Technology by Teens

Hey, I just pulled upgraded my dad's 2o gb hardrive to 40 gb, that was a huge pain. The 40 gb hard drive was my old hard drive, on which I had Suse 9.2 installed, with Grub in the MBR. I had already formated the drive and moved the data over, but when I tried to boot I got the command line interface of GRUB with no way to boot. I managed to clear grub out of the mbr using the recovery console and "fixmbr" , but after that I always reached the blue windows welcome screen, but no usernames showed up. So I did a repair install with the windows installation disc, and it booted up, but the drive was labled E, and that wouldn't work since all the etries in the registry for programs were pointing to the C drive, so with some clever registry editing I managed to change the drive letter back to C, but when I rebooted, I got the same blue screen. By now I was fairly frustrated, but I kept goin. Shortly after, I made a floppy boot disc, and threw fdisk on it, and did the "fdisk /mbr" command, and everything worked from then on. Ah this is why I want a friggin mac. The old 20 gb is gonna be repurpoused as a secondary drive in my comp for the Windows Vista beta, I'll try to post some screenshots when I get it working.

Ars Technica has some information about a video iPod capable of decoding MPEG4, MP3, and JPEG to a 4:3 aspect ratio color TFT. Although the information is unverified, it seems that Sharp sales reps are bragging that their ARM chipset is being used on the initial version of the iPod. Cool can't wait, I really want one, hmm what to do with the 20 gb 4 gen?? Ebay?

I have been using google's equivelent of my yahoo for quite a while now I liked being able to check out the headlines, weather etc. Being abl eto drag the windows in real time was amazing also. However I always felt that something was missing, I always wanted to be able to veiw any news I wanted and use it as a rss aggregator, well now you can!! It's truly amazing.You simply click add content and create a section, then type in the rss feed you want to add. I think the next step would be, allowing users to add a podcast feed, which you can do now, and use google's browser integrated media player to play the files. One thing that struck me as odd was the fact that under fun, Ask Yahoo was listed, why would they link/ offer their compitition's content in anyway, hmm odd.

Ok, I know you probably can't see the text, but bear with me, I had to crop the image and make it smaller to make it fit in the margins, stupid blog, couldn;t make it wider, any way click on the image for the full size image, somethign I threw together.

That's right, it's official now, Longhorn is no longer, the official name is Windows Vista, get used to it your gonna be hearing it a lot. I know there are a lot of bad things I can say about Longhorn and windows in general, but I won't. To be honest I am pretty excited about all of this, hope fully we will see a ton of new holes to exploit some cool new features, that probably should have been out earlier yatta yatta yatta, now you got me saying bad things again. Well the point is, even though it is a bit(understatement) late it's still going to have some cool new features.
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2005/jul05/07-22LHMA.mspx

In this meeting, Sony announced its confirmation of the White PSP color. UPDATE: Firmware 2.0 has been confirmed. Dude I want one so friggin bad. But I am too poor and not much of a portable gamer, I always think the PSP will be different since all the games aren't RPG's with lots of text(I'm get car sick). I prefer the shiny, sleek black look, over the simplictic, pure white color...hmmm...does that mean I'm evil?

The best MMORPG is now #1, NOO, BAH to you Greg. Greg once in a time long ago wrote an interesting post about MMORPG Addiction, and he is an addicted WoW player. We have always had a constant argument about whether Guild Wars, or WoW was the better MMORPG, I guess he was right, oh well, too bad I'm still not buying it. I don't to pay every month for a game I already bought. Guild Wars wins in that aspect....atleast.

Yeah guys, looks liek the server idea fell through the floor, I basically chose not to get it, didn't see the need fo rmy dad to spend a $1500 on a dedicated server. We are just gonna get some webhosting, we are looking at Bluehost. That should be sufficent. I also saw that filefarmer.com was giving free hosting for 1 year, 3 gb server space and 100gb Monthly transfer, but no SQL, which I want for Drupal/Mambo. But hey I'm still gonna try and get it, the more server space the better!!

Broadband Internet access via TV cables can reach 100 Megabits per second as early as next year, 50 times faster than the average broadband speeds now offered to cable TV homes, a Finnish firm said on Wednesday. Yes, finally. I was always wonedring, how Comcast was able to send live video through their cable, but still only gave me 5mbps internet connection, why didn't they do this originally?

I did a practive podcast today, to test out some audio recording tools, I looked at Podproducer, CastBlaster, and Audacity. CastBlaster didn't work, it just burnt up in flames and died on me, so screw that. I tried podproducer, but the audio quality was kinda bad when i used that for some reason, but I like the buttons for audio effects. Overall I think I liked audacity best, by far it had the best audio quality. But it was slightly more difficult to insert audio not much harder, but it has good affects, like the fade in and fade out. One thing I noticed, is that i figured it would get boring real fast, if I did it alone and it's not much fun to do it alone either, my friends aren't really as interested in technology, I have a few gamer friends, and one or two that program, so yeah I'll have to see should be fun. My dad is ordering the server today, should come later this week, and should take another couple days to set it up, and get the new website going, so I might just throw a few solo podcasts out there until then and just see how it goes.

(I'm not releasing the practice)

Whoa!! Hate to say it but who called it? Me and kagillions of other people. I caught this on slashdot, and apparantly It'll be out in september, and apple is currently trying to get licensee fo videos which they will sell for $1.99. I'm assuming, wait no more hoping that by videos they are referring to movies, casue that would ROCK!!! If htey did that, it woudl end the majority of movie piracy, I mean who wants to wait for a lon gitme to get crappy pirate videos, when you get it in full H.246 from apples super speed servers!!

Edit: I'm a fool, Apple is looking ot license music videos. Pirate away...

There's a new, aptly named VoIP 'Gizmo on the Internet, setting out to compete with the phenomenally successful Skype. Skype CEO isn't concerned. I don't know about it killing Skype, but if you want to do a podcast using a free VOIP program, gizmo beats skype out right, it seem simple to get a adoesn't add an echo, also if you want to do a roundtable discussion, skype limits you to 5 people. Gizmo, on the other hand has a built in recording feature, which will record your call and place the mp3 file on your desktop. Also it's conference call feature supports unlimited users! This might even be a good alternative to a teamspeak server for gaming. I play Warcraft III, me and my buddies use skype for gaming, but we never have more than 4 people so the confrence limit doesnt matter to us, but for games like Counterstrike, or larger scale games, gizmo could be useful.

Via engadget: It's not entirely clear where they scored this info, but Xbox365.com is reporting that Microsoft is going to launch the Xbox 360 on November 4th. 112 days and counting... Sweet it just hit how close teh next gen system's really are. I heard something about Nintendo being slated for a spring release. I guess you could get the preorder for x-mas, even though that would suck.

Alright, we are going to order the server today, and I have a decision to make when it comes. Whether to run FreeBSD or some form of Linux. FreeBSD which is based on Unix from Berkeley, is supposed to be able to handle more of a load yahoo uses FreeBSD on their servers, however I am unfamiliar with it, but I'm sure there are many resources on the internet to get me up to speed. Linux runs 20-30% slower that FreeBSD under the same load, which is a big minus since my dad wanted to run a lot of services and WebLogic stuff, but I am more familiar with Linux, I was dual booting Windows and Suse for a while. I'm leaning towards FreeBSD, since I'm not opposed to learning new stuff, and it is obviously is better performance wise. Also if I was ever asked to set up a business server, I would be able to do it properly. Well I guess either way it's free!. It's absurd how much the enterprise license cost, even for Suse its about $350, and you don't really need it to run a webserver, FreeBSD would do the job as well if not better. Good thing I did some research before buying, got to upgrade the server instead of wasting it on a pricey license. I'll post the specs for the server when we order it.

Wanna go Wardriving but don't know what software to use.....Check out this site has 70+ war Driving programs....If you got a notebook and a WiFi card Give it a Try ;) Sounds liek fun, but with that guy getting busted, not sure how safe this is. I really hope that guy was doign something horribly illegal with that bandwidth, cause I'm sure a lot of us are guilty of "borrowing" bandwidth.

Infoworld reported that Firefox increased its market share to 8.71 percent, up from 8 percent in May, while IE's share shrank to 86.56 percent from 87.23 percent. Since the beginning of the year, Firefox has increased its market share every month between 0.5 percent and 1 percent, mostly at the expense of IE. w00t it won't be long now...

Sharp will begin mass production of the world's first dual-view LCD, enabling viewers to see 2 totally different images when looking at an angle to the left or right of the screen. This breakthrough is achieved by superimposing a parallax barrier onto the LCD to make the source light separate into right and left directions. Hmm kinda skeptical, what if your sitting in the middle would u see chopping's of both put together??

Skype International and Boingo Wireless announced a partnership this week that will allow users to access Skype's VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) technology from 18,000 Wi-Fi hot spots worldwide. Why Boingo...?

Japanese electronic giant Sony said it will recall 16,000 liquid crystal display (LCD) televisions sold in Japan due to a default. That's kinda scary since we just bought a 55" Sony LCD tv, good thing we don't live in Japan.

I am officially tired of this blogger interface, so I think I will be switching to either Wordpress or Drupal. I'm leaning towards Drupal, even though it's overkill for what I am trying to do, but I like how customizable it is, it has so many modules, it seems like something I would enjoy tinkering with. Wordpress will get the job done, since I'm mostly just going to be blogging(hope fully podcasting soon) but if I ever want this site to be more than only a blog I will have the power. Plus what's more fun than spending an afternoon tinkering with stuff? :)

More than half a century of U.S. dominance in science and engineering may be slipping as America's share of graduates in these fields falls relative to Europe and developing nations such as China and India, a study released on Friday says. HAHA Asia wins!

Creator Paulb has put together a game of Blackjack that can be played on a standard iPod (no iPod Linux required). Paulb made clever use of the Notes capability of the iPod to make this somewhat non-traditional Blackjack experience possible. Aww Come on, you gotta have linux on your ipod.