Posts by Haku

Very nice, but...

don't OLED displays suffer from poor (compared to CRT/LCD) lifetimes?

The manufacturers have to remember that some people will leave their tv on for as long as they're awake, and longer if they fall asleep in front of it with or without the sleep timer. CRTs can cope with decades of such usage patterns but I doubt OLEDs will.

Oh, wait, that's built-in obselecense isn't it, silly me - how else would they make you buy a new set right after the warranty runs out...

2.5 watt popcorn maker?

naah, the movie would be over by the time all the popcorn has popped, besides I'm having trouble believing it actually works because there's a cut in the middle of the video clip where suddenly it's full of popcorn, whereas I CAN believe this USB powered meat cooker is real, granted it does use the power from 30 USB ports...

http://xe.bz/aho/24/

Solar power is fun to dabble with

but here in the UK you'll need to spend a serious amount of money to get any return from it, plus the price of panels are still HIDEOUSLY expensive compared to the US etc. Sure you could make your own panels by buying a large batch of cells & wiring them up yourself into waterproof frames, but it's still not cheap and a lot of hassle.

One minor flaw in having solar-roof cars, I haven't seen many garages with see-through roofs...

Not just corporations

As much as I think this a completly dumb idea in the overall picture of the internet, I can see one or two groups of people combining spending forces to acquire custom TLD's such as .jedi where contributers would get the chance to have their own sub-level domain name for free.

Can we have a new internet please? this one is overflowing with an abundance of spammers, scammers, bloggers, governments trying to control it, RIAA/MPAA etc. trying to control it etc.

@Martin Owens

"Just redirect IE6 requests to /dev/null, come on guys anyone using IE6 needs a big banner saying "Stop using the computer""

CONGRATULATIONS!!! You've just alienated all the Windows 2000 users.

Miro - cross platform online video downloader

http://www.getmiro.com/

Very nice piece of software, avoid skimming through a host of ad-loaded websites for your supply of "aww cute kitten!" and ilk videos, still in it's early days as there are a ton of features still needed to raise it to superb level, one of which I'd like is to be able to convert the downloaded video files to other formats for playing on PMP's etc.

Re: Theft

"Surely this just advertises that there is a mobile on charge in the tent?"

Use the wind turbine to charge a portable battery pack meant for charging mobile phones etc., sure you'll lose some of the generated energy by not charging the mobile direct but you won't have to leave it in the tent.

Legtops & battery life

I can get over 3 hours on this 701 Eee, but where are the ~£300 mark legtops (too small to be called laptop) with absurdly exceptional battery life? I'm talking 8+ hours with screen on full brightness & wifi on, most of these designs of laptop concentrate more on the layout of the screen/keyboard/ports and then just slap the battery somewhere on the back wherever they can squeeze it in.

Sure a long battery life legtop would be heavier but I could live with that, using the standard cylindrical cells saves them money but what about the flat types of battery used in mp3 players/mobiles etc.? a bunch of those on the underneath of the unit would help with stability (the Eee can have a tendancy to tip backwards when on uneven surfaces) and give you exceptional runtimes.

Re: What to call them

Steven Knox wrote: "How about "Toy Laptops"? Just like toy dogs, they're more for show than for any real use and their owners are way too enamoured of them."

No way man! I got my EeePC last year and it has been immensely useful due to it's small size & sheer portability, had I spent the same amount on a 'full size' laptop I would have been cursing it almost daily due to the sheer size/weight/unportability of them compared to the EeePC.

You can't hold a normal laptop on the palm of one hand whilst typing with the other, and not have to put it down after 30 seconds because awkwardness & weight of the thing makes your arm ache badly, but you CAN with an EeePC.

Hooray for stupid shoppers!

I've discovered a car boot seller who picks up the returns from Maplins, digging through their £2each/3for£5 boxes I've picked up some great bargains that overall would have cost 10x had I bought it direct from Maplins. Only 2 things didn't work but I fixed them; battery terminals needed bending on a portable soldering iron, which I then used to fix a resistor (bad joint) on a laser diode of another item.

You sank my battleship!

Sorry, it was the first thing that popped into my head when I read the headline - meaning it would be an ideal screen for head-to-head two player games.

@Alan

"but electric bicycles are just too expensive."

Not when you compare it to car ownership.

My UM36 electric bike cost £900 with a lithium battery a year ago, roughly in the middle of the price range of ebikes. Maybe it is expensive for a bike (looked at the top end normal bikes lately?) but I don't own a car so it's basically my main transport, I ride it literally daily but if I'd bought a car for £900 (or even got one free) instead I'd then have to shell out on tax/mot/repairs/fuel/insurance...

Someone on an electric bike forum worked out their car over 4 years of ownership & eventual sale cost them 70p/mile (adding up all car related receipts) yet an electric bike can be less than 4p/mile (factoring in a replacement £300 lithium battery every 2 years but not factoring in the initial bike cost).

SSD costs & longevity

So does this mean the power consumption of SSD is low enough to make it cheaper in the long run than using traditional HD's, despite the absurdly high $/£ per GB of SSD compared to HD?

And what about the SSD write cycle lifetime? I know when the Asus Eee came out there were a lot of people who were worried about the SSD failing within a year or two because of the write cycle lifetime of flash storage - not something I'm worried about with this Eee because it's not a critical device for me that I regularly read/write gigabytes of data to it's drive & SD card, but servers tend to be a bit more harsh in that respect.

I look forward to the day when SSD is cheaper per GB than HD, hopefully Google's interest will push this one step closer.

@druck

You've got your Aussie "sex in a canoe" drinks mixed up

it's Castlemaine XXXX - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcOnqDLeAMs

and Fosters the Amber Nectar - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-q-669AFNY

In Soviet Russia

Servers downtime you!

Twilight Zone

Reading the title & subject matter of this publicity stunt reminds me of a certain 1980's (colour, not the original black/white) Twilight Zone episode "The Elevator" where two brothers go and try to find their father in his warehouse type lab and discover he's been working on a growth serum, in one part of the building they find this mass of meat which has been grown for food (or something), it looked pretty disgusting.

I wouldn't want to eat "test tube meat", it sounds like something out of a sci-fi horror movie, the idea kinda makes my skin crawl.

Re: The death of the PMP?

When I got my Archos AV500 almost 2.5 years ago I did a test of playing video and got just shy of 6 hours, this extended to about 8 hours when outputting to a tv so the screen wasn't draining power. Now I'm lucky if I get up to 2 hours playback, the battery is work out.

These miniature laptops (legtops? palmtops?) are excellent for playing video because they can play practically any format you throw at them ust by getting the right codecs (which unlike Archos' offerings, won't cost you a penny) but the biggest advantage PMP's still have over laptops is the battery life, PMPs being double that of a laptop, and Cowon trump the lot with their high capacity batteries.

RE: coffee sweets?

Coffee AND yoghurt? oh.. dear.. god.., either one is bad enough on their own, but together.... *brain impodes*

@Damn Yank, hallelujah! holy shit! where is the Tylenol? could do with some after reading about the coffee yoghurt

re: ZX81

There was a rubber keyboard accessory for the ZX81 which made it feel close to that of the first gen ZX Spectrum, it was glued on top of the flat keyboard but you still had to press hard to make the buttons work.

http://www.retro-trader.com/images/march03/DVC01707.JPG

open wifi dangers

A malicious person could get a lot of innocent people in hot water with a honeypot URL and a bit of wardriving+piggybacking, especially with the amount of unencrypted and easily crackable WEP encrypted routers out there.

Also as "no" pointed out, it would be very trivial to get people to visit a honeypot URL just by posting it somewhere - it could be obfusicated by using tinyurl or the like and you wouldn't know the destination unless you clicked it, but more frightening is how easy it would be to make their browser automatically visit a honeypot URL just by using an img src tag in a forum/messageboard post.

Static power

Summertime + cars + me = zzzap, I've often in past summertimes gotten out of a car, gone to lock it up and got a nasty zap from the lock, to avoid this I would hold onto the key and let the spark jump from the lock to the key instead of me, however it's not funny when you go to fill the car up and get a zap from the fuel cap... I mostly ride an electric bike now (no, not static powered)

I remember a few years ago seeing a news piece about a woman who would trigger store security alarms, her body would act like those magnetic security strips.

Whoa, that takes me back

I went to a Siggraph expo in London waaay back in 1994 and there was a Silicon Graphics Onyx Reality Engine setup with a virtual skiing game, had to hold two handles like sticks and wear a belt with another sensor, the belt was so you could physically jump up in the air and the character on screen would follow suit.

Freaked aka Hideous Mutant Freekz

How could I forget this little-known classic favourite of mine, with the 'Bill & Ted' actors Alex Winters, Keanu Reeves as Ortiz the Dog Boy (uncredited), one of Randy Quaid's best performances ever and Mr. T as a bearded lady (seriously!). It has such lines as:

"You trust your lives to a guy just because he can lick his own balls?"

"You're ugly enough to burn the nose hairs off a dead nun"

"I just laid a turd that's the spitting image of Kim Basinger!"

Re: My daft ex

I bet if you told her the theory of "Dark Suckers" (google for it) either her head would go bang trying to comprehend that light bulbs don't produce light but actually suck the darkness out of the air, or she'd be left believing it was true for the rest of her life.

Not thermal imaging

When they talk about infra-red I can only assume they mean the type of camera that can see in the dark by way of infra-red lighting, not thermal imaging which sees heat, thermal cameras cannot see through glass so they'd be useless for trying to count the number of people in a car.

@heystoopid

I think Mike Judge has been doing a version of "Scrooge", if you look at "Office Space" as "Christmas present" and "Idiocracy" as "Christmas future" it means he still has a "Christmas past" film to do, in that his films are a warning to everyone to stop having meaningless jobs and smarten up (perhaps take more stupid people out of the gene pool, putting sterilising substances in scratch cards & lottery tickets would be a good start).

P.S. did you get the memo about the TPS reports?

Missed opportunity

With mobile phones probably more popular than thethered phones (wouldn't really know, I hate both types), what about a mobile phone hamburger?

Perhaps their last banner ad campaign didn't go so well...

http://www.haku.co.uk/b3ta/Pipex.gif

(and you get a free ringding!)

mp3 input?

Don't they mean line-in? I hate that kind of bullshit marketing, jumping on whatever's the current bandwagon craze just to shift a few more units on the lure that it does more than it says on the box.

I have two of the original Dubreq Stylophones, each has a different pitch, though sadly I can't play a tune on them to save my life.

@yeah, right

The keyboard problems you experienced, keys getting stuck etc., I haven't experienced any of that with this Eee I'm typing on which I got last Nov, perhaps the build quality has dropped with production being ramped up to meet demand or it hasn't been treated well. I find the build quality of the Eee pretty good, I haven't been too gentle with it (it's slowly building up a collection of 'war wound' scratches) and nothing's getting loose or creaking badly.

The problems I've had with the keyboard are the actual layout of the keys with some in the 'wrong' place, namely the right shift is the wrong side of the up arrow, there's no right Ctrl key, the "\" is a sub-key of Z which only works when you press the Fn at the same time, and the worst of all is the "" key which for some reason they decided to place it to the right of Esc instead of underneath which means I've often mis-typed numbers because I expect them to be 1 key to the right of where they are. I have quite large hands and haven't found the small size of the keyboard a problem but actually really like it, when I go back and use regular sized keyboards they feel like over-sized comedy keyboards - the same with mice because I bought a mini-mouse for it which is about 1/3 the size of regular mice and I really like that too.

First degree toastercide

WowWee have just made the toy equivilant of Talkie Toaster.

In houses all over the world it'll end up in the garbage bin in three thousand separate pieces, because of accidents involving a fourteen pound lump-hammer.