The Rigged-Up Net

Apple’s new set of ads are great… the “Restarting” ad reminds me of the Kill Bill ad that Dirk sent me a while back…

Good stuff:

http://www.apple.com/getamac/ads/

Woah:

See how the car you own rates by the IIHS standards:

Insurance Institute for Highway Safety

(You can search for your vehicle on the left-hand sidebar)

This is a pretty cool demo of the Logitech Orbit Cam… For a $100 webcam, I think the software set is pretty amazing…

Wow… free Wifi in downtown Austin… sweet!

Right now, the network covers an area extending from Town Lake on the south to 7th Street on the north, and from Lamar Boulevard on the west to I-35 on the east.

Downtown wi-fi network goes live

Everyone is excited about this new Tivo box that came out.

YAY! Great! It has built-in ethernet! WOW! And it has dual-tuner capability – we can record TWO shows at once! Whoopie!

So Tivo finally delivers on a feature that people want, right? Dual tuners is the ultimate, right?

Wrong.

These Tivo idiots have released a box that can record two shows at the same time, however:

• The coax source MUST be analog cable TV. (no RF antennas allowed here folks)
• Only one of the sources can be an external tuner box like a cable or digital cable or sat dish box.

How lame is that?!

Why can’t you have two receiver boxes hooked up? And why can’t you use RF antennas for an input instead? (which would be great if you had DishNet or DirecTV since Tivo won’t let you have two receiver boxes!)

Bastards!

Tivo is a loser – no wonder they’re losing marketshare hand over fist. [sigh]

So yeah, the dual tuners are pretty much the only functional difference once you get the thing booted. TiVo is pretty up front about what it can tune and how: one cable box, max. Which means if your cable company only offers digital cable (like ours), you’ll only be able to use a single tuner with that single cable box. (TiVo called to let us know this thing won’t tune RF — yick.) If you have digital and analog on the same line, you should be fine recording digital and basic cable simultaneously

TiVo Series2 DT hands-on review

Every car needs one of these:

Turn the car on and watch it “SPIN”

Step on the gas and the spring loaded spinner

aggressively “POPS OUT” of your exhaust!

SPINNER EXHAUST TIPS

The Newest BLING For Your Ride!

http://www.shoplaser.com

One of my favorite SNL skits… Awesome. 🙂

Super Colon Blow

Apparently, I haven’t travelled all that much yet… gotta get working on that…

create your own visited states map

create your own visited countries map

Ruby on Rails – a loser?

Why Ruby on Rails won’t become mainstream

Everytime I see this ad, it reminds me of Pouya… I can just see it, he’s rolling down the highway in his Benzo with his posse… phone call from the office comes in… well, you know the rest…

A reader sent in this absolutely hilarious Avis commercial featuring XM Satellite Radio. I don’t care what side of the fence you’re on, this commercial is the kind that can be played over and over again.

Avis – XM Radio Commercial

By the way, the song in the commercial is “Warbux Lumbajac – 2G’s”

Wanna download an entire set of photos off of Flickr? Don’t want to do it manually? This is your answer:

Recently a friend started using Flickr which is a great service. I personally like to save pictures locally and selecting them one at a time to download was too much of a hassle so I whipped up this program so I could download them more easily.

FlickrDown

I just watched a recording of Frontline that covered the Meth epidemic.

Its actually really fascinating.

I recommend you watch it too, you can watch the whole program online here:

FRONTLINE: the meth epidemic

Let this be known – I *LOVE* iFolder.

For awhile it was hard to recommend and use becuase it was commercial only… you had to buy the server software, and it wasn’t cheap.

But now, you can get iFolder for free!

I’ve been using it to sync my bookmarks and documents across multiple PC’s… you create it on one pc, and it appears on the other PC’s automagically. No manual syncing – it all happens 24×7 in the background.

Try it out:

Finally, after two years of development we have finally convinced the gatekeepers to release the iFolder server out into the wild. The team has been hard at work the last few weeks prepping the code, fixing file hierarchy issues and building packages so we present to you the first open source release of the iFolder server.

http://www.ifolder.com/index.php/IFolder_Server

I (finally) received my Kyocera KR1 (made by D-link) today after waiting for it for about two months.

It was worth the wait.

This thing is awesome. Its completely plug and play. You slide in your EVDO card, then you fire it up (AC or DC with the included car adapter) and you’re on your merry way surfing the net over cellular. If you don’t have an EVDO PC Card, you can also use an EVDO enabled cell phone and a USB cable to tether to the router instead. Either way, this thing is sweet.

CNET has a video review of the unit here.

The unit’s hardware is pretty complete. It has a Wifi AP, a 4-port 10/100 switch, a PCMCIA slot, a USB port, and a RS-232 serial port.

The router runs Linux as its base OS, so I’m sure it won’t take long for the OpenWRT team to port their feature-rich software to the KR1. Meanwhile there’s a group of folks modifying the base firmware with mods to include telnet, busybox, gpsd, and other useful goodies.

For about $200 (afer rebate) its the obvious choice for a mobile router when you compare it to something like a Stompbox which would easily run you three times that amount to build yourself.

Hell has officially frozen over…

Apple® today introduced Boot Camp, public beta software that enables Intel-based Macs to run Windows XP. Available as a download beginning today, Boot Camp allows users with a Microsoft Windows XP installation disc to install Windows XP on an Intel-based Mac®, and once installation is complete, users can restart their computer to run either Mac OS® X or Windows XP. Boot Camp will be a feature in “Leopard,” Apple’s next major release of Mac OS X, that will be previewed at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference in August.

Apple Officially Releases Beta Dual Boot Loader

I’m getting lots of messages (email, IM, sms, etc…) regarding my new grid hosting company, so I decided to post some facts:

Fact #1:

Clustering on PS2’s is very real, in fact, the NCSA has constructed a PlayStation 2 Linux cluster as a test bench for scientific computation.

From PlayStation 2: Computational Cluster:

The cluster consists of 65 compute nodes, 4 user login and development nodes, and 1 prototype node for software installation tests. All the nodes run the Sony Linux distribution for PlayStation 2. The compute nodes fill a 24-inch rack; 5 shelves at 13 per shelf

The Sony Linux kit (for PlayStation 2) includes a full Linux operating system. This distribution uses Linux 2.2.1 ported to the PlayStation’s Emotion Engine CPU, and is based on an earlier version of Red Hat Linux for PC’s. The distribution includes development tools that you would expect; libraries, editors, compilers and debuggers that you’d find in any Linux distribution. The kit also includes software tools that provide hooks into the PlayStation 2 specific hardware.

Fact #2:

Building a computational cluster using PS2’s, with the help of the people I met at SC’05, is absolutely something I would try to do. And apparently – none of my friends would ever be suprised if they heard I had.

Fact #3:

The entry was posted on April 1st – aka, April Fool’s day. 🙂

So:

Thank you for all the positive feedback and well wishes, but I’m not insane enough to try to build a company selling computational time on video gaming consoles. 🙂

Lots of people have been asking me what I’ll be doing now that I’m no longer working at Rackspace full time.

I don’t feel like explaining the entire business in detail, but I’ve had a fascination with grid computing and the virtualization of software services across computational clusters for sometime

Additionally, anyone who knows me, knows that I’m fascinated with repurposing hardware (both electronic or otherwise) to do new and different things.

Anyhow – last year, I spent some time at the Supercomputing ’05 conference in Seattle. There, I met lots of great hardware engineers and software developers. Since then, lots of us continued talking and we formed a new company. Over the past few months we have been building a new low-cost datacenter and setting up our own state-of-the-art computational cluster in a secret warehouse using Sony Playstation 2’s.

The amount of innovation and ingenuity I’ve seen with this new team rivals that of any tech company including Google and even Space-X. I’m very proud of what has been accomplished in such a short period of time.

We are in the middle closing our A-series round of founding of about $27.5million and if goes well, look for the official announcement of my new Grid Hosting Company(tm) later this year!

Wow – this is really cool.

Basically you take your cameraphone (1 megapixel or better), take a picture of a whiteboard or document, and then email that photo to scanR – and it’ll email back a PDF version!

Very cool.

Try scanR now. It’s fast, easy and FREE!

Telephones are just supposed to work. No fuss. Pick it up, dial a number, and you’re connected.

Cell phones shouldn’t be any different – but they are.

In the case of my I-Mate K-Jam, the thing is simply too slow. And often times, it looks like its frozen – while its actually just chugging through something.

Last night I decided I need to do some research on overclocking this thing. Turns out, someone else had the same complaint and already had a blog entry about it. Here it is:

Smartskey update, overclocking integrated

The standard clockspeed was 132mhz, and now I got it running at 264 – twice as fast. Its only been in this state for about 6 hours, but its like having a completely different phone – its a huge improvement.

The only thing left is to see what it does to the battery life… 🙂

Ok, a lot of these are very, very trippy….

Illusions, Magic Tricks and Puzzles: When Your Perception Turns Against You!

Optical Illusions Blog

This is pretty fun to watch…

Gamers Getting PWND

Some these are amazing – like the full size Lego SUV…

It’s time for our weekly Top 10 list and this week our editors bring you the “Top 10 Strangest (or Coolest…) Lego Creations”.

Top 10 Strangest Lego Creations

Oh yeah…

An amusing muppet themed spoof on the matrix movie trailer. Really well done!

Muppet Matrix

Yay!

You scored 90% or more!

Guy Kawasaki’s Entrepreneurial IQ Test
Brought to you by Tickle

In December, I got a new cell phone after deciding that my Treo 650 was a piece of junk.

I ended up replacing it with a I-Mate K-Jam – which is also known as an HTC Wizard… and is now also known as the Cingular 8125 or the T-Mobile MDA. Since I bought the unlocked version before it was officially released in the US, I paid a fortune for it. (You can read a recent review of the Cingular 8125 here and another one here.)

The K-Jam is nice… it has a huge screen, a 1.3megapixel camera, built-in Wifi and its still about the same size as the Treo 650 (if not exactly the same size).

The past few months of owning it have been pretty good – most importantly it doesn’t have the reboot problem like the Treo has. I only have two complaints about it:

1. Its not built for one-handed operation like a typical cell phone or the Treo. Which is a real pain when you’re trying to make a call while driving, or even walking.
2. The processor on it is pretty slow. I can get it to slow down to a crawl while surfing and emailing at the same time (which happens a lot, apparently)

After seeing how little Palm did to improve the one-handed operation of the PocketPC OS in their latest phone, the 700w, I wasn’t all that dissappointed in the end about the first issue. But the slow processor issue was a bit of a problem.

Until the new firmware update came out for the K-Jam! 🙂

The phone seems much more responsive now – only time will tell if it is really faster. They’ve made some tweaks to the apps here and there… but the biggest addition is that the new version of the OS supports true push-email on Exchange… it works, its fast, and its pretty sweet.

All in all, I’m glad I switched to the K-Jam – I’ll take slow over rebooting any day… and now that it does true push email, theres no reason to consider switching to a Blackberry. W00t! 🙂

Sushi is more popular than ever before but eating it “has become the new Russian roulette” in terms of safety, a group campaigning against mercury in fish said on Monday.

…

Tuna samples from six popular sushi restaurants in Los Angeles were taken to a Southern California lab for testing.

They returned an average mercury level of 0.721 parts per million, about 88 percent higher than the reported Food and Drug Administration level of 0.383 ppm for all fresh and frozen tuna.

Sushi may be bad for health: California group

I’ve been using Verizon’s EV-DO service for the past couple of weeks, and I have to say that I absolutely love it.

Its fast…. its VERY fast.

I almost never worry about trying to find a wifi hotspot anymore since I can get around 500kps on the EV-DO network most of the time (and faster if I have really good signal strength.) And to solve the signal strength issue while I’m in hotel rooms, I got a small external antenna…

I’m still waiting for my Kyocera KR1 EV-DO wifi router so I can share the connection… and a mag-mount EV-DO antenna for my car.

I highly recommend it. 🙂

As I said before, I continue to tell people NOT to buy HDTV sets for various reasons… one of which is the fact that the HDTV “standard” is a bit of a moving target.

A couple of years ago at CES, 1080-progressive, or 1080p, had become popular… (not there was any content for that format as the 1080p format isn’t supported via ATSC or QAM as far as I know)… turns out that 1080p will be supported in the new hi-def DVD formats coming up.

So lots of people I’m sure started buying 1080p televisions to make sure that they’ll be able to display the new Hi-Def DVD material…

But as it goes, the Hi-Def industry has moved the cheese again, and even if you have 1080p capable tv set, you probably won’t be able to display any HD-DVD content since they changed the DRM spec….

HD DVD to Screw Early HDTV Adopters

I imagine that the HDTV “standard” will evolve a few more times before its done… so to hold me over until then, I bought four standard-def TV’s the other day that were on sale. 🙂

Lots of folks in the advertising business have been poo-poo’ing the whole TiVo and PVR revolution… but I’m glad some advertisers are finally starting to adapt to the new technology instead of bitching about it:

Advertisers are running into a jam. With more and more people using digital video recorders, people are just zipping through the ads.

One company says you won’t want to do that with their latest commercial.

KFC says its latest ad has a hidden message. Apparantly, if you watch the ad in slow motion, you can decode the message, and get a coupon for a free sandwich.

KFC Unveils “Tivo-Proof” Ad

(Thanks to Vikram for pointing out this article – usually I’m on top of such things, but I was traveling when this article came out… 🙂 )

If you’re running Trillian, you probably have run into the same problem I ran into with Miranda IM… please update your version of Trillian or you’ll be unable to receive messages from people with current versions of an ICQ client.

AIM/ICQ patch available for all versions of Trillian (02-15-2006)

For those of you who have been IM’ing me via ICQ and I haven’t been responding – I’m sorry… I haven’t been getting them.

Turns out there was a bug in the ICQ protocol in Miranda IM that was causing the problem… it was fixed days ago, but I didn’t know about the problem until tonight.

New version is installed and everything is fixed… so resend me those messages! 🙂

I had been looking for a new phone headset and I had a few minimum requirements:

• Wired – No Bluetooth – I love BT, but I don’t want to carry (yet another) charger with me
• Boom Mic – I hate the dangling mic on the cord, and I think that mics in the ear-piece still pick up too much noise (no matter what noise canceling tech is being used)
• Easy to carry – I have been carrying a GN Netcom headset around with me, and its been great but its a bit of a pain to carry around with its metal headband and all.
• Sufficient volume – The main problem I’ve been having with cell phones is that its difficult to hear the other person on the with so much background noise in the car or whever I may be at the time.

Speaking of volume – the Treo 650 I had was barely audible in a car or airport with the volume cranked (even with Volumecare), and the I-mate K-Jam I have right now is better, but not much of an improvement.

Instead of trying to boost the audio, I decided that maybe blocking out the ambient noise was better… While I was at CES this January, I had the chance to stop by the Shure booth and play with some of their newest sound-isolating ear-buds. I own a set of E2c ear-buds and I love them. So I wondered if they made phone headsets – and it turns out they do!

You can read about them here: Headsets For Mobile Phones

Mine came in today, and so far, I love it… it has a real boom mic, and its light-weight, and since it blocks out all the other noises around me I have to turn the volume down on my phone to its lowest setting so it won’t blast my ear. Sweet!

Save the McRib!

Go to http://www.mcrib.com/, click on “Save the McRib” on the upper left corner and sign the petition!

What sort of world would we be in if the McRib was gone!?

I went to the local Verizon store today to buy a Treo 700w. But I didn’t.

Its not to say its not a great phone:

• The sound quality is awesome – its loud and clear (finally!)
• The proc is pretty quick – but its not quick enough… I managed to get it to slow down when switching apps.
• The one-handed operation of the 700w is better than any PocketPC phone I’ve owned (or played with) but its not as slick as the Treo 650’s UI.
• It has EV-DO for data access and I can only sum it up with one word – “WOW!” Its wicked fast.

So the upside is that its probably the best PocketPC phone I’ve seen… but the downside is that since its on the PocketPC platform its really hard to make it that much different than anyone elses PocketPC phone… I mean, is there really THAT much difference between one company’s WinXP machine to another’s? (I’ve not thought so in quite some time.)

Ultimately it didn’t make sense to buy it at the Verizon store even if I did want to go home with it since Amazon.com has a $350 (after rebate) price on it while the walk-in store had it for $500.

Everyone else is doing it… so I did it too:

Apparently I’m an “Encouraging Leader“.

Ok so people continue to ask me – “Does this ColdHeat thingy really work?”

I actually got one as a gift from Dirk, and quite frankly – I like it. It does take a little while to get used it – this is not your father’s soldering iron. But once you realize that its not the same thing, and treat it as something different, it actually does a pretty decent job soldering joints on wires and pcbs.

As an invention, Cold Heat seems to have everything. At first glance, it does something old (soldering) in a new, potentially better way (without a hot soldering iron and the risk of burns). It has the “Why didn’t someone do this before?” factor.

How Cold Heat Works

For years, I’ve been discouraging people from buying HDTV’s for two reasons…

1. To date, there are very few shows in any sort of HiDef format or resolution
2. HDTV display technology is changing rapidly and improving by leaps and bounds while prices continue to drop

There’s still very few shows to watch in HD… and while there was once simply CRT, LCD, DLP, and Plasma… there’s now LCoS… which appears to be the “new hotness”:

Liquid Crystal on Silicon, LCoS, is a relatively new and obscure display technology that is now making its grand entrance into the HDTV marketplace. What is really impressive is that instead of taking the traditional path of entering at the ground floor with mediocre performance compared to the established technologies and then trying to percolate up to the top tier in picture quality, it is starting out right at the very top. Already, LCoS provides the highest resolutions, the highest non-CRT Contrast Ratios, and the most artifact-free images of any display technology. For people that are sensitive to flicker and eye-fatigue, LCoS operates at the highest refresh rates (120 Hz) for the smoothest, most flicker-free images. This article will be an in-depth examination of 5 LCoS HDTVs, all but one of them prototypes, in order to get an early look into this unfolding technology.

LCoS Display Technology Shootout Part A

I decided to order one of these “Sleepmate” thingies… we’ll see if it works… 🙂

Have you ever laid awake at night wondering, “What do I have to do to get a peaceful night’s sleep?” as your neighbor’s dog barks all night and traffic roars by?

Why Constant Noise is the Perfect Sleep Solution

I had no idea that there are different kinds of earwax… quite frankly, I find the notion of “wet” earwax to be kinda yucky… weird. 🙂

Genetics researchers have uncovered the key gene behind the mystery of human earwax.

Finally.

The report in Monday’s Nature Genetics journal solves a long-running anthropologist’s riddle – why many people in China and Korea, as well as elsewhere in Asia, have dry earwax while the rest of humanity enjoys the sticky variety.

Dry earwax? It’s genetic