Cool article that shows you how to get your regular USB charging device to charge those god damned Apple i-thingies.
Tag Archive for 'hardware'
My personal laptop just died this past week and I’ve been assigned a desktop at the new place, so that means that I’m actually machineless at the moment.
I’m looking into a replacement as we speak, and right now it’s a toss up between an Acer TimelineX 4820T or a 13″ MacBook Pro. I’m basically going for rugged small form factor, large battery life, and great performance on power. At this stage the Acer is winning because it has a 1366×768 screen, but the aluminum body on the macbook pro is doing it’s best to sway my decision towards durability over screen real estate.
Moved to the new place and now I can’t seem to get SBS Digital reception at the new place (mythbusters and man vs wild are just too much to miss).
Turns out the house has an old style analogue antenna, and I’m getting oversignal interference from channels 1-5, and the only UHF channel it affects is SBS. Annoying thing is I can get the teacher’s channel and channel 44 (higher in frequency than SBS).
Just ordered a new Fracarro LPV34H, DVB-T antenna and hoping that will fix it.
Update: A Fracarro LP345HV actually arrived, but I installed it, and that did the trick.
From over on boing boing, I saw this interesting post about the fact that LED traffic lights can’t melt the snow that collects in their shade covers.
An interesting calculation would be to see if the energy discipated by the waste heat of the old bulbs year round equals the energy required to keep the lights usable in the winter, in countries that have snow.
We’ve had LED lights here in the greater Sydney region for a while now, and I don’t think anyone has come across this issue here (it doesn’t snow in Sydney).
So Havoc Pennington of former red hat and freedesktop.org glory has posted about his company litl’s latest product.
It’s an interesting concept, and could well take off, though the starting price of 700 USD seems a little steep to me. As Havoc mentions it’s all about build quality and attention to purpose when designing the thing and he does seem to have a point. I know I use several different PC’s and laptops around the house to do all the things the litl webbook is trying to wrap in one user friendly device.
On boing boing, this post mentions a new scheme to allow people to order movies at home for $1 using their mobile phone. Once ordered a gadget attached to the TV descrambles the signal, with the money being billed to the user’s mobile account.
Over on boing boing, this post about an awesome invention that enables you to boil water in a cardboard box.
So this invention takes a cardboard box, paints the interior black, throws in some foil and acrylic and then harnesses the sun’s energy to create a cardboard oven.
Over on planet gnome , I read this article about how Orange in Poland downgrades all images over http on it’s network.
Note that the artifacts of the image compression are less visible here than after the jump, as I had to resize the image to make it display properly in WordPress.
This is rotten on so many levels, the most extreme of which is a gross abuse of net neutrality. Data providers are providing just that, a transport for data, and should not be messing with it on its way to my handset.
What would make this even worse, is if they actually charged you for the full quality image.
This mobile news comes from the guys over at boing boing (and not mobile crunch as would be expected). Personally I think it’s absolutely ridiculous that I have in excess of 20 charging adapters lying around the house, each one incompatible with the next one, and then when one breaks I have to go out and buy another one at a stupid mark up.
Go EC
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