Blogs / Discoblog

A Texas doctor claims that you can now kill your acne while you chat on the phone with your friends. Houston dermatologist Greg Pearson says that his AcneApp, available at Apple’s app store for $1.99, is a great way to clear your mug of unseemly spots.

Fox TV, Houston reports:

The AcneApp emits alternating bursts of red and blue light from the iPhone’s screen. All users have to do is run the program then hold the phone up to their faces.

Dr. Pearson says the phone needs to be held to the face for about two minutes a day, and callers have to remember to switch sides for maximum benefit. He isn’t quite sure of the results, and he can’t promote the app’s medical benefits because it hasn’t been FDA-approved. Nevertheless, Pearson told Fox TV that the app has been designed with “some science” in mind.

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Ah, the iPhone. What would life be without it?

You can get directions, make dinner reservations, break up via text and now, thanks to the latest app, you can get live streaming mugshots on your phone! Wait–is that mom?

Arrested! Mobile Mugshots prides itself on “Real People! Real Arrests! Real Mugshots! We collect mugshots from jails all over the USA and post them for you to view.”

The iPhone app, gratis on iTunes, serves up police pics from around the United States with full names, birth date, age, the date and time of arrest as well as the alleged crime.

Finally, a way to track Lindsay Lohan’s movements!

Check out some recent perps here.

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A Newsweek writer better known as Fake Steve Jobs is so fed up with AT&T’s service for his iPhone that he’s calling on his fellow AT&T customers to clog up the 3G wireless network today in protest of AT&T’s plan to impose service fees on “bandwidth hogs.”

According to the Inquirer:

Dan Lyons, blogging as Fake Steve Jobs, has called on AT&T users to show their service dissatisfaction by trying to overwhelm the network with data-intensive tasks. “Operation Chokehold”, as he called his incitement to flash-mob mischief, hopes to shut down the US AT&T 3G network at 3pm today and appears to have gained some support from the iPhone rabble.

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For those too busy (or self-important?) to pocket the iPhone while walking down the street and too safety-conscious to blunder out into traffic while texting, we’ve got just the app for you, via Gadget Venue:

The application is called Type and Walk and makes use of the camera on your iPhone to push video in to the background of an application where you can type on top of the video, thus being able to see obstacles as you are walking.

Type n Walk was designed to work with your favorite apps — not try to replace them. Use it to compose your email, text message, status update, or tweet and paste it into your target app (or the browser) to send.

Yes, the app shows you the same thing you’d see if you just looked ahead of you without the iPhone, the same way people have for thousands of years, and animals before them for millions of years. Is it genius? A signal that our species has really, finally gone too far with this technology thing?

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Video: YouTube / typenwalk

You’ve just robbed someone and taken their iPhone, now what do you do? Why not snap a pic of yourself brandishing your weapon?

Well for one, it could lead to your arrest, as a Philly teenager found out recently. Philly.com tells how a tech-savvy mugging victim was able to turn up the pressure on her mugger:

The 20-year-old woman had programmed her phone so that it would automatically send photos to her home computer. Some time after the robbery, she received a photo of a young man holding a large handgun to his head.

Shortly after seeing his picture plastered on the evening news, the gun-wielding cell phone bandit, eighteen-year-old Kadeem Cook of Philadelphia, turned himself in to police.

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Image: iStockphoto

Look, it’s a recession, and you gotta do whatever you can to get your name out there. Ashley Towns, the 21-year-old Australian student who crafted the first iPhone worm, used the notoriety to land a job building iPhone apps with the Australian developer Mogeneration.

Though this might seem an odd way to land a new gig, Towns is just the latest in a long line of hackers turned legit. And his worm was tame by comparison to its followers: Towns’ code simply rickrolled “jailbroken” iPhones—those hacked by their owners—by changing the phone’s wallpaper to a glamor shot of singer Rick Astley. Some subsequent iPhone worms are far from harmless pranks; one steals banking information.

Despite the relative harmlessness of Towns’ rickroll, the idea of rewarding bad behavior doesn’t sit well with some developers. Wired.com reports:

Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for Sophos, said the move sends the wrong message to hackers.

“What disheartens me is that Towns has shown no regret for what he did,” Cluley told TechWorld. “Now his utterly irresponsible behavior appears to have been rewarded. There are plenty of young coders out there who would not have acted so stupidly, and are just as worthy of an opportunity inside a software development company, and are actually quite likely to be better coders than Towns who made a series of blunders with his code.”

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Image: flickr / William Hook

So you’ve sufficiently gorged yourself on turkey and deviled eggs, now it’s time to flop onto the couch and slip away into a tryptophan coma. Luckily, the Pzizz Relax iPhone app will ensure you get the perfect post-meal nap, even on your relative’s horribly uncomfortable, left-over-from-the-70s couch. From Macworld:

Pzizz Relax…enables you to create a customized, relaxing sleep soundtrack. With a combination of soothing music, positive and calming words, and just-right wake-up alarm, I found Pzizz Relax did the trick for me nearly ever time I tried to take a midday 20- or 30-minute snooze break. With Pzizz Relax playing on my headphones, I was able to fall asleep quickly and wake up, when I was supposed to, feeling refreshed. That’s what the app is trying to assist with.

So hopefully you can shake that mid-day turkey hangover and be back at it for dinner.

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iLingual (not to be confused with Linguo, the grammar robot) will help you communicate in a foreign county and make people smile at the same time.

According to Cult of Mac:

The iLingual app is clever translation software that speaks foreign phrases with video of your mouth saying the words. Launch the app, snap a picture of your mouth (or someone else’s) and hold the iPhone in front of your mouth. The software animates your mouth to make it look like you’re actually speaking French (or German or Arabic). Well, sorta.

See for yourself below:

The best part about this iPhone app? It’s free. We mean, c’est gratuit.

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Video: YouTube / jeremyw75

Technology writer Chris Stevens calculated the weight of the Internet by adding up all the computers, iphones, blackberries, servers, cables –  and just for fun, viruses and websites. The damage comes to 498,438,559,990 kilograms, which Wolfram|Alpha tells us is 1.7 times the mass of all humans currently alive.

CNET tries to help readers imagine this bulk:

There you have it, ladies and gentlemen. The Internet is very heavy indeed. To give you some idea of just how heavy the internet is, imagine an absolutely enormous tower of computers and servers and cables reaching up into the sky like the evil fingers of some apocalyptic demon. Now imagine sparks, thunder, electrical storms. And, on top of it all, an otter screaming pointlessly. That is the closest you are likely to come to visualising the Internet.

The author claims that “for the first time in the world, we have precisely and scientifically calculated the weight of the Internet.”

Well that’s interesting, considering that Stephen Cass, writing for DISCOVER, calculated the weight of the Internet back in 2007 and came to a very different answer. Cass ignored the hardware, and instead calculated the weight of  online information by taking the total estimated Web traffic of 40 petabytes (40 x 10¹⁵ bytes: a 4 followed by 16 zeros) and figuring out the weight of the electrons required to store that information. His total?

The weight of the Internet adds up to just about 0.2 millionths of an ounce.

However, a year before that, in 2006, Russell Seitz, calculated the weight of the internet to be 2 ounces. You can read more about his calculations on his blog.

So which is it, readers? Weigh in on whose calculation is closest to the truth.

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Image: flickr / sugree

Because using your lungs to blow air is waaay too much work, a new iPhone app will do it for you.

According to Mashable:

The iPhone app is called Blower and it works by moving air through the speakers of your iPhone (strictly speaking, the same thing happens when you play music through those speakers, but let’s not be too harsh on the novelty part of the application).

Check out the app in action:

Or you can use it to blow away “herbs.”

This actually seems like a lot more work than just, you know, breathing on the candles, or dragging your hand across the table. Whatever, it’s only $0.99.

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Video: YouTube / QneoDotNet