Dreams Unlimited©

Diary

archives

A list of recent thoughts, things I saw or things I spotted on the Net, things that excite me (Uuh, baby!) or upset me, stuff I hate or love or in any other way find worth the trouble of blogging right here for your entertainment or interest and my archive. ;)

	Wednesday, August 31 New IrDA Spec Shoots for 100Mbit/s Data Rate #Posted by Dreams on 16:56 Better late than never, I guess... It seems they were able to achieve 100 Mb/s data transfer rates with new IrDA Specs. Why didn't they do this 5 years ago when no had Bluetooth nor USB, and 100Base-T ethernet had just been invented for the masses...? sigh oh well, perhaps we can finally play that quake3 deathmatch during boring meetings I always dreamed of... LOL :D
	NY subway perv busted by mobile snapshot #Posted by Dreams on 16:46 Putting your mobile camera phone to good use... A girl was being flashed by a guy in the subway, sitting across from her. He ended up wacking off and she got finally fed up! She grabbed her phone, snapped a picture and posted it on Flickr and more. 6 other women admitted also to have been molested by the guy and NYPD is now hunting the guy, who has been identified... Read the article on The Register
	Updated Dreams' photo galleries #Posted by Dreams on 10:03 I've caught up with all the photos that were laying around on my laptop's hard disk... sigh Sorry for the delays. I've been really busy recently during the day and at night I just can't seem to gather the strength to get behind the computer again... Anyway, my smugmug online photo gallery is up to date now. I added the vacation in Condat at my parents' house, last July. Some photos from dinner at Soomers on the beach. SOS Sundays pictures from recently in Kijkduin. Mysteryland, of course! The Dance Tour on the Malieveld in Den Haag last weekend. And more that I had laying around... Some of them are still uploading as I type this, but they'll be there shortly. Enjoy!
	Tuesday, August 30 XL Blackhole After Party #Posted by Dreams on 14:16 W00t! My picture set from last Saturday's Blackhole after party in club XL in Amsterdam are online! Go check them out!
	Tarantella your secure global personal desktop #Posted by Dreams on 13:37 I've been at a training course these past two days, hence the reduction in noise you may have been noticing... ;) However, the course has been for Taratella. Tarantella is Sun's latest acquisition and a Unix/Linux equivalent to MS Terminal Server. It's used to give everyone access to the same applications and/or desktop no matter where in the organization they are. At home, at work, at a client, in an internet café on Aruba... You install applications on special, centralized servers and users connect to them when they want to run programs like MS Word, Outlook, Photoshop or programmers want to work with Oracle IDE tools, Visual Studio and so on. Applications are centrally managed, maintained and controlled and users authenticate themselves, securely and globally from whereever they currently are, to the terminal server. Tarantella is pretty well structured and easily configured. If you need to maintain a certain number of legacy applications or obscure programs a few people use, using a system like Tarantella gives you a cheap Linux-based Terminal Server for those users and more. Even local, common en remote printers are transparantly managed for users so when they hit 'print', it prints on the printer next to them or in the hall. Not in some hallway at a remote office... Impressive!
	Monday, August 29 Canon EOS 5D Hands-on Preview #Posted by Dreams on 22:51 Oh drool... Can someone just give me €5000...? Please? DPReview has a hands-on preview and photo samples. I just wanna have this camera so badly, and some decent lenses to go with it. Man-o-man what a digicam... :)
	Hurricane Katrina images by GEOS satelite #Posted by Dreams on 11:53 Hurricane Katrina is about to slam-dunk on the coast of New Orleans... check the weather image loop of the NOAA... Scary stuff.
	Sunday, August 28 Dance tour in Den Haag #Posted by Dreams on 13:30 Barely recuperated from Mysteryland and the after party in club XL last night (I dropped Petra off at home at 23hrs, drove back to XL, partied some more, got home at 430hrs and woke up at 13hrs), I'm already off to the another great festival: Dance Tour on the Malieveld here in The Hague. It's also free this time (Mysteryland cost €50, no mystery why they keep on doing it!). This festival is a first in Den Haag, AFAIK, and where going with Knevil, Arjen and Isabel to check it out. Weather is great, so -worst case- we'll be sitting in the sun all afternoon and have a blast listening to bad music... I'll have pictures up soon... really! ;)
	Saturday, August 27 Mysteryland #Posted by Dreams on 09:55 Today it's time for the season finale of outdoor dance festivals: Mysteryland! So sad it's already over. :( Summer seems just to have started. But today it's to meet my friends again and forget about everything for a day and just be happy. Don't worry, be happy! Tonight, I have permission from Partyflock to go to the (XtraLarge) XL Blackhole after party in Amsterdam and take pictures. This will be a test set and if they like it, I may be given more parties to photograph. Cool! Always fun and great practise under difficult conditions. We'll see if I can stay awake and perform well after 12 hours of partying on Mysteryland... ;)
	Friday, August 26 New ATi Linux Drivers 8.16.20 #Posted by Dreams on 09:06 ATi released new Linux drivers for x86 (Intel) and for x86-64 (AMD) as well as versions for XFree86 and x.org, the two Window Managers for Linux.
	Thursday, August 25 Blu-Ray and HD DVD talks frozen... again #Posted by Dreams on 13:51 It seems a never ending battling for Return-On-Investment (ROI)... In the left corner: Blu-Ray. In the right corner: HD DVD Remeber the wars over video formats in the early 80s? VHS or betamax? The former won because marketing was smart and the porn industry was pawned into using the format. Betamax, although much superior for a little more money lost out big time. Since then, VHS invented SVHS and more to try to improve the poor invention. well, it seems histry will repeat itself over the next DVD format that everyone will use... Blu-Ray (Sony) or HD DVD (Toshiba). The two camps can't seem to agree... nerds rarely do, marketing/sales never will!
	Tuesday, August 23 BOFH: Drunk gravity #Posted by Dreams on 21:41 Ever wonder why the world seems different when you're drunk? Why time just doesn't quite seem to be as constant as you thought? Why jokes are funnier when you're drunk but any sober can't laugh about them? Read the BOFH episode 24 on the Register! ROFLMAO If that ain't the truth... :D
	Ta-da to-do Lists #Posted by Dreams on 15:05 You constantly forget things, like I do? Some of them actually even important? Change from one high-priority item to the next, like I do? Keep forgetting what the next thing was on your list? Keep loosing the to-do lists you make? Enter Ta-da! Online, free, hosted to-do lists that you track whereever you are on this globe. Even has RSS feed to easily check the status of one or more lists you keep. Ta-da even lets you assign tasks to others. Handy for the office or small(er) workgroups...!
	Canon EOS 5D Preview #Posted by Dreams on 10:27 It's here! W00t! The new Canon EOS 5D with almost 13 Mpx and full-size frame CMOS sensor. :drool: No more conversion factors, no buying ludicrously expensive lenses for you DSLR. Just ordinary will do fine, thank you very much! B) While it only does 3 fps, this onyl matters if you're a sports photographer. Weirdly, the buffer is much larger with room for upto 60 JPEG or 13 RAW images! Given the 13 Mpx, that's one huuge buffer they got in there! They also took out the built-in flash and preprogrammed shootnig modes (portrait, landscape, sport, etc.). All-in-all, this seems like a great amatofessional or pro-amateur camera than the 10D. Read the preview at DPReview...
	Miro backflips on Mambo copyright #Posted by Dreams on 09:50 To get back to what I reported on earlier, Miro (creators of the Mambo CMS) has decided to give in to the developers and transfer all the copyrights of the Mambo open source content management system (CMS) to the non-profit Mambo Foundation. W00t! Another win for open source... pffew
	Google Desktop v2.0 #Posted by Dreams on 08:49 Google has released their next version of the desktop search tool GDS. The new version includes improved Outlook filtering, Gmail indexing, and... a new Sidebar which displays RSS feeds, a Gmail inbox, news, scratch pad and more. There is also a method for adding plugins. Where will this stop?
	Monday, August 22 Digital Camera Cleaning Techniques and Products #Posted by Dreams on 17:08 "We have put this site together to help educate the consumer on how to clean the CCD/CMOS sensor in their Digital SLR Cameras." Cleaning Digital Cameras is a site to educate you about the cleaning of the CCD/CMOS sensors in today's modern DSLR cameras. The Minoltas, the Canons or Nikons used by professional and serious amateur photographers. Read the site (and I do mean read) and you judge yourself if you send in your camera to get cleaned, or you do it yourself. Thanks to Martin for the tip.
	345 horsepower, 5.7-liter HEMI V-8 engine powered Barbeque #Posted by Dreams on 11:33 I knew the world record for lighting a BBQ was 0.5 seconds... using liquid oxygen as lighter fluid. But I didn't know you could use a 345 HP, 5.7 liter car engine as BBQ heater! LOL Chrysler had a contest to see what people thought their engine could be used for. The top 5 ideas were then actually built by engineers and judged in the grand finale. Some people just have way too much time! ;)
	Sunday, August 21 S.O.S & Club Déjà Vu on The Beach #Posted by Dreams on 16:40 Just in time for the good weather break: S.O.S & Club Déjà Vu on The Beach at the Vida Bonita club in Kijkduin... (y) :bounce:
	7floor.net \|\|\| Black & White Entertainment #Posted by Dreams on 15:57 Allright, this is a guy thing, but at least the pictures are very sexy and tasteful. So very least thing women could do is marvel at the lighting and post processing this guy has done with the pictures of sexy women in various states of undressing... :drool: OMG! :respect: for both women and their photographers... pfff /me goes to cool off some
	The Death of Mambo? #Posted by Dreams on 13:37 Mambo, a free, open source content management system for websites and a very popular one, is suffering from one of the dangers of open source. The company who founded Mambo and made it open source, is taking steps to keep it open source on one hand but control all aspects of it on the other. Miro International Pty created a foundation to organize development of Mambo, yet took no outsiders in its board. Only Miro internal or personal friends are appointed in the board of the new foundation. Naturally, the core development team objected against these steps and unanimously decided they cannot work any longer under these terms. So they will most likely branch a version of the (open source) Mambo CMS and develop it independently.
	Saturday, August 20 Synergy #Posted by Dreams on 14:43 "Synergy lets you easily share a single mouse and keyboard between multiple computers with different operating systems, each with its own display, without special hardware. It's intended for users with multiple computers on their desk since each system uses its own monitor(s)." Spotted this on Martin's site... sooo cool! Runs on Unix, Linux, Windows or Mac computers and you don't need anything special for it. Just network cables, so the computers you'd like to manage must be connected to each over a network. Duuh?! Is anybody still using stand-alone computers...? WHY? ;) "Redirecting the mouse and keyboard is as simple as moving the mouse off the edge of your screen. Synergy also merges the clipboards of all the systems into one, allowing cut-and-paste between systems. Furthermore, it synchronizes screen savers so they all start and stop together."
	Friday, August 19 Google Releases Blogger for Microsoft Word #Posted by Dreams on 17:54 Google Releases Blogger for Microsoft Word so you can now Blog from within Word. B) Cool! Too bad I don't run Windows anymore... LOL
	Perpendicular Magnetic Recording are Shipping #Posted by Dreams on 17:47 Toshiba Storage Device Division (SDD) is announcing the shipment of the world's first HDD-based on perpendicular magnetic recording (PMR). The new 1.8-inch HDD, used primarily in consumer electronics (CE) devices, enables up to 10,000 songs or 25,000 photos on a single 40GB platter.
	Monday, August 15 QBubbleMP - multi-player mobile gaming #Posted by Dreams on 21:20 My friend Jelte released the multi-player version of QBubble: QBubbleMP. Now where was that P910i my boss promised me I could play with...! ;)
	The best paper airplane in the world! #Posted by Dreams on 15:03 As there is an increasing number of daddies in my social circle these days, I thought it prudent (uuh heavy word) to blog how to make The best paper airplane in the world! 'nuf said!
	Mojo Master #Posted by Dreams on 09:32 Spotted by Sjoerdski from sources I don't want to know: Mojo Master. It's a game built on the Half-Life2 engine, it seems, and the object is to seduce like your life depends on it... and it does! :D There are 100 different 3D women in 7 different areas and they're begging for it... no really! :) LOL One word of caution: the download is 90 MB! But you get a whole lot of woman for it... :ROFL:
	Experimental Hybrid Cars Get Up to 250 miles/gallon #Posted by Dreams on 09:18 :shock: Did you know cars can be very fuel efficient...? Did you know Hybrid Cars Get Up to 250 miles/gallon(mpg) ? 80 mpg is easily achieved. That's 35 km/liter! Wow, cool! "Gremban, an electrical engineer and committed environmentalist, spent several months and $3,000 tinkering with his car." :respect:
	Dance Parade 2005 #Posted by Dreams on 08:47 What a weekend...! :) Saturday was marked by another year for the FFWD Dance Parade in Rotterdam. This year it looked once again like bad weather but the gods were smiling and probably dancing themselves. ;) It was a perfect temperature for jumping around and dancing in the streets with the late afternoon brightened by some sunshine. Arjen, Isa, Petra and I were given free tix to the after party, but we gave our tix to Anke and friend. We headed back to our own BBQ at home. Petra has her Dance Parade pictures already online. She also made a sexy series of images: what a man sees at the Dance Parade! Hmmm, close but my view is even better! ;) :devil: My pictures will be online soon, gotta do work now. :(
	Sunday, August 14 NASA World Wind #Posted by Dreams on 14:27 Did you know that NASA already has a "Google Earth" equivalent out for ages? No? Check out NASA World Wind. An open source development using multiple satellite image sources to combine them into a massive zoom-in package for Windows. Impressive!
	Canon 5D is finally unveiled #Posted by Dreams on 14:18 Spotted at Lightzone, I did some more searching and found details on the new Canon EOS 5D... :drool: full-frame digital sensor, like the expensive 1Ds. 13 mpx, better than the 20D. The camera seems largely based on the 1Ds Mark II, with some features canabalized to make it cheaper. It does open up a whole new range of possibilites! B) Cool!
	Wednesday, August 10 Google News Adds RSS Feeds #Posted by Dreams on 10:59 Finally, all the tricks, hacks and add-ons such as gnews2rss are no longer necessary: Google News Adds RSS Feeds. Using these feeds, you can search Google News for topics that interest you and save them as an RSS or Atom feed. That way, by subscribing to your custom feed, you can easily check if there's anything new to report on that topic. For instance, by searching for "open source linux business", you build a query on the use of Linux and open source in a business environment. By subscribing to the associated RSS feed, you can quickly tell if anything new occured on the topic. Cool, huh?! B)
	Tuesday, August 9 Is Google Cool or Evil? #Posted by Dreams on 08:52 Interesting: Is Google Cool or Evil?
	Monday, August 8 A Prerelease Tour of GNOME 2.12 #Posted by Dreams on 16:57 A new version of GNOME, a Linux desktop manager, will be released on September 7th. They already have a preview for us online. Looks like good work, but nothing earthshaking radical, as far as I can tell. Now I just need to figure out how to slip the new GNOME past Debian's stable and contrib package control... ;)
	La Marche de l'empereur #Posted by Dreams on 11:51 The movie La Marche de l'empereur, a documentary about Emporer penguins and their way of birth, life and death, is about to become the most popular documentary of all time. It may push "Bowling for Columbine" of the throne... "For 13 months, Jacquet and his crew braved Antarctic temperatures as low as 70 degrees below zero - and winds up to 150 mph - to capture astonishing images of thousands of emperor penguins engaging in a mating and child-rearing ritual that is nothing short of astonishing."
	Sunday, August 7 Installing Debian GNU/Linux #Posted by Dreams on 22:35 Well, Martin will say "I told you so" and he'd be right, but I finally canned Gentoo Linux in favor of Debian Sarge (v3.1). Gentoo is absolutely brilliant but I can't get a decent, stable, working disto the way I want it. My old AMD Thunderbird 1300 literally takes days to compile all the shit and using binary packages instead leaves things scattered and broken to the point I can't really use them well enough. So, sorry, goodbye Gentoo. Installing Debian GNU/Linux via the InternetHellooo Debian! :)
	Friday, August 5 sjoerdski's photo galleries #Posted by Dreams on 15:35 Finally, after Arjen got one, Sjoerdski couldn't stay behind too long, I knew. Today is the day: world, meet sjoerdski's photo galleries; Sjoerdski, the world. B) Cool
	Internet on vacation #Posted by Dreams on 09:40 Everybody is booking their vacation using the internet nowadays. Even here in Holland. But more and more people also want internet access at their holiday address. That's more of an issue. Hotels, fine. They've had that covered because of business travellers during the week. But vacation parks, resorts and island getaways are different. Getting a line costs money, installing cables is prohibitively expensive and though WiFi is easier, good equipement and plenty coverage is costly because it means extra Access Points. Frankwatching has a story (in Dutch) about his adventures. Good reading!
	Wednesday, August 3 Microsoft Windows Vista Screenshots #Posted by Dreams on 14:18 Windows Vista :puke: is the new version of Windows to followup on XP mid-2006 or so. You may enjoy the Windows Vista screenshots at ExtremeTech. It's not really mindboggling stuff, not really that great but it's new. You be the judge.
	RAID Levels - What's RAID0? RAID6? RAID10? #Posted by Dreams on 13:58 Confused like I am about which RAID level does what again? I can never remember it because I don't use it often enough. I found a great, clear, easy-so-your-mother-knows guide on RAID Levels. So know you can make informed decisions on when RAID0 will give you the most performance, when RAID1 gives you the reliability you need or when need to go full out and treat yourself to RAID50. Recommended!
	Phishers Steal Trust from eBay Sign In Pages #Posted by Dreams on 10:05 Netcraft lets me know that hackers have found a way to use eBay's own sign-in pages to do phishing attacks. That's terrible because the user actually sees eBay's real page and therefore believes he's fine, only to find the phishing starts after he's signed in... Scary!
	How to burn or crack protected WMA files? #Posted by Dreams on 10:02 FYI... Club CD Freaks has a nice listing online on How to burn or crack protected WMA files. The DRM in WM9 and WM10 are now also cracked so you can circumvent it, if you like. Beware though, that MS updates and patches its tools and players in an attempt to stay ahead of the crackers. So you might be in for a long night. ;)
	Robots take scientists into sea depths #Posted by Dreams on 09:54 A team of robots is researching a "city" of deepsea vents in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. In 2000, "the researchers discovered a startlingly massive collection of limestone towers located miles away from the tectonic cracks in the seafloor that typically produce such structures. Some of these hydrothermal vent towers are hundreds of feet high, prompting the scientists to call the unprecedented find the 'Lost City' after the myth of Atlantis." This time they're back to investigate. What's cool is that they use robots, high-speed internet connections and remote sensing equipment to do all the work while the team sits in a room at the University of Washington.
	Monday, August 1 IE7 beta addresses web standards #Posted by Dreams on 17:42 While The Web Standards Project cheers for IE7 and its improved support for web standards, CNET was not so estatic about IE7. I, for one, am happy about better standard support. It's a pain having to deal with IE seperately if you really get creative with XHTML/CSS. And it doesn't add up to spend hours to fix little IE things that should just go right...
	Oldest vibrator found in... Germany #Posted by Dreams on 17:03 Well, I didn't know ze Germans were so kinky, but someone found a 28,000 year old dildo in Germany in a cave near Ulm. ;) It may also have been used to knap of split flints (to make fire). I think it was to make fire allright, but not as we know it, Jim! LOL :D
	Zazzle.com #Posted by Dreams on 14:09 Zazzle.com Check it out! Print custom design on shirts, stickers, mouse mats, stamps and so on... Google is now investing in this! B) Cool!