Gizmodo can suck my balls with all their netbook hate, but at least they pointed me at this recent little development: Nvidia’s planning to add in a new graphics processor to Atom-powered netbooks (like my lovely little Asus Eee 1000H, teh Shiny) that will increase graphics speed by 5x, and allow full 1080p video playback. They’re calling the upcoming platform Ion, and I for one can hardly wait.
Gizmodo’s protestations about netbook’s suckiness aside, I’m quite happy with my little Eee. With the 10″ screen and weighing barely 3 lbs., it’s the perfect balance between a full notebook and a PDA for me. I can (and do) take it nearly anywhere. It’s powerful enough for web surfing, blogging, managing music and pictures, and even light gaming. Hell, I play WoW with the full WoTLK expansion) on it just fine. The Atom processor is flexible, and just powerful enough for my needs. No, I can’t play Call of Duty 4 on it. I wouldn’t want to. But for my uses: portability, power, and battery life are perfect. Sorry the netbook format isn’t for you, Gizmodo writer, but, honestly, keep the venom stored up for a product that deserves it. I’m the target market for this thing, and I *love* it.
And next year, when I can buy this same netbook with a slightly faster Atom and NVidia’s Ion for under $500? I’ll be first in line. Have to start planning my stickers for that one already, I think. Read the rest of this entry »
Sorry, as always, about the delay in between posts. And this one will be short, too. I just acquired a 16GB iPod Touch, and have spent the last few days in a happy haze of technolust. The new iTouch is now officially jailbroken (only 74 easy steps!) which means I can run 3rd party apps on it, access the filesystem, do anything I want with it, really. I’ll see about posting up some pics of it to the Flickr stream later. I also installed a couple od iPhone/Touch friendly plugins to this blog, so when anyone browses it from their mobile device, they automatically get a much nicer interface than the usual one, more suited to the mobile browser. Perhaps more importantly for me, I also installed an iPhone friendly interface for the admin side too. In fact, I’m writing this post on it now! More news (cause I know you all care so very much) as it develops.
So, I’ve always wanted to be more of a DIY sorta guy, but working with power tools and such never quite appealed to me. I never really felt the lure of the power tool section at Sears. But I always wanted to be able to have something in my hands and be able to say: “Look! I made this!” It’s a wonder I never turned to electronics before.
Recently, Dethroner dedicated a week to the wonders of electronics, specifically the DIY kind, and they invited Aaron Dunlap, of Electroids fame, to co-host the week. The whole thing inspired me to actually get around to ordering one of the $10 9V USB Charger kits from his site, and the parts arrived not too long ago. Of course, the kit only includes the basic stuff: the battery snap, the USB connector, an LED light, a resistor, a 9V-to-5V IC, and that’s about it. You supply your own solder, soldering iron, electrical tape, battery, and, of course, Altoids tin. So, for those of you thinking of taking this on as your first electronics project, and telling yourself it’s worth it ’cause it’s so cheap: you’re going to end up going to Radio Shack and spending ~$100 on additional parts, including the solder, hookup cable, soldering iron (stay away from those ColdHeat irons, they suck), electrical tape, and, if you’re like me, a little Dremel tool for poking holes in the Altoids tin. However, look on the bright side: by the time you’re done buying all that extra stuff, you’re well-equiped to handle other electronics projects, and I can assure you that once you finish your first one, and get the ‘OMG, I made something that works!’ high, you’ll definitely want to make more.
So, over the past couple of days, I’ve been cursing my lack of soldering skills, and slowly trying to avoid burning myself (or frying the components) while soldering wires and resistors and stuff… but it has been worth it:
Behold! My very own Electroids charger, fully working, and charging up Glitch. It’s a thing of beauty! And I can say with pride: I made this.
So, I am officially on a full-on, hot and heavy Doctor Who kick. I’ve watched Christopher Eccleston’s 2005 season as the Doctor. I’ve watched David Tennant’s 2006 season as the Doctor. I squealed with childish glee at seeing Eccleston in Heroes. I’ve watched the entire season of Torchwood, and loved every second. I bawled like a big, blubbering baby while watching Doomsday. I hopped up and down on my seat and went all ‘OMG Daleks!’ when I saw.. well, I won’t spoil it for you. But there are Daleks. Woo! And, of course, I’ve been catching whatever older episodes I can get my greasy mitts on.
And so, on that note, I want you all to pull your money together and buy me this:
So, I’m currently downloading the 3.6 GB DVD image for Windows Vista RC1, the latest preview of MS’s new operating system, due out sometime in the far flung future. Why? Well, I recently did a major upgrade on my PC. New motherboard, Athlon 64 3.2 Ghz processor, a Gig of DDR400 RAM, 250 GB HDD, 256MB Geforce 6200 video card… and I still know that these components are outdated. Why, the video card is AGP, not PCI-E!
But still, the computer should be able to run Vista well enough, I hope, and you know me, I like living on the bleeding edge. Dunno if I’m just going to install it over the version of Windows I have now (a hacked version of XP called 2FastXP), or, you know, go for some sort of dual-boot dealie. I’ll figure it out once the download is done and burned. So, in a few days, expect a short review of what I think of Microsoft’s latest and greatest. Woot.
So, among the gifts I got myself for my birthday this past month, were a shiny, pretty, gorgeous, sexy little Nintendo DS Lite. The precious. And, let’s avoid any PSP/DS debates here, okay? My choices were between barely affording a PSP, with no games (plus, no real games that interest me), no extra memory card, no nothing, or buying a DS, plus 3 games (Animal Crossing: Wild World, New Super Mario Brothers, and Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney), plus screen protectors, extra accesories, and lots of neat other things. Not to mention that if I want to watch movies on the go, or listen to music, I already have Glitch and the iPod.
So, anyway, one of the games I have for the DS is Animal Crossing: Wild World. If you own it already, then you know that you can visit other folks’ towns using the DS’ built-in WiFi. So, this is my open invite to my blog readers: come, visit L33tTown! If you’ve got a DS, the game, and access to a WiFi connection, just leave me a note in the comments below on a good time for me to leave my gates open, and you can drop right in. I’ve got all the fruits already (thanks, Penguin and Absu!), so if you don’t have them all yet, now’s your chance. Here’s the info:
Name: Katsu
Town Name: L33tTown
Friend Code: 4982-9443-3335
Fruits: All of them! Woot!
So, what’s better than a still screenshot of the XGL/Compiz eye-candy running on my linux desktop? Why, a video, of course! I finally figured out how to record desktop movies using VLC, so I recorded this short (about 28 seconds) video of some of the neat visual effects, such as the bendy windows, Multiple desktops on different faces of a cube, transparency, videos continuing to play whie being moved and bended, Expose-like effects, and more. Can your Windows or Mac desktop do this?
This is fair warning: in two weeks, it will be impossible to view this site using Internet Explorer. Hell, if you’re using IE now, you probably already noticed a bar along the top of your screen letting you know that you really should upgrade to Firefox. If you haven’t done so yet, seriously, what the hell are you waiting for? In any case, this is my personal site, and I can block IE if I want to, so I will. In two weeks, that banner at the top will morph into a full-page “Sorry, you suck, go switch browsers before I let you in.” deadbolt. Enjoy!
Finally got XGL/Compiz installed and running on my Kubuntu Dapper Drake desktop, and it is amazing! Neither MS nor Apple has anything out right now that comes close to this. Vista will supposedly bring some of the things in Compiz, but that’s still a year away, and will require special locked hardware. Meanwhile, I have it today, on a free, open source platform. Hurrah! (And, yes, that video in the middle is *actually* playing, on the border of the cube, as I move it around.) Click here to see a YouTube video showing off what this all looks like in action
Finally, technology used for something actually useful: putting a real head on a can of Guiness:
Costs about $30, and is, of course, not available anywhere near to where you live, but damn do I want one. I mean, look at the video on their site and you’ll see how insanely cool this is: a device that uses ultrasonic waves for one thing and one thing only: putting a real head on a pint of can-poured Guiness. Brilliant! Read the rest of this entry »
So, Google Calendar is finally out. Now, I’m a bit of a Google fanboy, but I checked out the Calendar and was nonplussed. I’ve been using Kiko for a while now, and it does everything Google Calendar currently does, in a nicer interface (at least in my opinion). iCal import and RSS subscription, flexible AJAX-y interface, etc. But the appointment creation interface is niftier to me: I can just write ‘Fill out reports’ and then add in catgories, locations, and contact invitations later as in the Google version, or I can write:
Fill Out Reports @Office +bob@mywork.com [Work]
And Kiko knows what to do, creates my appointment and sets the Location as ‘Office’, the category as ‘Work’, and invites Bob via email, with no extra clciking or form filling on my end. Also, I can create an appointment and write ‘Pay Phone Bill Every Month’, or ‘Call Accountant Every Week’ and it does the Right Thing and creates automatically repeating appointments with no extra work on my part.
It can also send appointment reminders via email, IM (AOL only at this point), or even SMS, which is handy as heck when I’m out of the office. Calendar sharing with contacts or the public at large is dead easy too.
Plus, there’s more features, such as syncing, coming. If you like Google Calendar, do yourself a favor and check out Kiko. It’s free too and I, at least, like it a lot better right now. (And, no I don’t work for them, but I have corresponded with a couple of the Kiko folks over email, and they are *very* responsive, quick, and nice, so I’m rooting for them. )
Update: played around a bit further with Google Calendar, and looks like it actually does a lot fo the same stuff as Kiko, including SMS reminders, natural language appointment creation, etc. Still prefer the Kiko interface, though. Still, the Kiko folks have their work cut out ofr them now to differentiate and add in new features, because I’m sure a lot of folks who discover GoogleCal first will erronously see Kiko as a ‘me-too’ if they compare features. This ought to be interesting. Read the rest of this entry »
Behold the ultra-blurry phonecam video! But that’s okay, it’s not the video that matters.. it’s the audio. Turn up the volume to hear the dulcet tones of Mr. Samuel L. Jackson letting us all know what he thinks about those motherfucking snakes on his motherfucking plane. Read the rest of this entry »
After much soul-searching, I’ve decided to finally dump Google as my official search engine, and move completely over to MSN Search as my day-to-day search thingy. Let’s face it, Google’s cool and all, but they just don’t have the kind of resources to dedicate to this sort of thing that a mega-corp like Microsoft does. MSN Search has better search results, plain and simple. But you don’t have to take my word for it, click here to see the results for an MSN search on my name, and you’ll see what I mean: MSN Search for: Daniel Rodriguez. Read the rest of this entry »
Anyone out there on AIM? I know that most of the folks I interact with are on MSN and know me there as fourthfate@hotmail.com (yeah, I already get a butload of spam at that address, another extra helping won’t kill me), a few more of you know me as 9616049 on ICQ, and a couple more know me as fourthfate on Yahoo. I’m also Katsushiro on GTalk. But I’ve a feeling none of you know me as Katsu42 on AIM. And now, the none of you that are on AIM, can talk to an electronic version of me there: KatsuBot! Just send a message to KatsuBot on AIM and he’ll respond; he’s a little quirky, as you’ll probably notice, but that’s not so different from the real me. He also has a few useful functions, such as weather and theater listings, just send the word ‘help’ to the KatsuBot and he’ll let you know what he can do. I’m also working on adding a few more functions, with time, such as listing the latest postings on the Techgnosisweb Blog Empire memeber blogs, for the future. As for the rest: I’m looking for a good MSN bot program, I’ll be sure to post up here when KatsuBot for MSN becomes available. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s no secret that Second Life, the virtual world where all the cool kids hang out(warning, link requires Second Life software and account installed to work!), is home to many wonders, incredible places, bizarre creations and fascinating flights of fancy. It’s also home to a bevy of digital prostitutes, selling their time and avatars in exchange for L$. Some do little more than provide the typical chat-room cybersex you can find on IRC, while others go all out and trick out their avatars with clickable nipples, detailed sexual animations, extremely lifelike skins, and even sounds. Now, one guy has gotten it into his head to rate and review these online hookers: Second Life Escort Ratings. Totally NSFW, but it’s worth a visit and a read, there’s something inherently fascinating about this, and one gets the feeling that he’s actually looking for something specific, not just rating them to rate them. Read the rest of this entry »
So, for the longest time I’ve had a dickens of a time getting a good night’s sleep. You see, since I live in a tropical island, the nights can get pretty balmy, and often, a plain old fan won’t cut it. So, not that long ago, we put in an air conditioner in the bedroom. This has generally been a Good Thing ™. However, air conditioners have a certain side effect, besides just cooling the air: they tend to dry it out. This was ok at first, but as time passed, I noticed that I was constantly getting up with my nose and mouth bone dry, and my throat feeling scratchy and uncomfortable. This has progressed to the point where it’s difficult for me to get a good nights sleep, due to having difficulty breathing the excessively dry air. So, tonight, I finally broke down, drove by Walgreens, and plunked down a couple bucks for a little humidifier unit. Cleaned it out, filled it up, plugged it in, and it’s sitting in a corner right now, happily humming and gurgling to itself and spewing out a little cloud of cool moisture into the air. On the other side of the room, the air conditioner emits its own, slightly more ominous hum, as it brings the room temperature down to the high 60’s, which is perfect sleeping temperature as far as I’m concerned. I’m hoping that between the humidifier spewing out moisture, and the AC sucking it in, we can achieve some sort of happy medium that will allow me to actually get some decent sleep again. And if that doesn’t work.. well, surely there’s *some* gizmo or gadget that will save me, no? technology, in thee I place my faith.
Tomorrow: the aftermath of my doctor’s visit, and my upcoming transformation into a superhero. Read the rest of this entry »
Over the past month, or so, I’ve been working on a Super Double S33kr1t project for a friend of mine. Without going into too many details, it’s a web-based management application for a new business he’s starting up. We decided to make it web-based so that he could connect to it from anywhere and see how his business is doing. However, since the application will also be used locally at the business, I wanted to approximate the speed and responsiveness of a local app. So I’ve finally dipped my feet into AJAX, also known by the much less sexy name XMLHTTPRequest.
Ajax stands for ‘Asynchronous Javascript and XML‘, or something along those lines. Point is, up until last week or so, before I started working on the actual application coding, I knew nothing about it other than that it existed, and that everyone was all worked up over it for some reason. Don’t get me wrong, I thought AJAX was pretty darn nifty: it allows parts of a webpage to be manipulated and comunicate with a database without having to reload the entire page for every little change, which enables a lot of really cool effects and the ability to write web apps that can be just about as responsive as one running locally. But I wasn’t exactly chomping at the bit to master it, either. The vast majority of my coding these days is in Visual Basic (and that’s VB6, not VB.NET, even) for maintaining old legacy apps for our clients. And when I do any web coding, it’s almost invariably in ASP rather than PHP (although AJAX can be used easily in each one). But, still, not environments that really lend themselves well to experimenting with new things.
Then this new project dropped into my lap, and I decided to take a chance on it and see if this AJAX stuff is all it’s cracked up to be. I didn’t actually get to the web programming until this past week; up until this point I was mostly doing database work. The application keeps track of a fairly large number of interrelated variables, with a lot of things tied together in ways that aren’t always obvious. We’re not talking about an app to organize your CD collection here. Therefore, figuring out how to properly structure the data into different tables, how and where to tie tables into one another, and documenting what I was doing so I wouldn’t be completely lost later when I started crafting up the SQL statements for reports and lists, is very, very important. I’ve learned from experience that a properly structured database at the begginging can save you, literally, weeks of coding effort later on, especially if any changes are requested to the application. Adding or substracting even a single field from a badly designed database can mean having to go through the entire project codebase later on to make sure everything still works. To top it all off, I’ve been working on this app only during my spae time, which, as you may have gathered from my last post, is at a premium these days. So, it took me several weeks and a couple of grudging ‘back-to-the-drawing-board’ moments, but I finally got a workable database in place early last week. Now it’s time for some AJAX.
I suppose that deciding to learn a new programming technique by using it in a huge application may not be the smartest move I’ve ever done, but, luckily, I already knew a lot of the basics behind the core AJAX concept: instead of passing variables and receiving responses and reloading the entire page to display those reponses, I pass the variables over to the little AJAX object, it passes them on to the main script, receives the reponse, and updates just the parts of the page that need updating, without having to reload the whole damn thing. Nifty. Unfortunately, I’d become a bit rusty in my javascript skills, which led to a few false starts and stupid mistakes at first. However, I think I’m getting the hang of it now, and I already have a couple of the main program screens working at about 70% capacity. I’ve also been trying a few things I didn’t think we’re possible in web-based apps before, and I’m liking what I’m seeing.
The application itself if about 10-15% done, overall, but I really expect that number to go up rapidly now that I’ve gotten the hang of this. Plus, the fact that new code ideas keep popping up, means that I’m more willing to spend more of my leisure time on this than I was before, which should also accelerate the final development of the app. And, as a side-bonus, once I’m done with this, I can proudly put on my resume that I am proficient in AJAX coding, and will even have an app I can point at to prove it. Read the rest of this entry »
for that one already, I think.
Entries (RSS)