Sunday, September 30, 2007
One of the sexiest things I have ever heard
Ok so maybe sexy isn't the best term for it but anyway here it is:
The ZFS file system uses 128-bit pointers. The minimum mass of a device capable of storing 2^128 bytes using atomic level storage would be about 272 trillion kilograms.
Also if you use Firefox and don't have a good download manager this one has been maxing out my cable modem (1.4Gigs in 30 min): DownThemAll!
The ZFS file system uses 128-bit pointers. The minimum mass of a device capable of storing 2^128 bytes using atomic level storage would be about 272 trillion kilograms.
Also if you use Firefox and don't have a good download manager this one has been maxing out my cable modem (1.4Gigs in 30 min): DownThemAll!
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Pumpkins are fun
We had to get some practice in. Expect bigger and better things near Halloween.
Kristen's:
Joseph's:
I guess some people are having trouble recognizing 'the cheat':
Kristen's:
Joseph's:
I guess some people are having trouble recognizing 'the cheat':
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
Forums are up
Not sure if anyone will ever use them and since this site is sort of a hodgepodge of stuff that isn't tied together I'm sure no one will look at them, but regardless, the Nerd Herd Forums are alive and kicking at
http://forum.nerdherdblog.com
I've added a link in the right sidebar.
http://forum.nerdherdblog.com
I've added a link in the right sidebar.
Moving some stuff around
Just thought I'd let you all know that I moved the domain control of www.nerdherdblog.com to my dreamhost account. Before it was just set to redirect to this blogger page but now I've got dreamhost redirecting the www.nerdherdblog.com to blog.nerdherdblog.com which is where the blog portion of the site will be located. I'll also be adding a forums.nerdherdblog.com and possibly a gallery.nerdherdblog.com for forums & photos. It could take up to 3 days for all the dns settings to propagate through the series of tubes that is the internets. If you're still having trouble after that let me know.
Monday, September 24, 2007
Don't tase me!
Quite possibly the funniest thing I've seen all week (besides my brother's dormroom with 3 other freshman boys at UW). Here's a link in case you don't know the backstory.
Sunday, September 23, 2007
Friday, September 21, 2007
Tuesday, September 18, 2007
First impressions on my new iPhone
Having just had a rather lengthy discussion with Kristen about my new iPhone I realized I have a lot more to complain about it already than I had thought. Don't get me wrong, I have a lot of good things to say about it also. Here goes...
First the good...
The phone is just plain sweet. I am a big believer in convergence devices, but ONLY when they still work at the most basic level as a phone. I can't tell you how many shitty camera/mp3/smart phones I have had that did the camera/mp3/smart part fine, but couldn't make a phone call to save your life. Constantly dropping calls, bad signal quality, bad voice quality. It's like they tacked the "phone" on at the last minute and failed miserably. That said, the iPhone is not that device. It does the phone part right to begin with, even adding new features such as Visual Voicemail to make the phone experience all the more perfect.
Now I've only had it 24hrs now, so there is still plenty of time for it to start dropping calls on me, etc. If this happens expect to see a picture of a broken iPhone in the next post. Assuming that is not the case, convergence devices like the iPhone are great, especially for men. We don't have the luxury of being able to carry around a purse (at least not without some rather strange looks). Please don't respond with some comment about how masculine your oversized, man-purse that you sling over your shoulder is. It's not masculine, it's gay. Perhaps in a later post where I rant aimlessly about nothing I'll put together an assortment of Murse (man-purse) pics so you can see what you really look like to those around you.
What was I talking about again... oh yeah, convergence. So the iPhone has the phone, camera (more on that later) and of course the digital media player, aka the iPod. The media player, as can be expected works flawlessly. Just sync up your music and vids and enjoy. It also has good old safari web browser, google maps, yahoo stocks, yahoo weather & Youtube. All of these work pretty much as expected.
What about the camera? Well 2MP is a little weak, and there is no zoom at all. But the convenience of not having to bring a camera around with you outweighs this in my opinion. There are so many times I want to take a picture but don't have my camera because who the fuck just caries their camera with them? I will also say the image quality is still better than most any other "2MP" camera phone I've seen or used.
So what about the bad...
Where to start. Lets start with the things we can't change. That is the hardware limitations that no act of software engineering will fix. There is the lack of 3G network support. This means when you aren't at your house surfing via Wifi (or anywhere else you have Wifi access) you'll be trudging along at EDGE network speeds. This is fine for checking/sending email and google maps info if you don't mind a minor delay, but forget about browsing Youtube or just plain web surfing in general. Apple of course rightfully claims this is due to the power consumption of the current crowd of 3G chipsets which would likely half the battery life between charges.
Which of course brings us to point #2, the battery life. If you are just sending and recieving phone calls you'll probably get about the same battery life you get from your current phone, but if you were just sending and recieving phone calls, why did you buy and iPhone? If you start listening to music all day and/or watching videos you'll be charging daily, and worse case scenario charging mid-day in the car or at the office. What is the worst case scenario...
Bluetooth. Oh bluetooth, such a wonderful way to connect to your device without those pesky wires. But what a power hog. Yep, if you turn the bluetooth on you'll be suckin down batter faster than you can imagine. My recommendation is to use it sparingly only when driving. Don't be that guy walking around the office with the fuckin headset in his ear, or even worse, the guy who appears to be talking to a cantaloupe at the supermarket. But remember to disable bluetooth on the phone when you take it off because it's not saving you any battery if you just turn the headset off. This of course is sort of a pain in having to constantly go into the settings and turn bluetooth on and off, I'd personally like to see a phone with a physical switch on the side the way my laptop does for quick on/off access.
But that's not the only issue with bluetooth. No no no. I HATE wires. Hate them. I would like nothing more than to slap on a pair of stereo bluetooth headphones and listen to my music, assuming I didn't care about my battery to begin with. But no, iPhone doesn't support A2DP stereo bluetooth. Not only that, my attempt to listen to my music in mono with my little Jabra bluetooth headset failed to work. The only way to listen to music is either through the internal speaker or WIRED headphones. WTF??
Still reading...
Okay enough about the stuff that just can't be fixed. What about the oversights and/or intentional cripplings of the software.
First there's the internet browser. Remember how I pointed out that Youtube and Google Maps were "applications", not something you just view from the web browser. That's because the web browser doesn't support Flash. So aside from Youtube & Google Maps which are running custom solutions, you can't view and flash websites.
Next up Photos. My biggest complaint with photos is the lack of on-the-go connectivity options. Basically, if you take a photo on your iPhone, the only thing you can do with it from the phone is assign it as someone's pic for when they call and email it. You CAN'T text message a pic! Also, you can't email more than 1 pic at a time, so if you want to send 3 or 4 pics to someone (or to your blogger account's email for remote posting), you have to send seperate emails (which in blogger's case make seperate blog posts). Also, Steve Jobs showed off how when assigning a picture to a contact you can first zoom, rotate & crop the image as desired. This works. He also said that you could do this to the picture you are emailing. Wrong! When you email a pic it always send the original uncropped, unzoomed, unrotated version DOWNRESSED to 640x480. You can't even send the original 2mp version.
So basically, when it comes to photos, aside from quick, 1-photo emails, you have to wait til you get home, sync up to your pc and then do all your photo stuff from your pc. So much for removing the pc from the equation.
Lastly I'm a little peeved at the whole lack of highlighting text. This means you can quickly delete large sections of emails your composing and you also can't do any form of copy & paste. Of course I knew about this beforehand and it's not a dealbreaker. As with the photo & internet stuff, that's all just software and hopefully if we just bitch enough about it, they'll add/fix this stuff in upcoming patches.
Well if you read this whole thing then you're really lame cuz it was long. Sorry bout that :)
First the good...
The phone is just plain sweet. I am a big believer in convergence devices, but ONLY when they still work at the most basic level as a phone. I can't tell you how many shitty camera/mp3/smart phones I have had that did the camera/mp3/smart part fine, but couldn't make a phone call to save your life. Constantly dropping calls, bad signal quality, bad voice quality. It's like they tacked the "phone" on at the last minute and failed miserably. That said, the iPhone is not that device. It does the phone part right to begin with, even adding new features such as Visual Voicemail to make the phone experience all the more perfect.
Now I've only had it 24hrs now, so there is still plenty of time for it to start dropping calls on me, etc. If this happens expect to see a picture of a broken iPhone in the next post. Assuming that is not the case, convergence devices like the iPhone are great, especially for men. We don't have the luxury of being able to carry around a purse (at least not without some rather strange looks). Please don't respond with some comment about how masculine your oversized, man-purse that you sling over your shoulder is. It's not masculine, it's gay. Perhaps in a later post where I rant aimlessly about nothing I'll put together an assortment of Murse (man-purse) pics so you can see what you really look like to those around you.
What was I talking about again... oh yeah, convergence. So the iPhone has the phone, camera (more on that later) and of course the digital media player, aka the iPod. The media player, as can be expected works flawlessly. Just sync up your music and vids and enjoy. It also has good old safari web browser, google maps, yahoo stocks, yahoo weather & Youtube. All of these work pretty much as expected.
What about the camera? Well 2MP is a little weak, and there is no zoom at all. But the convenience of not having to bring a camera around with you outweighs this in my opinion. There are so many times I want to take a picture but don't have my camera because who the fuck just caries their camera with them? I will also say the image quality is still better than most any other "2MP" camera phone I've seen or used.
So what about the bad...
Where to start. Lets start with the things we can't change. That is the hardware limitations that no act of software engineering will fix. There is the lack of 3G network support. This means when you aren't at your house surfing via Wifi (or anywhere else you have Wifi access) you'll be trudging along at EDGE network speeds. This is fine for checking/sending email and google maps info if you don't mind a minor delay, but forget about browsing Youtube or just plain web surfing in general. Apple of course rightfully claims this is due to the power consumption of the current crowd of 3G chipsets which would likely half the battery life between charges.
Which of course brings us to point #2, the battery life. If you are just sending and recieving phone calls you'll probably get about the same battery life you get from your current phone, but if you were just sending and recieving phone calls, why did you buy and iPhone? If you start listening to music all day and/or watching videos you'll be charging daily, and worse case scenario charging mid-day in the car or at the office. What is the worst case scenario...
Bluetooth. Oh bluetooth, such a wonderful way to connect to your device without those pesky wires. But what a power hog. Yep, if you turn the bluetooth on you'll be suckin down batter faster than you can imagine. My recommendation is to use it sparingly only when driving. Don't be that guy walking around the office with the fuckin headset in his ear, or even worse, the guy who appears to be talking to a cantaloupe at the supermarket. But remember to disable bluetooth on the phone when you take it off because it's not saving you any battery if you just turn the headset off. This of course is sort of a pain in having to constantly go into the settings and turn bluetooth on and off, I'd personally like to see a phone with a physical switch on the side the way my laptop does for quick on/off access.
But that's not the only issue with bluetooth. No no no. I HATE wires. Hate them. I would like nothing more than to slap on a pair of stereo bluetooth headphones and listen to my music, assuming I didn't care about my battery to begin with. But no, iPhone doesn't support A2DP stereo bluetooth. Not only that, my attempt to listen to my music in mono with my little Jabra bluetooth headset failed to work. The only way to listen to music is either through the internal speaker or WIRED headphones. WTF??
Still reading...
Okay enough about the stuff that just can't be fixed. What about the oversights and/or intentional cripplings of the software.
First there's the internet browser. Remember how I pointed out that Youtube and Google Maps were "applications", not something you just view from the web browser. That's because the web browser doesn't support Flash. So aside from Youtube & Google Maps which are running custom solutions, you can't view and flash websites.
Next up Photos. My biggest complaint with photos is the lack of on-the-go connectivity options. Basically, if you take a photo on your iPhone, the only thing you can do with it from the phone is assign it as someone's pic for when they call and email it. You CAN'T text message a pic! Also, you can't email more than 1 pic at a time, so if you want to send 3 or 4 pics to someone (or to your blogger account's email for remote posting), you have to send seperate emails (which in blogger's case make seperate blog posts). Also, Steve Jobs showed off how when assigning a picture to a contact you can first zoom, rotate & crop the image as desired. This works. He also said that you could do this to the picture you are emailing. Wrong! When you email a pic it always send the original uncropped, unzoomed, unrotated version DOWNRESSED to 640x480. You can't even send the original 2mp version.
So basically, when it comes to photos, aside from quick, 1-photo emails, you have to wait til you get home, sync up to your pc and then do all your photo stuff from your pc. So much for removing the pc from the equation.
Lastly I'm a little peeved at the whole lack of highlighting text. This means you can quickly delete large sections of emails your composing and you also can't do any form of copy & paste. Of course I knew about this beforehand and it's not a dealbreaker. As with the photo & internet stuff, that's all just software and hopefully if we just bitch enough about it, they'll add/fix this stuff in upcoming patches.
Well if you read this whole thing then you're really lame cuz it was long. Sorry bout that :)
Sunday, September 16, 2007
Whats your thoughts on the Apple Itouch
Itouch
I think the biggest feature is the Built in Wifi, which will let you go to streaming audio websites like pandora while you are on the go. Probably better just to wait for the second generation Iphone and go from there, just thought I would see what the collective nerd was thinking.
I think the biggest feature is the Built in Wifi, which will let you go to streaming audio websites like pandora while you are on the go. Probably better just to wait for the second generation Iphone and go from there, just thought I would see what the collective nerd was thinking.
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Check out my blog lolz
So I have a 'PHP/SQL' blog (no SQL yet). Might be fun for some light reading. If you want to contribute let me know and I'll add you to the list.
~Mama
~Mama
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Burning Saltwater for fuel??
Pretty crazy stuff and even crazier that no one has found this out before now. Assuming his frequency generator doesn't consume tons of energy or can't be made much more efficient, this could be an amazing source of energy. It doesn't mention what the byproducts of the reaction are, but I'm assuming given NaCl & H20 there's not much of an environmental concern here.
Sunday, September 9, 2007
Thursday, September 6, 2007
My God!!!
"Asses are the human races favorite thing. When God gave us our asses he had to stick them round the back just so we wouldn't sit and stare at them all day. Cause when God made the ass he didn't say "Hey it's just your basic hinge, let's knock off early." He said "Behold ye angels, I have created the ass. Throughout the ages to come, men and women shall grab hold of these and shout my name"!
Wednesday, September 5, 2007
Sunday, September 2, 2007
Get Perpendicular!
Kind of an older video you might've already seen. For some reason the song was stuck in my head today so I thought I'd post it. I can't remember but I think Joe might've been the one who showed it to me a long time ago. Either way, here's a ridiculous video explaining a fancy new technology used to increase hard drive capacity :)
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