Monthly Archive for April, 2006

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You Know You Go to a Tech School When…

Published on Tuesday, April 11, 2006 in Random Stuff, Shorts, Technology and Wireless. Closed

I don’t know what a typical college campus is like. Everything I’ve experienced at Georgia Tech is apparently not normal for a university lacking “tech” in the title. I’ve compiled a few things I’ve noticed around school for your enjoyment on this slow news day. Here we go. You’d be surprised at how much I’m not exaggerating.

This is pretty funny and interesting. We don’t see much of this at our high school, as our tech support is quite unfriendly! We have some evil people there, (and some nice ones too), but they don’t like you sniffing around, even if you know what you’re doing!

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PS3 at E3: Viewing will be restricted, no demos?

Published on Tuesday, April 11, 2006 in Gaming, Noteworthy and Technology. Closed

PS3

It looks like we won’t be seeing much of the PS3 at this year’s E3. People have been speculating from the beginning that Sony will be tying the console down, and not letting us see much, pretty much how the PSP was debuted. SPOnG has heard information from numerous sources, developers and third-part manufacturers, that Sony won’t be allowing their products in the Sony booths. Nor have any numbers of PS3 units have been outlined for 3rd parties, so they don’t know whether they’ll be able to show off their products at all.

“From what we have been hearing, the PlayStation 3 will be shown in a similar way to which the PSP was debuted at E3,” one publishing source told SPOnG last week. “Attendees will be able to view the machine in a tightly-restricted environment. People thinking the floor will be awash with playable demo pods will be sore if they walk through the doors expecting to be able to sample a massive range of [PlayStation 3] software at leisure.”

Sony is cutting it really close here. I think even the developers and 3rd parties are annoyed now. How will they be able to showcase their products / gear at E3 if Sony hasn’t communicated with them. Many people will be disappointed, and I think it will be similar to the 360 at E3 (or some other conference where it was), where you could play a demo of the games, but they were not run on the 360′s but G5′s! Sony really needs to hurry up, otherwise Nintendo’s Revolution release and 360 release will really bite their asses off!

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Hacking Google Analytics…

Published on Tuesday, April 11, 2006 in Internet, Noteworthy, Shorts and Technology. Closed

Most of you will have at least one friend who is obsessed with the web stats program. That may very well be me. If you want to have some fun with said friend, read on.
It turns out that someone had copied the source code of my Google Maps housing project and was hosting it on their own website, but forgot to remove my Analytics references. Whenever someone hit the page on their site, it would thus register as a hit in my analytics.
But what really interested me was how easily you could scew a websites statistics by simply adding a couple lines of javascript to the source code of your own site. If your website generated enough traffic, you could effectively render a target websites Analytics meaningless.
Want to scew the statistics of a friends website, how about a competitor? Look up their source code, plug it into your website header and laugh. But don’t worry you could run multiple accounts, and hit them both on each page. That way you can keep your stats flowing just like normal.

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The case of the mangled PowerBook, that works!

Published on Friday, April 7, 2006 in Apple, Noteworthy and Technology. Closed
mangled powerbook

This is amazing! This PowerBook has been absolutely battered, and guess what? It still works; with an external screen connected via DVI and a keyboard and mouse you can use it nearly like normal. The Airport also works! I wonder what actually happened to it to get it to this state, but this just shows you how tough Apple machines are. I’m sure other laptops would be long dead by this stage!

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The $8.50 MP3 Player!

Published on Friday, April 7, 2006 in Technology. Closed
evergreen dn 2000

For only $8.50 you can get your very own MP3 player. With a 5 hour battery life from a single AAA battery it certainly is a good deal, that is of course without an SD card. It can accept upto a 1GB SD card, so if you are straooed for cash and just want a cheap MP3 player to go, then this is it. This is Evergreen’s DN-2000. We are now in the era of disposable MP3 players, and maybe other electronics (like that disposable camcorder, which has been hacked).

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Xbox 360 Camera Specs Revealed

Published on Thursday, April 6, 2006 in Gaming, Microsoft, Noteworthy, Technology and TV's. Closed
xbox 360 camera spec

Images have been aired on the Internet by Xbox360galaxy.com, who got their hands on a 360 Camera flier. It lists a lot of interesting specs including “gesture recognition”. The full spec is listed below.

  • USB 2.0 bus-powered device
  • Smooth, near DV quality video up to VGA 640×480 at 30 FPS
  • High def images: still photos up to SVGA 1280×960 (1.3Mp)
  • Manually adjustable variable focus: 2 feet to infinity
  • Field of View: 43°
  • On board image processor
  • Digital zoom, cropping
  • Auto exposure, white balance, gamma correction, sharpness
  • Long (~9 feet) cable to reach around large TVs
  • Includes a headset for great audio

This seems similar to the EyeToy — not the specs, but how it interacts with the games. I can just imagine feeling really stupid because I’m punching into the air! We’ll have to wait until Microsoft releases it and lets us have a go. On a separate note, I don’t really like look of the camera. It looks very 1980′s (like an old B/W tube tv).

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DS Lite arriving to the US in May!

Published on Thursday, April 6, 2006 in Gaming, Noteworthy and Technology. Closed
ds lite in egm

It seems to be that the DS Lite will be arriving to America in May. This is according to EGM (American gaming magazine) anyway. This is a scanned image of the current issue from the magazine which states that the DS Lite will be landing in the US in May. “They do not give a specific reason as to why, but we would all like to guess that the system is coming out in May to coincide with the release of New Super Mario Bros.” Being in a huge magazine I don’t think they would be reporting false information, so it is probably true, but why wouldn’t Nintendo make a press release before a magazine got hold of the info. I’m happy for you Americans, now if only we could get it here in the UK, we always get everything late (and very expensive!)

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Boot Camp News Roundup

Published on Thursday, April 6, 2006 in Apple, Microsoft, PC, Software and Technology. Closed
boot camp 2boot camp 3

Ever since Apple came out with their Boot Camp yesterday, more and more news of it has been posted. All sorts of things so I thought I’d make a collection of links to the various bits and pieces!

That seems to be as much news as I could find. If there are any additions please add it to the comments and I will make sure it is inserted into this post. Have fun!

Windows on an Intel Mac: The Apple Way – Boot Camp!

Published on Wednesday, April 5, 2006 in Apple, Microsoft, Noteworthy, PC, Software and Technology. Closed
boot camp

Apple has released their own solution to installing Windows on an Intel Mac – Boot Camp. Apple’s complete solution, though still in beta, provides owners of Intel Macs to easily partition their hard drive and install Windows XP SP2 (Home and Pro) with a cool GUI for changing bootup drive. When booting hold down the option (alt) key to select between OS X and Windows.

For your convenience, Boot Camp burns a CD with all the Mac-specific drivers for Windows:
- Graphics
- Networking
- Audio
- AirPort wireless
- Bluetooth
- The Eject key (on Apple keyboards)
- Brightness control for built-in displays
This CD also installs a Startup Disk control panel for Windows.

However, iSight isn’t supported, nor is the MacBook Pro’s backlight keyboard or the Apple Remote. Granted, these things are the ones we wouldn’t have expected to work off the bat. I, for one, am glad to see Apple do this, and I think it is a very positive thing, because now you don’t need to spend ages in getting Windows running using the hack (by Narf2006 and blanka) but you have an Apple distrubuted installer. This takes away all the pain, so now anyone can do it, relatively easily. Be warned though, you need to have 10.4.6 and Apple’s newest firmware update or you might end up like this guy, who already had is Blue Screen of Death (in Windows, that is).
So if you’re feeling adventerous the give it a whirr, it is a 83MB download (not counting the firmware update and 10.4.6 update) and tell me how it went!

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Mac OS X 10.4.6 Update released

Published on Tuesday, April 4, 2006 in Apple, Software and Technology. Closed
10.4.6 update

Apple has released another update to Tiger, 10.4.6, for PowerPC based Macs and Intel Macs. The PPC version weighs in at 45.3MB and contains the following fixes:

- login and authentication in a variety of network environments
- file access and byte range locking with AFP file sharing
- network access when using proxy server automatic configuration files
- connecting to Cisco VPN servers using IP/Sec
- using Bluetooth wireless devices
- searching iWork ’06 and Microsoft Office documents with Spotlight
- saving Word documents automatically when using a network home directory
- creating Automator workflows for iPhoto 6
- synchronizing contacts and calendars to .Mac and mobile phones
- mounting and unmounting iDisk volumes
- compatibility with third party applications and devices
- previous standalone security updates

I’m not going to grab this just yet, as I have a few programs (mainly MainMenu) which need updating before they work on a newer update. After that I’ll be good to go. One thing to note is that two restarts are completely normal for PPC users, as Apple have also confirmed, so don’t be alarmed.

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