Found this on the net, and am impressed with the coolness of the idea. Wish I could do something like this, but in my neighborhood, junk collectors would have ripped this off the post and run off with it within a minute of my closing our gate.

(I feel a little bad for myself though. I have a similar model - souped up, to be sure - that I still spend a lot of time on, and the thought that my treasure is someone else’s junk is kind of depressing.)

NSW police arrest armed bank robbers Friday at The Bank of Queensland in Rhodes, NSW, Australia.

[Via ABC]

…well, at least they boost your grades.

An Australian study has confirmed what we all already know: that iPods (and other tech stuff) boosts your grades and helps you to learn more.

The Victorian Department of Education in Australia conducted a half-year of studies at Heathmont College using Apple solutions and found that using iPods and other technologies as study aids help both students and teachers to be active learners, and has improved test scores and pupil performance. They also had a more pronounced effect on kids who were socially isolated and/or had literacy problems. According to math teacher Sally Bodo at Heathmont, the studies led to “Improvements in all curriculum areas and also in behaviour, motivation and responsibility by the end of the project.”

So now you can tell your parents, in all honesty, to get you that iPod Classic because “it’s for school, Dad!”.

(Via Macworld.)

That report about Apple secretly mining iPhone users for all sorts of data by phoning home personal information about users and their preferences whenever they use the Weather and Stock widgets has been definitively disproven - although it was also found out that generic, innocuous information is still sent out nevertheless, particularly application identifiers which tell Apple what apps are being used.

MacNewsWorld reports that some German iPhone users from the docpool.org blog set about trying to find out if this original report was true, and tracked signals coming from about a dozen iPhones. They found out that all the info being sent was an identifier code, or UUID, for which app was being accessed, and not IMEI information or stocks being looked at, and all the signals coming from the phones were identical.

So for the meantime you can rest easy that your weather-watching secrets are safe. (It might not be all good news - knowing that if Apple wanted to, they could is a bit disturbing.)

Reports are surfacing that a number of Intel-processor Macs, mainly MacBooks and MacBook Pros, are experiencing inoperable keyboards when using the new version of Mac OS X, Leopard.

AppleInsider is reporting that users on their forums are complaining about the glitch, and that a lot of other user groups (even Apple’s own) are getting posts about the problem, which has surfaced after installing Leopard. The keyboard freeze seems to occur randomly with both older and newer laptops, and relaunching Finder or restarting the system sometimes fixes the problem but not always, while drastic solutions like PRAM resets don’t do anything for it.

External keyboards and onboard trackpads remain unaffected.