Apple and Sony duking it out

As I called it, Apple drops the iPod with video. Not the Video iPod, or vPod, just an iPod that happens to play video in its spare time. Also, Apple enters the media center arena with the iMac G5.

But Sony will have none of that. Why pay for TV shows when you can use LocationFree to stream them from home? Media iMac, meet the VA Media Center PC. While we're at it, you got a Powerbook G5? No? Well here are the S580, FJ series and AX series for you to chew on!

I give a brief overview of Shuttle's history and place in the Small Form Factor (SFF) world, including the M1000, and a heads up on the VoodooPC Idol and Doll lines. Microsoft updates Media Center Edition 2005 with Rollout 2. Quake 4 ships, as GPUs across the world scream in fear, and Shure intros the EXg series canalphones aimed at gamers.

Cell phones rock! At least the SonyEricsson W900 and Motorola RAZR V3x do!

Finally, at the beginning of the show I discuss setting up your home computer for access, from anywhere, for free. Get UltraVNC, and make sure your router supports Dynamic DNS. Register an account at dyndns.org, and get a hostname (hostname.something.com). Add that info to your router's DynDNS config, and you're off! You'll also want to forward Port 5900 (the port used by VNC) to your desktop computer. Have the VNC server running on your desktop, and launch the VNC client from anywhere to connect! Start a thread in our forums if you need more info, and I will clarify further.

You can download the podcast over here at Designtechnica.