0 iPhone 4 and iOS4

As many people already know, Steve Jobs announced yesterday Apple's new iPhone and revealed more details on its new operating system. Aside from information that's been public for months, he touched on many different additions. I'd like to touch on the facts and points that I believe should end up being a turning point for anyone looking to purchase a new iPhone or upgrade their existing.

• Just by looking at the iPhone 4, its easy to see the differences between it and its predecessors. iPhone 4 has a glass front and back, along with metallic framing. The important part here is the frame is designed to improve cell phone reception (and most likely compensate for AT&T coverage) and the glass that covers the rest of the phone is supposed to be engineered such that it minimizes damage from impact. More hard facts on this will have to wait until professionals do reviews of it.
• iPhone 4 has upgraded their rear camera to 5 mega pixel, and has added a front camera for taking videos and doing video calls with Apple's Facechat. Hopefully other companies will develop video chat apps such as Skype to not pigeonhole this new addition.
• The screen resolution is high enough to make images and videos crisp, and to improve text visibility.
• The iPhone 4 is supposed to be significantly faster, more details on how much will come when reviews start coming in the next week or two.
• iPhone 4 will use the new iPhone OS (aptly named iOS).
• iOS has many new additions, the most significant being multitasking. However, this is only supported on the 3GS and 4 models, since previous models do not have the hardware to support it. Sorry. Only way around this is to upgrade, jailbreak, or (the easiest and best decision) switch to the Google Droid. Which already has this. On all phones.
• If you are looking to purchase a new phone, you'll be able to preorder them in a week, and they hit the floor in late June. If you already have an iPhone and want to upgrade, just go online to att.com and check if you are available for an upgrade. The positive side to this is that many more people are eligible for an upgrade than a year ago when iPhone 3GS came out. From what I have read, the pricing for new and upgrades should be the same, for $199 and $299 for differing hard drive capacity.

So this is the general gist of what the new iPhone upgrades mean. I hope this is helpful for any looking to purchase or upgrade. Next week is E3, so expect me to blog on many of the new innovations in gear and video games.

0 Food: Lemon cupcakes

So spring is here! And not only is it spring, but no longer am I in the month of hell that I was in with work, and the month of quasi-hell that led up to that. So, now I'm back to posting on my blog, and my goal is to really get my blog out there (if possible).

Goals that I really want to achieve are the following for the remainder of this year:

1. Build a good amount of gluten free recipes, and start looking at possibly publishing....
2. Also blog on another development that I'm starting, and that's me delving into the world of artificial intelligence and video game design....

So we're going to start off with a lemon cupcake recipe that is gluten free, light, and very delicious.

Lemon Cupcakes with a sweet lemon glaze

Cupcake ingredients

Dry ingredients:
1 cup sorghum flour
1/2 cup tapioca flour
1/2 tsp xanthum gum
2/3 cup sugar
pinch salt
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp baking soda

Wet ingredients:
2 eggs
1/2 cup milk
1/4 olive oil
1/4 cup melted butter
1 tsp vanilla
1/2 tsp lemon flavor
juice of one lemon
zest of one lemon

Glaze:
1/8 c powdered sugar
lemon juice

Directions:

Preheat oven to 350F. Line 12 muffin cups with muffin liners.

Combine all dry ingredients in a large bowl. Mix well.

Add the wet ingredients into the dry mix. Stir well (approximately 50 strokes). Best indication that the batter is evenly mixed is that there are no yellow egg streaks in the batter.

Pour the batter into the lined cups, and place in the oven for 16 minutes.

After the cupcakes cool, in a plate place the powered sugar, and make a crater for the lemon juice. Add a small amount of lemon juice, and mix with the sugar. Gradually add more lemon juice until there are no dry clumps of sugar, and the glaze has a fairly thick consistency.

Grab the cupcakes, and rub the tops of the cupcakes into the glaze, covering the tops. Place the cupcakes onto cooling racks, and wait approximately 30 minutes before enjoying, to allow time for the cupcakes to soak the glaze.

1 Christmas time posts

I haven't been able to blog much over the past couple weeks due to work and other life things, but I plan on posting recipes for some of my favorite Christmas food traditions, while also posting reviews and suggestions for the perfect gift for that technical wiz you're trying to find a present for.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

0 Sesame garlic base

Funny thing about this noms post is that I'm doing it while riding the metro, headed to a restaurant named Fogo De Choa, which is this amazing Brazilian steak place that serves you all the steak you can eat. Def best all you can eat restaurant I've been to.

But onto my post, sesame garlic base. Now, I call it a base because it's pretty versatile, change the ingredients a bit and you could have anything from a marinade to a salad dressing. Here's how to make the base:

3 part soy sauce
1 part sesame oil
2 diced cloves garlic per part
3 dashes of ginger
Salt and pepper
Sprinkle of sesame seeds

If you want to turn this base into a marinade, add a little bit of rice wine vinegar to the base, and if you want to turn it into a salad dressing add 1 part olive oil to the base.

Expect some more noms posts this weekend as I will be attending the food convention in dc this weekend.

-- Posted from my iPhone

0 Fixing a broken Windows

So the title of this post summarizes how I feel about Windows 7. I downloaded it from IEEE (thanks little for the info), and upgraded my computer from Vista to 7. Here's my impressions:

Windows 7 really feels like Vista 2.0 to me; it feels like what Microsoft should have delivered two years ago when it came out with Vista, instead of the slow, bogged down black hole of an operating system that's about as annoying as that little fairy from Zelda on the N64. Vista is a demon of an operating system that hogged resources (albeit is slowly getting better with regular Microsoft updates) and tried to hide all of its flaws under a flashy new interface. An interface, which, to those used to Windows' paths was about as confusing as Narnia to navigate.

Now, as a computer engineer, I was taught that an operating system should be minimal, shouldn't hog resources, and should really be a mere tool to whatever you are trying to do on a computer. That is why I do, and will always dual boot in Linux.

But this article is about my honest, geeky impressions of Windows 7. I am pleasantly surprised by how functional and fast this OS is. Windows 7 feels like Microsoft's closest attempt to the textbook definition of what an operating system should be; fast, functional, and easy to use. Microsoft decided to take one from Apple and polish up the task bar (to anyone who has used a Mac, it feels very similar to that now.) and overall succeeded. However I am annoyed that now in my toolbar, I will no longer be able to read if someone has gchatted me while I'm multitasking at my computer. Sigh.

Continued impressions tomorrow...