computers

I've recently come down with some serious technolust. The object of my desires is made by Apple, but it's not the new iPhone or iPad--although the iPad does look really slick, it's still a first-gen Apple product. No, I'm referring of course to the new Mac Mini. I think it would make a perfect replacement for my media computer, or HTPC I guess they call it. My current HTPC is still quite functional, so really all I would gain is a smaller and quieter computer, a no-fuss mp3 remote control, OSX, optical audio out, built-in bluetooth (and no more wireless keyboard base), and a 1.5X smugness bonus. I think my biggest loss in buying a Mac Mini, other than money, would be Winamp. It's a shame that iTunes destroyed the music player competition on the Mac.

I used to mock the Mac Mini. I used to lament the lack of a headless Apple desktop somewhere between the Mini and Pro, but it looks like that gap will never (as long as Jobs is alive) be filled. Call me crazy, but now that I'm no longer all that interested in keeping up with Moore's Law, I'm starting to believe the Mini could replace my desktop. It even has multiple display support these days!

As seen here.

I recently bought the new Motorola Droid, and almost everything about it is great. The one major complaint echoed by all is the camera--specifically, the auto focus. Taking non-blurry photos (especially macro) or using the barcode scanner app is an exercise of trial-and-error. Until yesterday, it seems, when the auto focus on everyone's Droid started working properly.

The root cause of this is a wonderful little clock-based bug, where a rounding error causes the auto focus to perform poorly on 24.5 day cycles. A permanent patch for this is forthcoming, supposedly before the next "bad" 24.5 day period. As one who in theory earns a living telling computers to do shit for me, hearing about this bug filled me with twisted glee, while also making my blood boil at the thought of having to track it down myself.

Is it possible that I'm beginning to experience my third hard drive failure this year? After a couple of decades of perhaps only one total failure, is it finally time to pay my dues? And why does it always happen right before the weekend when it's too late to get a next-day replacement shipped?

A couple of reboots and a SATA cable/slot switchup later, it seems to be working again. But I'm afraid a fresh terrabyte is not too far off in my future...

PDF attached below, but the originating site has interactive flowcharts with a lot of great notes.

The Control Room of Project Cybersyn. See also

Google's 411 service was created to help the machines to understand our spoken languages

The Conficker eye chart is a brilliantly simple web page that could indicate whether your Windows machine is infected with the much-ballyhooed Conficker virus, which defied everyone's predictions of total world destruction on April 1.

I know I'm just asking to be struck by lightning here—and I don't want to get all neener neener on you—but to my knowledge I have yet to ever experience any type of virus or other malware infection. God knows I've installed my fair share of shady apps with nebulous origins. Maybe I need to try out more helpful toolbar or sexy lady programs, and see how the other 99% of computer users live.

...until 1234567890 in Epoch Time. Watch the countdown.

MS Songsmith covers classic rock...

It's fun to see this famous ad in the context of the IBM/Apple battle. It's also funny to consider the profitability Apple enjoys despite the erosion of their market share from then until now.

So I've just got windows reinstalled on my machine after getting infected with some sort of nasty spy/malware/virus. I'm not sure where it came from or what the vector was*, but I'm usually pretty safe**, and I haven't installed any shady programs in some time. What really pisses me off is it spread to my tablet notebook, which has no optical drives and is really annoying to install on OS on. This comes about a week after similar shit on one of the office computers led me to have to reinstall it. In both cases, a full reformat and reinstall were the only way to be sure I got rid of it (the old take off and nuke it from orbit approach). There's nothing like having to delete a Windows install to make one realize how fucking infuriating the centralized registry is in Windows. I have all my programs intact as they were on a separate drive, but they all think they are not installed because they check for now nonexistent registry keys instead of just reading an ini file. I fucking hate computers.

Bruce Schneier has an interesting article on wired.com on the parallels between the recent Colombian hostage rescue and man-in-the-middle attacks.

There's no way to go back. You can't arrange them by penis.