Archive for the 'CoolStuff' Category
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Only posts prior to April, 2006 are categorized.
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- Chessops is an excellent way to study chess openings.
Welcome to the inaugural post of my newest category: CoolStuff/Potpourri. This category will host short lists of incongruous items. Mostly link-dumpage, but also perhaps random thoughts, curious facts, and whatever else comes to mind. Possibly a precursor to a side-blog, if this category gets used too much. Without further ado….
- MattMcHugh.com has some wonderful, original short-story fiction. Reminds me of a resolution I made (Personal, #4… as yet unfulfilled).
- un:parsed is a new Blosxom blog, and a stunning demonstration of the power of simplicity. A very elegant, minimalist design. Yet another nail in the coffin of my current site layout. :)
(Via The Tao of Mac) Mail.appetizer shows a preview of new mail via a translucent window, so you can decide if you want to go check your mail right away. Sure wish they I had this for Outlook at work.
So I’m still watching Steve Jobs give his Keynote at Macworld. He just announced the iPod Mini. He stated that they are going after the “high-end ($199)” Flash-based mp3 players, which typically have 256megs of RAM (est. 60 songs). The mini will have 4 gigs of RAM memory (est. 1000 songs), will be the size of a business card, will be 1/2″ think, features the standard iPod interface, and will be compatible with the standard iPod dock. It will cost $249. Ooops.
This is one slick looking piece of hardware, and Jobs stated that $249 vs. the stated competition, i.e. $199 high-end flash players, is the best $50 you’ll ever spend. He did a nice breakdown of the market, showing that 31% is the target competition. But I still think they might have mis-calculated. For another $50, you can get least expensive full-sized iPod… which, Jobs announced, is now 15gig: (vs 10gig before) for the same $299.
Either way, they’ll be in store in Feb, and I do plan to check one out.
Oh, and they come in colors.
Update: The Tao of Mac has a nice summary of everything in the keynote.
Update 2: I may have been giving too short a shrift to the coolness factor. They are wicked cool… but if they had a 2 gig version for $149, I’d buy one for my teenage daughter, so she could use iTunes Music Store. At $249, that’s still a bit high for something a kid may lose… or drop.
Update 3: I changed “4 gig of RAM” to “4 gig of memory”, since I don’t think Jobs mentioned what kind of media is in the iPod mini. My guess is some kind of mini-drive. Flash would be too expensive.
Update 4: Confirmed - iPod mini uses hard drive storage. (via Daring Fireball)
Today is the day Mac fans have been waiting for… Steve Jobs’ Macworld Keynote. I didn’t get to jump into the streaming broadcast until an hour and 15 minutes had gone by, but I did tune it just in time to see the unveiling of the newest iLife app… GarageBand. This thing is incredible… not sure I could describe if it I tried. It goes on sale Jan 16, and I plan to be at the nearest Apple store (an hour away) that day. Hundreds of Over 50 software instruments, thousands of professionaly cut loops, instant recording, vinatge guitar amps… Incredibly cool.
I think the streaming link above will offer playbacks after it’s all over… definately check out the on-stage demo with Steve Jobs and John Mayer rockin’ out. I’ll be catching up on the hour+ I missed. When it’s done.
Sean bought the Canon Digital Rebel a couple of months ago, and has been taking some good pictures with it. He just got a new lens with macro functionality, as well as a diopter kit for image magnification. He has a review of the new equipment, which includes some great pictures. What a camera. He also has other camera stuff, and I’m sure he’ll be adding more.
Verbatim has a cool new CD-R product available - Digital Vinyl:
It’s a CD-R disc that’s made to look like a vinyl record… complete with grooves. Of course, I think they should have left some room on the ‘label’ (painted, not paper) for a description of the contents.
Simon Willison recently wrote about Knoppix. Knoppix is a complete Linux distribution on a single, bootable CD. After reading Simon’s account, I’ve been meaning to give it a whirl. Tonight I did. And am… this entry is being blogged to you from Knoppix 3.3.
I’m very impressed. Simon’s review was right on the money… it works great, right out of the box. Autodetects everything. Audio, video, USB keyboard & mouse, configured the network connection; beautiful. I love it when something Just Works™.
Since I normally run Windows 2000 on this pc, my drive contains a single NTFS partition. Knoppix has mounted it read-only. If it were FAT, I could write to it, even creating a swap partition within a file in the FAT filesystem. I’ve been planning to re-install this machine from scratch for a while; when I do you can be sure I’ll be leaving some room for (at a minimum) a nice Linux swap partition (right now, I’m running with 256K ram and no swap… nicely!). Of course, the beautiful thing here is that I’m running a totally useful Linux desktop without repartitioning my hard drive. For that matter, without any setup whatsoever. If Linux is ever to make a presence on the desktop, this is how it will happen… with a distribution that’s even easier to use that Windows.
So far, my only complaint is that it doesn’t seem to include tcsh. I really need to break down and learn to use bash, I suppose, but I’ve been using tcsh ever since college and old habbits are hard to break.
Terra Soft Solutions, creators of Yellow Dog Linux, have an incredibly cool way to fill an empty 5.25″ drive bay in your desktop pc. With a PowerPC. Meet the Briq.
Pricey, but boy oh boy do I want one. With Cygwin’s XFree86 implementation running an X server under windows, I’d never even need a display connected directly too it.
They are a bit pricey… I’d love to see a cheaper version, perhaps an X86-based box. Hmm, maybe using something like this.
As I’ve mentioned, I’m a Windows programmer by day. Yesterday, after typing “l” (my alias for ls -lF) and “cat” in a DOS windows for the 20th time in 2 minutes, I finally snapped. I went Googling for a Unix-on-windows solution. I’ve used Cygwin before, but it seemed a bit klunky and limited. Well, no more.
I didn’t find anything except reference to Cygwin. I finally decided to download it again and give it a whirl. I must say, it’s come a long way. There’s alot of good packages available now, including Python, Perl, Emacs, and XFree86… rootless, fullscreen, with external window manager, you name it. And the installer handles dependancies seemlessly.
One of my first complaints with the old cygwin was that the shell runs inside a DOS window, so you are limited to 80 columns. That still applies, but now I can run an X Server and used xterm instead. It works wonderfully… and since I can run DOS commands as well, I’ll probably retire CMD.EXE completely. I can also retire Exceed, the X server we use at work to connect to our Solaris machines. Once I got xhost configured, I can just rsh from my box to the remote system, set my DISPLAY, and go.