Category: stuff

Software, toys, gadgets and computers

The new iPod Shoplift

LuxPro Super ShuffleNow that I finally gave my brother his gift, I was going to blog about the iPod Shuffles I got him and Caitlin. But then on Friday, I read something amusing.

Think that the picture to the left is an iPod Shuffle? It’s actually a photo of the LuxPro’s “Super Shuffle” which DAPreview snapped a shot of at CeBIT 2005 (mouseover for the backside). What a clear case of trademark and trade dress infringement! And just after they were asked by Apple Legal to remove them on Friday, they put them back up the next day because “Apple said nothing about Saturday.” I guess that’s what happens when you live in a country that is perennially sanctioned under the U.S. Trade act.
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Posted on by tychay 12

Rubber ducky, you’re the one.

Cyberduck Application IconWell I wanted to get Caitlin’s blog up and running. Then it hit me I had to allow her to edit her blog without the command line. Sure it is easy getting the Linux box to talk to the Mac Apple Fileshare, but how to get the Mac to work with the Linux box? She can do remote control with Chicken Of The VNC but what about file transfer? I’ve stopped using FTP in 2001 when the wu-ftpd bug turned a whole bunch of my company boxes into DDoS zombies. Besides, the password is unencrypted. And I am tired of going through the Apache configuration file hoops in order to set up WebDAV again.

What to do?

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Posted on by tychay 0

Giving my Powerbook the middle finger

two finger trackpad scrollWhen my Powerbook G4/800 was stolen last year at Amsterdam, I gambled that Apple would have an interim release in January 2005 and announce a Powerbook G5 as early as June 2005, so I purchased my Powerbook hoping to tide me over for a revision B Powerbook G5 in 2006 at the earliest.

A couple weeks ago, Apple announced a kitchen sink release for the Powerbook. You can tell that they are running out of things to put in by what they put in—what used to cost money now comes standard. The speed bump is reminiscent of Apple circa 1999.1

One nice new feature is the two-finger scrolling: Mac notebooks don’t have the integrated pointer/scroller that the Thinkpads do, nor do they have scroll zones like some other tank-sized laptops. The solution that uber-geeks use is SideTrack, which effectively acts like the latter and can be tricked out to do much more.
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Posted on by tychay 0

My computer, the porn star…

BulbasaurAfter I left my second startup in 2001, I’ve been obsessed with small, cheap and powerful computers.

At the time I used to say, “Common sense says that the converse of Moore’s Law1 is that a computer today is going to cost roughly half that in 18 months—i.e. you shouldn’t buy computing power until you need it: it’ll be half off in a year and a half.”
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Posted on by tychay 1

The (online) state of comics

screenshot of ffviewI used to love comic books.

When I was in middle school, one of the only two disciplinary reports I received was from reading a comic book. The headmaster ripped up a issue of Groo right in front of me. I remember receiving a tap on my shoulder, him yanking it out of my hands, and me yelling, “No! Don’t…” *riiiiiiippppp*,“…It’s somebody else’s.” The fact that I finished all my homework did not matter to me; knowing that a replacement issue was going to cost me a pretty penny did.

If you couldn’t guess already, most of my comic-book-reading friends didn’t survive prep school.1 Neither did I for I stopped reading them.

Then I went to college.
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Posted on by tychay 2