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Nerd score

Fri, 04 Nov 2005 19:18:37 -0800

200Gb upgrade for iPod nano!

Thu, 29 Sep 2005 23:20:26 -0700

Want to buy an iPod nano, but you're worried about the 4Gb not being enough to store your 200 gigabytes of ilegally downloaded music? Don't worry anymore! Now you can upgrade your iPod nano to 200Gb on a very low budget!

But what is really interesting is the fact that this upgrade uses an MSX ATA-IDE board made by Sunrise.

See the upgrade instructions here.

September 11th Memorial Jenga!

Thu, 14 Jul 2005 00:22:00 -0700

I know that many of you won't find this funny, but I did:

September 11th Memorial Jenga:

http://www.manse.cx/nine11_jenga/

Dumbest lawsuit ever

Wed, 13 Jul 2005 23:00:00 -0700

This is incredible. Let's say that you work in a city far from home and the bus is expensive. Then let's say that you join with some friends who work in the same place and share a car to go to work.

And you get sued by the bus company.

Original article:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,3604,1525590,00.html

Bus firm takes car sharers to court

Kim Willsher in Paris
Monday July 11, 2005
The Guardian

They might have been congratulated for their "green" efforts in an area of heavy air pollution.

Instead a group of French cleaning ladies who organised a car-sharing scheme to get to work are being taken to court by a coach company which accuses them of "an act of unfair and parasitical competition".

The women, who live in Moselle and work five days a week at EU offices in Luxembourg, are being taken to court by Transports Schiocchet Excursions, which runs a service along the route. It wants the women to be fined and their cars confiscated.

Two years ago a business tribunal threw out the company's case. It is now pursuing the women in a higher court, claiming that their action has cost it �2m (�1.4m).

The women explained that for many years cleaners used the TSE line for the 40-minute ride across the border, which cost them �110 (�76) a month.

"Using our cars is quicker and at least twice as cheap. And on the bus we didn't have the right to eat or even to speak," said Martine Bourguignon. Odette Friedmann added: "In the evening instead of coming to get us at 9.30pm the bus would arrive at 10.30pm. If you made any comment to the driver you'd get a mouthful of abuse."

"It's absurd and ridiculous," said the women's lawyer, C�cile Klein-Schmitt. "I don't see how any magistrate can find any legal basis for this case."

TSE is also suing the women's employer, Onet-Luxembourg. "They've basically accused us of inciting the car-sharing scheme when we have nothing to do with the method of transport used by our staff," said director Fr�d�ric Sirerol.

The court case will be heard in January next year.

Spammers aren't very smart

Wed, 13 Jul 2005 00:28:00 -0700

At work we have several mailing lists related to our products. I'm the admin/moderator on some of these and have to deal with the spammers who post to the members-only lists. I found this one quite fun while I was going through today's messages:

Hello Kitty fans... literally

Tue, 12 Jul 2005 00:11:17 -0700

Two cute Hello Kitty fans for your enjoyment. Quite literally:

I saw these yesterday in Yodobashi Kamera when I was looking around.

Google Earth: now THIS is scary

Sat, 28 May 2005 11:23:11 -0700

Some weeks ago I downloaded a trial version of Keyhole LT. This software lets you see satellite data of most of the world, with a very good level of detail for many, many cities. This, this and this are photos of where I live, for example. I liked the program, so I registered it.

Keyhole was bought by Google on October last year.

Today, when I checked my GMail account, I found a message from Google about a new beta program: Google's Earth. It was to be expected.

Google Earth's is basically Keyhole, with an slightly improved interface. Looks like the beta is offered only to Keyhole subscribers (needs a working Keyhole license key installed). Performance seems to have improved a bit too, though it's still a bit unstable. Sometimes weird things happen when switching from full screen view to window mode.

In my opinion, the biggest addition it the possibility to view buildings in 3D. This feature is available only in a few cities, but the result is stunning. Look at the two screenshots in this article to see the result. With this feature enabled rendering is much slower (obviously), and terrain download times are also much longer. That is of course to be expected. This new program lets you also do searches on the map, trace routes, etc etc etc

What is really stunning is the amount of data now stored in Google's databases. One thing is to store big chunks of satellite images, and another to store the shapes and locations of each and one of the buildings in a city.

The release notes are available here.

Musical baton

Sat, 28 May 2005 11:00:02 -0700

Laurens passed me this chainmail a few days ago... I don't usually pay much attention to these, but this one was interesting:

Total volume of music files on my computer

Classified and imported into my iTunes library:

octospider:/disk2$ du -ks iTunes/

7050676 iTunes/

Not classified/ID3 tags missing/whatever:

octospider:/disk2$ du -ks mp3*

5891672 mp3

3067552 mp3-2

Total: around 16Gbytes.

Last CD I bought

21st Century Boys (Sigue Sigue Sputnik), if I recall correctly. That was at least three years ago...

Song playing right now

I'm not listening to anything right now. But I was listening to Digitally Imported's vocal trance stream just a while ago...

Five songs I listen to a lot, or that mean a lot to me

Computer Love (Kraftwerk)

Moonlight Shadow (Mike Oldfield)

Animal (Front 242)

Boing Boom Tschak (Kraftwerk)

Sometimes (Erasure)

Five people to pass it on to�

Just one for now...

fr3nd

More on the 1-chip-MSX

Sat, 16 Apr 2005 05:56:07 -0700

I've just been talking with a member of the MSX Association now, and he has told me that the 1-chip-MSX is NOT being sold today. It looks like the source who told me yesterday that was not well informed.

I removed the photos from the previous article, as they should not be shown before the magazine is released. The rest of information is still there, because it was already known before.

Also, he told me that on May 8th there will be a very big MSX event in Akihabara, MSX-Denyu Land style. I will be there taking photos and finding out more.

One-chip-MSX on sale today

Fri, 15 Apr 2005 13:55:23 -0700

Note: the information in this post is NOT accurate. See the next post.

I've been told by a non-official source that sales of the long-awaited 1-chip-MSX start today. I have not confirmed this yet with the MSX Association, so don't jump for your credit card right away. It looks like the board is sold naked (no plastic cover), but I might be mistaken. I'll confirm this later today.

Update: Indeed, the information was not accurate. The 1-chip-MSX sales do not start today. The release date has not been decided yet.

Anyway, there's a 9-page article on MSX Magazine #3 (to be released on April 28th) that explains the technical details of this board. I haven't read it all, but here are the basics:

The heart is an Altera Cyclone EP1C12 chip containing 12060 logic elements.

There's a configuration ROM from which the FPGA code is loaded when switched on.

32Mbytes of SDRAM

2 x MSX cartridge slots

2 x MSX joystick connectors

1 x SD Memory card slot

2 x USB connectors

1 x PS/2 keyboard connector

A/V connectors: S-VHS, composite video (RCA), audio (2 x RCA), VGA

The FPGA chip comes loaded with an MSX(1) configuration: Z80A emulation, 32Kb ROM (ROM images can be loaded from the SD Memory slot), 64Kb RAM, 16Kb VRAM, TMS9918A emulation (VDP), AY-3-8910 (PSG), SCC and YM2413 (FM-PAC) emulations. Looks like the SD Memory card can be used as a disk drive.

It doesn't have a network connector, so you should start ordering your ObsoNET while they last. Yes, the ObsoNET has been successfully tested on the 1-chip-MSX. See for yourself here.

The FPGA chip can be reprogrammed by the user using a PC software from Altera called Quartus II Web Edition, which seems to be free. An especial cable to link the PC with the 1-chip-MSX board is required too. The article explicitly mentions that is is possible to upgrade the board to MSX2 by just updating the microcode in the FPGA, when that code is available. As a curiosity, the article compares the source code sizes for the MSXPLAYer emulator and the 1-chip-MSX VHDL code. MSXPLAYer's C source code weights 526Kb, while this board's VHDL code is 472Kbytes long (when implementing an MSX1).

I'll post more info here as soon as I find out more.