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Fri, 28 Dec 2007I decided to do some more shopping for my game system, and went to the store to buy a (non existant) HDMI-Wii cable.
"I see the component cables, but where do you keep the Wii HDMI cables?", I ask. After a quick iPhone googling in the store -- there really was no such thing. No need to argue, it just does not have any digital out. Lots of forum posts with this exact same HDMI question, and plenty more Fred Meyer electronics section employee-esk responses. Ugh. Time for video school forum posters and store clerks alike:
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. Sun, 23 Dec 2007Matt 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.
Wed, 13 Dec 2006My wife's windows laptop had a complete hard drive failure. This was also in addition to an earlier battery failure (5 minute charge time) and some physical issues that involved juice and soda. It was time to go laptop shopping. After looking at a bunch of junk low end PC's, we came across a very well priced group of MacBooks in the $1000-$1500 range with some very nice specifications and fast intel processors. Oh, they also ran OSX, which is cool too. We decided to do something a little different and jump into a completely different platform than we were used to. We bought two and threw away our PC's. The mere value of running Windows XP in a virtual machine sandbox was good enough reason alone. So far, we haven't had to install such garbage yet as OSX meets all our needs. There was at least one close call that involved web broswer plug-ins for her online class, but that has since been resolved. Microsoft Office for Mac is a real life saver. As far as productivity software goes, you can't beat Microsoft's line of office products. Its how business gets done. OpenOffice and its variations, as much as I love it, is a buggy, bulky piece of crap. It means well, but after my wife ran that garbage for a years time, I was almost to the point of shelling out $300 and buying the real deal. This time, we went with student edition, which includes Word, Excel, Powerpoint, and Entourage, for something shy over $100. Nobody verified our college ID (even though its legitimate), and they even gave us *3* licenses. Since we have His and Her MacBooks, it was great to get office on both of these suckers for that price. With Apple now on the Intel platform, I really can't come up with one good reason why someone wouldn't get a Mac. Thu, 20 Jul 2006Alright, so these aren't really physical, actual gadgets, but I have been working on some pretty crafty code sniplets for people to throw on their blogs, myspace, etc. They are preview only, but soon will be accepting users on a sort of limited beta program. The phone one This one is simple. Type in your phone number, it calls the blog owner. The number of the blog owner is never disclosed, which can be useful. I haven't decided if it will be limited to 5 or 10 minutes. I am limiting to US 253, 206, and 907 termination for just this demo. Feel free to call me, i'll probably get a kick out of someone actually using this thing. Want to be a sponsor? Contact me offline. Its cheap and you get your own voice ad before the call starts, with optional features.
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