“bura bura” - wandering (Japanese)
I finished The Da Vinci Code the other night… I found once I started reading it, I couldn't put it down! Caused lots of lost sleep…
!!!Spoiler Alert!!! Don't read any further if you don't want to ruin some of the surprises.
Continue reading 'The Da Vinci Code'
I bought some new CDs this evening:
Franz Ferdinand - Franz Ferdinand Seems pretty good so far. I especially like the song 'Take Me Out', which is being played on the radio in Australia right now…
Starsky & Hutch Soundtrack Haven't listened to it yet. 
But I liked the music from the movie, so it should be good.
Basement Jaxx - Plug It In (Single) I haven't listened to this either, but the song on the album was OK, and this has some remixes of Plug It In and Rendez-Vu (from Remedy).
The Cat Empire - The Chariot (Single) I've listened to some of this already, and really like the live tracks, which were recorded at the Metro Theatre. I think they were recorded at the concert the night before we went, as the songs are similar, but not exactly the same as I remember it. Great nevertheless!
I came across a couple of new Sony products today, which look quite cool:
From Engadget, the Sony wireless tablet PC, that isn't a tablet PC… This would be great to just have around the house. If I wanted to watch a movie in the kitchen or anywhere else, I could do it on this machine!
From Engadget and PVRBlog: Sony's 1 TeraByte DVR with seven TV tuners! That's crazy… Even if it's High-Definition, that's still a hell of a lot of TV shows. I've been struggling to setup MythTV, and now Freevo on the Gentoo box, and it's looking all to hard. Something like this (perhaps with one or two tuners) would be great.
I just got back from the Jet concert at the Metro Theatre… It was pretty good. The doors opened at 8pm, and there were two warm-up acts: the Cannons and the Stands. The Stands were awesome! They come from Liverpool, and the drummer looks like 'Animal' from the Muppets (Lucy's comment). Very, very funny! Jet didn't come on stage until 11pm, and they only played for an hour, which was a bit of a let down. The songs they played were good, but the concert seemed to be missing something… I'm not sure what. It almost seemed like they were just playing the songs, one after another, to get the concert over and done with. Compare this to the Cat Empire, where they stretched every song out and put all their energy into it. The difference is quite clear.
I received the Hollywood+/DXR3 MPEG-2 Decoder card I won on eBay a couple of weeks ago in the mail yesterday. The Gentoo box I have isn't very fast, and I was advised that this would be the best way to get better performance out of the machine. I bid US$10 and won, but the shipping was US$12, and it ended up costing me AU$37, which isn't so bad…
I'm having some issues getting it to work on the machine, though. (Isn't that always what happens?) I had to apply a patch to the kernel to get it to work in 2.6.5, and now I can't find information on how to actually configure it! I don't know if I have to add a device for it in the XFree86 config file, or if anything output to the device file in /dev automatically goes to the TV-Out… I'll figure it out, eventually!
Courtesy of DrunkenBlog, I came across this blog. Very, very funny. Especially the post on Legolas.
I've subscribed to a couple of new blogs today, which I hope will prove interesting.
Firstly, DrunkenBlog, which I talked about the other day.
Next one if Decaffeinated, which I came across as well (don't remember where!).
The last one is courtesy of Chris Clark (author of Decaffeinated), MacAndBack. This blog should be REALLY interesting. It's a Mac-switcher-turned-PC-switcher's experience with Windows as a full-time machine. I can relate to some of the things he has posted about, since I use a Windows 2000 machine at work. I use Firefox, Thunderbird, Sharp Reader and Gaim most of the time, as well as PUTTY and WinSCP. I used to use AppRocket, which I found great in replacing LaunchBar, but I feel cheap and don't want to pay for it, since I'll probably buy LaunchBar anyway. They all work together fairly well, but I always enjoy coming back to my Mac OS X machine at home.
Courtesy of Mobitopia: I came across a company today called Semacode, which produces bardcodes that Symbian/Nokia Series 60 phones can take a picture of and recognise. One example given was a hotel bill, where you snap the barcode, send it off to your company and they process the bill with only that barcode. Pretty cool, huh?
I bought some tickets from the Metro Theatre a month or two ago for the Jet concert (which is tomorrow), and was sent a barcode in that SMS, which I'm guessing could be used when I go to pick up my tickets.
Hopefully semacode will extend their software to other platforms as well, and not limit it to just Symbian. There are plenty of Palms out there with cameras now, and they could make use of it too. Not to mention the Nokia Series 40 phones and my Sony-Ericsson.
A day or two ago Apple announced that the next version of Mac OS X, 10.4, or "Tiger", will be previewed at the WWDC in June. MacNN has a long(-ish) forums thread that covers the features that people want to see in "Tiger", and I thought I might add to that list here!
nbnz said "What about the "Home on iPod" that was meant to be in Panther?" I think this would be cool, as you could take your iPod to someone else's computer and have all your files there. The only problem is, what would you do with the music stored in the music folder? You'd want those to be easily accessible for the user to listen to, but then it defeats the purpose of Apple hiding and re-organising the music on the iPod, and you'd also have two copies of the music folder. Plus, I only have 160+ MB available on my 15 Gig iPod, which probably wouldn't be enough.
JasonQG said "I forget what Apple used to call it, but I want the ability to save the contents of RAM to disk and shutdown (like hibernate on Windows). For laptop users, I think this is the biggest OS 9 feature not in OS X." I think is also pretty cool. I usually put my computer to sleep, but the battery power slowly drains, which can be a problem. I usually take my laptop to work on the days I get to uni, and the battery life sinks down to the low-90s/high-80s, which isn't such an issue for normal use, but if I had to stay at uni for a bit longer than I normally do, I'd probably run out of battery life. Having a "hibernate" feature would probably avoid this.
Bugger… the MacNN forums just reached their maximum user connections, just as I was going through the posts and pulling my favourite requests!
Ok… It's back up again.
Link says "mail: smart email boxes (there's already junk)" I think this would be great! We already have it in iTunes and iPhoto (smart playlists), why not have meta-folders for Mail. I could have a folder that contains any emails from my friend Mat, for instance, and they'd be viewable in there, even though they have a different physical location.
This could be extended to the Finder as well. I think it'd be cool. LaunchBar (which I use) already has some grouping of similar files, even though they're in different folders.
He also says "A dialog box that pops up when you plug in something that doesn't have a driver installed… this is REALLY crucial for new users trust me." I think this is another great idea! I've been thinking about this for a couple of weeks… See my previous post. Once I get my Cocoa programming up, I may think about doing this.
That's about all I have for now… I'll add to this post if I think of any more.
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