Crackerwax

It’s true. Today was a voyage of discovery for me that lead to my uncovering of two amazing gems.

The first is that we have Ronald Reagan to thank for GPS navigation! Well, a point of clarification perhaps, he didn’t invent it but he was responsible for allowing its use by civilians.

After a Korean Airlines flight got lost over Soviet territory and was shot down by fighter jets in 1983, it was Reagan that decided that GPS should be declassified. GPS then moved from being a military only doodad to being accessible by the general public!

Additionally in 1996 Bill Clinton authorised the phasing out of selective availability. That’s the noise that’s injected into the signal to prevent it from being too accurate.

So a combination of Clinton and Reagan has meant that I can now locate my nearest McDonalds on my iPhone without batting an eyelid.

The other amazing fact is more of an epiphany.

At the end of Mr Blue Sky by ELO I always thought the robotic voice said ‘Mr Blue Sky’. No! I was wrong!

It actually says ‘please turn me over’, how mad is that? For the past twenty years I’ve thought it said ‘Mr Blue Sky’ and now I find out it says nothing of the kind.

Thing is, I now can’t hear anything other than ‘please turn me over’ no matter how hard I try.

My life is amazing isn’t it?

It’s less than twenty four hours until Apple make their latest announcement.

As ever I proffer up my predictions on the content of their Keynote.

1. iPod Touch redesigned to have physical volume control, possibly built in speaker
2. iPod Touch range repriced, possible introduction of 64GB model
3. New iPod Nano design with widescreen
4. Possible bump in capacity of 160GB iPod Classic, 80GB to remain
5. iPhone/iPod Touch firmware 2.1 released
6. iTunes 8.0 released, introduction of a subscription service sadly unlikely
7. Mac Mini possibly dropped from the Mac range
8. New MacBooks introduced
9. iPod Shuffle to receive storage boost to 4GB

I’m usually completely wrong with these sort of things but it I would say that iTunes is a dead cert, as is the new Nano and the increased capacity Shuffle.

Of course all of this will undoubtedly result in me being parted from my cash at some point down the line, although I don’t need any more iPods I think a nice little aluminium MacBook might be nice.