Category: Geek

Well the Xbox360 is coming out in a few days and its time to move onto the next generation of videogame consoles. I have been reading most of the Xbox reviews online and I have concluded one thing, I need a High Definition Television. The majority of the reviews I have been reading have been saying that unless I have a HDTV I won’t be seeing much of an improvement over the current generation of consoles. So it seems the wise thing to do is to upgrade my TV which I have been wanting to for a while now. I don’t want to get a plasma/LCD TV for numerour reasons including the fact that the only plasma I can afford are the cheap Panasonic Viera series which are currently being advertised on billboards around Kuwait. The problem with the Viera is you get what you pay for and according to online reviews the Viera series have numerous issues with the most important one being they doen’t support the 720p resolution. I also believe that a high definition tube television would give a better picture quality then the plasmas and LCDs, so until OLED TVs get released I will be sticking with the old tube.

This is where the problem starts, I haven’t found many HD tube televisions in Kuwait. I only found two models at Sony, a 29″ and a 34″ and I haven’t found any other anywhere else. The 34″ seems like my best option at the moment but it costs around KD700-KD800 which brings me to the following question, is it worth getting HDTV in Kuwait?

In the States they already have cable and satellite channels broadcasting at High Definition, from what I know we don’t have anything like that in Kuwait. So paying KD800 for a TV so I can play high definition games on it doesn’t make a lot of sense. DVD’s are supposed to look better on HDTV’s but I don’t buy that many DVD’s and I mostly use my TV for watching TV shows.

So any HDTV experts here? Any tips and advice in purchasing a HDTV and using it here in Kuwait?

Wow, took him 50 minutes to hit the main page with it. View the source. [Link]

update: they pulled him off the main page now.

Last month I purchased an old 300mhz Apple clamshell iBook. It had 32MB of RAM and was running OS 9.2 slowly. So I ordered a Kingston 256MB RAM stick for my iBook and it arrived earlier in the week. The first thing I did once I installed it was to replace OS 9.2 with Linux. The reason simply was I needed to be able to browse on the iBook and Firefox wasn’t available for OS 9.2 and I had heard OS X would run very slow on my Mac. So Linux was my only option and after over 1 hour of installing the OS I tried it out and was very disappointed. Although it was very responsive and it did have Firefox, I wasn’t very comfortable using it and I decided to give OS X a shot. If OS X turned out to be very slow then I would come back to Linux as my last option.

I formated the drives and proceeded to install Panther (OS 10.3) onto my ibook. Installation was brisk and in less then 30 minutes it was done installing and rebooting. When the OS launched again I played around with it a bit and I was shocked. Panther was pretty responsive and very very usable. It was not slow, there was no lag and I wasn’t even bothered by the 800×600 screen resolution. I was simply amazed at how well everything was running. I quickly copied Firefox and Adium from my main mac at home and proceeded to set things up importing my bookmarks and setting up my system preferences, everything ran extremely smooth and I even managed to install OS 9.2 in case I ever needed it.

After a week of using my iBook it has finally become my main Internet browsing portal. I am getting online from my living room while watching TV and I am really enjoying it. Sure I could be surfing from the living room with Nat’s powerbook but its not mine and even when I setup my own account on her powerbook it still always felt as if I was using HER powerbook. My previous Internet portal in the living room was my Audrey and I think I will have to find another place for it (maybe the bathroom) since because of my iBook I am no longer using it. This iBook is mine and I feel right at home with it… until the next generation of iBooks get released. So far its great and I even am posting from it right now. So in conclusion a Mac capable of running OSX smoothly cost me KD25 ($85) for the iBook and KD12 ($40) for the RAM. Unbelievable fucking cheap!

Wired has a very cool and informative article on the worst software bugs in history. Some really interesting stuff. [Link]

Torrent Finder is a Torrent Search Engine which searchs top torrent sites from one page. Very practical. [Link]

[via]

My favorite magazine has opened their first ever store although its temporary until Christmas. From November 18th to December 24th you will be able to visit the WIRED STORE in Soho, New York City and “geek out in style”. More info after the jump. [Link]

This article discusses exactly WHAT hardware you want, WHERE to find the software, and HOW to install it. [Link]

Two years ago I purchased two PowerMacs and two 21inch Sony Monitors from my previous agency. I gave the newer Quicksilver PowerMac to my brother and I kept the older Graphite PowerMac for myself. When it came to the monitors, I gave the older Sony G500 to my brother and kept the newer G520 for myself. Come back to the present day, my Sony monitor is fucked. There are a couple of white horizontal lines that show up on dark areas of an image which makes things really annoying, plus there was a sharpness issue, I couldn’t read small type on websites anymore and especially if they were grey. When my brother moved to Lebanon for university he kept his Sony monitor at my parents place, so I decided to go get it and try it on my Mac to see if it was any better. Wow what a difference, after installing my brothers monitor I realized how fucked mine was. The colors are more vibrant now, the text is wayyy sharper and when there is a dark image on the screen I don’t see any horizontal lines! I can’t believe I spent all this time working with such a messed up screen. I feel like my Mac is reborn again, cool shit.

Matt Mullenweg of WordPress has released a new anti-spam plugin for WordPress called Akismet. According to the early beta users its supposed to be incredibly accurate capturing 99.51% of the spam with no false positives. I personally won’t be installing it since I am using Spam Karma and it has been doing an incredible job catching in total over 10,000 spam comments since I installed it late September. Plus Spam Karma is free. [Link]

I just realized that Evolt redesigned their website. I stopped checking the site in the summer because it wasn’t being updated due to the redesign but now 5 months later the site is back up but I really hate the new look. The old design looked way better in my opinion plus the articles were much easier to read. Luckily I am not the only one who hates their new design and many users have left their feedback on this issue. Hopefully they will read them and fix things up. [Link]

Hacker Translator will translate any text you input into ‘H4X0R’ text (Leet). The idea of ‘H4X0R’ text is to replace as many letters with numbers/symbols as possible. Therefore, Hacker Translator would be ‘H4X0R ?r4|\|514?0r’. [Link]

Found this link on Will’s Weblog and decided to try it myself. As expected I turned out to be a Low-Rank Computer Geek. Hopefully Tivo-Guy will take the test. He should probably ace it. [Link]

Update: Tivo-Guy took the test and sadly scored only a 93. I thought for sure he would get 100. tsk tsk

Yesterday I recieved my 1GB Ultra II Memorystick Duo and I quickly tried running games off it by copying their iso’s onto the Memorystick and running them using FastLoader 0.7. Majority of the games I tried didn’t work and I even had trouble unraring most of the files. So here are some tips I would like to pass on from my experience.

– Firstly, Mac users, if you want to unrar files, get UnRarX. Its a great utillity that does a much better job then Stuffit. I was getting errors using Stuffit but didn’t get any when using UnRarX.

– Secondly, there are two different types of MemoryStick Duo’s, the regular kinda and the High-speed. Whats the difference? Regular memorysticks read and write at 15MB/sec while the high=speed ones read and write at 80MB/sec. So get the High-Speed (Ultra II) ones since they cost a bit more but offer better performance.

– Thirdly, most of the games like Winning Eleven 9 and Madden 2006 wouldn’t work with the regular FastLoader. To get it working I used Devhook 0.21.

If I have any more tips I will add them to this post in the future.

* You have an Apple ][e in your room
* You have over 5 web browsers installed
* You use an old desktop-format Mac II/Powermac as a laptop stand
* You’ve been to 1 Infinite Loop
* You’ve used System 1 on a 128k Mac…within the past year
* Your external hard drive has Apple stickers on it
* You’ve stood in line for at least one Apple Store opening/OS release
* If you see a Mac/iPod in a movie or TV show, you know exactly what model it is, how many megahertz it has, and whether it can run OS X at a decent speed

I am posting this post using Linux on Nats powerbook. I feel like such a newbie using this OS. It took me like 5 minutes trying to figure out how to get the network setup though which is faster then it would have taken me trying to figure it out on Windows XP. Linux does feel allot like Windows though which isn’t a good thing. The OS is pretty fast and responsive running on Nats 867mhz pbook. I am running the live version of Ubuntu. The hardest part of working with Linux is I am using the Command key when I should be using the CTRL key for stuff like copying or closing windows. Anyway, gonna boot back up into OSX now.