Using Google Android for...

What could you use a compact, capable, Internet-aware and -enabled OS for besides netbook :yawn: and smartphones :bored:?
Well, smart devices that can benefit from easy connectivity. Such as the Parrot Grand Specchio photo frame. :) Or what about an easy 7" touch screen on your HD DVR? Internet radio station tuner? Car board computer for climate control, music selection and "in-flight" movie selections to the back seat? Smart in-house climate control systems? Anyone else...?

Google Movies

This is what I've been waiting for, for the last 10 years: Google Movie Showtimes. Go to it and it uses your location to get movie listings nearby. Go to it on your mobile and it is near your current location. Type a title or genre and get related listings. Brilliant! Now where is that Android I've been waiting for?

Dream job

Today, I found my dream job (sorry, in Dutch only): chef in château Les Merles. *sigh*
15 points on GaultMillau scale (out of 20), dependable 35-45 guests year-around with peak to 55-80 in Summer. Situated in the Sud-Ouest of France (best culinary region according to the French) and near my parents. The place has a restaurant, a bistro, hotel, beds, sunny terras, country-side, golf, wellness, in short: the works. Now about my resumé, did I mention I've worked in a kitchen for, uhm, 3 years...?

Coffee Gadgets

If you love coffee, and I know many of you do ;), you most likely also like various (exotic) coffee gadgets. Well... feast your eyes on this dream-machine Slayer or any of the other coffee gadgets (by SpecialBite)

Nokia N900 mobile computer

Oh and speaking of Internet, should the Android Liquid A1 fail (available early december), then I can always change over to the fabulous Nokia N900 mobile computer. It runs Maemo5 Linux, has 32 GB of RAM, 1 GHz ARM processor (underclocked to 600 Mhz) and all the connectivity options anyone could want need. The specs are simply mouthwatering! A-GPS, 3D OpenGL support, Bluetooth 2.1, USB 2.0, microSD slot for up to 16 (!) GB.

Update: T3 has pricing info

Go, Google's New Open Source Programming Language

Slashdot: "Go, the new programming language Google has released as open source under a BSD license. The official Go site characterizes the language as simple, fast, safe, concurrent, and fun. A video illustrates just how fast compilation is: the entire language, 120K lines, compiles in under 10 sec. on a laptop. Ars Technica's writeup lays the stress on how C-like Go is in its roots, though it has plenty of modern ideas mixed in."

I know this is YAPL (yet another programming language), but with all of Google's effort in trying to transform the way we interact with the Internet (Google's search, Google Android for smart phones, Android OS for netbooks/laptops, Google Wave for Web3.0 communications, and all of Google's applications such as Froogle, Docs, Books, Mail, Calendar, Maps, Sync, Earth, YouTube, Picasa, AdSense, Analytics and many more), knowing or learning the language that can tie it all together may make good sense...

HOWTO: Hackintosh on your PC

Lifehacker has a guided howto for installing OS X Snow Leopard on your PC, without needing the RebelEFI I reported on earlier.

They even claim you can update OS X to the latest 10.6.2 update and it will keep working!

Update: Tom's Hardware has confirmed that developers who've updated their netbooks running Hackintosh are now unable to boot. However, PC's running non-Atom Intel chips are unaffected. So Psystar computers will update without a problem.

Digitally pimping a home network

While visiting Michiel in Singapore, I pimped their home network a bit. It was fine, but cumbersome and loosely tied together: 5 laptops, PS3, Wii. They have a cable modem, but didn't know their connection speed. WiFi was setup but not used because downloading over a fixed connection into the WiFi router was "going faster". Hehe, I told them their ISP limits the speed and after a bit of testing concluded that their 8 Mb down-link would scarcely fill the 54 Mb/s bandwidth of their 802.11g WiFi network. So no need for the fixed network hook-up not sitting near the router, freedom to sit around the house wherever they wanted to. I moved the Linksys WRT54G into a nook, out of the way, receiving thousands of thank-yous from the housekeeper who hated the nasty blue box on the floor in the livingroom. ;)

I then tied the PS3 and Wii to the WiFi network. This meant all devices were now on the same subnet. I installed PS3 media server on Molina's Vista Acer laptop. (It's free, open source and supports Windows, Mac and Linux!) Up until then, they'd had borrowed the HDMI cable from the PS3 if they wanted to watch downloaded TV series. Fine, but why swap cables?! :) Now, they hook up USB disks with movies, music and series to the Vista laptop, fire up ps3 media server, turn on the PS3 and watch or listen to anything from the Windows laptop. :)

Next, after seeing this digital revolution in his house, Michiel asked if he could somehow get WiFi on his 17 m² roof terras, overlooking the Singapore skyline? I said sure, but he'd likely have to drill a cable up to the roof. The reinforced concrete would be unlikely to pass his WiFi signals. So did a little digging and after MrVanes suggested WiFi Range Extenders (I had been looking for that term), it all came quickly together:
* get a WRE54G Linksys Range Expander to get unobstructed full speed WiFi access outside on the roof
* pulling a cable up from the livingroom
* Connect a QNAP TS-410 NAS server to a free network port on the WRT54G and add some disks to taste.

The NAS supports Windows, Apple and Linux, has built-in everything and is expandable with hot-swap drive bays. The UPnP/DLNA media server supports their PS3 so the Windows laptop can be used as a workstation instead of doubling as a media server, the built-in bittorrent (BT) client let's them download directly to the NAS and the iTunes server let's them stream their music collection to their laptops, iPhones or iTouch devices. If only I could be there to install it and see it work!!! :)

Hurricanes on weather.com

Weather.com has a good site about Hurricane Ida and hurricanes in general. Great is also the information and tracks about all the hurricanes so far this "season". Funny to see the different tracks they took across the Northern hemisphere.

CoPress: open source College newspaper CMS

Just heard about CoPress, an open source CMS for student newspapers where hosting is taken care of, based on the popular WordPress by Matt Mullenweg.

CoPress came from the frustration of a student editor (Daniel Bachhuber) unhappy with his current CMS hosted by an outside company. He looked around to other CMSs (Drupal, Django, WordPress) and finally founded a new company (CoPress) to give him what he needed: an open platform for anyone wanting to run a College newspaper of sorts.

LuminoGlow - Lingerie that Glows in the Dark

And now for something completely different: LuminoGlow, Lingerie that Glows in the Dark. ROFL But it is true. The lingerie is actually not bad at all, reminds me of basic Chantelle or Hunkemöller lines. Basic but nice and feminine. And no, I do not need any help finding a female body in the dark. But the thought is appreciated!

Intel Atom CE4100 chip for STB

With Full-HD TVs and Blu-ray soundly established on the consumer market these days, Intel announces the Atom CE4100 for insanely powerful cable boxes and Blu-ray players. Dual 1080p streams can be decoded, MPEG4 and 3D graphics capability, as well as raw uncompressed 1080p capturing!

Sony Ericsson on Android: Xperiax10

And Sony's is coming with an Android phone too: the Xperiax10 will hit stores early 2010. Engadget has an extensive hands-on and pretty pictures... uuuuuuh
My opinion? I think it looks stunning and I think I'll like the screen, I'm not too fond of the buttons. If they'd be soft-press, though, it might be good enough.

Google Wave App Store official

Google has confirmed that its Google Wave tool will come bundled with its own application store. The online real-time collaborating tool will allow developers to market their own apps within the store, while Google will (happily) take a share of the revenue.

Currently only available in beta, and with only 600,000 testers worldwide, Wave is a mash-up of online documents, instant messaging and plug-ins for things like Google Maps and Weather that can all be displayed publicly in a "wave".
Source: T3 magazine

Update: BTW, I'm on Google Wave. Look me up!

Apple to block OSX installation on Intel Atom netbooks

Admit it: it was too good to be true. If you can install OSX on a cheap netbook and get a working Apple-like device, Steve (Jobs) is going to have something to say about this! And the more popular it gets, the more wide-spread, the more likely he'll hear about it. Duuh!

Still it's sad that Snow Leopard Update 10.6.2 Blocks Kills Hackintoshes. Of course you can still use an older 10.5.8 or 10.6.1 OS version, if you can get a hold of it (quick: rip your ISOs now while they last! I have one at home, BTW). But the EULA clearly states that you can't install the OS on any hardware not obtained through Apple. Hence the problem with Psystar and their attempts to simply offer consumers the possibility to make their own choice: accept the Apple lock-in or not and use the Rebel EFI tool to do what they wish to. Freedom of speech and freedom of choice!

Psst, here is an OSX netbook compatibility chart.

ZFS gets inline deduplication

One of the file systems out there, IMHO, is ZFS by Sun for Solaris. Sadly, they can't open source it easily because there are portions that can't be licensed under the GPL license. And if they take them out, there isn't much left of the strength of ZFS. Oh well...

Anyway, ZFS gets inline deduplication! This means, that ZFS can decide -on the fly- if a data block was already written by another process at another time and know where that was. It then merely needs to store a pointer to that particular block elsewhere on the disk (an inode) and it's done.
Expensive data center storage solutions such as NetApp and EMC use this technology too, but these boxes cost $100,000+. ZFS is the file system that you use when you format your disks! Any disks! :)

USB turntables & Audacity

My parents have a respectable LP collection and recently organized their attic, seeing how many they really have. I've always been planning on digitizing the collection - or at least a part of it - to guard them from disappearing and regain some of my childhood memories. USB-based turntables are perfect for this. There even some which have an iPod port built-in too.

A recent search for brands that make USB phono players aka turntables brought up the USB turntables - Audacity Wiki. Not only does it list decent brands that make the turntables, but it also lists how to record the LPs. Pay especially attention to their instruction on recording old 78 rpm records. If your recordings sound dull, chances are you need to post-process the recording to remove "RIAA playback equalization". :) Good to know!

HTC confirmed to be cooking up Android 2.0 update for Hero

With Motorola's DROID coming, HTC is a bit jealous and confirmed to be cooking up an Android 2.0 update for Hero. I had a Hero in my fingers while in Singapore, but didn't like the feel and the form-factor. However, if you just bought one and are happy with, it would be a shame to have to buy a whole new phone just to get Android 2.0. So I'm glad HTC will release an upgrade.

Nintendo Wii 2 specs leaked

Cool, the rumor machine is predicting that the Wii 2 will get Blu-ray and 1080p playback support. ETA is Q3 2010 and everywhere at the same time, none of this Japan-first shit, then US en then EU. Hurray to Nintendo!

Latest Adobe Flash Player crashes all my browsers

OK this is weird...
Last week, when Firefox was updated to 3.5.4, the welcome screen told me I was using an outdated Flash player version and I upgraded to version 10.0.32.18. Since then, each page transition to a page containing a Flash object of any kind freezes my browser.
I'm at work where I have this problem on Windows XP SP2. I tried Firefox 3.5.4, then IE6 and finally the latest Chrome browser. All browsers crash at exactly the same thing: page transitions. Chrome is actually very nice! It informs me the tab crashed and if I'd like to kill it. Then it informs me the Flash plug-in is causing the problem and if I'd like to stop it.

Has anybody had this problem too or heard about it? I've uninstalled Flash for now because I cannot get a hold of an older version