|
Headlines!
|
News Front
|
|
|
|
| Monday March 27, 2006 | | 10:18 AM - kan |  Oops, seems like our ageing server went into a few hiccups during the weekend.  Probably it's time for a new server?
|  Print Today's News
| | Monday February 20, 2006 | | 02:13 AM - bktoh |  So I walked into Best Buy the other day when I was in the US, and on the counter was Street Fighter Alpha 3 Max for the PSP.
Good thing I packed the PSP along for the trip, I thought.
Even though I didn't use it on the plane this time around (too many good movies to catch), I usually pack the PSP along for my trips just in case (insomnia caused by jet lags etc). I never really get to play my PSP much anyway.
So a day later, I am at the airport waiting for my flight to start boarding and I plonk in the SFA3 UMD, and then it happened:
You need ROM Update 2.50 or higher to run this POS crap.
WTF! Stuck in an airport gate with no recourse. Gee THANKS! Sony!
Whatever happened to power up and play simplicity of consoles...
The least they could have done was to bundle the 2.50 upgrade on the disc itself so I could upgrade my PSP.
WTF. Now I am home, and I finally upgraded the firmware to the latest one, but I usually don't get the PSP much use until I hit the road.. maybe in a couple of months then.
Afternote: Since this incident, I have been told that if I rummage through the UMD directory in the Home page, I should be able to find an update to upgrade my PSP. Of course, this wasn't highlighted when the Cannot Run Message was showing on the screen. Dammit.
| Print Today's News
| | Thursday February 02, 2006 | | 12:03 PM - kan | For those who haven’t updated their virus signatures and perform a full system scan, I suppose it’s a good time to do it now. With probably over 300,000 infections worldwide, the Blackmal/Nymex virus is programmed to start deleting eleven different types of files on the third of each month, starting with Friday, February 3 2006. More information available from SecurityFocus and F-Secure.
When Nyxem activates, it will overwrite all of your DOC/XLS/PPT/ZIP/RAR/PDF/MDB files. This is nasty, as this is done on all mounted drives, ie. any drive that has a drive letter. So it might affect your USB thumb drives, external hard drives and network drives! Also, if you're taking daily automatic backups you might end up backing up the corrupted files over good files.
The number of machines that have been infected by this worm is over 300,000. Many of those have been disinfected already, though. But thousands of computers will get their files overwritten on February 3rd - most of them in India, Turkey and Peru.
This is what you get when the virus hits you:
 | Print Today's News
| | Wednesday February 01, 2006 | | 18:11 PM - kan |  My BF2 comrade serg_pain just dropped me an email regarding this interesting homepage on the successful clone of the VeriChip, a RFID access control chip which is usually used in the healthcare industry.
Verichip markets their product for access control. This means that you could have a chip implanted, and then your front door would unlock when your shoulder got close to the reader. Let us imagine that you did this; then, I could sit next to you on the subway, and read your chip's ID. At this point I can break in to your house, by replaying that ID.
Also available are some articles available here and here regarding the cloning of proximity cards. Well, my office is using the HID Prox Card II and I would be very interested to know if this works. Hmm, very James Bond indeed…
| | 03:00 AM - bktoh |  I got crazy into car audio a while back.. and splurged on a (then) top of the line head unit Alpine with a FantomFace panel, that could fold away when powered off (for security). 
Since then, I have kinda gotten out of the whole car audio phase, but I kept the Alpine unit for my new car. While it is quite dated now (no WMA playback), it still remains one of the top models from Alpine. But alas, my feeding the unit with badly mastered MP3 CDs led to the early demise of the CD player component of this unit.
For a long time now, I just lived off regular radio as well as the MP3 CD changer. Thing was, as I began to use my iPod nano more regularly, it seemed klunky to have to keep burning a new MP3 CD everytime I updated my itunes collection. I really wanted a way to hook my ipod to my car audio.
Alpine came up with a new series of head units to support iPods about a year ago. I gottta admit, I was a little piqued then, but since I didn't have an iPod, it only remained a novelty then.
A recent road trip to Malaysia for the long Chinese New Year weekend finally gave me the impetus to look for a solution. With the help of a friend, I narrowed it down to this model:
This isn't a full audiophile unit like my old unit, but it had the ipod connectivity, and it also included a Glide control which supposedly makes for much simpler navigation.
Installation was pretty straightforward. I needed another multiplexer unit to allow toggling between the ipod and my regular MP3/CD changer in the boot (which I hadn't expected), but otherwise it was a pretty straightforward swap.
Interface
I gotta admit, I wasn't too hot on the whole Glide interface idea. Sometimes, regular buttons still work best.
Also, the Alpine user interface to the iPod was "usable" but not ideal. In many ways, the iPod interface worked pretty much like a CD Changer device to the head unit.
When scrolling down long lists of Songs or Artists or Albums or Playlists (easily enough on my friend's 30GB ipod), the Alpine was limited to only 256 per list. Using the Glide to scroll down the list was also painfully slow.
Considering how much Apple had invested in their iPod interface, I feel Alpine should have at least given us the flexibility to use the iPod to control the navigation of the menus and playlists.
Still, on a 4GB iPod Nano, it wasn't as daunting to navigate and I quickly managed to navigate the menus to what I want pretty quickly.
Aesthetics
I am not sure if it was deliberate, but the iPod dock connector cable supplied with the Alpine iPod kit was also black in colour so it matched my black nano perfectly. The iPod kit also includes a box that may be a little clunky and industrial, but it is meant to be tucked away out of sight.
One thing I do like about the new 9855 head unit is how you can now change the illumination color from a large spectrum of colors. One of the problems when buying head units today is that the unit you want with all the nifty features you are looking for, may look out of place on yr dashboard. Alpines used to have an ugly green color by default, which would look out of place in most modern cars that usually have red/amber lit dashboards. My old Alpine allowed me to choose between Amber and Green, but the new 9855 just lets you go bananas in your color choice.
Sound Quality
This is the real gem of the piece.
If you use the headphone jack of the iPods (or any MP3 players for that matter), you are using a high level output, ie amplified to drive your earphones. When hooking up hifi components, you should ideally use low-level outputs. Using this Alpine iPod kit allows you to do just that.
And the sound quality is pretty amazing. My bass heavy R&B tracks usually end up saturating my earphones, even the really decent Shure E2C set. But piped in over the Alpine kit to my DLS speakers, they are thumping tightly without the same levels of saturation and distortion.
| Print Today's News
| | Monday January 23, 2006 | | 14:08 PM - kan | SecurityFocus and The Register both published an article to pay tribute to possibly the first computer virus, Brain. If you remember, Hardware one used to have connections with one of the co-authors of the virus back in the year 2000 days when we were still having the DOT COM dreams. Our HW1 server used to be graciously hosted by them and it was pretty incredulous to work with them in some of the projects we had. I’m not sure about you, but I used to have my own little virus collection using floppy disks just like the one shown below.
* Picture shamelessly taken from F-Secure blog.
| Print Today's News
| | Wednesday January 18, 2006 | | 18:05 PM - kan | Found out that I had some time today to investigate on bktoh's “allegations” that Hardware One was sporadically slow for the past two days. I should have guessed that the slowness of Hardware One wasn’t his primary concern. He is more concern with his SG Evo Club forum which we are concurrently hosting on the same server. Darn, I’m disappointed with him.
Anyway, he is right when I personally encountered the slowness in the early afternoon. Spent some time tweaking Apache and trying to find who is possibly trying to be funny with us (for what?). Finally the light came in when I saw the host nancy.astra-net.com doing an entire download of the the site (yikes!).
A visit to www.astra-net.com shows this: “Welcome to ASTRAnet – Your Highspeed Internet Service via Satellite!” It became apparent that we are probably hit by an unfriendly proxy caching server!
Duh.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Hello New User!
|
