NVinNYC

Feist stars in the new iPod Nano Ads.

Some people are not pleased with this.

I am, so far, conflicted. Don’t fuck with my Feist.

A new communiqué from Steve Jobs: A Greener Apple on Apple’s environmental efforts landed today. It’s well worth reading.

Even better, check this Translation From PR-Speak to English of Selected Portions of Steve Jobs’s ‘A Greener Apple’ Article. Here’s my favorite excerpt:

Dear Greenpeace,

Fuck you.

Love,
Steve.

I couldn’t agree more.

(PR Translation from Jesper via Daring Fireball.)

HandBrake, the venerable DVD transcoding app, which I’ve noted before is one of my favorite utilities, has been unforked from MediaFork with the newest 0.8.5b1 release.

There’s a ton of useful new features and bug fixes but here are the highlights:

• User presets including iPod, AppleTV, and PS3 support
• Anamorphic, even in QuickTime
• Surround sound (both AAC 5.1 and Dolby Pro Logic II)
• Chapter markers (QuickTime-style)

See the full change log in this PDF.

You can download the program for various platforms directly from the project home page. I’m also mirroring the Mac version because their servers are a bit swamped at the moment:

Download HandBrake 0.8.5b1 for Mac from NVinNYC (15 MB).

New Apple iPhone ad for the Oscars Movie-Circle-Jerk-Awards: Hello.

All the actors and movies (almost all the movies I think) are available on this Flickr set.

Some more details from MacRumors.

My take: Brilliant! I loved John Cusack from High Fidelity and The Dude (can’t call him anything else) from The Big Lebowski but I was annoyed by the (one second) of Cameron Diaz (says a lot I guess). I got everyone from Steve McQueen on up except Burt Reynolds (and I should have got him because I watched Boogie Nights again recently… bad angle I guess).

Today Steve Jobs released this open letter discussing the current status of selling DRMed music online and several posibilites for the future of onine music distribution.

The crux of the piece is that Apple would sell DRM free music if the big 4 music labels allowed this on the iTunes store, indeed Apple would prefer this to selling DRMed music.

It’s a fascinating read for several reasons. It’s an interesting new perspective on the business. But even more interesting is that Steve deemed this topic worthy enough to release this kind of statement. It’s not often you see this kind of open communication from a company like Apple, especially Steve himself.