In our endless wandering on the Internets, the Doodler stumbled across something Wordpress bloggers might find a bit interesting: a retro MacOS theme (which incidentally enough, is also its formal name) that uses 1-bit System 1.0 graphics. You can’t get more retro than this clunky monochromatic look. Who’da thought that in the future, pixellation would be cool?

Try the Retro MacOS Theme if you’ve a mind to, although for this Doodler, it’s a bit too hardcore. System 7, maybe. Even if I cut my teeth on Macs staring at screens like this for hours on end back in the day, it’s something I wouldn’t exactly want to revisit. Too retro for me, man.

See it here.

It’s always been a sci-fi conceit to have the computer talk with a perfect, natural-sounding speaking voice, and so far all we’ve had are the usual halting, phoneme-mangling robotic voices built into the operating system. There hasn’t yet been the smooth, soothing menace of HAL, the business-like LCARS computer voice of the Starship Enterprise, or the prissy Brit butler accent of C3PO. Instead we get Vicki, Bruce or Zarvox.

At least one company has been trying hard to accomplish this difficult feat, and they’re closer to it as anyone has been, and that’s Infovox iVox, from the Acapela Group and AssistiveWare. They have been providing wonderful voices, in many languages, for use with any software compliant with Mac OS X’s Speech Manager, like TextEdit, Preview or Adobe Acrobat, or even Tiger’s VoiceOver screen reader feature. Notable in iVox are the Lucy and Graham voices, which eerily sound like something you’d hear from a spaceship computer.

Well, the company is releasing a new British voice named Peter, which I imagine would sound real cool when it tells you the hour on the hour. This will be in addition to the many existing accented voices ranging from American to Flemish (eh?). Peter is included in the British voice pack which sells for 99 Euros. Existing owners get Peter as a free upgrade.

If you’re curious, there’s a fully functioning demo available here.

Now we’ve seen everything. In a effort to squeeze every last drop of revenue from a fading product, manufacturers are thinking up all sorts of last-minute gimmicks to make a sale. See the neoprene iPod shuffle Watch Style Case from USB Fever. Comes in the usual colors, and gives you access to all the controls and ports of the player even while it’s in the case.

I just wonder how inconvenient it would be to have the earphone cable dangling from your wrist to your ears, in the way of nearly everything. In fact, I wonder about the wisdom of creating such a wearable casing for something that’s eminently wearable by itself via the built-in-clip. You can attach it to nearly everything on you, from a baseball cap, headband, shirt pocket, hem, collar or sleeve, or even your darned earlobe, so why would you need this thing? Attach it to your shirt cuff if that’s what all you want done.

But hey, different strokes for different folks, right? Shipping is free worldwide from USB Fever when you order it for US$10. Get ‘em while they’re, uh, hot.

It’s all over.

The boys at iPhoneSIMfree have won the Great Race. The definitive software unlock of the iPhone has finally been achieved. (Get a whiff of their smugness here.)

Meantime Engadget’s got all the gory details, steps, videos and links over here.

We can expect a tsunami of new iPhone sales activity. With this development, there is now no reason for Apple to not release an official open-line iPhone, which they will likely start with for the Europe round of releases. (Which was the plan all along, I think.)

Meanwhile, the SOLness of AT&T is now total and complete, and his Steveness sits in the darkness of his office, face lit up by the glow of his prototype tablet Mac, quietly cackling to himself.

(Cross-posted from Mobile Philippines)

There’ll be a major Apple event on September 5 (at least that’s what Ars Technica is convinced will happen), and the likely agenda will be to announce the already-leaked new iPod nano, the short, fat one you’ve seen on the net, the one that looks like a small Blackberry with a facelift. The fact that Apple’s Department of Legal Bullies asked Gizmodo to take their spy shots down practically confirms it as the real thing.

Lending credence to this is the fact that the original nano was announced around this time two years ago (Sept. 7). Hope springs eternal as other pundits speculate that the long-rumored iPhone nano might also be part of the agenda.