Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

If you’ve ever thought about getting a Pink iPhone for yourself, look no further than Colorware PC, who will let you pick out a custom paint job for your iPhone in the colors you want. For example, a classic AdSense like blue/green/white job looks like this:

The cost? Just $200 and 2-3 weeks of processing time, plus additional time to ship it there and back. Looking at their gallery of samples, the painting appears extremely high quality, precise, and on-color. They even off pantone matching for those colors you absolutely need to have. Behind the scenes, they use a custom UV resistant plastic coating they call “X2″ and (probably) paint robots to precisely paint your device.

They also can paint notebooks, macbooks, iPods, PC computers, the Sony PSP, your blackberry, an xBox or PS3, and a host of other commercial products.

With the release of their latest version of Wordpress, 2.5, the official Wordpress site has undergone a redesign by Happy Cog studios:

The main page has been refreshed in boring, pastel colours, and prominent links to their Wordpress for Dummies book via Amazon affiliate link and their hosting affiliate suggestions have been added. I’m honestly not impressed with the redesign, which has included work on the administrative interface:

It’s as if they took the strong ideas and colors of Wordpress past, watered them down, spaced them out, and made sure everything looks sufficiently web 2.0 without actually adding a substantial improvement. Every administrative screen now looks different and inconsistent with the others. If I upgrade, I’m definitely going to miss the old theme. On the other hand, no work had been done since Wordpress 1.5 on the administrative look and feel, so any work, regardless of how it feels, is welcome. Perhaps this is just a stepping stone to a truly better admin panel?

The WP 2.5 release notes blog post indicates some other nice changes:

• Multi-file upload with progress bar
• EXIF extraction (the photobloggers will love this)
• Password strength meter
• Few-click plugin upgrades (I am expecting some 0day exploits here)
• Built-in galleries
• A new Shortcode API (Isn’t this just BBCode ripped off?)

I’ll probably end up installing this with the next release of my own blogs and themes, as the features look promising.

According to the FCC, the term “broadband” now means 768Kbps, up from the previous definition of 200Kbps. Under the new definition, “basic broadband” defines download speeds between 768Kbps and 1.5Mbps. Other changes in how subscribers are reported includes a breakdown of upload and download speed and additional gradations of speed. News dot COM notes that “ISPs will not have to report the prices they charge, yet.”

For comparison’s sake, an average movie download is 700 MB (5872025600 bits), and would take 8.16 hours to download under the old broadband definition at 200Kbps. However, at the new faster rate of 768Kbps, an American with basic broadband will be able to download a movie in just 2.12 hours.

Broadband reporting is a problem for America, because up till now we could only point to useless studies indicating that 12.5% of internet users are still on 56.6k or worse speeds. Once politicians and the industry realizes how bad broadband penetration in the US really is, we’ll see better internet service and connectivity.

Amazon released official Facebook applications, but they don’t publish your purchases into your newsfeed. Verdict: useless.

Oh yeah, I’m a I’m a baller! You know you’ve made it when you get your own supplemental link unit section from Google! I’ve been waiting a long time for these, and now I’ve finally got them, even if they are a little bit incorrect. I think I’ve got some 301 redirects that need to be changed…