Splitsider

Improv Everywhere really is everywhere, even at technology, entertainment and design conferences in Long Beach, California. The group faked out the audience for a talk "on how crowdsourcing solar panel technology innovations can lead us to a new paradigm for health care reform" with Apple's spinning beach ball of death. Even more awesome, they wrote in their report of the prank that all the performers involved (aside from Eugene Cordero, who plays the speaker) were regular ol' TED attendees who'd signed up for an Improv Everywhere workshop. I'd say they got a pretty hands-on learning experience.

Attention, iPad owners: if you're into watching videos on your fancy toy, go grab VLC from the App Store. It's a media player that can handle pretty much any video format you download from any source online, be it savory or unsavory. Apple's built-in video player is extremely limited unless you buy everything from the iTunes Store.

There's a new way to watch TV shows without cable: through Apple's new Apple TV. At $.99 per episode, Apple is claiming that it's the future of streaming. But it's not.

The most obvious comparison for Apple's rentals is Hulu Plus. Both offer a limited number of shows from specific networks, but Hulu is all-you-can-eat for a monthly fee. That means that if you want to watch 20 episodes of Glee, it'll set you back a flat rate of $10 through Hulu, and it'll cost you $20 through Apple. You also will be unable to rewatch any of those episodes through Apple, as you're just "renting" that [...]

Here's The Onion on the resignation of Steve Jobs and his replacement at Apple by new CEO Tim Cook: "Following the resignation of Apple founder Steve Jobs, incoming CEO Tim Cook called a meeting of shareholders and members of the press Thursday morning to announce that he envisioned printers as the company’s future. 'Laser, ink-jet, double-sided, color, black-and-white — the future of technology is in printers. I am absolutely convinced of that,' Cook explained to a packed auditorium as a montage of printers and people using printers played on a screen behind him.

Maybe you don't have a TV. Maybe you don't want to pay for cable, or rent a satellite dish. Maybe you don't like accommodating the odd and conflicting schedules of competing armies of shows, or maybe you just slip out of sync every once in a while. Sometimes you can't watch what you want to watch, and it would be nice to just be able to catch up online, preferably for free. Here's how to do that.

Apparently, back in the pre-Simpsons 80s, Matt Groening was tapped to illustrate an Apple brochure aimed at college kids using his Life in Hell characters. It is fun but also weird! In addition to the illustrations, it's fun to see Apple trying to sell $3,500 computers to 18-year-olds with promises of being able to move text around without needing whiteout. Check out the full set of pages here.

Well, I mean, technically people don't really use Facetime at all, but I guess that doesn't make for much of a video.