Thursday, March 31, 2005

microbus replicas

now that vw has canned the microbus remake, we have:

japanese microbus replicas:

http://www.geocities.jp/kgdgk927/minbus.html

href="http://www.jalopnik.com/cars/retro/replicas/japans-mini-vw-micro-bus-replicas-037720.php

The the new VW microbus was going to be based off the eurovan chassis anyway (huge) so I think of it as kinda contrary to the whole microbus concept in the first place... Not that I remember my father's microbus with much fondness, engine fires, no cornering ability and watching the road go by through the hole in the floor just weren't the highlights of my life. It was however proceeded by the amc wagon and followed by the dodge caravan, so hey, auspicious company.

Monday, March 28, 2005

Some URLs

Gotta keep the Daleks away from parliment...

http://www.sundaymail.co.uk/news/tm_objectid=15337120&method=full&siteid=86024&headline=who-the-hell-are-you--pal-name_page.html

Ok, this is baddass... Cartoon character skeletal systems drawing studies...

http://michaelpaulus.com/gallery/character-Skeletons

usb wireless links with cookware...

http://www.usbwifi.orcon.net.nz/

Wednesday, March 23, 2005

Some URLs

http://www.livejournal.com/users/imomus/94162.html

Racist American killer robots

http://www.defensetech.org/archives/001246.html

and

http://www.livejournal.com/users/imomus/2005/03/19/


How long before they fail to mirandize you before busting a cap in your ass during a routine traffic stop in LA?

More along the lines of dying your poodle to match your sweater...

http://wireless.3yen.com/2005-03-23/a1404s/

Though in this case it's making your phone match the bunny...

http://pliink.com/mt/marxy/

New addition to the family



On the upper right hand corner of the larger monitor...

Tuesday, March 22, 2005

I'm so behind...

I've been playing with:

http://www.ippoder.com

The whoe podcasting rss mp3 thing is something to which I'm obviously a latecomer, in part probably because I'm so awash in downloaded media at this point that I don't have time to digest it all... and that's before the netflix and other distractions show up.

The thing that sorta pushed me over the edge is auteurs who seem intent on curating the hell of their indie music collections. one example is here:

http://warrenellis.libsyn.com/

the rss feed for ipodder or whatever applicaion you're using is:

Podcast address: http://warrenellis.libsyn.com/rss

Thursday, March 17, 2005

Some URLs

debian on soekris
http://roland.entierement.nu/index.php/archives/2005/02/16/debian-on-soekris-howto/
http://www.cheapnet.net/~mike/soekris/

soren has poe power supplies for soekris for $22
http://www.soekris.com/how_to_buy.htm

metrix.net pigtails
http://metrix.net/metrix/products/pigtails

Wow shiny!

http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000963036340/

Tuesday, March 15, 2005

some urls

Katamari Damacay creator gives speech at gdc:

http://www.1up.com/do/newsStory?cId=3138803

http://www.gamespot.com/news/2005/03/11/news_6120232.html

from penny-arcade

gigabyte appears to have come out with some potentially low cost sata to fc and fc to fc disk enclosures... Now if I could just find a retailer...

http://tw.giga-byte.com/Server/Products/Products_StorageArray.htm

Wednesday, March 09, 2005

Just a note on phones as mp3 player

Just as an observation, now that every vendor in the west has decided that phones should be mp3 players I have a few things to say about that. First the japanese are making a go at it, so go over there and look...



First put a damn mini jack on the thing. If you think a cellphone headset or bluetooth has sufficient fidelity for serious music listening, you'd be wrong. If you think that stupid proprietary port on the bottom or side of your phone is adequate for this applicattion you'd be wrong... People want to use decent headphones, they don't care for a wired remote, the phone is small enough, they don't care for a wireline mic, the mic in the phone is fine.

Second, if you don't bundle the storage capactiy for a decent number of tunes people will drop your product like a hot rock. The price of a 1GB flash card to add to your phone is vanishingly close to that of a whole mp3 player and the hard-drive ones have 1.5x to 60x the capacity of your 1gb flash card. BTW, the Cornice hard drives are 14 whole grams if you can't figure out how to put one in a phone then you're stupid. Samsung can do it.

gizmodo samsung 3GB hd

Some URL's

Some dude who lives outside Hiroshima and teachs english in junior high...
dave ahlman's japan

Harbinger of things to come....
crappy picture of 7 mega pixel camera phone

New laptops. Two users have run linux on dell Inspiron 6000 pci-express laptop none on 9300 yet.

dutch debian

english mandrake

Things I'd be interested in compared to my current dell (Inspiron 4150) are working 3d acceleration, the ability to suspend to ram, a larger screen. The current Dell has a Radeon 7500 which is better supported than newer chipsets, but slow. The current Dell can use apm so in general it sleeps although occasionally it doesn't wake up, The new ones would all have to use acpi suspend which I've had pretty horrible experiences with on pretty much every linux machine I've ever used it on.

The Inspiron 6000 can have a 1920x1200 15.4" display the 9300 a 1920x1200 17". the Inspiron 9300 has either Radeon x300 or Geforce 6800, the 6000 either Intel integrated or Radeon x300. I suspect that either the Intel or the Nvidia would be more appropiate for linux than the x300 at this point.

Some company that takes regular white mac products and makes the fruit flavored.

colorware

Paint even applied in automotive process is gonna get the shit bunged out of it on any device you handle a lot. for metal powder coating would probably work, but color infused platic is still the best way. If apple still did color that would be cool. at one point I was in possession of both blueberry and grape imacs which are at least asthetically pleasing if not terribly well performing...

Tuesday, March 08, 2005

Streaming from IETF 62

hardware for audio streaming


7 x travala c134 chassis, via epia m10000 mainboard, 256mb ram 40GB samsung disk. The lonely shuttle cube at the end was our backup box because one of the mini-itx boxes built failed...

Managment workstation


NOC 62

some urls

Zombies!
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/03/08/high_school_zombie_threat/

VAIO crap:
http://www.spic.net/u1/linux/
http://www.ottaky.com/vaiosuse.php
http://jr0bak.homelinux.net/~imai/linux/u3linux.html

Kinda cool phone if they actually deliver it in a reasonable timeframe. Still it's a candybard and I want a real keyboard in the next one.

http://www.mobileburn.com/review.jsp?Id=1177&source=HOME

Some university that thinks they have the right to regulate the 2.4ghz ism band...

http://www.oit.umass.edu/policies/wireless.html


I give you:

Airlines win Wi-Fi management battle with airports

Sunday, March 06, 2005

Kyoto has a micro-brewery



The kolsch was pretty good, the alt beer was a little unremarkable... Check out the engrish in the blown up version...

brand confusion...

Snoopy mayonaise:


Luftwaffe meserschmitt airplane girl?

Friday, March 04, 2005

A note on the jr700

The JR700 is the biggest most civilized airplane you've ever been on. Sure it flys kinda low and it has no wings, but it zips between hub cities fast enough to make the temporal distance between Tokyo and Osaka similar to that of Tokyo's outlying suburbs. This morning I caught a Nozomi super express bound for Osaka at 08:53 and had arrived at Shin-Osaka by 11:27. Another 45 minutes on a much slower train out to Kansai airport and I'm ready to board the United Airlines (777) meat-can back to the west coast. One can debate the wisdom of traveling halfway across a country to catch a flight, sufice it to say that some bad planning on my part was involved.

If airline travel were actually as civilized as the Shikanasen perhaps some of the enjoyment I felt at going from point A to point B on an airplane as a child would have remained... Eliminate to roar of gaint turbines and their associated compressors, eliminate 5% relative humidity, eliminate breathing thin stale recycled air, eliminate upper atmospheric turbulence, looking out postage stamp sized windows (why do planes have windows at all at this point?) being packed in with your fellow sufferers without enough room to move with disturbing them, all of those things gone...

Just a few observations on Shikanasen travel.

Unless you're traveling during the high travel seasons, don't bother with reserved seats... Just show up at the train-station buy a non-reserved ticket and catch the first train headed in the right direction.

A JR700 Nozomi between Tokyo and parts south is 11 cars in length, seats about 8000 people 5 across and is about 330 meters in length... My timetable lists something like 115 Tokyo-Osaka departures each direction per day, that's not counting the Hikari and Kodama trains which are slower and make more stops.

Externally the lines of these trains are flat-out sexy in a functional is beautiful way. airplanes and cars have a lot to aspire to in terms of something that's as visually slippery as a JR700.

Tuesday, March 01, 2005