Archive for December, 2005

upgrades

I finally decided to do some upgrades to my computer… and aside from problems getting windows to install properly, I’m so glad I did. I basically found a great deal on an Asus A8N-E motherboard, Athlon64 3200+ (venice core) and Rosewill 6600GT video card. All told, I spent $315 and ended up saving a good 80-90 bucks. I bought it all used from two people on the forums @ anandtech. Amusingly, none of the stuff even looked remotely used so it worked out pretty well. The only thing I didn’t get in the deal with a heatsink/fan for the CPU. I just ended up going to CompUSA and getting one for $30. Compared to my old AthlonXP @ 2300Mhz, this thing is quite a bit faster and runs Need For Speed Most Wanted at a higher resolution with more details cranked up. The 6600GT is an awesome video card for those that aren’t hardcore gamers and don’t need to run games at ridiculous resolutions. If you’re happy with 1024×768, this card will be great. I don’t game all THAT much so this should do me perfectly fine.

I had a hell of a time getting windows to install properly since my boot drive is a SCSI drive on a SCSI card. Windows seems to want to make your primary master IDE device drive C regardless, which made my windows drive E or F. Completely retarded. Eventually I had to install Windows with only the SCSI drive plugged in and then plug in the two IDE drives. After setting the BIOS boot order properly and doing that, it worked fine. Just setting the SCSI drive to boot first didn’t seem to work. I had to actually have ONLY my SCSI drive connected in order for Windows to install the way I wanted. :( Lame!

off on christmas!

I think this is the first time I’ve actually been off on Christmas since I can remember. Amusingly, it really doesn’t even matter to me. Last year I got off at like 9pm or something, I think. This year it’s a Saturday so I’m off all day. I’m really hoping that SOMETHING is going to be open for food because I don’t do Christmas and thus will have a hell of a time finding something to eat. I’m sure at least some grocery stores will be open so I can get some pizza to nuke or something. I’m even going to be off New Year’s Eve, too! I think my friends and I are going to Fiction that night if all goes as planned.

just watch

Quite possibly one of the best documentaries I’ve ever seen. It’s basically a video put together to disprove the official story on 9/11. It’s an hour long, so it’s a hefty download but worth every second of it. I watched it from beginning to end and it’s quite sickening once you see the evidence put right in front of your face. Obviously all you idiot Bush supporting right-wing conservative Christians wouldn’t believe anything in here despite the fact that the evidence is much more indisputable than anything the government told us about what really happened. No matter, it’s worth watching. Too bad that at this point, it really makes no difference who was responsible for it… especially since just like JFK, we’ll never know what REALLY happened that day.

Loose Change 9-11 Alex Jones Conspiracy

finally mobile gmail access

It’s about time… Gmail is finally officially giving us access to our gmail on our mobile phones. All you have to do is go to http://m.gmail.com in your phone’s browser and login. There ya go! It works fairly well. I haven’t composed any emails with it yet but I did login and browse around my email box to see how things looked and it was pretty acceptable on my phone. It’ll even preview jpeg attatchments for you before you download them. It also includes support for word documents and even pdf files. I’m assuming it somehow translates them into wml format just like google’s search engine will allow you to view such documents as HTML. Pretty neat stuff. Here’s the blurb from their site:

It also has these cool features:
• Automatically optimizes the interface for the phone you’re using
• Opens the attachments you receive in messages, including photos, Microsoft Word documents and .pdf files
• Lets you reply by call to people whose phone numbers are in your Gmail Contacts list

Tons of flash fun

I’ve been bored at work… I found a few neat flash games tonight… one of which I’m going to post here, the other two I’ll link to.

First up, we have Bloody Penguin… the idea is to bat the penguin as far as possible. My best score so far is 996.9.

    then we have a multiplayer flash version of the old Command & Conquer game. Pretty neat shit for sure. Check it out here.

    Then we have BulletTime, where you click your left mouse button as soon as you hear the gunshot, thus making you “dodge the bullet”. Great way to test your reactions. Best I can do so far is 0.170. Not so hot. :( Here’s the link.

PEBL out soon?

Well, according to a post at Engadget the Motorola PEBL is soon to be out on T-mobile. It’s listed as “coming soon” on their website. It’s a nice phone in my opinion. Supposedly the phone is held shut by magnets and all you have to do is give it a gentle flip and it opens.. I love the way it looks, though it lacks those true geek-class features. It has bluetooth and not a whole lot else. Cheesy screen (176×220, I’d prefer 320×240), 0.3MP camera (640×480) no removable memory, only 5MB of internal memory, monochrome outer display, etc. Their site does say it’s quad band so that’s a plus. Looks like it’s a great phone for those of you out there that use your phones mostly as phones and don’t use a lot of the geek features that I’ve come to know and love. We don’t have T-mobile here anyway, so it’s mostly a moot point. Regardless, I find the phone to be quite sexy and I’m sure carrying it around would get a few looks and “wow, is that the new RAZR?” responses from people. It’s GSM and GSM isn’t all that great around here so I won’t be owning one anytime soon. No idea if Cingular will be getting it, either. Here’s a couple of pics I dug up on google’s image search…

PEBL closed
PEBL keypad

things I learned from movies

I found this list posted on another site… it’s been around the block a few times but it’s quite funny and strangely true about movies. So here goes…

Things I learned from movies (Not me dumbass)

1. If being chased through town, you can usually take cover in a passing St Patrick’s Day parade - at any time of the year.

2. All beds have special L-shaped top sheets that reach up to armpit level on a woman but only waist level on the man lying beside her.

3. All grocery shopping bags contain at least one stick of French bread.

4. Once applied, lipstick will never rub off - even while scuba diving.

5. The ventilation system of any building is a perfect hiding place. No one will ever think of looking for you in there and you can travel to any other part of the building without difficulty.

6. Should you wish to pass yourself off as a German officer, it will not be necessary to speak the language. A German accent will do.

7. The Eiffel Tower can be seen from any window of any building in Paris.

8. A man will show no pain while taking the most ferocious beating but will wince when a woman tries to clean his wounds.

9. When paying for a taxi, never look at your wallet as you take out a note - just grab one at random and hand it over. It will always be the exact fare.

10. If you lose a hand, it will cause the stump of your arm to grow by 15cm.

11. Mothers routinely cook eggs, bacon and waffles for their family every morning, even though the husband and children never have time to eat them.

12. Cars and trucks that crash will almost always burst into flames.

13. A single match will be sufficient to light up a room the size of a football stadium.

14. Medieval peasants had perfect teeth.

15. All single women have a cat.

16. Any person waking from a nightmare will sit bolt upright and pant.

17. One man shooting at 20 men has a better chance of killing them all than 20 men firing at one.

18. Creepy music coming from a graveyard should always be closely investigated.

19. Most people keep a scrapbook of newspaper cuttings - especially if any of their family or friends has died in a strange boating accident.

20. It does not matter if you are heavily outnumbered in a fight involved martial arts - your enemies will wait patiently to attack you one by one by dancing around in a threatening manner until you have knocked out their predecessor.

21. During a very emotional confrontation, instead of facing the person you are speaking to, it is customary to stand behind them and talk to their back.

22. When you turn out the light to go to bed, everything in your room will still be clearly visible, just slightly bluish.

23. Dogs always know who’s bad and will naturally bark at them.

24. When they are alone, all foreigners prefer to speak English to each other.

25. Rather than wasting bullets, megalomaniacs prefer to kill their arch-enemies using complicated machinery involving fuses, pulley systems, deadly gases, lasers and man eating sharks that will allow their captives at least 20 minutes to escape.

26. Having a job of any kind will make all fathers forget their son’s eighth birthday.

27. Many musical instruments - especially wind instruments and accordions - can be played without moving the fingers.

28. All bombs are fitted with electronic timing devices with large red readouts so you know exactly when they’re going to go off.

29. It is always possible to park directly outside the building you are visiting.

30. A detective can only solve a case once he has been suspended from duty.

31. If you decide to start dancing in the street, everyone you bump into will know all the steps.

so many frickin ads!

Ok, I understand that people have to find some way to bring in revenue to support their websites when they get larger and start developing more traffic but DAMN there are tons of ads on what seems like nearly every website I visit these days. Amusingly, I normally run Firefox 1.5 with the adblock extension so I don’t even notice them but I decided to fire up Opera 9.0 preview just for fun and that was when I realized just how pervasive they really are. I don’t really mind google’s ads too much because they’re relatively small and unobtrusive. Not only that, they’re text-based. The ones that annoy me are the huge 128×128 pixel animated advertisements. Seriously, there’s absolutely no need for such huge advertisements! I go to Pandora to listen to some music and see one of those very ads in the top right corner blasting me in the face. Normally in firefox I never see the ad so I didn’t even know it was there until just tonight. I go to Neowin to browse the forums and see a google adwords banner in the header image. I don’t mind this quite as much since it’s text-based but the way it’s aligned looks atrocious. Heck, even my favorite news site (digg) has a big honkin’ google ad banner across the top. I think the ones that annoy me most are the ones that are inline with the content I’m trying to read. Like I’m reading an article and slapped right in the middle of that sucker is a big square ad that the text is wrapped around. They’re really hard to miss and while that’s obviously the point, I find it rather annoying to say the least. Ads along the outside of the content aren’t quite as bad because I can focus my eyes on the actual article and not notice the ads off to the sides until I finish reading. Needless to say, I won’t be giving up my adblock extension for Firefox anytime soon. I understand webmasters’ reasoning for having them… doesn’t mean I like it though

Rokr E2?

Ok, the ROKR E1 was a complete fucking turd. 100 songs? Give me a break. Motorola apparently realized this and is planning to release a ROKR E2 that fixes most of the shortcomings of the E1. It also looks a ton nicer if in fact the final product ends up looking anything like the picture. From the AppleInsider article, it appears as though it’s going to connect to the PC via USB 2.0, still has iTunes but will support up to 1000 songs (that’s like 4GB so I wonder how that’s going to work!), 1MP camera, bluetooth stereo headset compatible (A2DP profile, I’m assuming) and a normal 3.5mm headphone jack instead of the stupid cellphone 2.5mm jack. I especially like the idea of using bluetooth stereo headphones instead of having wires. Just have the phone in your pocket playing tunes and headphones on without having to worry about wires. Too bad more phones don’t support it. I don’t konw of any others that do at the moment but there are a few that really should. Verizon’s Samsung A950 and Sprint’s Samsung A940 (no relation to one another) both are mp3 phones with bluetooth and have removable memory (microSD) slots but neither support streaming audio to a set of bluetooth headphones. At least the Sprint A940 comes with a set of stereo headphones, unlike all of Verizon’s mp3 phones (A950, A970 and LG VX8100). Needless to say, I’m a big fan of convergence devices since as of right now I carry both a phone and an mp3 player. My mp3 player is 6GB and I’ll probably continue to carry it around until I can get something comparable in a cellphone. Even 1GB of storage probably won’t cut it. I’m eagerly awaiting something similar to the Nokia N91 to come to America. A phone with a 4GB hard drive in it! That’s what I’m talking about! Plus it supports 802.11b/g wifi and 3G UMTS. They even thought enough to include a normal 3.5mm headphone jack, too. Hell, that sucker even has a 2MP camera! Bring that bad boy over here and I’ll be the first in line for one, that’s for sure. Granted, we’ll have to wait for UMTS service from either Cingular or T-Mobile. Sadly, it’s only 900/1800/1900 so it won’t work on all of Cingular’s networks (they use 850Mhz in many areas). Perhaps Cingular will convince Nokia to make a quad band version of the phone so they can sell it here. :) Here’s to hoping! Or at least hoping that somebody comes up with a similar device if we can’t get the N91 here specifically.

Best USB device ever

This has to be the coolest USB device ever! Seriously… it’s a USB-powered air cannon of sorts. It holds 3 missiles and you can fire them off via the mouse. I want one! Too bad the place that sells them doesn’t ship to the USA. Still it’d be hella fun to have cubicle wars with your co-workers using these things. Oh man the possibilities. They even have a 3-for-2 special going on. Someone seriously needs to export them to the US so we can buy them. Too bad thinkgeek doesn’t carry them. :(