sony executive and an analyst report from Tokyo.

Kaz Hirai, head of Sony Computer Entertainment’s (SCEI) U.S. unit, said in an interview last week that the company plans to ship 2 million of the consoles in the current calendar year. That’s just half of the 4 million consoles the company originally planned to ship. But SCEI said Thursday that Hirai misspoke and that the company’s original plan remains in place.

It calls for 2 million consoles to be ready at launch, a further 2 million to ship before the end of the year, and an additional 2 million to ship in the January to March quarter of 2007. The PlayStation 3 is due to be launched in Japan on November 11, and in North America, Europe and Australasia on November 17.

A day earlier, Mitsubishi UFJ Securities downgraded Sony stock from a “2″ to a “3″ on its rating scale, citing expected low shipments of the console. The Japanese brokerage house said it expects total shipments from the launch until the end of March 2007 to be just 3 million units — that’s only half of Sony’s target.

Mitsubishi UFJ Securities believes that supply problems for some electronics components used in the gaming machine will cause Sony to miss its target. The components in question were not identified.