My ex-boss made his first iPhone call, and talks a bit about how the The iPhone came to Canada. Still not sure I'd pay $600 for this especially with rumors of a new iPod (please, please let it be touch with full screen video and a hard drive or at least 64G of solid state storage) and that Apple could turn it off with one sync of new firmware pushed down. Still, cool to know someone who had used an iPhone :)
Via OSNews I found a nice little X.Org 7.3 Preview with some of the new nifty stuff that'll be coming up in the new Linux/Unix graphical system.
Whoot! Sounds like Enemy Territory QUAKE Wars is GOLD! Can't wait to see it on the shelves!
IStartedSomething has the roundup of links about Windows Vista Service Pack 1 whose details are starting to emerge.
A few days ago a story passed by my news aggregator about how under Vista if you are playing audio, your network connection will be affected. I just saw a new post by Robert Love about Those Dang DPCs Clogging the MMCSS which goes in to explain a bit more about this, and compare and contrast the same kernel systems in Linux.
In other words, consuming half of your processor is (surprise!) detrimental to multimedia playback performance. At this point, it becomes clear that the process scheduler folks and the networking folks are bitter enemies and do not converse. Consequently, the obvious solution of fixing the abhorrent networking performance was bypassed for a quick bandaid:[...]
Thanks to Darren for pointing me to Run, Fat Boy, Run, hilarious looking new movie from Simon Pegg, who did Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz.
Found on Digg this Call of Duty 4 – The Beta First Impressions.
If you don't know what "dumber than a sack of hammers happy" means now, watch Miss Teen USA 2007 - South Carolina answers a question and then come back to me. I'll wait.
To be fair, I'm sure she was flustered, but really, come on, can't people string a sentence together? One that, like, has an ending that has something to do with the beginning that has something to do with the question asked, like, okay?
The sad thing is, I'm sure she'll do ok in the world, for some reason society these days seems to reward the bim-tards.
Sweet! Boing Boing points out that The IT Crowd -- season two, episode one has aired and is around for upload. Links in BB story.
For anyone who is a geek and who hasn't seen The IT Crowd before, it's an absolutely hilarious show about a bunch of nerds/geeks/sysadmins. I'm interested to see if the US adaption is anywhere near as funny as the original UK version. I'd say go and download season 1 first and then watch season 2, if you haven't seen it before.
Aliens vs. Predator - Requiem trailer is out. Yowza, definitely not something you'll see on TV anytime soon, lots of people's heads exploding and the like. Super-cool stuff!
Welp, looks like it only took a month or so... Engaget says: iPhone unlocked: AT&T loses iPhone exclusivity. Glad it's finally happened..... now gotta get me some of that (assuming that this isn't nuked the next iPhone update).
Saw on shacknews that a World in Conflict Demo was released.
Developed by Massive Entertainment, and published by Sierra, the alternate history action strategy game World in Conflict will be in stores September 18.
Not everyone is (still) impressed with MS's "we're doing open source now too!" initiative (Shared Source I believe it was called). Microsoft's Open Source Trashware is an article where a few of the open source MS projects are looked at. As you can tell by the title, the author is not impressed.
It does seem that the staying power of MS's initiatives falls off rapidly as the marketing campaign ends. Who has heard about the Zune (outside the zune specific blogs I suppose) in the last couple of months? The Vista Ultimate site remained silent for months after Vista's launch, and was only updated after 5 months because of pressure from the internet community bitching that the extras they were supposed to receive after paying the ultimate price for vista were a) lame and b) not updated. Even now, 2 months after the update (which really just said they were going to release more stuff "over the next couple of years") nothings been put on the site.
Of course this (the lack of MS open source projects) may simply be due to pressure at work. We all know how easy it is to be busy enough to really have no desire to do anything in the evening after work, maybe that's the case for these folks? Or they have realized that OSS won't make them money, while working for The Man at MS will.
ORA has a nice look at Silverlight and Moonlight.
Very cool pics of the making of a CPU Desk.... basically the top of a desk with CPUs in it. I actually had this same idea 15 years ago or so, putting old electronics on a desk and then filling it with epoxy to create a cool tabletop. Well, maybe not the same idea, but still cool. I could do this as well, just need about 800 more spare CPUs :)
Looks super-cool though.
Gizmodo has a Hands On D3 and D300 Impressions (the latest Nikon digital SLRs) from a Nikon event. Both cameras are 12mp cameras, the D300 being APS sensor size with 5fps and the D3 being a full frame body with 9fps. Awhoooga!
...when I fired the D3 on burst mode, I felt like Arnold firing the minigun in T2 between the rapid clacking and the weight.
Somehow my 6mp 2fps Pentax *ist-D is starting to feel very, very wimpy :(
DPReview also has their own previews of the D300 and D3.
Spore Preview over on 1up.com. Man I can't wait for this game!
Suprnova.org – The Universal Bittorrent Source, is back. I'm not sure if it's as relevant today as it was Back In The Day(tm), with the advent of the age of TPB, Torrentz, mininova, etc, but it is nice to see it back. Torrentfreak has an article on what is old and what is new.
Content Aware Image Resizing is a super slick and super cool technology which allows you to resize images in a (duh) content aware way, allowing you to expand or contract an image not by simply throwing away columns of pixels, but by figuring out which parts of the image are more or less important, and then inserting or removing averages. It's kinda hard to explain, the video shows it really well though.
In other gaming news, there's a Call of Duty 4 Video up on Fileshack. sCary has both flash (instant view) and the mondo HD version (if you're willing to wait 80+ minutes for the free FileShack servers) available.
It's another one of those "download if you're a subscriber" things I think, but the demo for Bioshock is on Fileplanet now. Also new nVidia drivers are out (faster to get them from the beta section on the nVidia website than from the FilePlanet download) with some BioShock specific improvements.
How good is the demo? I'll tell you when the download starts in 33 minutes or so :) Unless I find the same file elsewhere (*cough*tpb*cough*).
Well, GNOME 2.20 is starting to ramp up, and some release notes for 2.19 are out, to give you a bit of a taste as to what's to come.
OMG. Sounds like JJ Abrams (of Lost fame) will be doing a Dark Tower movie, which Stephen King confirms.
I'm torn about this. I consider the Dark Tower King's best work, and up there in my favorite books of all time (it's a series I literally have been reading since high school). However, movies from books don't translate well, case in point, Bourne Identity (a fine movie, but incrediably cut down from the original book), 99% of Stephen King's other movies, and a host of others. See my previous comments on this.
The only way to do the DT justice is to make it a mini-series, with a minimum 8 hours per-book.
I can only pray that this doesn't destroy my memories of this series :)
Mental note: Make one of thesedesktop biospheres for work.
‘Harold & Kumar’ Sequel Teaser Trailer - Can't wait!
A great strategy guide for Unlocking Valley with the Strollin’ Soldier, directed for ET Quake Wars Players for the new Valley Map.
Forget foo has The Net in 12 Minutes, an amusing and horrific montage of the best and worst moments in those little video clips you see passed around.
Darren let me know this morning that Movable Type 4.0 was released. Lots of new stuff. I played a bit with one of the betas and it had some nice stuff in there. Might be finally time to update the UFies.org install to something a bit more modern.
Note for self, for new projects, the new Yahoo! UI Library: Rich Text Editor looks really sexy.
Compiz Fusion has made it's first first release. 0.5.2. Compiz Fusion is the new(ish) un-branch of Compiz and Beryl with some sexy new effects and stuff to play with. Unfortunately it still lags unbearably when using nVidia Twinview (at least the last git version I tried out) :( Hopefully something that can be worked on in the next release.
I wish I had this Beginners Guide To Lock Picking the other week when someone here at work locked their laptop in their desk drawer without knowing where the key was.
For Linux geeks only.... Anatomy of the Linux networking stack over at IBM's developerworks site.
Well, maybe not 101, but cassette tape culture has a good start!
Today in Microsoft news, we have:
Found a nice overview of AppArmor vs SELinux via a story about how AppArmor is now included by default in the new Ubuntu 7.10 release.
Anyone else find this picture that JWZ posted strangely and almost disturbingly hot? Or is that just me? Please say it isn't just me...
Lifehacker has a good list of Power replacements for built-in Windows utilities. Most I think I knew about, but there are a few others I didn't. Also nice to know that some of my choices for replacement apps are the same as other peoples :)
Turn Your Old CRT Computer Moniter Into A Fish Tank. I have a couple of 19" monitors I can use this on....
Great guide from Stanford on how to prepare for parenting.
Well, not "parents" per-se, but the people who reared it before it being let go to the wild. The video will give you a good portion of your "awwww" requirements for the day. Note: no goring involved (luckily)!
And the Bad Astronomy Blog has the 12 things you need to watch it!
— desrt Ryan Lortie writes about how i’m excited about the future of gnome. Basically a laundry list of the new stuff that's going into GNOME, showing how it's not stagnant with just boring incremental updates. However, some of the things he lists are... well, boring incremental updates (IMHO). Tracker as the new search engine, dconf as the new low level config manager, a new web rendering engine in Epiphany, etc all really sound like minor updates to components of GNOME, instead of something really big and exciting (again, IMHO).
Still, it is nice to see what's upcoming in my favorite desktop platform.
Some similar opinions to mine are in the OSNews comments for the story.
Funny: 10 Good Reasons You May not Want to Have Kids:
If they are ugly or stupid, you will have to endure them for a long time to come.
Chris points to some (official) Windows Vista Updates which (they say) will fix various performance issues, including the dreaded "calculating time remaining" bug. These are official updates, from the MS support site, so I don't see any reason not to install them. If your vista experience is like mine... "mostly good with a handful of pissing-me-right-off", these sound like at least part of the solution.
Fingers crossed!
Found a ETQW Public Beta 2 - Valley Map Guide.
Fairly cute story from World of Warcraft called I did something nice found on reddit. I almost glossed over it, but read it even though it's a bit long. Worth it IMHO.
We chatted a little whilst we played, and it came to my attention that this wasn't a very old player, as he kept on having to go "becuase dad neds 2 chek the emall" he also clearly had no idea how to play, kept on pointing at random objects and saying "coooooooooool!!", and by the state of his outfit, it looked like he hit mach 2 and collided with a Dorthy Perkins store.
Top 10 Halo Pick-Up Lines. Yet another reason to get an XBox 360....
YouTube Find: Futurama Trailer from Comi-Con - via Forever Geek.
When I see this report from FOX NEWS on UFO Disclosure it really makes me understand why the US is absolutely insane. What other reasonable news organization would put the leader of the UFO political action party (or whatever the hell it is) on TV and act as if he's not completely insane.
I for one welcome our new UFO overlords.
Fileshack has the Rage Trailer in both flash and HD. I'm waiting for it to download, but from the comments, you're going to like what you see :)
X Games Skater Somehow Doesn't Die seemed a bit of a silly title, till I watched the video. Yowza!
Enemy Territory Quake Wars Public Beta 2 and Keys Now Available!
Not sure what else there is to say about that....
Check the KDE 4.0 Beta 1 Release Announcement for some info and sexy screenshots!
I just found a post on Hidden things in GNOME. I knew about Epiphany, and had no clue about the mouse scrolling less output in GNOME-Terminal! (and as mentioned in the comments, it works in VIM as well). Planet Gnome for the win! This wiki page also has other tips and tricks.
I'm so getting a Level 1 Human baby shirt when I have a kid!
Yokohama at night trippy panorama from the Landmark tower. Cooooool!