General

Game consoles are evil by ZDNet‘s John Carroll — Richard Stallman is the godfather of the Free Software Movement. He is also maddeningly hard core in his beliefs, to the point where I wonder if he would allow doctors to work on him if the machines they were using run anything but open source software. The following is an excerpt from an interview given […]

Slashdot: ‘It seems that the most recent DVDs released by Sony — specifically Stranger Than Fiction, Casino Royale, and The Pursuit of Happyness — have some kind of ‘feature’ that makes them unplayable on many DVD players. This doesn’t appear to be covered by the major media yet, but this link to a discussion over at Amazon gives a flavor of the problems people are experiencing. A blogger called Sony and was told the problem is with the new copy protection scheme, and they do not intend to fix it. Sony says it’s up to the manufacturers to update their hardware.’

Remember Sony’s CD copy protection that installed a rootkit? Or their constant war against homebrew PSP software? Sony’s motto is the opposite of Google: “Always do evil”.

This is really cool. A new house being built in the mountains of Greece will have the ability to repair itself when things break. Embedded in the walls will be an entire arrays of batteryless, wireless sensors that will give data readouts on a whole host of things, including vibrations, temperature, humidity and gas levels. The sensors are so advanced that “even if the building totally collapsed, the sensors would still let you pinpoint the source of the fault,” says Dr Roger Gregory, the chairman of the University’s spin off company Instrumental Ltd. In addition to the advanced sensor design present in the house, the walls will be made of self-repairing polymers. Self-repairing materials are able to fix themselves when small cracks form, helping stave off more catastrophic failures. The self-repairing walls will contain polymer nanoparticles that will turn to liquid under extreme stress, flowing into the cracks that may form. Once in the cracks the materials reharden, fixing the newly formed fracture.

The Prius OS seems pretty powerful, but this goes a lot further.
Via Engadget:

We’ve certainly seen all sorts of exotic vehicles run on Windows XP before (so to speak), but Toyota execs are mulling the idea of crafting its own in-car operating system in order to keep that competitive edge alive. Currently, OS’ are ‘built from scratch‘ for every new vehicle model, but the automaker is realizing that an in-house squad focused on delivering a single system to run behind the scenes could not only dramatically cut R&D costs, but also ‘ boost efficiency and speed up development.’ Although Toyota wouldn’t comment directly, it is presumed that the project is an integral part of the new VI (Value Innovation) initiative, in which the firm is hoping to consolidate the amount of parts used in their vehicle. Still, we aren’t going to see a Toyota-branded OS until ‘closer to 2015,’ so we hope fully expect an auto-pilot feature to be in there somewhere. [Originally from Wired]

Technorati Tags:
Toyota, Prius

The spam problem at my gmail account got so bad that I switched to a new gmail address. Replace ‘mike3k’ with ‘macmegasite’ for my new email address. Since I still get lots of email at my old address since I used it to sign up for a lot of stuff, I’m having it forward to the new address for a while. I’ll attempt to keep this address as spam-free as possible by never using it to sign up for any public sites.

Since the spam that ended up in my inbox was being forwarded as well, I’m now using two forwards, first to my DreamHost account for filtering with spamassassin, and then via Procmail to my new gmail account. I now have the convenience of using Gmail but with much stronger spam filtering.

Several people informed me that Mii Transfer won’t launch on a PowerPC Mac. Since my G4 lacks Bluetooth, I’ve only tested it on Intel Macs. I’ll try to release a PPC fix in the next few days.

Microsoft introduced a new image format to potentially replace JPEG. Despite JPEG’s flaws, it’s an open standard. There’s also PNG, which is superior to JPEG in some ways. Even though Microsoft plans to license HD Photo, they still own the patents on it and anyone who uses it will be held hostage to Microsoft. On a whim they can decide to prevent it from being used on a particular platform or use it against a particular software developer they consider a threat.

• Paul Thurrott’s Merciless Attack on Artie MacStrawman
  Thurrott doesn’t need to invent or imagine anything; he simply takes every complaint ever leveled against Microsoft–and there are many–and recycles them to be about Apple, but without any basis
  (tags: microsoft Apple)

I got a Wii today! It was the last one in the store. I caught the sales guy as someone else was buying a Wii and asked him if they had any more in stock, so he gave me the last one. He wouldn’t let the Wiis out of his site. Instead of letting us carry it, he took them straight to the cashier.

Setup was fairly easy. I was a bit disappointed that it comes with an AV cable rather than a component video cable, although that worked out better for me since I wasn’t using either of the AV inputs on my TV although I was using both component video inputs and the HDMI input. It connected to my wireless network without any problems and immediately downloaded a software update.

The only game I have is Wii Sports, which I played right away. It’s a pretty good workout; almost as good as going to the gym. However, I found that I still stink at baseball, just as I did when I was a kid.

TeraStation

Originally uploaded by mike3k.

My TeraStation arrived this morning. It has 4x250GB drives arranged in a RAID 5 array (which can be changed to RAID 0 or 1) for a total capacity of about 700GB. It was very easy to set up and I can connect to it easily using Samba.

I’m now moving my backups and other stuff from the Linux box to the TeraStation. I’ll now be able to use the Linux box as a desktop development machine with some non-critical stuff like iTunes sharing since I no longer need to use it for my critical file & print server.