I don't care about the "jaggies" or blocky video game graphics. All I want is there to be one mario, not one mario and three of his ghosts, because nintendo has a slight impedance mismatch on the component jacks.

[/gadgets] permanent link

Wed, 26 Dec 2007

1080p

Its great to finally see some higher resolutions in the plasma market at affordable prices. It also appears that all of my complaints about plasma dot pitch (aka, the gap between the pixels) have gone away with some of these new sets. It no longer looks like peering through a screen door! Now if only they weighed less and did not buzz so much. :p

Price drops are also getting silly in the LCD market. If you look around, and do not care much about the nameplate on the front, you can pick up a high quality 1080p 42" set for under $1000. Most of these are OEM from well known brands.

How great do things look on a 1080p set? Couldn't tell you. I'll wait for this Blu-Ray/HD-DVD thing to finish and let you know later. I am not putting my money on either format just yet.

[/tv] permanent link

Sun, 23 Dec 2007

ZipIt2

Matt got me to impulsively buy the second generation ZipIt, which features a color screen and loads of new features.

Some of the highlights:

and then one of the most interesting features:

There is a port inside the battery compartment, a larger ipod-isk connector on the back, and a small 4 pin jack next to the headphone jack. I am not really certain what any of these do.

The battery on the unit is unusually large for the capacity of the battery. I can get the same capacity with half the size, and nearly double capacity (2000mAh) in that exact form factor. Sounds like the first hack for this nifty device, as it could really use a lot more run time.

Second, a lot of the configuration (backdrop, themes, and radio stations) are pushed to the device from the company's website control panel. I am certain that these can be intercepted by faking the DNS on a local network. It could also serve as a way of uploading new code to the device, as it frequently checks for firmware updates from ZipIt.

No word on whether the device will be "opened up" or perhaps an SDK offered. Hopefully the GUI menu is expandable with new applications, as its not a bad launcher, so someone will not have to re-invent the wheel.

Anyway, I have no time to do anything productive with this device, so i will wait until someone gives me a serial port with "terminal", an IRC client, an SSH client, and all that jazz.

[/gadgets] permanent link

Thu, 13 Dec 2007

One Thousand Monkeys on One Thousand Typewriters

Can one thousand monkeys on one thousand typewriters eventually write a novel? For fun, I decided to put this to the test.

No--I did not fill a warehouse full of monkeys. I used the next best thing: /dev/random. This unix device, or file, can generate a limitless stream of random text and binary for your enjoyment. We are also making /dev/random do something it was not designed to do: produce non-random data.

Conclusion: They probably can't write a novel. But they can write a few words.

If you ever get bored in a shell, and have a lot of computational power at hand, you could try something like this:

cat /dev/random | strings | grep -i wtf\?
wtF?_HO
wtf?

Wow! now that was kinda creepy. Lets gather some statistics...

Use the 'tee' command and try to count just how much useless noise there was before our monkeys typed something of interest:

$ cat /dev/random | tee junk | strings | grep -i wtf\?
Wtf?'
^C
$ wc -c junk
330432512 junk
$

So there you have it. In 330 megabytes of sheer randomness, our monkeys finally asked "wtf?".

You can also try using base64 or uuencode to make /dev/random generate alphabetical characters to increase the odds..

[/funny] permanent link