This video of a homemade beer cannon recently made my Must See YouTube Videos playlist. Watch closely for the Snakes on a Plane gag.

Apple hit the tech world with a raft of announcements at their “Showtime” event on Tuesday. Now that Ryan and I have had a chance to talk about some of the new products and services, here is our take on Tuesday’s announcements.

The much ballyhooed “widescreen video iPod” was not to be at this event. Instead we got refreshed full-size iPods (now widely being referred to as 5.5G) with:

• 60% brighter screens
• Larger hard drives (30GB and 80GB)
• Longer battery life (3.5 hours and 6.5 hours of video playback respectively)
• Lower prices ($249 and $349)
• New headphones
• Gapless Playback
• Instant Searching
• Letter overlay when scrolling
• New Games

At first glance, these updates are a bit underwhelming, but taken all together they make for some pretty nice enhancements, especially given the $50 price reduction. The pieces of this puzzle that I am most excited about are the gapless playback and searching improvements. Ever since making the transition to digital music I’ve been really bummed out about the small gaps between songs that originally flowed into each other. If you have an album on CD where say, track 3 and 4 blend right into one another, the new iPods will play these songs without a gap between them as originally intended by the artist. Nice!

The ability to search for songs on the iPod using text and the letter overlay while scrolling are also welcome additions. Using the touch wheel to zip around 30-80GB of songs was getting a bit tiresome. These new features allow you to search for songs or albums by using the wheel to select letters instead of just scrubbing back and forth through the entire list until you find the track you are looking for.

Way, way more thoughts after the jump!

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This is a well done edit of the bit in Empire where Darth Vader opens his clamshell control center. The scenes have been scrubbed together to make it look like Vader is toying with his general, opening and closing the clamshell every time the general tries to speak.

Thom Yorke is planning on realeasing Harrowdown Hill from his recent album The Eraser as a single this month and to help promote it the video has been put on You Tube. From the Pitchfork writeup:

“The number, named after the Oxfordshire location where the body of scientist Dr. David Kelly was discovered in 2003, is teamed with an eerily beautiful video that zones in on bird imagery (including bird’s eye views of both the countryside and city) and hazy war/riot footage. In a particularly interesting scene (”It was a slippery, slippery, slippery slope. I feel me slipping in an out of consciousness”), Yorke dives underwater, releasing air and letting go in an implied drowning.”