Category Archives: Geek

Another toy for my wish list

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Finger DrumsSince I’ve spent all my saved pennies on my most recent “toy” I’ll have to refrain from getting this at least for now. This would be a great addition to my desk at work and I’m sure there are many who would visit just for a quick solo. There are also plenty of opportunities for a well-placed rim-shot, too.

Click on the image to the right to go to ThinkGeek. They even have a movie showing it in use.

Update:When I was young, I visited my grandparents house and discovered a drum set in the garage that used to be my uncle’s. In the process of making a play for them, my uncle got a renewed interest in the hobby and decided to dust them off for himself. I remember being disappointed but I can’t hold it against him. My parents saw this post and decided to order the Finger Drums for me which showed up last Friday. They’re in my office at work. Not the same as a full set, but the do take up a lot less space. Thanks Mom & Dad!

A lot of geek in a small package

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Through the generous donation of time from my dear friend, Kristin, I was able to purchase an iPhone this past Saturday morning. I have to say that I’m quite pleased. Sure, I could have stuck with my current phone, but the fact is that the commercials are accurate. The device works as they say it does. I truly have a full web browser, functional email, impressive iPod, and a functional PIM all about the size of a deck of cards. I am still getting accustomed to how everything works and there are some minor nitpicks, but I think I will be quite pleased for the foreseable future.

Confused about Kristin’s involvement? Well, since the iPhone was released just over a week ago, supplies have been somewhat limited. Apple was kind enough to identify every night which of their retail stores will have some in the morning. Since the only reasonably close Apple stores are in San Diego (UTC and Fashion Valley), Kristin offered to get there early in case supplies are limited as she lives much closer. I argued with her that such an offer was unnecessary but since she insisted that she would enjoy the time away from the house to read, it would have been rude of me to decline.

All-in-all, I have a cool gadget and an even cooler friend.

Very sexy storage option

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Even if you’re not in I.T. I’m sure you realize that having all your important data on a single drive is risky and the way data has a tendency to grow, you never have enough storage.

I recently found out about Drobo which is being touted as the world’s first storage robot. Kinda silly tag line, but the demo is extremely impressive. It’s a four disk enclosure that connects to your system (Windows or Mac) via USB and provides a very flexible and resilient storage volume for all your data. It doesn’t come with any drives but they will accept any SATA drive of any size and will automatically grow the volume and replicate the data while the system still runs. If a drive fails, just pull it out and replace it with one of equal or more size and it will rebuild the array and grow the volume, if possible.

If you watch the demo movie, you’ll get a much better idea of how it works. The downside is that the unit is $499 with no drives. I’ll have to think about it, but may have to start saving pennies.

A better browser for your cell phone

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While I wait for the upcoming iPhone, which I am likely (but not definitely) getting, I have been playing with implementing similar functionality in my existing phone. I’ve previously written about it if you want some details.

Opera Software has released a new beta of their very impressive Opera Mini. This new beta adds a full page view scaled to the phone’s display. No longer do you have to view web pages in a very tweaked format. You can scroll around and zoom in on any part of the page to read the content. It’s also quite fast.

It’s free and supports most cell phones that support most cell phones. Here’s a list of supported models.

Waiting for the iPhone

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As an admitted Apple fan, I, like many, am waiting for next month’s release of Apple’s iPhone. Since I have some concerns about the features, contract requirements, and price, I’m not certain that I will be getting one, but it is certainly a possibility. I’ll have to see what the initial reviews are and see if I can get my hands on one for

While I’ve been waiting, I decided to see how capable my current phone is. Surprisingly, quite a bit. I have a Sony Ericsson S710a which I got about two years ago and only used it for voice as I never saw the need for paying for a data plan and would rather call someone than “text” them.

The goals I was shooting for was to as closely emulate my “Internet presence” that I can obtain on my computer via my phone. That includes having a respectable browser, access to my mail server (via imap), and IM (AIM or Google Talk) availability.

The first step was to add data to my wireless service. AT&T (formerly Cingular Wireles, formerly AT&T Wireless) has a MediaMAX 200 service which includes unlimited gprs/EDGE data and 200 sms messages a month for $19.99. Not too bad and I’m surely going to get my money’s worth this first month. I can scale it back later if I will be using less.

Next, the browser. Opera Mini is a free java browser by Opera Software. It’s a decent browser and while I kinda wish it rendered the full page rather than thinning down the page for display, it is probably the better way to go to improve speed and reduce the amount of data transferred.

Email support also worked out. The built-in email program supports imap and even can do SSL (encrypted) connections. The only down-side was that server certificates have to be smaller and the 4096 bit cert I got from CAcert for my imap server couldn’t be imported into my phone so I ended up generating a 1024 bit self-signed cert which did work. After importing, the phone can see my inbox and can even check mail on a schedule, but I’ll keep that disabled.

Lastly is instant messaging. The phone has an AIM client built in and while it looks reasonable, I don’t like it and am trying to find a Java client that supports Jabber (Google Talk) as well as AIM and uses the data network rather than SMS messages (which is metered with the current plan).

I think I still will end up getting an iPhone but I certainly am having fun seeing how functional a device that I used to just take and make calls on can be.

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And it’s not even my birthday

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I’ve been a long time listener to the Geek News Central podcast and to celebrate his recent 250th episode, he asked 10 listeners to call in for a very special gift box. Due to my ever-so-early 5:00 AM drive in to work, it wasn’t hard for me to leave him a quick voicemail. I don’t know if I was the first, but I was one of the ten as he announced my name the following episode.

Fast forward today and I was the happy recipient of quite a nice hand-crafted box of very thoughtful and Hawaii-oriented items:

A gift box from Geek News Central

From left to right. Back row: Lion Coffee catalog and 7 oz of Fancy Roasted Coffee, Hawaiian Host Chocolate Covered Macadamia Nuts, a Tiki Candle (“Ku” the god of war), a good luck cat (inscription “Ten Million” for much wealth). Front row: Aloha Bottle Jacket, blubrry sticker and stress ball, a PodcastConnect.com pen, and a note card. Not pictured: A teak napkin holder.

The card reads:

Geek News Central Ohana

Congratulations on winning a gift box on my 250th show. I apologize for this taking so long but we have been crazy busy. I appreciate your support of the show, and hope that you enjoy the selection of goodies that my lovely wife picked out. Each box was a little different as we picked stuff up piece meal.

Thanks again for being such a great supporter of the show.

–Todd

It was a very generous gift and I really appreaciate the effort and expense. Give his show a listen, it really is a fun podcast.

Can the PS3 save humanity?

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Folding@Home PS3 screenshotO.k. that title is a bit over the top, though it is interesting and possible with recent developments. Stanford University has since 2000 been sponsoring a distributed processing project called Folding@Home who’s goal is “to understand protein folding, misfolding, and related diseases.” A recent update to the firmware of the Playstation 3 added a Folding@Home client which has been optimized to take advantage of the multi-core cell processor present in the console. Since that processor was designed for extreme math performance, it was a smart idea to make use of it.

The results are impressive. When I looked this morning at the OS Stats page, the PS3 represented only 16% of the active CPUs but have produced 65% of the recent output. It takes about 63 PS3 (and their 7-8 cores) to produce a TFLOP (teraflop) of computing power compared to 1048 Windows-based PCs to produce the same results.

I look forward to seeing the long-term benefits from all of the additional power.

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Just a quick test of IMified

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I just got set up with IMified which is an interesting IM bot that can be used for notes, reminders and, in this case, blog entries from any IM client that you have access to (in this case iChat from my Mac at work). I’ve just started using it, but it may be a pretty nice way for me to make some quick blog entries. If you are interested in checking it out, just IM IMified (AIM) or imified@gmail.com (Google Talk/Jabber), or go to http://imified.com.

How to get your DVDs ripped for your iPod

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One side project that I’ve been working on for about a week is ripping my catalog of DVDs for use on my iPod and the recently built Mac Mini media center. The iPod has supported video for about 18 months now and I have a video iPod but up until recently, the resolution of the video had to be 320×240 (or 480×480 in some situations). That resolution, while decent on the small iPod screen, isn’t respectable enough for TV playback and that was a pre-requisite for ripping my DVDs. I don’t have enough desire to watch videos only on my iPod to rip my DVDs once for it and then have a second copy for TV playback.

When Apple started selling download-able movies from the iTunes Music Store (iTMS) they made them available at 640×480 and released a firmware update for the video iPod that supported that resolution. For the unfamiliar, that is the effective resolution of NTSC (analog TV) video.

A popular program for ripping DVDs for iPod/computer/Sony PSP use is HandBrake. There are many programs to convert video for iPod use (including iTunes itself), but HandBrake can convert encrypted (read commercial) DVDs that represent most first-run store-bought DVDs.

The original HandBrake program has more-or-less been abandoned by the original author but has been picked up volunteers who have recently added full 640×480 resolution encoding (currently in beta form) and have renamed it MediaFork.

As a disclaimer I have to state that circumventing the encryption on a DVD is currently against the law. Personally, I feel that my use falls logically under fair use as I am doing this for my personal use only on DVDs that I have already bought and paid for. I don’t see why I must spend another $15 to get a lesser quality copy of a DVD I own just to have it on my iPod.

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