Bovine Theology

SAN FRANCISCO — When Steve Jobs was preparing to introduce the Apple TV, he called it “one more hobby,” and based on our first impressions, that’s a safe choice of words.

The new Apple TV is a major hardware upgrade. One quarter the size of its predecessor, it’s a small black box with curved edges, somewhat resembling a hockey puck. The highlights: It costs $100, and it integrates nearly instant streaming TV and movie rentals, along with Netflix streaming.

The major limitation: For TV rentals, only two studios are on board to stream shows through the Apple TV — ABC and Fox. This isn’t an adequate replacement yet for cable subscriptions.

So calling it a “hobby” was right — Apple’s starting out small, and maybe it’ll roll into something bigger if more studios warm up to the idea.

Nonetheless, I got some hands-on time with the new Apple TV and it is a promising start.

TV and movie rentals are really snappy and fast. After choosing to rent a movie or show, the Apple TV takes a few seconds to prepare a buffer and begins streaming your video live.

Also particularly cool was internet integration. I enjoyed searching through Flickr streams: Select a photo and hit the Play button and it immediately plays a slideshow with music and fancy transitions. I’m too lazy to check my friends’ Flickr streams the normal way on Flickr.com, aren’t you? Plus, the photos look great on a big screen through the Apple TV’s HDMI connection.

The Apple TV’s remote is familiar: It’s got the same aluminum and black design as the current MacBook Pros. It’s also very similar to the current Apple remote that controls Macs — only it’s a little longer and the buttons have small bumps for subtle tactile feedback. It feels great in the hand and navigating through the Apple TV menu was really smooth.

As good as the idea sounds, you won’t be able to use your iPhone or iPad as a remote for the Apple TV (not yet, at least). Instead, there’s a feature called “AirPlay,” so if you’re using your iPad or iPhone to listen to music, look at photos or watch a video, you can tap an AirPlay button, select your Apple TV and boom — your content is streaming onto your Apple TV. We weren’t able to test that since this feature won’t be available until iOS 4.2 ships in November, but we’ll keep you posted.

You can also stream media from your Mac’s iTunes library by choosing the “Computer” option and selecting a movie or playlist. I tested that out too, and it worked fine, but do note that iTunes only supports a few formats for video (.H264, for instance). So if you prefer getting media through some alternative non-iTunes-compatible means, you’re still going to be doing a lot of file conversion before you can watch your videos on the Apple TV.

All in all, it’s a cool device, and for $100 it’s going to pose a serious threat to the Roku Netflix player. But as a TV replacement, it’s still not there yet. Maybe later.

See Also:

• Apple Takes Aim at Cable With Tiny New Apple TV
• Live Blog: Apple’s iPod, Music Event
• Apple to Live Stream Press Conference — to Apple Customers Only

Photos: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Just when you thought the only differences between the iPhone 4 and the iPod Touch were the size and the phone, a closer look reveals that the Touch actually has a different camera.

Apple’s specifications page for the Touch lists a resolution of 960-by-720 pixels for the rear camera, which is roughly one megapixel. That’s several steps below the 5-megapixel camera seen in the iPhone 4.

Then again, the iPod Touch is about one millimeter thinner than the iPhone 4 (which is significant when it comes to pocketability). Anything bigger than a one-megapixel sensor probably would have been a squeeze, especially when you consider that the Touch includes a front-facing camera, too.

When Apple refreshed its iPod family last year, many expected the iPod Touch to gain a camera and were left disappointed when it didn’t. However, a teardown by iFixIt revealed that was just barely enough room for a camera. iFixIt CEO Kyle Wiens speculated that the feature was omitted due to engineering challenges.

Long story short, the iPod Touch’s camera probably isn’t great, but we’re glad it’s finally here.

See our earlier posts for more details on the new iPods announced today.

Via DaringFireball

See Also:

• Live Blog: Apple’s iPod, Music Event
• Sporty New iPods Tout Tiny Touchscreens, Retina Display

Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

The other day, pop princess Katy Perry said something interesting:

“I think when you put sex and spirituality in the same bottle and shake it up, bad things happen.”

I disagree.

Although that specific quote was about Lady Gaga, I think it’s indicative of something much bigger and much worse. Put simply, our culture has divorced God from sex.

I’ve long said that popular culture often acts as if God might have invented humanity and thus sex, but he was completely caught off guard that sex was an enjoyable activity. He was convinced it was a very clinical activity designed for baby making. But then Prince showed up and told us all that sex was in fact awesome. Upon hearing this, God was as shocked as I was the first time I used the Shazam app on my iPhone to automatically tell me the name of a song I was listening simply by me holding up my phone near the speaker. (I swear, that thing is voodoo.)

That’s what we’ve been told. That God and sex don’t go together. And if you say something enough times, people start to believe it’s true. Even pastor’s kids like Katy Perry will reinforce the barrier between God and sex. You can’t have both in the same bottle. They’re oil and water. Cats and dogs. Spencer and Heidi. They just don’t go together.

So what has our response been to this dynamic, to the idea that God and sex shouldn’t be in the same sentence?

I’d love to say Christianity has knocked it out of the park and ransomed the beauty of this gift from the world, but I’m not sure we have. In fact, I think we’ve caused our own damage in four ways:

1. Sometimes, we teach guilt, not abstinence.

I touched on this a little in the Stuff Christians Like book. Lots of our churches and youth groups teach kids for years that “Sex before marriage is bad.” And I agree with that message. I’ve seen the damages of pre-marital sex hundreds of times. The challenge though is that’s only half of the message. I wish when we taught abstinence we would say, “Sex before marriage is bad, but sex when you’re married is awesome.” Because what happens is that during your formative teenage years you hear over and over again about how bad sex before marriage is. And your head and heart shorthand that idea and just tell you that, “Sex is bad.” Then you get married, on your wedding night, you’re supposed to magically, instantly shed all your guilt and fear about sex. We’re taught guilt for years and then left on the doorsteps of our marriages to figure it all out by ourselves.

2. We have very few ways to discuss it.

Because of this site, people often send me links to Christian stuff they think is funny. Every now and then, I’ll get links to “Christian sex sites.” The sites are typically forums where Christians talk in an honest and holy way about their sex lives. Now for the majority of us, that last sentence was weird. Let’s be real, our sex lives are not something we collectively talk about a lot in Christian circles. Our finances, our parenting, our jobs, our in-laws, deep regrets from the past, we’ll touch on anything in a small group. But broach some sexual topic at your next small group and people will look at you like your F to the E to the R to the G to the I to the E. That’s off limits. It’s supposed to be beautiful and holy and loving. And yes the world is attacking it everyday in thousands of ways, but you’re supposed to discuss that on your own as a couple. Maybe you’ve had a different experience in small group but we were in one that didn’t touch on that subject for the first three years or so.

3. We write 10 books about lust for every one book about the gift of sex.

God Bless the stuff folks like xxxchurch.com are doing. Buy Breaking Free or the Samson Pirate book. I love both of those. I’m happy for all the work that’s being done to free people from the bondage of sexual addiction. But I wish that for every time I heard about the poison of lust, I heard about the perfection of love. I wish every time someone preached on the problem of sex, someone preached about the untamed awesomeness of sex. The conversation has become very one sided when it comes to Christians and sex.

4. We’ve made the crayon box pretty small.

Have you ever prayed before sex? Have you ever applied every ounce of God given creativity you have to it? Have you ever made a Christian songs sex tape? OK, that last one is impossible, Michael W. Smith just doesn’t make music like Sisqo. But seriously, I think to some degree we’ve bought the lie that the world gets to have wild, crazy sex and Christians, holy folks like us get to have black and white, two dimension sex. But what if that’s wrong? What if the God who overflows us with love and hope and mercy, wants that part of our lives to be as big and as colorful as two married people could possibly imagine?

Those are the problems, or rather some of them, but what’s the solution? What’s the answer? What’s the fix? Those are fair questions, but there’s no way I could possibly solve the sex situation in a blog post. Here though is what I hope.

I hope that every time we say sex before marriage is harmful, we’ll say “sex after marriage is neon awesome.” I hope that some well-designed, honest Christian sex site will launch. (Feel free to use the variation, “Sexy Stuff Christians Like.”) I hope that Thomas Nelson and Zondervan and Baker and some other folks will release some wild books about the goodness of Christian sex.

Until then though, until all of those things happen, you should at least go download Chris Isaak’s “Wicked Game,” the Sundays, “Wild Horses,” and Mazzy Star’s “Fade into You.” Those are all some pretty fantastic make out songs.

Your turn, what are your thoughts on this subject? Are we Christians getting it right or wrong when it comes to sex?

Russell Moore has written a great piece which exposes the idolatrous nature of Glenn Beck’s ghastly self-promotional pantomime on Saturday, and the evidence this provides of the woeful state of an evangelicalism that, to put it bluntly, greets blasphemy as truth, as long as the flag is being waved vigorously enough. If liberalism is the accommodation of the gospel to culture, then they don’t come any more liberal than Beck and his merry band of evangelical followers.

Recorded some time ago – this video interview is still right up to date regarding the issues facing the western Church in our time. On this edition of the White Horse Inn, Michael Horton talks with R.C. Sproul, Chairman of Ligonier Ministries and author of numerous books including The Holiness of God, The Truth of the Cross, and Knowing Scripture. Together they discuss many of the themes relating to the year-long WHI theme, “Christless Christianity,” and evaluate the overall health of Evangelical Christianity.

Redrock Micro makes accessories for movie cameras, and lately it makes add-ons for the latest movie-shooting SLR-cameras. The latest addition is a range of “Nano” kits which turn your stills-cam into a film-making rig, and they do it on the cheap.

SLRs are obviously designed to shoot single photos, and access to the various exposure controls is the premium consideration. A movie camera needs to be focused and moved around as you shoot, which is tricky if you’re using two hands just to hold it up.

The new Redrock kits come in three main flavors: A grip, which is a simple handle that screws into the tripod-mount, a pair of chest braces which let you hold the camera with one hand and focus with the other, and a couple “low-down” kits which put handles on the top and sides so you can carry the camera like a briefcase or an underwater-style rig. The chest rigs come with eye-pieces for the rear LCD-screen to allow live-view-shooting outside.

The prices run from just over $100 to just under $500, depending on how many rods, grips and pads are hanging off the stick-insect structures. This might not sound inexpensive, but in the overpriced world of movie-cameras, it’s an almost dirt-cheap bargain. Available now.

Nano DSLR Rigs [Redrock Micro via Photography Bay]

See Also:

• MicroRemote Uses iPhone to Keep Movies in Focus
• RED Takes Aim at DSLR Market, Photographers Salivate
• High-Resolution External Display for DSLRs

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

It’s clearly the season for new camera gear, and today it’s Canon’s turn in the spotlight. Along with a few new lenses comes the EOS 60D, a “replacement” for the two-year-old 50D. Those looking to upgrade from their 50D should look elsewhere, though, perhaps to the 7D, as this new camera is more for consumers than enthusiastic amateurs.

The magnesium body of the 50D is now plastic, and the 60D uses SD-cards instead of Compact Flash. It also gets a slew of gimmicky image processing features (Toy Camera, anyone?) and the obligatory video capabilities.

In fact, video seems to be what this camera was made for. The rear screen is the pop-out, tilt-and-swivel type, Canon’s first on an SLR, and has the over a million dots of resolution (or around 330,000-pixels). Video is shot at varying sizes and speeds. 1080p is available at 24p, 25p or 30p frame rates. Drop to 720p resolution and you can shoot at up to 60fps. Whatever picture you choose, you get full manual control, including sound with 64 audio-levels.

The 18MP sensor (like the LCD panel) is the same as that found in the 550D (or Rebel T2i), the AF system comes from the old 50D and the 63-zone exposure meter comes from the 7D. It’s almost like the Canon engineers just picked through a shelf of existing parts and snapped them together like Lego, producing what seems like a pretty sweet-looking camera.

The 60D will go on sale in September for $1,100 body-only, or as part of a $1,400 kit with a 18-135mm lens.

EOS 60D product page [Canon]

See Also:

• Canon Makes EOS 50D Official
• Canon's New 18 Megapixel Monster, The EOS 7D
• Canon's 7D SV With Parental Controls, Barcode-Scanning

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

Remember the McFly 2015s, the Official Shoes of Gadget Lab? They were a fairly faithful rendition of Marty McFly’s amazing self-lacing sneakers from Back to the Future 2, forced to the market by the tireless work of the Maloof brothers who spent years badgering Nike into making them.

They looked great, but lacked the flashing lights and auto-lacing functions of the “real” thing. Now, Nike has actually patented a self-lacing sneaker. This, you are no doubt just realizing, is completely frickin’ amazing: It’s entirely possibly that these shoes could actually be in stores in the year 2015, just like in the movie. This would be a weird, time-warping paradox so perfectly mimicking those in the Back to the Future movies that the world might possibly end.

That Nike has filed a patent for these things is mind-bending enough, but pretty much everything has made it in. The shoes will of course fasten themselves, but there are also LEDs a-glowing and a detailed breakdown of the batteries, circuits and control-systems. There is even a charging stand.

One problem Nike might have to face, though, is the existence of prior-art. Not only did the sneakers already show up in the movie, but just last month we saw that an enterprising hacker had made his own self-lacing shoes.

McFly 2015 patent application [WIPO via Nice KicksThakns, Matt!]

See Also:

• Great Scott! The 2015 McFly Sneakers Are Now (Somewhat) Real …
• McFly 2015 Competition Announced
• McFly 2015 Update: Kanye West Digs Our Favorite Sneakers
• Gallery: Hands-On With Nike's Hyperdunk 2015s
• Nike Hyperdunks Make Disappointing Debut, Still No McFly

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.

In what’s a sure sign that the megapixel race in cameras is out of control, Canon has announced that it has developed a 120-megapixel image sensor.

That’s 13,280 x 9,184 pixels packed into a rectangle about 29 millimeters x 20 millimeters–or 1.4 inches x 0.7 inches . It’s the highest level of resolution in a sensor of its size, says Canon.

Most cameras today used either a CCD (charge-coupled device) sensor or a CMOS (complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor) sensor. Canon’s latest innovation is for a CMOS sensor.

The 120-megapixel sensor is about 7.5 times larger and offers a 2.4-fold improvement in resolution over Canon’s highest comparable commercial sensor. Canon’s highest-resolution commercial CMOS sensor is currently the EOS-1Ds Mark III and EOS 5D Mark II digital SLR cameras. That sensor incorporates approximately 21.1 million pixels.

Cramming more pixels into a sensor is not necessarily indicative of the quality of the photos. Many consumers think more megapixels in a camera means better photos. But sometimes packing more light-sensitive pixels on a tiny sensor can result in greater noise in the photos. Cameras also require strong processing capabilities to take all the data from the sensors and translate into a beautiful picture.

With most CMOS sensors, camera makers use parallel processing to read data at high pixel counts. But that has to be balanced against problems such as signal delays and deviations in timing, all of which can affect image quality.

Canon has modified the method to control the readout circuit timing to get about 9.5 frames per second. This can support continuous shooting of ultra-high-resolution images, says Canon.

The newly developed CMOS sensor also includes full HD video (1,920 x 1,080 pixels) output capability.

For now, the 120-megapixel sensor is a proof-of-concept. It’s an engineering flight of fancy but it shows camera makers are trying to find ways to pack in greater capability into increasingly smaller sensors.

See Also:

• Fuji Introduces Compact 3-D Camera for Consumers
• Camera Software Lets You See Into the Past
• Why the iPhone 4 Camera Is So Promising
• Quantum Technology Promises Wedding Photos From Phone Cameras
• Do Mirrorless Cameras Spell the Death of DSLRs?

Photo: CMOS sensor/Canon

I what has become an annual occurrence, the yearly leaking of new iPod cases has begun. In previous years, these have given us hints about the presence of cameras, whether correct (Nano) or not (iPod Touch). This year, things are more interesting thanks to the whole antenna-gate fiasco, and its subsequent fix via free cases from Apple.

Above we see what are likely to be the cases for a new Nano and Touch. The Touch case has a cut-out for a rear-facing camera, and we’d guess that it will also sport a front-facing camera for FaceTime calling. Notice that although it has a bumper-style colored strip around the edge, the transparent rear is curved just like the current Touch. My guess is a form-factor almost identical to the current one, only with cameras, a Retina display and the game-friendly gyroscope.

The other, smaller case is probably for a touch-screen Nano. What? Yes, I think that the small square screens that have leaked out over the last few months are not for a shuffle but for a tiny Nano. It probably won’t run anything from the App Store, but if the Nano is to get any smaller, the only way to do it is to combine the screen with the controls. The cut-out on the rear is probably for the existing video camera to peek out through.

As ever, all will be confirmed at the Apple Event next Wednesday September 1st, and I can begin my own yearly ritual of buying the new Touch and passing the old one down to the Lady for use as an alarm clock and not much else. This year the lucky thing will have a 32GB, multi-tasking monster to wake her up.

Accessories appearance early exposure iPod touch 4G leaked [SJ.91 via iLounge]

See Also:

• IPod Touch 3G Cases Already On Sale
• How Apple Designed the iPad Out in the Open

Follow us for real-time tech news: Charlie Sorrel and Gadget Lab on Twitter.