Monthly Archives: August 2005

Ars Technica just published a nice system guide for those interested in a little do-it-yourself PC construction, and I think it’s worth mentioning here.

People have been building their own PCs for years, but Ars brings its expertise to the table in a nicely packaged article offering readers a choice of three machines: the Budget Box, the Hot Rod and the God Box. Using the site’s comparison shopping service (powered by DealTime), you can check the current price of each component yourself and read a nice paragraph or two explaining why it’s a good choice. Some specs on each of the machines, priced before buying an operating system:

•Budget Box ($787) – AMD Athlon 64 3000+, 512 MB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 6600, 80 GB HD
•Hot Rod ($1551) – AMD Athlon 64 3500+, 1 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 6800 GT, 250 GB HD
•God Box ($12,213) – AMD Opteron 275 (x2), 4 GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX (x2), 73 GB Maxtor Atlas 15k, 147 GB Maxtor Atlas 10k (x3)

Looks like they’re big fans of AMD and NVIDIA. A friend of mine did a good job of putting it in perspective, saying that he could cancel his plans to buy a condo, cash out his IRA and go for the God Box…or just snag the eight-monitored beast whose eBay auction is set to expire today. Ars DID say the God Box is beyond the range of mere mortals, but somehow that doesn’t placate me. What can I say? BYO projects like this are fun to think about. As soon as the first MacIntel machines ship, I’m seriously contemplating a run down do-it-yourself road, with help from the OSx86 Project, of course.

If you attended college at any point in the last decade, I’m willing to bet you knew SOMEONE who spent way too much time on thespark.com (now sparklife.com). From the love test to the personality test and everone’s favorite, the death test (their most popular one!!!), we all know the accuracy with which a short list of multiple choice questions can determine elements of our inner being we were never before aware of. Come on, people! The internet can do these things!

Fruitless ways of killing time online aside, it appears that researchers at the University of Manchester have developed their own internet test to determine our genetic disposition to depression. Hoping to recruit more than 1,000 UK volunteers for further tests as part of a five-year, EU-funded project called NewMood, the group invites potential volunteers (and anyone else interested) to visit their web site. There you can try out shorter versions of some of the tasks in the study, including a test to indentify emotions on people’s faces and a gambling test.

According to professor Bill Deakin, involved with the study, our brains are wired to see anxiety – it ensures we are safe. Depressed people are apparently more likely to see sadness or fear in a neutral face. Gambling tests are a way to stimulate people to work for a reward – depressed people are apparently less affected by reward stimuli and tend to give up more easily.

All of this leads to a more complete understanding of the forces involved in depression, which is a complex disorder involving genetic and personality factors, as well as life history.

[Kudos to Science Blog]

My first thoughts after watching the news today was, how will they check their email?! T-Mobile decided to step in and do something about the horrible situation under water. Free phones? No. Free Wifi? Yes! Although there’s tons of places that already give free WiFi access to people who aren’t up to their attics in water, T-Mobile has decided to be a good samaritan. It’s a step in the right direction, maybe in the near future people with skinned knees and sprained ankles will get a day of free WiFi compliments of T-Mobile.

Nothing like checking your email while your house is under water, heck, you know I’d be doing it!!

Before you say, it can’t be done, it has been. Walgreens and Snapfish have joined forces to bring all of your one hour online photo needs together. HP’s Snapfish was chosen by the green walled super store last month to represent their photos on the web, and now the favor has been returned. Just hit the “pick up” option when Snapfishing pictures, and with a zip code, you are directed to your closest Walgreens for pick up of your photos. I can’t wait to fill those spray paint and macaroni picture frames that I learned how to make in grade school, and in just one hour!

But then again, digital photos aren’t developed. Is it that much of a difference taking a memory card in to Walgreens or emailing them pics via Snapfish. There’s something (Snap)fishy going on here.

Yesterday Apple sent out a teaser announcing a special media event to take place next Wednesday, Sept. 7 at 10 am in San Francisco’s Moscone Center. Some, like Think Secret, think the portable music darling will likely release a much-anticipated video iPod. Others think we might find out about the perpetually forthcoming iTunes phone by Motorola, whose specifications have been causing chatter for months. Latest news on that front: Engadget reports that a source involved with making the commercials for the phone claim it will only hold 100 songs, so as to prevent the phone from cannibalizing sales of the shuffle.

Knowing Apple, we could find out about either, both or neither of these two things…or about something else entirely. That’s the joy of it!

It looks like everyone’s favorite Communist state decided to exert a bit of influence over the personal entertainment industry. Last week the Chinese agency overseeing online gaming announced a system to impose limits on time spent playing online games, in a move to prevent game addiction (think there will be a clinical diagnosis for this anytime soon?). Apparently ready for deployment as early as October, the system will reduce the abilities of game characters after a player passes his/her limit of three consecutive hours of play. Character abilities will apparently be cut by one half after three hours and reach the lowest level possible after five consecutive hours of play. Let’s recap:

•A South Korean died earlier this month after a 50-hour gaming session in an internet cafe.
•A 4-month-old Korean girl died when her parents left her alone for hours to play World of Warcraft in an internet cafe.
•China opens a game addiction clinic that uses psychotherapy and the tremendously effective electro shock therapy to treat game addicts.
•A Korean dies after an 86-hour gaming marathon devoid of food or sleep (from 2002)

Methinks Korea needs to be enacting one of these laws too. Sheesh!

[Props to GameSpot]

Stop what you are doing right now and check out this eBay auction (ends 9/1/05). It’s a Dell system upgraded to the bleeding edge – dual 3.2 GHz Xeon processors, 4 GB SDRAM, two 146 GB 10k RPM hard drives and part that made me nearly wet myself: eight 20-inch flat screen monitors tiled in two rows of four. Cheers to the truly copius amounts of free time this guy has. Spreadsheets and web browsers? Puh-leeze. Now if only there could be an easy way to shrink the gaps between the monitors even further, I’d be in World of Warcraft heaven. I always wanted to feel like I had my own top secret military installation command center in my bedroom.

“I’m dreaming…of an 80 x 40-inch monitor…”

If you’re reading this, it’s probably obvious to you that you’re ahead of the general internet population when it comes to embracing new trends and technologies. Congratulations.

eWeek ran this interesting article last week that spends some time discussing the average consumer of blogs, rss/xml feeds and podcasts, based on recent data obtained by Jupiter Research. Some interesting points from the survey, which polled some 4,000 internet users in June:

•11 percent read a blog monthly or more frequently (up from 6 percent in 2004)
•7 percent downloaded or listened to a podcast
•3 percent regularly receive information via rss or xml

According to Jupiter, these people are “super net vets.” How cute. Either way, the pseudonym denotes five-plus years of experience online and an income of $75,000 or more. Yee-haw! Since I meet one of those two requirements, do I classify as a “semi-super net vet?” It’s just money, right? Right?

The statistic that will make companies perk their ears at the sound of is this: 89 percent of these blog/rss/podcast consumers said they regularly buy stuff via the web, compared to 62 percent of the total online population. As the number of people using these technologies increases, we’ll start to see more companies moving to cater to people like us. Watch out world…here we come!

(dramatic music…and fade to black…)

It’s old news. But I’m an old guy. Blogger and Microsoft Word have come together at last. Everything I blog about needs to be spell checked or else there will be lots of ‘taht’ ‘nwo’ and ‘ehre’ throughout my writings. I’m not a bad speller, just a bad typist. Regardless, Blogger (a div. of Google) has a neato plugin that allows you to compose, and then post from the same word editor we all use, love, hate, and rely on. I chalk this up as plus one for the home team. Let’s get to blogging, Word style.

Rants, especially those on the web, typically fall into the category of “things that feel good and are no fun for others to read.” But occasionally someone will pen an angst-laden diatribe worth perusing, if only for its ability to do nothing more than stimulate thought.

Yesterday Gizmodo ran this piece, which spends time talking about the idea of the idiot’s PC – in this case, a machine with built-in drive mirroring, a la RAID (redundant array of independent/inexpensive disks). Having been written by someone with an obvious level of technological competence, I found it particularly interesting.

I rarely back up my data, and I know this complete negligence may very well come back to haunt me someday. But the idea of asking computer manufacturers to include built-in disk redundance (possibly without even mentioning it) is curious. Unfortunately, the author’s confession that he would gladly pay an extra $200 for the pleasure of never having to think about backing up his data is something that I can guarantee will not necessarily be well-received by our hyper price-conscious public.

But the piece still resonates. I guarantee that most people (myself included) only have a limited understanding of what it would/could mean to have complete and utter hard drive failure. At work or at home, we’re so aloof to the simple fact that large percentages of our lives rest inside plastic and metal boxes. The prevalence of digital cameras, home video production and digital music mean that our hard drives are holding more than just word documents and e-mails, and when it comes to preserving these things, being safe and not sorry means paying more attention to safeguarding our electronic lives.

Arrrgh, matey, get yerself ready, because Talk Like A Pirate Day is fast approaching! Get ready to strap on your peg leg, adjust that eye patch and tell Smee to shine yer boot and sharpen yer cutlass! If ye can read, make yer way to The Ship’s Log O’ The Festerin’ Boil, where Ol’ Chumbucket ‘n Cap’n Slappy will tell ye a tale o’ the high seas. On September 6 grab yerself a copy of their book, Pirattitude, with an introduction by Dave Barry. By September 19th you’ll be ready to hoist the mainsail and show those scurvy dogs and wenches what yer made of.