Category: hardware

08/24/2005

Well, tomorrow, we’re planning to head off to the San Diego area to visit relatives. This means tomorrow is baby-on-the-plane-in-our-laps day. Hopefully we can get through that without headaches. 🙂 We’ll be returning by September 1st.

I think it’s amusing how discussion sites like slashdot (and even myself) said, “nobody will buy DRM.” (encrypted music files) Yet, teenagers are buying itunes in droves. “Nobody will buy overpriced Sony UMD movies for PSP when it’s such a ripoff.” These are also selling well enough for Sony to release a lot more. I agree with the silliness of these formats, but I think savvy nerds underestimate general consumer ignorance. Sure, some minority of nerds are going to insist on open formats. Savvy Nerd wants to freely copy mp3s and videos between several computers without restrictions or any special itunes program. But Jane Teenager just wants to easily get a 3 Doors Down single on her ipod and doesn’t care if it’s all locked up in DRM. Jane Teenager outnumbers Savvy Nerd by far. Guess whose money companies will listen to? At this rate, with more evil cooperation on the hardware side, I wonder if proprietary DRM formats might eventually win. I mean, they’re even going to lock down monitors and TVs at the hardware level! We’re getting beyond the days of just encasing a chip in epoxy so the customer can’t look at it. Companies are getting better at locking up their stuff, trying to get from a platform of selling things for a one-time fee to a platform of selling subscriptions for continual fees. There is growing proof that the majority of customers just don’t care. 🙁

I was just chatting with my cousin about the “cloneburbs” in the US. All new housing developments around the US are being built in the same way. He told me he’s getting a new house in San Antonio. I asked him, “Home Depot or Lowes and Target or Walmart nearby? Minor architectural differences between one house and the next?” “Yeah, somewhat.” There’s also usually a community center nearby with a park and gym. I think it’s funny that I can look at my neighborhood in Albuquerque and predict what a new suburb in Idaho will look like. Sure, they’ll use wood instead of stucco and grass instead of gravel, but that’s about the only difference.

A couple of flash apps to make a custom Lego head or Lego body.

03/25/2005

Here, have a sweet mp3. Ratatat – Seventeen Years

It’s the music video to The Bees – Chicken Payback in streaming Windows Media or Real Video. Best music video I’ve seen in a while.

So, on the Sony PSP couldn’t they have let you open a simple text file from the memory card? Is that too much to ask? Maybe Sony would let you do it if all you could put in the text file is “I love Sony”. I really hope someone eventually hacks the machine to run executables from the memory card. Of course, Sony would hate the idea. I love seeing proprietary stuff fixed to run the way the consumer wants it to.

Last night, it was round 3 in gramma Peny’s Scrabble Champeenship. Amazingly, I actually won. My first word was rigatoni which got rid of all my letters and gave me a 50 point bonus. Part of the game feels like luck, though. I mean, I sometimes wonder if expert players could still win if they were drawing all vowels like we were the other night. I just found a Scrabble page with a dictionary and even a cheat field to offer suggestions when you tell it what letters you have. This page has a text file of scrabble words that would probably serve as a dictionary. Good to put on a PDA.

11/23/2004

Vanessa points me to this sweet t-shirt.

Hmm, Second Life is only a $10 initial fee. And they have a free one-week trial. I’ll have to look into that.

Here, sing along. DO IT!

The padding in our Ignition DDR pad is beginning to bunch up where we can’t get to it. I guess this is what happens to electronics when you stomp on them. With all we’ve spent replacing pads, we should have got one of these. But $360 for 1 after shipping. youch.

Why are videogame cartridges measured in megabits? I can’t get behind that!

1/20/2004

Looks like they installed free wireless internet access at Civic Plaza here in Albuquerque. Wow, our first free hot spot.

6 Music says The Cure and Kraftwerk will be at Coachella this year. Kraftwerk…wow…they never show up anywhere that I know of.

We solved our last internet problem. It was a bit embarrassing. I called up Comcast and they helped me determine that my cable modem was turned off and I needed to push the power button. A real duh moment.

Hmm, I really haven’t been getting outside much. It often seems to be this way in the winter. Just too cold to do much outside. Maybe I just shouldn’t be such a wimp. Ah well, I still try to exercise indoors with DDR and now eyetoy. My kung foo is improving. It’s a game you play with a camera on the Playstation 2. I can defend myself quite well from dim sum being tossed at me.

1/27/2002

Today’s Dilbert explains why I once took a Sega Nomad into the mountains with me.

We went to CompUSA yesterday. There we saw Apple’s 23 inch 3500 flat screen monitor. It’s a beautiful thing if you happen to have 3500 lying around. You can get a nice big HDTV for that much! Anyway, you can use it on a PC with a 150 adapter and a videocard that outputs DVI. Funny how Apple is so careful never to mention the words “Windows” or “PC” on their hardware pages even though PC owners probably account for a lot of the purchases of these monitors.

Co-worker went to hybrid rocket launch in Rio Rancho this weekend. He had heard about some people using a special parafin to burn as fuel in the rocket. He tried candle wax. Here is the result. It looks like the three engines didn’t cut in properly. The one with candle wax probably just clogged or something. The rocket ended up pointing at the crowd and not having ejected the parachute yet. Zoiks! Anyway, it ejected into the dirt and nobody got hurt.

The computer parts I ordered were delivered Friday. The Fedex website said they were delivered but it wasn’t on our porch. We got a call at 10 from someone at the same address on a different street that had our package on their porch. We went over and got it and I put it together Friday night. Cheapest parts money can buy. I sliced my finger on the case at one point. I didn’t even bother with a floppy drive ’cause I never use them. Anyway, so far, so good. Haven’t gotten to try any games yet. We’ll see if it freezes up or rides smoothly. This page was deleted accidentally.
Fortunately, I had it in my cache at work. Yay for cache!

We went biking in the foothills one day and hiking with the dog there the next. You can go to the
end of many Albuquerque streets leading up to the mountains and find a place to park and then hike the trails…very convenient.

5/23/2001

A while back I bought a $120 mouse from cyberrebate.com. The idea was that they sell you items inflated by 10 times and then 3 months later, they send you a rebate for the full amount so you get it for free. Well, now they’re bankrupt and I probably won’t get the rebate. Don’t I feel sheepish. With all my warning people about pyramid schemes and urban legends, I fall for this. I would laugh at me if I were you.

Gameboy Advance comes out June 11th and I think that’d be cool. Very light-weight and has low power consumption. I thought I had the ideal “portable” game machine with my Sega Nomad…until I finally realized that it’s pretty impractical to try to hold up a couple of pounds of console and batteries for very long before losing circulation or hurting your wrists. The Nomad is probably the heaviest “handheld” ever and had horrible battery life. The Gameboy Advance is only 5 ounces…almost pocketable and supposedly has a battery life of 12 hours or more.