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Stanford archives provide rare glimpse into Apple's early days as mere seedling (video)
Housed in a climate controlled storage facility operated by Stanford University, nearly 600 feet of shelf space is dedicated to preserve documents, videos and memorabilia of Apple and its early days as a young startup. The collection holds rare gems such as interviews with Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, both of whom discuss some of the rationale behind Apple's name -- Jobs asserts that it was selected to place his company ahead of Atari in the phone book. Originally intended to furnish Apple's corporate museum, the materials were donated to Stanford in 1997 after Steve Jobs' return to the company, which was most concerned with financial survival at the time. According to the university, more than 20 significant collections have been added to the archives in the subsequent years. The warehouse holds blueprints of the Apple I, user manuals, magazine ads, TV commercials and T-shirts, along with thousands of photographs that document Steve Jobs during his years as CEO of NeXT. Other rarities include a $5,000 loan document -- signed by the two Steve's and the partnership's third co-founder, Ron Wayne -- a spoof of Ghostbusters that starred former CEO John Sculley and other company leaders, who played "Blue Busters" to eliminate IBM, and handwritten sales entries of the very first Apple II's. While the location of the facility is undisclosed, we can only hope that, some day, the collection will be showcased for fanboys, fangirls and the public alike.
Google launches revamped doodle website, store, self-celebration ensues
Google is inviting users to take a trip down Memory Lane, with a new web archive on one of its most celebrated traditions -- the Google doodle. Last week, the search giant unveiled a revamped doodle website, replete with an interactive gallery of over 1,000 homepage designs from around the world. On the new site, users can browse, watch or play with any of Google's myriad doodles, all of which are organized by date and location. Die-hard doodle-heads, meanwhile, can commemorate their love with a customized t-shirt, coffee mug, or any other completely embarrassing stocking stuffer, available at Google's new "Doodle on Demand" store. Check it out for yourself, at the links below.
Royal Society opens its archives to the web, is less elitist than the name suggests
Get ready science nerds, you're about to get a lifetime's worth of reading material for free. The venerable Royal Society, the over 350-year-old British scientific organization, has just opened up its archives to the web-dwelling public. That's over 60,000 scientific papers dating back to the first ever peer-reviewed research publication in 1665. Other highlights include Isaac Newton's first ever published paper, research from Charles Darwin, and Ben Franklin's famous kite experiment. Don't waste any more time, go hit up the source link for all the old research papers you can handle.
The Deleted City visualizes GeoCities as it was, today
GeoCities may be no more, but, unlike some other bits of internet past, its entire contents were thoroughly archived before the site was completely shut down in 2009. That opened up some interesting possibilities for anyone interested in playing around with the 650 gigabyte archive, and this so-called "Deleted City" project may well be the most interesting yet. Described as a "digital archaeology of the world wide web as it exploded into the 21st century," the project appropriately visualized GeoCities as one large city, which can be dived into and explored at will (complete with a soundtrack supplied by "nearby" MIDI files). Unfortunately, it's not clear when or if folks will actually be able to try it out for themselves, but you can at least take a guided tour in the video after the break.
Daily Mac App: SiteSucker
Back in the pre-ubiquitous internet days, services like AvantGo allowed you to cache and store websites for offline viewing. These days there's little need for that kind of thing, simply because we're very rarely offline. Having said that, there are times when a solid internet connection just isn't available and it would be nice to keep on working, reading or browsing sites. That's where a program like SiteSucker comes in. SiteSucker, as the name suggests, sucks down a localized version of site of your choice to your Mac's hard drive for viewing offline. Simply type in the URL of the site you want and press "Download," SiteSucker will do the rest, scanning, downloading and processing the site into an offline viewable form for when you haven't got an internet connection on hand. The number of levels deep SiteSucker will scan and download can be user defined, so if you're looking for a small skim of the site, a one or two level archive will do. If you want a more in depth, browsable localised site something more like a four to six level download will probably be best. You can also set limits on the number of files downloaded, the minimum and maximum file size as well as a minimum image size to download. File type limits can also be imposed as can paths to include or exclude, and whether or not to limit it to the original site's server. Once you've got your site downloaded, it's just a case of opening it up in Safari or any other browser of your choice from your disk. If you've ever wanted to keep an offline version of a site for tinkering, browsing or analysis, SiteSucker gets the job done fast, efficiently and automatically, all for the great price of free from the Mac App Store.
Internet Archive founder wants to collect every book ever published
Not depressed enough yet about the impending death of print? This might help: Brewster Kahle, the fellow behind the Internet Archive, is in the process of gathering together every book ever published for safe storage against a future where the prevalence of digital media has utterly devalued physical texts -- it's a perhaps unreachable goal, he admits, but Kahle's warehouse is currently at 500,000 books and growing fast. The Associated Press describes the undertaking as something more akin to The Svalbard Global Seed Vault than the Library of Congress -- these books aren't being saved for lending, they're being stored for the future. If you're reading this Brewster, we recommend signing up for an Amazon Prime account. Those shipping fees can really add up fast.
TUAW's Daily Mac App: Stuffit Expander
Being able to decompress the plethora of archive types that are flying about the intertubes these days is essential. Stuffit Expander, the free extract-only part of the Stuffit suite is a great utility to have when Finder, or even the Unarchiver, just can't help you out. There are quite a few free extraction tools available for the Mac. We've got the Unarchiver and TinyExpander just to name a few, but Smith Micro's Stuffit Expander handles several file formats that most others just can't, including Smith Micro's .sitx files, with aplomb. It's simple to use, either open the archive from Finder with Stuffit Expander, drag-and-drop the file onto the Expander program or open the archive directly within the app. You can even just drag-and-drop your file onto Stuffit Expander's dock icon to quickly extract the file. If you're going to use it as your primary archive extractor you can also assign various different archive file formats to Stuffit Expander from within the program preferences. When other extractors just can't cope with that unusual archive type, Stuffit Expander steps in. From MIME, StuffitX and yEncode, to AppleSingle, ARC and .btoa files, Stuffit Expander can get you what you need and for that reason, regardless of whether you use the Unarchiver or its kin, it's an essential free Mac app. Stuffit Expander is available for free from the Mac App Store.
TUAW's Daily Mac App: BetterZip 2
Mac OS X has had a zip utility built into it for some time. For extracting stuff other than Zip files, the Unarchiver's your friend. But what about actually compressing and managing archives? That's where BetterZip 2 steps in. BetterZip 2 allows you to open archives without first extracting them, allowing you to see precisely what's inside them before processing them. Often you've got loads of files compressed together, but you only want one -- BetterZip allows you to extract single files from archives without having to extract the whole lot, which can save you time and disk space if it's a really large archive. You can also update archives, adding files into an already compressed archive without having to extract the whole lot first and then re-compressing them together. BetterZip is able to open and extract most common formats, from ZIP to TAR, RAR to JAR, it's got you covered (for a full list see the MAS listing). BetterZip can also compress files into six archive types natively (ZIP, TAR, GZip or BZip2 compressed TAR, XAR and 7-Zip), as well as RAR archives courtesy of an external RAR command-line utility. You can also secure your ZIP, 7-Zip and RAR files with passwords, with WinZip compatible AES-256 encrypted archives at your fingertips. The US$19.99 BetterZip brings a full archive manager to your Mac. It's fast, easy to use and handles all but the most obscure archives. I would like to see the ability to create a few more archive types, but native ZIP and 7-Zip support will see you though most of your archiving needs. BetterZip 2 is available from the Mac App Store for $19.99 with a trial available from the developer's site.
TUAW's Daily Mac App: TinyExpander
Every Mac comes with a built-in file compression utility, but its decompression support is limited. We've featured a perennial favorite, the Unarchiver before on the Daily Mac App, but today we'll take a look at a new kid on the Mac App Store block, TinyExpander. Just like the Unarchiver, TinyExpander is ready to expand whatever archive you throw at it. It'll handle over 25 different formats, with the highlights being Zip, 7z, RAR, TAR and XAR. TinyExpander is also able to extract encrypted archives, so it's pretty safe to say that it'll get the job done for almost any archive you're likely to have on a day-to-day basis, save for the really obscure formats. There aren't many preferences to change in TinyExpander (as you can see above), but you can set archives to expand to a custom folder, should you want everything extracted to the same place. You can also change whether it'll trash the archive or not when it's finished extraction, and also whether it'll show you the results in a new Finder window. If you expand an archive to a folder that already exists, TinyExpander will give you the option to overwrite it or cancel your action, which should help make sure you don't accidentally overwrite something important. TinyExpander is a great little utility that gets the job done without a fuss. If you're not enamoured with the Unarchiver, then the free TinyExpander is a worthy replacement.
Google temporarily suspends Realtime search, thanks to expired Twitter deal
If you noticed a distinct lack of tweetage in your Google search results yesterday, you weren't alone. Turns out, the company has temporarily suspended its Realtime search feature, as part of its ongoing Google+ launch. El Goog made the announcement, ironically enough, in the form of a tweet, explaining that it needs time to integrate Google+ within its social network-based search tool, but without offering a specific time frame. Mountain View later revealed further details with the following statement, provided to Search Engine Land: Since October of 2009, we have had an agreement with Twitter to include their updates in our search results through a special feed, and that agreement expired on July 2. While we will not have access to this special feed from Twitter, information on Twitter that's publicly available to our crawlers will still be searchable and discoverable on Google. Twitter offered a similarly curt explanation, saying that it would continue to provide tweet integration to companies like Microsoft and Yahoo, while adding that it still works with Google in "many other ways." Google's Social Search, meanwhile, continues to function, but has been stripped of all Twitter data. No word yet on whether the two sides have entered negotiations, but when they do, the fate of humanity will certainly be hanging in the balance.
TUAW's Daily Mac App: The Unarchiver
The Unarchiver isn't a new utility to the Mac world, and we reviewed an earlier version of it. It's the Swiss Army knife of unarchiving programs and can handle pretty much any file, no matter how ancient, you throw at it. The native unarchiver for OS X is pretty solid in and of itself, but it's nice to have a utility such as Unarchiver around when you need something to tackle anything from Amiga PowerPacker files to StuffIt Archive files. There are a number of unarchiving options, including when you want to create folders for the extracted files or alter the modification date, and the ability to move the original archive file to the trash after expanding the contents. The one thing you can't do is archive stuff. If you want to do that, you can use OS X's built-in archiver, buy the venerable StuffIt Deluxe ($49.99) or spring for the US$19.99 BetterZip. However, Unarchiver is a free download in the Mac App Store, so it's definitely worth having as one of your basic Mac utilities.
Google News Archives stops digitizing old newspapers, picks great day to do it
Ain't like you'll be reading 'em anyway after today's over.
The Thinking Machines flashes back to 1968 for a lesson in computer logic, sideburns (video)
Another dusty gem's emerged from the vintage gold mine that is AT&T's Tech Channel archive, and this one's packed full of useful information and some classic Jetsons-style animation. The Thinking Machines pits man against computer to explain how the things reason, and it does so with a soundtrack that's straight out of, well, 1968. Unsurprisingly, the film's populated by giant, button-laden switchboards, early computer graphics, ladies sporting beehives, and gents rocking unfortunate facial hair, but if that doesn't do it for you, it also offers genuine pearls like this: "Best of all, they never get bored. Like other machines, they can do the same monotonous chores all day long without complaining." Someone should tell that to the disgruntled Roomba residing in our hall closet. Check out the full video in all its dated glory after the break.
William Shatner explains what microprocessors are and do... from way back in 1976
For a man that spent the best part of his acting career representing a savvy dude from the future, William Shatner looks pretty well at home in the past as well. This video, dusted off from AT&T's Tech Channel archives, shows Shatner dressed in a casual tan ensemble and dropping some knowledge on the subject of microprocessors. Aside from the retro visuals and presentation, what's great about the vid is that the seemingly lavish claims about where computers could take us -- and their own move toward increasing importance, utility and ubiquity -- actually seem pretty tame in light of what we know today. Beam yourself past the break to see this golden nugget from the Bell Labs archives. [Thanks, Dan]
Apple's iPad 2 keynote video ready for your viewing delight
Missed Steve Jobs' surprise reappearance to unveil the iPad 2 this morning -- or perhaps, are you an Apple fan who just can't get enough? Well, it just so happens that Apple taped its latest magic show for you to watch at your leisure. Find it at our source link below, and imagine a time before 9.7-inch tablets hit the gym and slimmed down to just 1.3 pounds light. Oh, and we've also got a comprehensive liveblog, if video's not your style. [Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
AT&T opens up video archives, shares the history inside
Where can you find Orson Welles, Marconi's daughter, Alexander Graham Bell's grandaughter, and inventors of the transistor and television? You might try To Communicate is the Beginning, a 1976 educational publication tracing the history of electronic communication, which AT&T recently decided to exhume from its archives of Bell Labs material. The 30-minute video's just the first in a series, too, as AT&T's website is already playing host to films about the origins of the laser and integrated circuit too, with more on the way. Find them all at our source link -- you do want to know how your favorite technologies evolved, right?
The Mog Log: A year of two games
It's really hard to believe that I've been writing this column for an entire year, especially when the start of it seems so fresh in my mind. Back in January of 2010, the first installment went live on a Sunday, sort of a television-style early premier event before moving to a regular timeslot on Saturday. Though it was mostly a collection of links to useful sites for fans of Final Fantasy XI and Final Fantasy XIV, it was still the start of something that's clearly stood the test of time, at least a year's worth. To be totally accurate, I should say that the first anniversary of the column fell on Monday. But I decided to go a little bit later than an exact year, so this week is when we're looking back over the past year of columns. And it's been an interesting time to be doing such a column, since we've had a rollercoaster ride with Final Fantasy XIV's launch and subsequent issues, not to mention the groundswell of content for Final Fantasy XI. So I'm going to take a look back to see what worked, what didn't, and what would best be never spoken of again.
Pioneer ships $200 BDR-206MBK BDXL writer, dares you to afford related media
Two months from introduction to shipping? Not bad, Pioneer... not bad at all. The world's first BDXL PC writer is now on sale at your local Fry's Electronics, bringing support for toasting 128GB quad-layer discs (if you can find / afford 'em) as well as speedy writing on typical BD-R, DVD-R and CD-R discs. Pioneer's also throwing in a CyberLink software suite, and if you buy in early, you'll get a single piece of 100GB BR-R XL media for free. Makes that $199 asking price seem entirely more attractive, doesn't it? In other news, the first Blu-ray format still isn't supported by Apple, not even on a $10,000 Mac Pro. Spectacular.
Ask Engadget HD: Combo media streamer and Blu-ray/DVD ripper?
It's been a while since we addressed this one, but the possibility of setting up an HTPC or media streamer, ripping ones DVD/Blu-ray collection and putting the discs out to pasture for good is an attractive idea to many. For our friend Stanford, that's the question, but also with an eye towards doing it simply in a way that can be explained to those who are less savvy: "Over Thanksgiving much of my family saw my desktop setup as a HTPC with XBMC running on my HDTV. Naturally I get asked many questions about how they could accomplish such. Unfortunately, none of them are 'computer-savy.' Mostly what they enjoyed was having a whole library of movies available with a couple clicks. I wanted to suggest some of the mediacenter box such as Western Digital's, Boxee, Popcorn Hour,... but I realized the main holdup would be the ripping of movies and transferring/networking them to the box. Are there any mediacenter boxes out that support inserting a DVD/Bluray, rip, encode, and add it to the library? I'm somewhat doubting it due to DMCA issues of breaking copy-protection." We know more than a few of you have your own media library kicking around, when a novice asks "How can I get one like that?" is there a push button solution to share... or do you just give them the "if you have to ask.." look? Got a burning question that you'd love to toss out for Engadget HD (or its readers) to take a look at? Tired of Google's blank stares when you ask for real-world experiences? Hit us up at ask at engadgethd dawt com and keep an eye on this space -- your inquiry could be next.
Friday Favorite: BetterZip
BetterZip is a utility I might not use every day, but I'm very thankful for it when I need it. It's an archive/compression utility which handles a broad array of archive formats, including ZIP, TAR, GZip, BZip2, and some that you rarely see on a Mac, such as 7-Zip and RAR formats. While the unarchiver built in to OS X can handle quite a few of these formats -- and is what I use on a day-to-day basis -- BetterZip adds a few very useful tools to the mix. BetterZip opens or creates your archive in a file-list format, and you can drag files between Finder and BetterZip to add to or extract from the archive. Creating new archives is just a "File->New" or Command-N away, and you can save them in Zip, TAR, TGZ, TBZ, 7-Zip or XAR formats. While the Finder lets you easily create archives by right-clicking a file selection and choosing "Archive," it doesn't allow you to easily edit the archive or add to it. For quick compression of one or more files for emailing, it's fine and I use it regularly, but for larger archives that need to be more flexible, BetterZip is an excellent choice. BetterZip also makes it easy to search large archives for a single file you're looking for. Read on for more reasons BetterZip is my Friday Favorite ...
