Monthly Archive for January, 2006

Page 3 of 11

Making an ‘inexpensive’ video panorama system

Published on Tuesday, January 24, 2006 in Technology. Closed

This is an interesting iswa. This guy decided to set out and make a relatively inexpensive (the cameras aren’t too cheap unless you already have them) panorama system that uses 6 cameras linked with firewire in daisy chain mode to supply video to his mac. He starts at week one with a prototype system and the Hat 1 (above) and ends with Hexacam 2. From live images on his computer to a moving video where you can pan around while the video is playing (this is really cool). It is all done with free software so no need to pay the money for high end apps. I think it is a very cool idea, though not perfect it certainly is cheaper than getting a pro camera system and software.

Install MythTV onto your old Xbox

Published on Tuesday, January 24, 2006 in Gaming, Microsoft, Shorts, Software and Technology. Closed

Mythtv is an amazing product for turning your xbox in to a home built PVR system, the downside is the Xbox is not powerful enough for having it do the recording or the streaming of your tv shows. This guide will help you through configuring the xbox as a front end “Viewer” to your already in place Myth TV System.

This means you can only view recorded programs and not schedule or record them (unless you have some exteremely good hacking, modding and programming skills. Still interesting though. It doesn’t mention whether you need a modchip inside your Xbox to work, but seeing how it will install Linux onto it, I’m assuming you have to.read more

Sorry for the lack of posts

Published on Tuesday, January 24, 2006 in General. Closed

Sorry that I only made one post yesterday, but my new Dell LCD arrived and I spent some time setting it up and making everything perfect. The monitor is the Dell 1704FPT 17″. My previous monitor was a 15″ and I am just loving that extra screen space. It is really beneficial. I will post some pictures to my Flickr account so keep an eye on it. I have a lot of posts to do today so watch out.

Bill Gates runs like a little girl (video)

Published on Monday, January 23, 2006 in Microsoft, Shorts and Technology. Closed

Though I can’t even get TechTV or G4/TechTV now here in the UK, I did enjoy those episodes of Call for Help and ScreenSavers on bittorrent. They were great. However there is still one show on G4/TechTV that isn’t too bad. And that is Attach of the Show. Sometimes they have interesting content and other times they have hilarious video of a person impersonating Steve Jobs, and dissing Bill Gates for the way he ‘pranced’ onto stage at an Xbox 360 conference. No, the video of Bill isn’t fake, and the Steve Jobs impersonator ads some light comedy. Must see.

Watch Windows 1.01 booting

Published on Sunday, January 22, 2006 in Microsoft, Shorts and Technology. Closed

I wanted to show some people how Windows1.01 worked and acted, granted all I do is boot it up and click a few things, It gives a rough idea on the OS. For the people who care, this was ran on a Dell Inspiron 7500. [Gray Apple]

Watch thermite burn through a car

Published on Sunday, January 22, 2006 in Noteworthy and Science. Closed

This is a really cool Google Video that was taken from the Braniac: Science Abuse series that airs in the UK (a really great show by the way). It has 3 different clips, taken from 3 different episodes that show thermite burning through a car hood and making the car blow up.
An interesting thing to note is that they use nearly exactly the same phrases in all clips. They are quite repetitive from the looks of these clips, though out of all the episodes I’ve seen they haven’t repeated any explosions or experiments.

The Biggest and Oldest PC Myths Busted

Published on Saturday, January 21, 2006 in Noteworthy, PC and Technology. Closed

This is a really interesting article that lists a lot of common myths about PC’s that people never know whether they are right or wrong. A few of them have been cleaned up for me such as “Magnets zap your data” and “Using a cell phone on a plane interferes with the navigation and communications systems of the aircraft.” Very usefull too, I’ll bookmark this for later incase I forget some as it has quite a few pages.

Cleaning water damaged electronics

Published on Friday, January 20, 2006 in Technology and Wireless. Closed

Have you ever spilt water, coffee or anything over one of your beloved gadgets and then it didn’t work. Well this guide has the answer. It may seem a bit out of the world with some of its steps, “4. Rinse the PCB (Printed Circuit Board) under the shower“, but if it is already dead then why not try, eh? Seems like it recovered a Linksys Wireless Accesspoint for the person who wrote the guide.
Personally I’ve dropped a my phone into water, a gameboy cartridge into the toilet and split some orange juice over a Blueberry iMac’s keyboard (that was a very long time ago, about 6+ years). They all worked fine, so I didn’t need to resort to something like this, but I’ll keep it in mind incase I need it later.

MacBook Pro PR Images Fake?

Published on Friday, January 20, 2006 in Apple and Technology. Closed

We’ve just been tipped off with some very interesting information about the MacBook Pro on Apples website. The images are quite clearly of a Photoshopped PowerBook G4. This is obviously nothing amazing I’m sure many companies do it but this goes together with the rumour that the MacBooks weren’t quite ready for the MWSF Keynote.
[...]
Open the image above in big mode and check out the IR port, notice it lacks a refelction…
[...]
Once again the IR port looks just like a circle stuck in with Photoshop and those ports down the side, are they squint?

My thoughts about IE 7

Published on Friday, January 20, 2006 in Internet, Microsoft and Technology. 6 Comments

I downloaded a *cough* legal *cough* version of IE 7 to test out. I was expecting some big things but I am really disappointed. The biggest annoyance is that the toolbar is messed up. Microsoft have gone with their own thought and totally moved everything so it is hard to get around. It has had me frustrated that the refresh and ‘stop refresh’ is on the right hand side of the address bar and all that is on the left is the backward and forward. Once more, you can’t even change this. The only thing(s) that you can move are the ‘toolbar’ buttons that can be seen on the right hand side in the screenshot above. This also contributes to the fact that the tabs have a smaller space (you can move the ‘toolbar’ buttons though below the tabs). There are also two buttons on the left hand side of the tabs that take up a bit of space and are virtually of no use. They simply help organise and add links to your favourites. The last thing to mention, which is perhaps the most annoying, is that the file menu is now gone. Unless you restore it through the ‘tools’ button, or press ‘alt’ when you need it, it doesn’t appear. So you can restore it, but it places itself below the address bar as seen below. This makes the whole window look absolutely stupid.

A few interesting things to note are:
- In the window bar, IE now says “Windows Internet Explorer” and not “Microsoft Internet Explorer”
- The IE search bar defaults to Google. I’m not sure whether this is a bug, or it retrieved some of my settings from somewhere, but when I first opened it it had Google on the search bar.
- When you first open IE, ‘ClearType’ is on which makes the text Anti-Aliased. I hate ‘ClearType’ because it never does anything good for me and makes all the text blurry. I think OS X has some sort of Anti-Aliasing on fonts bu they are much nicer.
- Page loads are faster than IE 6, but not by much.
- RSS isn’t handled badly at all, much better than I thought it would be.

Overall I think it isn’t too bad. Some of the changes that they have made to the layout can be annoying and it would take some getting used to. I like the interface, it is nice and clean and looks quite cool. If I could move the buttons around as freely as possible I wouldn’t mind using it (when I am on a Windows machine), not that I would though.