If anyone is interested in buying my Roomba, please contact me. Its in excellent condition and comes with 2 virtual walls. What is a Rooma? Its a robot vacuum cleaner. Email me or leave a comment below. Asking price is KD50.
Note: Originally purchased for $215 (with virtual wall and taxes, excluding around KD20 shipping to Kuwait).
Category: Technology
Roomba for Sale
Palm is Palm Again
Palm got split into 2 companies a while back, Palm Source and Palm One. Palm Source was going to be the software company and Palm One the hardware. Now, Palm One has become Palm again, and they have rebranded starting with a new logo. [Link]
Apple Intel Dev Systems
“It’s fast,” said one developer source of Mac OS X running on Intel’s Pentium processors. “Faster than [Mac OS X] on my Dual 2GHz Power Mac G5.” In addition to booting Windows XP at blazing speeds, the included version of Mac OS X for Intel takes “as little as 10 seconds” to boot to the Desktop from when the Apple logo first displays on screen.
sigh… [Link]
Running with the Bulls Injuries
Do you know someone that is running with the bulls this week in San Fermin, Spain? Well, this Google Maps hack will allow you to view all injuries of people involved in this event from the event each day. [Link]
Gmaps Pedometer
If you are a runner/biker/etc.. and want to know the distance you ran/biked/etc.. you can now use this handy tool called Gmaps Pedometer. You zoom in to the area where you ran/bikes/etc.. and then you can mark you route and it will tell you the ditance you rant. Here is the link [Link]
Note: when you click on the link and go to the page, once you get there press satellite on the top right. When you find the location you ran/biked/etc.. click on Start Recording then double click your starting point on the map and then just keep double clicking on the route you took, it will draw lines for you and measure your distance.
TANDBERG Video Conferencing
Today I was able to check out a TANDBERG video conferencing setup. Its such a cool system, we had 2 huge ass plasmas built into the wall and a videocamera built in between them. The system video conferences at various connection speeds but we were using 384kb/sec. The TANDBERG system is also a very secure system I was told (the US defence department uses it!), so its perfect for talking business no matter how confidential the matter might be. The guy who was showing me the video conferencing system used a Marantz RC9500 remote control (drool!!) to control the whole thing including rotating the camera and zooming in and out. With a click of a button we connected to an office in Oslo which was closed but we were able to pan the camera around over there and check out the office. While checking out the Oslo office he also connected to a roof top cam on their companies head office in Japan and then connected to the conference room located in the same building we were in. So in total we were connected to 3 places on the same screen, very cool. The guy also told me that you could connect a laptop to the system and do a power point presentation or play Quake and they could all watch you. I don’t know how much a system like this costs, I should have asked him but I know I can’t afford the Marantz remote yet alone the two plasma screens and the TANDBERG system.. sucks!!
The results are out, loads of cool stuff!! [Link]
Update: There are a 158 products incase you didn’t notice, just keep pressing next or use the drop down menu to go to a certain category.
Someone went and scanned a LadyBird book for kids on how the computer works. The book is from 1971, really interesting. [Link]
A9 Maps
A9.com has done a minor cleanup to their starting page, they also fixed up their Maps page. While maps.google.com shows you satellite images of countries, maps.a9.com is pictures from the ground of store fronts. Of course not all the cities are available and its only US cities but its still really cool. Using maps.a9 I was able to show Nat every shop I passed by when I was in New York on vacation. Shops which I had forgotten their names I was able to find by maps.a9. Try it out. [Link]
Google Video Viewer
Yesterday Google released the Google Video Viewer but sadly.. it only works on Windows! [Link]
Times Square, Kuwait City
I was on my way to lunch in Nibaq’s car when he noticed what looked like a large TV screen outside the Kuwaiti Stock Exchange. So, after lunch we decided to drive by it and there it was, a huge ass TV screen right outside. The location of it is really terrible though, there is a large tree right in front of it and I was only able to see the screen by climbing out of his sun roof and having him park his car right underneath it. They should seriously remove the tree or else this thing is useless.
Just read this article in Arab Times where they are talking about building a rail system in Kuwait in preparation for the major traffic congestion we will be facing in the upcoming future. Now the cool thing in the article is they are proposing the futuristic Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) to connect major buildings. It was the first time I had heard about it so I did a bit of research and this thing is like super cool. Its like mini trains that hold around 4 people for example, and if you are say at the main NBK branch in Kuwait City and you want to go to Souk Sharq for lunch, instead of taking the car you just hop into one of these tiny air conditioned capsules and tell it to go to Souk Sharq and it will take you. This system just requires major buildings to be connected via tracks and you no longer need to your car to travel from your building to another down the street. Here is a link with more information on PRT. [Link]
Cheap Fiber Connection
Was just reading a post about Verizon’s new fiber connection in the States. The price is incredibly cheap and the connection speed is insanely fast!
Here are the monthly prices:
5 Mbps down /2 Mbps up = $39
15 Mbps down /2 Mbps up = $49
30 Mbps down /5 Mbps up = $199
In comparison I am paying $110 per month with Qualitynet for a 512kb down / 256kb up connection.
[Link]
Nokia 770 Internet Tablet
Finally a new gadget for me to crave and dream of. Its been such a dry period with gadgets lately with the same crap over and over. Nothing has been grabbing my attention, the Palm LifeDrive caught my attention for a full 5 minutes, but then I found out it ran on the ancient Palm OS 5 (where is 6?!?!) and that it would actually be less responsive then my current 3 year old Tungsten | T. Then suddenly out of the blue, the Nokia 770 tablet came along.
From all the companies on this planet, Nokia was the last one I would have imagined would come up with a device like this. This is what the Sony Clie was supposed to be and what Apple should have introduced, a pda like device that allows you to surf the web.
The current tablets in the market are too big, bulky and expensive, the OQO is tiny and cool but too expenisve, and PDAs generally have just been lagging behind in technology. The new Nokia tablet on the other hand is a mixture of a pda and a tablet pc, its the best of both worlds, a perfect combination.
The new Nokia has wifi, bluetooth, a large 800×400 resolution touch screen display (which is perfect for web browsing) and it runs on linux. The price? Only $350. The MAJOR downside is that its coming out next fucking year in fall! Why did they even bother to show it to us now, its teasing us. This is what I like about Apple, they don’t show you or tell you anything, and then when they do show us something, its available on their store 30 minutes later for purchase…
For more information on the Nokia Tablet click here.