The advert for Lenovo’s Thinkpad X300 rips on the original Macbook Air advertisement. Hee hee.

(Courtesy of Paint.It.Black’s Flickr site.)

The rumors were true - updated iMacs, hot off the griddle! It seems the only thing they didn’t get was that it was happening a day earlier than the customary Tuesday announcement.

So what’s up? Same price, better specs! Core2Duo Penryns, faster speeds, more goodies:

• Bluetooth 2.1+EDR
• 802.11n WiFi
• Gigabit Ethernet
• built-in iSight
• 5x USB2
• Firewire 400
• Firewire 800
• 8x double-layer SuperDrive

Here’s the breakdown:

• 20-inch iMac: 2.4GHz proc, 128MB ATI Radeon HD 2400 XT (1680 x 1050), 1GB RAM, 250GB 7200RPM disk, $1,199.
• 20-inch iMac: 2.66GHz proc, 256MB ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro (1680 x 1050), 2GB RAM, 320GB 7200RPM disk, $1,499.
• 24-inch iMac: 2.8GHz proc, 256MB ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro (1920 x 1200), 2GB RAM, 320GB 7200rpm disk, $1,799.
• 24-inch iMac: 3.06GHz proc, 512MB NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GS (1920 x 1200), 2GB RAM, 500GB 7200rpm disk, $2,199.

Available now. Here. Cool.

Gizmodo’s got proof!

Someone actually got an actual living, breathing Psystar Open Computing unit, that third-party hardware pseudo-Macintosh desktop and made a video of it booting up. Software Update can’t seem to figure out what it is, but it thinks it’s a Macbook Pro. Whatever it is, it’s damned fast!

See the exclusive video!

UPDATE: Psystar itself seems to want to validate itself. It just put up a video of its own on their site, although they can’t seem to shake off that cloud of seediness and smarm that’s been clinging to it from Day One, up to now. Especially now. Watch it here.

Funny how media is these days. We’ve come full circle, and then we’ve gone around again a couple more times in the past few years.

Used to be we just had radio to listen to. Then the movies came. Then TV. Recorded material came and went: wax cylinders, vinyl, cassettes, film, Beta, VHS, Laserdiscs, CDs, VCDs, DVDs, HD-DVDs, Blu-Ray - we could listen to music and watch shows on tape and discs. Cable came and opened up the world to us - we could watch anything and everything, on demand. We can now pause live TV, and record many shows simultaneously, preprogrammed weeks ahead if we couln’t be there to push the buttons.

Then internet mixed it all up together even more: you can watch live streaming TV, download music and movies and enjoy them on players and computers. All permutations existed, and there wasn’t enough hours in the day to listen to and watch everything we wanted.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’d know I’m a voracious podcast listener. While the name is new, podcasts are just old-fashioned radio shows at heart. Having worked in radio for two decades and doing three-hour talkathons twice a week for years, there’s a special place in my head and heart for the format. It’s nice to sit back and listen to folk talk about things and discuss them. In the course of listening you get to know them and they feel like they’re your friends.

One of my favorite podcasts is Buzz Out Loud, which is a daily (well, Monday to Friday) tech-news-and-views talk show of indeterminate length (usually about 30 minutes) from CNET. It’s over 700 episodes now, which is a considerable run, and I started listening to it in the upper 300s or so. Hosted by Tom Merritt and Molly Wood, with producer Jason Howell piping in now and then, it’s an interesting and fun show for geeks like me who need to get updated and hear different takes on what’s new. (Give it a try, why don’t you? It’s available free from the CNET site and through the iTunes Store. Links at the end of the post.)

BOL and CNET have lately taken to streaming their podcasts live on cam via UStream as they are recorded, which seems to be an increasingly popular trend with previously audio-only podcasts. (Leo Laporte’s TWIT is also doing the live video streaming thing, along with other shows.)

I’ve been watching, and it strikes me as odd to watch people do a radio show on TV - or in this case, live video streaming via the net. Radio is meant to be heard, and the missing dimension of sight is actually a major factor in the makeup of the show. Watching people talk in front of a mike gets seriously boring after a while - I mean, what are you watching for, facial expressions and wild gesticulation? Radio shows are best heard than seen (no offense, Tom and Molly).

In my talk shows in radio back in the day, I’ve had visitors come and sit in on a live show to watch, and they invariably go glassy-eyed after the novelty of being in the radio booth wears out. After a while they just stare at the soundproofing on the wall and listen, they way they’ve been accustomed to at home or in the car. (It’s a phenomenon similar to when I catch myself at a front row seat at a live concert watching the video monitor coverage instead of the stage - but that’s a topic for another post.)

I’ve been watching BOL vidstream live for a few days now, and I’m the same way. After a few minutes I stop watching Tom and Molly and just listen to them talk, staring absently out into space the way I normally do when I’m plugged in and listening on my morning commute to work everyday on my iPhone. The vidstream is in that odd limbo between TV and radio that sometimes exists when new technologies get mashed up, and it can’t seem to yet find its level and place in the world. Those visually-oriented will sit and watch, and those audally-inclined will just listen. (Said another way, the young ‘uns will watch, and the old farts will listen. I’m an old fart.)

Also, watching them takes out a bit of the mystery of the show. Through my months of listening I’ve created my own CNET studio in my head, and have invented places where Tom and Molly and Jason would sit while they talk, how they would act, how they were dressed - and watching the reality somehow takes the magic out of it. And lately, I find no joy in listening to the audio version of the episode I’ve already watched, and I miss my BOL in the morning.

It may work for some people, but I guess not for me. I’d rather listen to them on my iPhone on the road than watch them on my Mac at 1AM - which is the ungodly hour  they come on in my country. (I had to sneak in the Mac reference, lest some readers berate me again for posting something not Mac-related; this is after all a Mac blog.)

But it’ll find its level eventually, I’m sure. Until then I’ll just listen. After all, Buzz Out Loud is still an audio podcast, and not a TV show; the live video stream is just a bonus for hardcore fans, so I don’t really have any right to complain.

Only BOL completists and obsessives will watch it, I figure; most folk, like me, will stick to the old audio version on their iPods. So why does BOL do it? I guess because, like that adage about why dogs do what they do when they have nothing better to do, they can.

Catch Buzz Out Loud here, and the video stream here (which starts at 5PM GMT) or here, or subscribe to the podcast via iTunes here.