2 cool new things I learnt about this weekend...

CouchSurfing - Free accomodation all over the world...

GeoCaching - finding other people's stuff all over the world using GPS...

Time / Tiny Stores close as they no longer can accept Credit Card payments. Full details here.

iPod arrived today. Much excitement and review to follow...

New Computer Time

Okay, so I want a new computer - I want FAST, small form factor, and will be using my current HD and DVDRW - main uses will be UD/ Seti/ Photoshop/ Gaming. (I intend to get a Radeon 9700/9800 256mb card or something similar) But I'm stuck on what CPU/mobo/system combination - here's the options from cheapest to most expensive:

System1 - Pentium 4 3.2ghz / ASUS mobo small form factor cube (socket 478 - so no upgrade potential) / 1gb ram
Total price around £300

System2 - AMD 64 3500 (2.2ghz) / Shuttle Nforce3 small form factor cube (socket 939 - so plenty of upgrade potential, even the possibility of dual core AMD chips... and will be able to run Windows 64bit) / 1gb ram.
Total price around £460

Edit - Found this system (using a QBic EQ3901A barebones cube) for £371 inc vat so am gonna get this system with an AMD64 3500.

System3 - Dual Core 2.8ghz P4 (Windows see 2 processors as it's 2 cpus in the space of one cpu - lots of heat though) / ASUS/Abit ATX mobo (intel 955 chipset) / 1gb DDR2 Ram / ATX midi tower case (would prefer small form factor, but dual core chipset isn't available in small form factor yet).
Total price around £508

System4 - Pentium M 2ghz / Commel Mini-ITX motherboard / 1gb DDR2 RAM
Total price around £610 (excluding case as I'll be able to use my current case) - Found a cube system for £199 (AOpen EY855) so the total for this would be £581 (still too much!)

What are your thoughts? The AMD seems the best: most future proof, 64bit capable, performance is better than P4 3.2ghz, heat output is less than P4s...

or I could get 10 x 1ghz P3 computers for £350 - then I'd have the equivalent of 10ghz :)

Police in britain: retards.

"He said: "The murder rates in some of these slums are worse than in a lot of war zones and that could explain why, when plain clothes officers pulled a gun on him, he may have run away."

hmmm... what would YOUR response be to a PLAIN CLOTHES person pulling a GUN on you?!?!? natural reaction would be to run in about 50% of people I guess!! So the police chase the innocent dude and decide to stick 5 or 6 bullets in his head!

bbc news

unbeleivable - suddenly the police have a shoot to kill policy on anyone who runs away from them when they (in plain clothes) pull a gun out on someone!?!?!?

Link

USA national naval government department of irony congratulates itself on building the first ever stealth boat with the minor setback that it's too dangerous to be put to sea.

Gilly said there had no significant drop in takings since the attacks of two weeks ago and, as she was speaking, a group of Hare Krishna, chanting and banging on their tambourines, walked past.

She laughed and said: "Look at that. That is so London. These terrorists are bonkers if they think they can make a difference. Not in London they won't."

Gilly sounds cool.

gerbils

gerbils in the news. hurrah!

wooo harry potter spoiler

motorists learn how harry potter ends :-) what is the world coming to?

robotic cars: driven by via-epia, another driven by mac os X (and mac mini's), driven by pentium-m

video of dude doing a 'drive by' spoiler ruining the end of the new harry potter book for people going to buy the book. (the last person's reponse is funny... "Nooooooooo!!!")

Videos and photos of the weekend can be found here (click videos for videos, and click gallery for photos - on the videos page there's also a link to phil's photos).

RSI: h'apparently two button mice give you RSI - and h'apparently the one-button Mac mouse is better because your index finger can rest in a much more natural position on the right hand side of the button... so if you've got a two button mouse, configure your computer for a left-handed mouse and then you can put your index finger on the "right" button - much more comfortable.

"The multi-button mouse is a MAJOR cause of RSI/OOS: very dangerous. Waggle your index finger and you can see related muscle movement right up into your shoulder. Holding that finger hovering over the left button sets up a slight but continuous muscle tension that can be very damaging in a remarkably short time if you have to do a lot of mousing. The Mac one (or no) button mouse can be clicked with only minimal movement of the right index finger, allowing that finger to return to a resting position to the right of the mouse." link

SCO Group vs. IBM. Just thought I'd post an update here, coz this is pretty mental stuff:

"On July 14, 2005, Groklaw obtained [3] a sealed email [4] from Michael Davidson to SCO Group senior VP Reginald Broughton sent on August 13, 2002. In it, Davidson describes the Santa Cruz Operation's own investigation into whether or not Linux contained proprietary UNIX source code. "At the end, we had found absolutely *nothing*. ie no evidence of any copyright infringement whatsoever," according to Davidson. Darl McBride had recently become CEO of on June 28, 2002. Quickly thereafter he championed the SCO Group's accusations of "line-by-line"[5] copyright infringment against Linux in the hopes of bolstering SCOX's tepid NASDAQ performance." found at wikipedia.

Full details on the Groklaw site - basically they say the case is now over... (Although it may take SCO a while to realise this...)

Anyway, I found all this coz we found an old SCO Xenix box at work.

Join the Waller Seti Effort (aka Distributed Computing revisited): The old classic SETI has sort of stopped, and been replaced by new Seti - if you did the old version then it remembers your old score, and you can transfer that account over to the new seti - if you were already a member of the Waller team, then you'll still be a member as long as you transfer over your classic (old) seti account. To get started with it follow these steps:

1. Activate your old account, or make a new account: Seti Homepage.
2. Download, Install and Run the BOINC* software: Seti Download link.
3. Join Team / See the team stats: Waller Seti Team

When you do install BOINC - don't bother with the screensaver, "it's gay", to quote burnt face man.

* One of the neat things about BOINC is that it's multipurpose, and there's various different projects you can get involved in if you don't like the idea of SETI. Or you could join the HEXUS UD team - to look for a cure for cancer.

apple and the switch to intel

apple and the switch to intel

Apple have stated that they will be selling intel based macs in 2006.

Their 'reasons' seemed to be 'ooh we can do a better laptop'*

eweek:Glaskowsky : In this article Glaskowsky says intel processors will not cost less than ibm, that the pentium m is not a good enough reason to switch, and ibm has similar processors.. So the real resons he hints at are that apple won't have to do their own hardware designs for strange devices, and that apple could do a seamless windows (as in windows compatible) platform.

(* alli-g-ly)

Part 2:

arstechnica:stokes : In this artcle John Stokes gets some insider info too.. and suggests that ibm don't make enough spare chips for apple (because no one else really buys 2.5ghz ppc chips) and then apple complain when they didn't order enough. And intel will offer good bulk discounts, [for pc processors], while also being able to supply the processor for the next generation of ipod devices.

so waddaya reckon? - will the best power pc to run darwin (and hence mac os X) in future be a microsoft xbox 360 (over 3ghz, 64 bit) or some pentium 4 with rosetta emulation. or something better from ibm. Is speed what apple are looking for? or just under-cooked laptop users?

Napoleon Dynamite (2004) Film, available from Blockbusters. Get it, watch it, ENJOY it, laugh hysterically until you cry*. (*that's what happened to me at one part of it - maybe you'll laugh as much at some other bit). It's £9.99 from amazon.co.uk if you want to buy it (cheaper than play/playusa.com)

Hey there, read my latest review on epiacenter.com - I review the Mini ITX VIA EPIA MS-12000 - a small 17cm x 17cm motherboard with 1.2ghz CPU, etc.

We got the games!!! WOOHOOO!!!

What an awesome moment to stick it up the French. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!

Other operating systems: There's the usual Windows, Mac OS X, and millions of different Linux versions, but there's also: SkyOS (written from scratch), and Syllable (also written from scratch). Syllable is a free 31mb download for the Live CD so can easily be checked out. More info and links here.

Amiga people might want to look at AROS - an x86 Amiga OS aimed at being Amiga compatible. I wonder what would have happened if after the Atari Falcon (Atari's last proper home computer release), Atari decided to write/port GEM/TOS (Atari OS) for/to the PC? (Perhaps it could have been slightly successful allowing Atari people to move over to a familiar place?)

Syllable seems quite quick, but the general user interface is like going back to using an Amiga (it's a bit ugly / basic looking - in fact the default theme is called 'Amiga' - you can choose from Beish, Next, Win98, Warp looking windows etc), the calculator's called 'Albert' so if you wanted to find the calculator you look in the Albert folder (rather than looking in a Calculator folder). Plus when you're in the Albert folder you don't even know it's a Calculator until you run it (the icon is simply the default Syllable 'program' icon). Whisper is a mail client - again you can't tell till you actually run the program as the program icon doesn't show you a mail icon or anything to give you a clue what the program does. The internet works though (ABrowse - at least it gives you a slight clue as to what it does). Well, I managed to crash the desktop by changing the window themes and the resolution / colour depth at the same time. (So now I need to reboot - I think I'll reboot to something else though :)

And in more OS related stuff, apparently Longhorn* (Windows XP + X number of years) is basically no more secure than Windows XP + SP2 - I was expecting something half way decent, but instead it's likely Microsoft are just going to force people to use it by dropping support of W2K and XP in the future. *link to PCWorld preview of Longhorn.

Che'ez! FoxZ3 First Look and FoxZ2 with Waterproof Case



I spotted these two cameras in John Lewis - the FoxZ2 (in orange) is a 2 megapixel camera, and is priced at £59 including a waterproof case! The FoxZ3 is a 3 megapixel camera, with a 2" screen, and is only 12mm thick - the camera comes with a small camera case, and is priced at £79.99 - it's available in Silver and Black. Both cameras have no optical zoom. Click images to enlarge. Expect to find a review of the FoxZ3 on DigiCamReview in the future.

There's a review of the thinner (9.8mm) FoxZ2 here. The FoxZ3 features MPEG4 video, so for example, you can fit around 86 minutes on a 256mb SD Card at 320x240, and 43 minutes at 640x480.

have you seen this? it's a J2EE development platform, based on a mini-itx VIA EPIA board/cpu running "a pre-installed copy of SUN's J2SE 5.0 platform, while the underlying operating system choices are Sun's Solaris 10, with either CDE or JDS3 preconfigured" - now if this isn't one of the freaky-est computer available, then I don't know what is.

dude gets fired for having an opinion in the UK.

Apple Dashboard - it's basically a version of Konfabulator but for the Mac, BUT it's main flaw is this: with Konfabulator, you can stick your favourite widgets on the desktop, open up your program, internet explorer for example, and resize IE so that you can still see your widgets. With Apple Dashboard you can't! It's simply all widgets and nothing else, or apps and no widgets.

Other things: You can't actually quit Dashboard - it's always on! (unless you get a third party app to switch it off!) Although you can remove it from the dock.

Matt: whats the difference between 'console' and 'terminal'?

I've put photos, and started a mini-review of the Mac Mini, on joshwaller.co.uk

Link - Deep Impact is a success and the BBC is there. Well, not really but you see the point. I love astronomy.

Take this poll: How many cups of tea do you drink in a day? Results: How many cups of tea?

Megapixel myth?* What do you think - If you could get an 8 megapixel camera for the same price as a 4,5 or 6 megapixel camera - would you get one, and why? Would you pay £300 for an 8 megapixel camera, instead of paying £200 for a 6 megapixel camera?

Black and White photography - do you bother taking photos in black and white? If you do, when would you use black and white instead of colour, and if you don't, why do you only shoot in colour?

* no one really answered the question here so I thought I'd make a fresh topic about it.