The folks at iProng will be at Action Sports Day, a Southern California event for extreme sports enthusiasts, tomorrow Saturday, July 29th, 2006 and they invited me to hang out at their booth. The iProng booth will feature a variety of iPod-related festivities including demo stations for all current iPod models, podcasting seminars, and interactive demonstrations of the latest and greatest iPod accessories.

Action Sports Day will feature extreme sports stars showing off their skateboarding and BMX skills on a large half-pipe ramp. Athletes scheduled to appear include 2005 X Games Gold Medalist Pierre-Luc Gagnon, Lincoln Ueda, Mike Crum, Chris Gentry, Phil Hajal, Jim Burgess, and more. The event is sponsored by Soundcast Systems, makers of the wireless iCast system for iPod, who will also be hosting a booth.

Action Sports Day will take from place from 2:00 to 6:00 pm, between races at the Del Mar Thoroughbred Club in Del Mar, California on Saturday, July 29th. Admission to the event is $6.00 for adults, or free for children under eighteen years of age. The city of Del Mar is within driving distance of San Diego, Los Angeles, and all of Southern California.

You may or may not have been aware of the contest going on over at phillryu.com, but regardless it yielded some very interesting results. All I can say is that as always Mac fans are extremely creative and have amazing imaginations when it comes to what an OS can or should do. I’d be willing to bet Apples OS X R&D team will be looking over this stuff and stealing borrowing some of these concepts (lets just hope not everything). You know these are some Mac-worthy innovations because the contest was judged by talented individuals from around the Mac developer and web site community. The contest received over forty entries, so I am sure it was not an easy task to select the 3 winners who all received prize packages worth over USD$1000. The winning screenshots by Eric Patterson, Emmett Stackelberg and Adam Shutsa, as well as runners up by Nathan Ziarek, Reuben Henriques, and Stephen Siciliano are now on display and accompanied by comments by members of the judging panel. So take a look and start daydreaming about your perfect OS X feature.

I just saw the trailer for the new digitally animated Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie due out 03.30.07 and I have to say based on the trailer it looks like it is gonna be good. I remember loving the original black and white comic book stories and was always a bit disappointed by the campy live action trilogy of films, although I must admit to seeing them all and owning them on VHS. While they do have that so bad their good appeal (can you say Vanilla Ice?) this new movie looks like it’s gonna kick some shell.

Looks like the folks at MacZOT are at it again. This time it is another Mystery Bundle. For the next 5 days (July 13th to July 17th, 2006) you have the opportunity to pick up 5 great Mac shareware applications for just USD$5.00. The only catch is you won’t know what you’re buying until the buying period over. It’s not a bad risk. I can tell you that I have purchased Mystery Zots in the past and wound up with some great apps. Now, you may find that you won’t want or use all the apps in the bundle, but for USD$5.00 you don’t have much to lose (go without the latte for one day). Plus, any apps you find you don’t want make great gifts for your favorite podcaster ;)

On the official PS3 website, click on “Specs” or “Gallery” and then click back in your browser and you’ll see an Apple logo fade in and out quickly in the middle of the PS3 console in the image. Take a look at the image on the right and you can make out the faint Apple logo. Click the image to see the full screen grab I made from the sony PS3 site.

UPDATE: Looks like they may have updated the file and the logo is no longer there. You can still see the faint logo in the screenshot I took. Click the image on the right and you can see the full screenshot. It is a faint logo just above controller.

Mystery solved: And no, this isn’t a secret hint of the PS3 running a custom version of OS X. It is the more logical explanation of some contacted designer who didn’t want to pay for his software. An update on Engadget points out that the Apple logo will flash on projects authored with a trial version of Apple’s Shake. Oh well, here’s to daring to dream.

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Calling all MacCast designers… Listener Edward just dropped me a note and his band needs some help. They are currently set to release a new CD but are having a hard time coming to an agreement on a cover design. Because of their dilemma they have decided to turn to the Mac community for help. The band is called ‘reel’ and the album is called ‘escape from america’. If you can come up with the design they choose you will get full credit in the liner notes, a couple of copies of the CD and the band will ship you a brand new shiny iPod Nano for your efforts. You can listen to tracks off their CD and get more details about the design competition* on the bands web site, http://www.reelband.com/.

*The MacCast is not affiliated with nor does this post serve an endorsement of this contest.

Well thanks to Shooby and Colm, I just found out that Apple is celebrating the 1st anniversary of Podcast support in iTunes. Apple has set up a special section in the iTunes Music Store and the MacCast is one of the featured podcasts. I can say it is truly an honor to be featured along side other pioneering shows like TWiT, TikiBar TV, RocketBoom and others who Apple selected for this category. When I started the MacCast it was to try and deliver Mac news in a format that was easy to digest while on a commute to work. From there it grew and became a way to extend my experiences with my local Mac community and User Group. Now the MacCast has really become a global Mac community and it provides a way for us to get together a few times a week and discuss “all things Macintosh”. I had hopes, but really no idea that podcasting or the MacCast would become what it is today. I want to thank all of you who take the time to listen to a Mac Geek in his spare bed room talk about one of his passions. Without you, the listeners, there is no MacCast. This celebration is as much yours as it is mine. So grab some cake and punch and thanks for a great year on iTunes. I look forward to many more.

Jon from The Flip Side (widgetshow.com) has been hard at work creating a new MacCast RSS Widget for Dashboard and it is now available for download. Get it here. This one provides some great options for keeping up to date with the MacCast. Choose from 3 different feeds (Podcast, Blog or Comments), set your desired article length, perform quick MacCast searches right from the Dashboard and more. All this and it look great too. And in case you missed the “Original” MacCast RSS Widget make sure to checkout the one created by Joe “The Dead Herring” Sayer and Matt Hoult. It’s still available here.

[ New MacCast RSS Widget ]

[ The “Original” MacCast RSS Widget ]

You may have already noticed that as of today the MacCast MacGeek Cam is back! Now you can once again keep an eye me as I go about my daily biz prepping the show and what not.

I know, you are all thrilled.

To add to the excitement of this momentous occasion MacNeo, has updated the MacCast GeekCam Dashboard Widget for OS X Tiger. Click here for screenshots. So now you can have my ugly mug just a F12 keystroke away.

[ Download GeekCam Widget ] ~129Kb

So grab it now and I promise I will try to avoid computing in my underwear.

Well, I asked and you delivered. MacCast listeners were all over the grand opening of the new Apple Store Fifth Avenue in NYC and they are sending in the pictures to prove it. Thank you to everyone who send these in and for those of us who couldn’t be there in person check out the gallery and you can live vicariously through others. Enjoy.