Ninja Assassins

08/11: Twitter is killing my blogging.

I found it hard enough adding a blog entry, but now the blog entries have almost stopped. I think the reason I don't blog (well this is my excuse) is that it's too easy to just send a quick tweet, or share a link using del.cio.us or google reader.

Still, it's nice to be able to type more than 140 characters. :)

Follow me on twitter

08/03: Touch Screen Kit for the Eee PC

I've decided to buy a touchscreen kit for my Asus Eee. Cost is about $85 delivered. I knew there was a reason that I didn't get the extended warranty. :-)

I find the touchpad a little tricky to use on the Eee. It's ok if you have the Eee on a desk, but you really need somewhere to rest your hands to use the trackpad properly. It makes it a bit hard if your scrolling while reading an ebook. Hopefully the touch screen will make it a nice ebook reader.

[Link] SOLDERLESS 7 inch Touch Panel Screen Kit 4 wire Eee PC

08/03: $400 - 14.1" Laptop

Laptops are getting a lot cheaper these days. Most of them have pretty low specs but I haven't seen many sell for this cheap.

* Intel Celeron 1.3 Ghz Processor
* Preloaded with Windows XP Media Center edition, COA included.
* 256 MB DDR2 Ram, 40GB Hard Drive
* DVD Combo Drive – Watch DVDs, Burn CDS!
* Massive Network and Internet Connectivity options:
o 56K Modem
o 100/10 Ethernet
o 802.11 b/g Wireless
* Thin and light size!
* Onboard sound and speakers
* Built in SD card reader slot
* VGA Output

Not too bad for a bit of email and web surfing. Not quite as nice as a Sony TZ 11.1", but a little bit cheaper.


[Link] Catch Of The Day - More Than You Bargained For

01/03: $200 Laptop

Not as nice looking as the Asus eee, but for $200 these laptops are going to be great for hacking. (and it's another Linux device). [Link]BBC News Player - Company in cheap laptop claim.

23/02: Don't Buy Gadgets Unless you can hack them.

I've been buying quite a few gadgets lately, and the one feature they all seem to have is "hackability".

I've been spending a lot of time playing with my Sony PSP. I'm not really that interested in any of the games, but learning how to make a Pandora battery and learning how to downgrade firmware so it can run homebrew has been fun.

My phone has also been through several firmware re-flashes. Thanks to the great work by all the rom cookers at xda-developers.com, I've been able to give my phone a ton of new features and increased it's functionality. I've slowed down a bit, but at one stage I was upgrading every few days, which was followed by another day of reinstalling all my applications. Now I limit my upgrades to once every couple of months.

I've also just bought a cheap Western Digital My Book World Edition NAS. It has an arm chip running linux, so I've been setting it up as a DLNA server to serve media to my PS3. The My Book seems a bit slow to transfer files, but for $199 for the 500GB version it's a pretty cheap way to add some network storage. It also has a usb port on the back to attach additional usb drives. I've added another 500GB drive salvaged from a media centre and I now have 4.5TB of storage available. About 3TB is in use to store a variety of stuff that I will probably never use, but it's easier to add stuff than it is to sort it. :-)

I've also been playing around configuring my Asus eee and a secondhand Thinkpad X31. I love my eee for it's portability, but the X31 is one of the nicest notebooks I've ever used. It's a great size, reasonably light, and it has some nice features (like the little keyboard light) that make it a joy to use. The keyboard is much nicer than the little eee keyboard, so if I'm typing more than a few paragraphs then I use the X31.

I've installed Linux Mint on my X31. It's a nice looking distro based on Ubuntu, so it's pretty familiar. It has some nice features as well, but it's not as user friendly as Xandros on the eee. An example of this is when adding a 3G usb modem.

I bought the 3 Usb broadband modem while I was in Sydney and missing out on having broadband. I signed up for 24 months on the $15 plan and the modem was free. For my $15 I get 500MB of data a month, which is fine for a bit of browsing on the train, but I wouldn't want to depend on it for all my Internet access. As usual, the modem is supported on Windows and Mac. On the Asus Eee, it's also really easy to set up. I just created a new Dialup connection and selected the USB modem. Then I chose the correct network to connect to, and accepted the defaults and I was online. I then tried to do the same thing on Linux Mint, and had to download a program to activate the modem and write a script to remove some kernel modules and do a few more tricks to activate it. Then I had to use wvdial to create the connection. I am probably missing something, but it was much more difficult that on the Asus eee. They really have done a good job on making the Asus easy to use.

As usual, this blog has been neglected. Hopefully this post will encourage me to post a few more.

05/12: My Photo is on a travel website!

One of my GPS tagged photos on flickr has been selected for use on the travel guide website schmap.com. Luckily it's only a thumbnail sized photo because it's only a cameraphone picture.

Brisbane - Historic Buildings

02/09: iplist - Peerguardian for Linux

I've been struggling with moblock with kubuntu Gutsy lately. It seems to crash randomly and it's tricky to install as the dependencies are no longer available in Gutsy Gibbon.

If your looking for a replacement for Peerguardian on Linux then you might want to take a look at iplist. It has a nice frontend that looks almost exactly like the Peerguardian gui.

[Link] iplist

14/08: Wii Balance Board = Amiga Joyboard?

I used to be a huge Commodore Amiga fan (originally I was an Atari ST fan, but I eventually switched to the Amiga). I still have 200+ floppy disks (I don't know if they work) and two Amiga 2000 computers. My Amiga has so many addons. It has a Kickstart (OS) switcher which supports 3 different ROM versions, An Emplant board (Apple & PC hardware/software emulation), a 24 bit graphics card, and a flicker fixer as well as 2 x scsi hard drives (not sure of the size) and a pocessor board that has a 68030 chip and memory. I also have a DCTV box attached.

Ars technica have a great article covering the history of the Amiga. It wasn't until I saw the Amiga Joyboard that it reminded me of how much it seems to function like Nintendo's new Wii Balance board.

A history of Amiga - Part 1
A history of Amiga - Part 2

More...

28/07: Yahoo! Go For Windows Mobile

It seems like everyone is getting into mobile portals these days with Microsoft's Live, Google Mobile, and now Yahoo has released Yahoo! Go 2.0.

Yahoo! Go gives you a nice interface to a number of common internet sites and applications. The interface is pretty slick with a carousel style menu with icons for things like news feeds, stock updates, entertainment news, flickr photo streams, calendar, maps and weather. It looks like the map option also includes gps naviagation and traffic updates, but as with MS Live & Google Maps, it's not supported in Australia.

Yahoo! Go also supports Push email.

[Link] Yahoo! Go. The Internet to go.

More...

17/06: Tumblr

This blog isn't being updated as often as I would like. I've created a mini-blog that should get updated a bit more often.

The Ninja-assassins tumblelog