Computers in Movies

I was watching this movie about this black ops military team that do an operation then things go wrong and now they want revenge, etc. etc. etc.

Anyway, the point is, they have this super secret encrypted hard drive, and they had to steal the decryption algorithm from this mega-corporation. So now this team are sitting in their room, and using a netbook, the geek from the team types a few commands and decrypts the hard drive in a matter of seconds. First point, you cant decrypt a complete hard drive using a slow netbook with the press of a button, you need to wait at least 20 minutes or more. Second point, I wanted to see what super high tech command he used, and here it is:

He used traceroute! HE USED TRACEROUTE! You don't use traceroute to decrypt a drive. I know this is just a movie, but please Mr. Producer, have a little imagination.

Missile Command

This is the best video game ever.

I spent so much money on this, I could have financed my own missile base.

Evolution of Storage

This graphics shows the evolution of storage, very impressive, for the bigger picture showing storage for data, music and photos, go here.

Social Media Addicts

Before Social Media when people had free time, they would have conversations, sit around the TV, read a book, now Social Media has taken over and people are always on facebook, twitter, etc. etc. etc.

Here is a funny video of a Social Media addicts meeting:

Stop the Presses - Steve Jobs Stepping down as Apple CEO

More about it here from Reuters.

How to get a fully loaded new Macbook Pro for less than the Apple web site

Apple advertises its fully loaded Macbook Pro 15":

• 2.53GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
• 4GB 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM
• 320GB Serial ATA @ 5400
• SuperDrive 8x

At $2,499. I got mine for $2,225 and no shipping or cutstoms duties.

How did I pull this off ? Well I was in London Heathrow Airport and bought it off the duty free. It cost me in British Pounds 1,488.47

Converting to dollars, I got a $274 saving. I did my own shipping by carrying it in my hand all the way to Kuwait.

In these hard economic times, every dollar saved, counts.

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Access your most recent apps / docs / servers from your Dock

Here is a cool hack you can do to access your most recent apps / documents / server / Favorite Items from Mac OS X Dock.

Here is a screen shot for my most recent apps used:



What you need to do it is to start up terminal and copy paste the below two lines:

$ defaults write com.apple.dock persistent-others -array-add '{ "tile-data" = { "list-type" = 1; }; "tile-type" = "recents-tile"; }'
$ killall Dock


Don't copy the $, this represents the prompt.

My First Computer

Here is an ad for my first computer:



They say you never forget your first time, oh wait, they meant something else.

If you want to learn more about the Commodore Vic 20, check it out here.

My Macbook Air is here

I just received my Macbook air. Here are a few pics, now I got to go play work on my new Macbook.

Flickr Protest

Created with Admarket's flickrSLiDR.

There is a protest on flickr about the Microsoft takeover of Yahoo. Flickr users have submitted their artwork against the takeover. Full pictures here.

Shattered Dreams

Seven Popular Myths Debunked - and a few of my own

The following medical myths where proven untrue by scientists:

* People should drink at least eight glasses of water a day
* We use only 10% of our brains
* Hair and fingernails continue to grow after death
* Shaving hair causes it to grow back faster, darker, or coarser
*Reading in dim light ruins your eyesight
* Eating turkey makes people especially drowsy
* Mobile phones create considerable electromagnetic interference in hospitals.

Full article here.

A few of my own follow:

Mobile phones are not dangerous in airplanes, I had my mobile phone turned on in my carry on luggage and nothing happened to the airplane.

Eating Vegetables make you lose weight, if this is true, why are cows so fat?

Playing video games is a waste of time. Actually, I played a lot of video games and I got great hand eye coordination and an appreciation of the technology involved, therefore my time was not wasted.

Google Talk is Speaking In Tongues.

Google Talk, google's chat client and messenger is speaking different languages. Google has introduced new chat bots that are added as your chat friends. Whatever you type to these chat friends gets translated to the language choosen. Among the choices are:

ar2en, en2ar (Arabic<->English)
bg2en (Bulgarian->English)
de2en, en2de (German<->English)
de2fr, fr2de (German<->French)
el2en, en2el (Greek<->English)
es2en, en2es (Spanish<->English)
fi2en (Finnish->English)
fr2en, en2fr (French<->English)
hi2en (Hindi->English)
hr2en (Croatian->English)
it2en, en2it (Italian<->English)
ja2en, en2ja (Japanese<->English)
ko2en, en2ko (Korean<->English)
nl2en, en2nl (Dutch<->English)
ru2en, en2ru (Russian<->English)
uk2en (Ukrainian->English)
ur2en (Urdu->English)
zh2en, en2zh (Chinese<->English)

For instance, invite en2zh@bot.talk.google.com, open a chat with it, and then whenever you type something in English, the bot will repeat the same in Chinese (say e.g. “hello” and the bot correctly translates to “你好”).

Here is an example of me translating English to French:





For more details you can go to Google Talk's blog, here.

Don't Give up on Vista

I got a new laptop. I turned it on and to my shock horror surprise amusement. I thought, let me give Vista a chance. I tried to start a few programs, and I got a multitude of dialog boxes asking me to confirm each and every action to keep me safe and warn me about potential security threats. "Are you sure you want to do this ?", "Your information might be exposed", "You are going to an unsafe link", "Do you want coffee?", "Do you need a jacket to keep warm?". OK, the last two are my own.

After a few hours of this ordeal, I started swearing at Vista. "Vista is the bloody operating system, it is running on a high powered dual core brand new laptop, if I need to tell it how to keep me safe then I don't need it.

I had 2 choices, downgrade to Windows XP or try Ubuntu. I did not have any important data on the laptop so I downloaded the latest version of Ubuntu Gutsy gibbon and booted up with my freshly burnt CD. It booted up and gave me the option to install, which I happily did.

Surprisingly, Ubuntu detected all my hardware even my Bluetooth, and worked seamlessly. I started playing with it and so far so good. No problems, no crashes, no freezing and no irritating dialog boxes. I installed some software for Ubuntu and never did it ask me to reboot as Windows always does.

I think I will stay with Ubuntu for a while.

Craving an iPhone?

Have you been caught in this iPhone hype and would love to get your hands on an iPhone but you are not in the US right now?

Well the waiting is over, eBay is full of iPhones that people want to sell. 8926 iphones listed so far.

You can get the full list here.

Remember, if you buy an iPhone, it will only work in an AT&T mobile network, unless you have some mobile hacking skills and can unlock the SIM and put in your own Mobile Network's SIM.

Lego Goes Online

Virtual worlds are becoming very popular. Sites like Second Life and World of Warcraft have members numbering in the millions. Virtual Currency is being exchanged back and forth into real currency.

Lego has decided to join these worlds by releasing an Online World. More about this here.

Digg is Down

UPDATE: Digg is back online.

The popular site for submitting content and having users voting on it, digg, is down.

Digg had some controversy recently about its users posting links to pages revealing the copyright encryption key for HD-DVD discs. Digg's users rebelled. Hundreds of references to the code flooded the site's submissions, filling its main pages and overwhelming the administrators' attempts to control the site's content.

Digg founder Kevin Rose said the site would no longer try to prevent users from publishing the code. "We had to make a call, and in our desire to avoid a scenario where Digg would be interrupted or shut down, we decided to comply and remove the stories with the code," he wrote. "But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you've made it clear. You'd rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won't delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be. If we lose, then what the hell, at least we died trying."

More here from Forbes.

Digg is now down, I hope it is just a maintenance shutdown rather than a legal one.

Microsoft Rules - or - 10 Facts about Microsoft

Microsoft announced quarterly revenue of $14.4 billion and net income of $4.93 billion. In other words, Microsoft’s daily net income is about $55 million. That’s $55 million in pure profit every 24 hours. Do some quick math and you’ll learn it takes Microsoft only about…

10 hours or so (yes, hours!) to exceed Red Hat’s quarterly net income of $20.5 million.
four days to exceed Research In Motion’s quarterly net income of $187.9 million.
four days to exceed Starbucks’ quarterly net income of $205 million.
one week to exceed Nike’s quarterly net income of $350.8 million.
two weeks to exceed McDonalds’ quarterly net income of $762 million.
two weeks to exceed Apple’s quarterly net income of $770 million.
18 days to exceed Google’s quarterly net income of $1 billion.
23 days to exceed Coca-Cola’s quarterly net income of $1.26 billion.
five weeks to exceed IBM’s quarterly net income of $1.85 billion.
10 weeks to exceed Wal-Mart’s quarterly net income of $3.9 billion.


Source: TechIQ

My Desk - and others

I thought my computer set up was pretty cool, with 2 monitors, my big screen TV and all my remotes (DVD, TV and satellite receiver) all lined up.





Then I found this link with other nerdy desk set ups, Now I feel I need to buy more hardware.

I especially like this one:

There is No Reason To Ever Beat Your Child…

I found this on digg titled There is no reason to ever beat your child.
Here is the flckr page for it.