May 24, 2007 by dragon_788.

Its the Optimus Maximus. I read about these a while back and when they were estimating a street price of $200 and I was all for it. Even $300 wouldn’t have seemed absurd, but $1564.37? That’s outta my league unless I start a business and write it off for taxes.

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May 24, 2007 by dragon_788.

In an interesting and environmentally friendly move Dell is apparently selling trees to offset the pollution caused by the production of electricity to power their products.

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May 24, 2007 by dragon_788.

I haven’t tried it myself yet, and the writer of the original article apparently hasn’t either, but I know a few people that probably wouldn’t die if they didn’t see the light of X for 24 hours. Do you think you could be productive without a full and rich GUI? Judging from this article I think I could make an attempt, although I might miss some of the annoying ads when browsing the web.

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May 24, 2007 by dragon_788.

Trolling Digg today I found a nifty little hardware article. Apparently some students at WPI have created a mouse that’s worn on your finger. It works similarly to GPS by using multiple receivers to track the position of the mouse on your finger. Check out the full article here.

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May 24, 2007 by dragon_788.

Judging from this article just because its free doesn’t always make it better.

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May 23, 2007 by dragon_788.

Recently, discussions between Beryl and Compiz have led to an agreement to merge the two projects. “This project, going by the temporary name of “Composite Community”, will be based on the latest Compiz core and will provide the ‘best’ plugins, decorators, settings tools, and related applications from each community.”^{[1][2][3] (from wikipedia)}

As of March 30th Beryl and Compiz have decided to merge their projects back into one. Much work has yet to be done, but the beryl forums are no longer active as the project is being shutdown in favor a new merged project. The Compiz team has decided to work with the Beryl team and implement many of the changes beryl made ^[9]. (again wikipedia)

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May 23, 2007 by dragon_788.

If you don’t think you would have a desire for either one then you can stop reading now, if you are curious you can read on.

While browsing the net the other day at work for alternative operating systems to install in VMware I ran across a beta version of a Windows installer for Debian. I’ve used Debian in the past and its a decent distro of Linux, very stable and well suited for web/file serving, its also the base for Ubuntu. I tried this installer out and it didn’t work very well, it ended up having some issues part way through the install because it wanted part of the hard drive partitioned for itself. Since this is a work computer I didn’t want to take that leap, then I read about Wubi. Wubi is a Windows based installer for Ubuntu, its not officially supported by the folks at Ubuntu but its making good headway and those who have tried it are almost all fans it seems. My last brush with Ubuntu was Kubuntu and it really didn’t impress me, it seemed so dumbed down that it made me feel stupid looking at it, then I installed MEPIS on the machine to try and access some storage arrays that needed a software that I couldn’t seem to access with Kubuntu.

Anyways, so I grabbed the Wubi installer, it only weighs in at 10Mb so it wasn’t too hard on the poor T1 at work. I ran it and got a registry error, but clicking OK a few times gets past that (I think the virus scanner at work was being overzealous). You choose which version of Ubuntu you want (Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Xubuntu) enter your username and desired password and then it starts downloading the latest ubuntu ISO (7.04). This took me a couple days because I didn’t want to tie up and bog down the internet for the rest of the office but I’ve heard on a good line it can take as little as 45 minutes. After it gets it all downloaded it lays out the directory where Wubi will be installed.

After the reboot you can choose Ubuntu from the boot options menu and this continues the installer. It then extracts the CD contents and makes a virtual partition to install Ubuntu in and copies all the files to it. A short while later it finishes and you can now reboot into your new Ubuntu install. Log in and if you are connected to the internet Ubuntu should tell you there are some updates available. You can grab them since they are probably security/stability updates, after that feel free to explore as its a full and complete Ubuntu install, you can add/remove programs using the shortcut on the menu. And that’s it, you got a full Linux distribution sitting beside your Windows data without partitioning or messing with any of your files, if you are working in Ubuntu and need to open something from your Windows drive its fully accessible since there is an NTFS driver preinstalled in Wubi’s Ubuntu.

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May 22, 2007 by dragon_788.

Look no further than Fog Creek Copilot. This software allows a “techie” to connect to any computer running 98 or higher or Mac OS X 10.2 or higher and assist the user in almost any task you can imagine. Their fees are very reasonable and very flexible as well, there is a pay as you go option or a one day unlimited use option. Check out their site here.

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May 18, 2007 by dragon_788.

I was listening to the radio on the drive into work today and happened to hear a commercial for Circuit City mention HD radio. I thought to myself “WTF? why do we need HD radio when there is XM and so many people are using portable music players connected to their car stereos already, or the built in mp3 playback of a lot of newer car stereos?” So I got to work and Googled “HD radio” and the first result is the official site with the second result being “What is it?” So I leave it up to you to decide whether HD radio is worth the price of a new stereo/adapter with the stations being free “as in regular radio” vs the XM receiver and a monthly fee. Just checked my search results again and it appears iBiquity is the developer, here’s what they have to say about it.

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