See how the car you own rates by the IIHS standards:

Insurance Institute for Highway Safety

(You can search for your vehicle on the left-hand sidebar)

This is a pretty cool demo of the Logitech Orbit Cam… For a $100 webcam, I think the software set is pretty amazing…

Wow… free Wifi in downtown Austin… sweet!

Right now, the network covers an area extending from Town Lake on the south to 7th Street on the north, and from Lamar Boulevard on the west to I-35 on the east.

Downtown wi-fi network goes live

Everyone is excited about this new Tivo box that came out.

YAY! Great! It has built-in ethernet! WOW! And it has dual-tuner capability – we can record TWO shows at once! Whoopie!

So Tivo finally delivers on a feature that people want, right? Dual tuners is the ultimate, right?

Wrong.

These Tivo idiots have released a box that can record two shows at the same time, however:

• The coax source MUST be analog cable TV. (no RF antennas allowed here folks)
• Only one of the sources can be an external tuner box like a cable or digital cable or sat dish box.

How lame is that?!

Why can’t you have two receiver boxes hooked up? And why can’t you use RF antennas for an input instead? (which would be great if you had DishNet or DirecTV since Tivo won’t let you have two receiver boxes!)

Bastards!

Tivo is a loser – no wonder they’re losing marketshare hand over fist. [sigh]

So yeah, the dual tuners are pretty much the only functional difference once you get the thing booted. TiVo is pretty up front about what it can tune and how: one cable box, max. Which means if your cable company only offers digital cable (like ours), you’ll only be able to use a single tuner with that single cable box. (TiVo called to let us know this thing won’t tune RF — yick.) If you have digital and analog on the same line, you should be fine recording digital and basic cable simultaneously

TiVo Series2 DT hands-on review

Apparently, I haven’t travelled all that much yet… gotta get working on that…

create your own visited states map

create your own visited countries map

Ruby on Rails – a loser?

Why Ruby on Rails won’t become mainstream

Wanna download an entire set of photos off of Flickr? Don’t want to do it manually? This is your answer:

Recently a friend started using Flickr which is a great service. I personally like to save pictures locally and selecting them one at a time to download was too much of a hassle so I whipped up this program so I could download them more easily.

FlickrDown

I just watched a recording of Frontline that covered the Meth epidemic.

Its actually really fascinating.

I recommend you watch it too, you can watch the whole program online here:

FRONTLINE: the meth epidemic

Let this be known – I *LOVE* iFolder.

For awhile it was hard to recommend and use becuase it was commercial only… you had to buy the server software, and it wasn’t cheap.

But now, you can get iFolder for free!

I’ve been using it to sync my bookmarks and documents across multiple PC’s… you create it on one pc, and it appears on the other PC’s automagically. No manual syncing – it all happens 24×7 in the background.

Try it out:

Finally, after two years of development we have finally convinced the gatekeepers to release the iFolder server out into the wild. The team has been hard at work the last few weeks prepping the code, fixing file hierarchy issues and building packages so we present to you the first open source release of the iFolder server.

http://www.ifolder.com/index.php/IFolder_Server

I (finally) received my Kyocera KR1 (made by D-link) today after waiting for it for about two months.

It was worth the wait.

This thing is awesome. Its completely plug and play. You slide in your EVDO card, then you fire it up (AC or DC with the included car adapter) and you’re on your merry way surfing the net over cellular. If you don’t have an EVDO PC Card, you can also use an EVDO enabled cell phone and a USB cable to tether to the router instead. Either way, this thing is sweet.

CNET has a video review of the unit here.

The unit’s hardware is pretty complete. It has a Wifi AP, a 4-port 10/100 switch, a PCMCIA slot, a USB port, and a RS-232 serial port.

The router runs Linux as its base OS, so I’m sure it won’t take long for the OpenWRT team to port their feature-rich software to the KR1. Meanwhile there’s a group of folks modifying the base firmware with mods to include telnet, busybox, gpsd, and other useful goodies.

For about $200 (afer rebate) its the obvious choice for a mobile router when you compare it to something like a Stompbox which would easily run you three times that amount to build yourself.

Hell has officially frozen over…

Apple® today introduced Boot Camp, public beta software that enables Intel-based Macs to run Windows XP. Available as a download beginning today, Boot Camp allows users with a Microsoft Windows XP installation disc to install Windows XP on an Intel-based Mac®, and once installation is complete, users can restart their computer to run either Mac OS® X or Windows XP. Boot Camp will be a feature in “Leopard,” Apple’s next major release of Mac OS X, that will be previewed at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference in August.

Apple Officially Releases Beta Dual Boot Loader

I’m getting lots of messages (email, IM, sms, etc…) regarding my new grid hosting company, so I decided to post some facts:

Fact #1:

Clustering on PS2’s is very real, in fact, the NCSA has constructed a PlayStation 2 Linux cluster as a test bench for scientific computation.

From PlayStation 2: Computational Cluster:

The cluster consists of 65 compute nodes, 4 user login and development nodes, and 1 prototype node for software installation tests. All the nodes run the Sony Linux distribution for PlayStation 2. The compute nodes fill a 24-inch rack; 5 shelves at 13 per shelf

The Sony Linux kit (for PlayStation 2) includes a full Linux operating system. This distribution uses Linux 2.2.1 ported to the PlayStation’s Emotion Engine CPU, and is based on an earlier version of Red Hat Linux for PC’s. The distribution includes development tools that you would expect; libraries, editors, compilers and debuggers that you’d find in any Linux distribution. The kit also includes software tools that provide hooks into the PlayStation 2 specific hardware.

Fact #2:

Building a computational cluster using PS2’s, with the help of the people I met at SC’05, is absolutely something I would try to do. And apparently – none of my friends would ever be suprised if they heard I had.

Fact #3:

The entry was posted on April 1st – aka, April Fool’s day. 🙂

So:

Thank you for all the positive feedback and well wishes, but I’m not insane enough to try to build a company selling computational time on video gaming consoles. 🙂

Lots of people have been asking me what I’ll be doing now that I’m no longer working at Rackspace full time.

I don’t feel like explaining the entire business in detail, but I’ve had a fascination with grid computing and the virtualization of software services across computational clusters for sometime

Additionally, anyone who knows me, knows that I’m fascinated with repurposing hardware (both electronic or otherwise) to do new and different things.

Anyhow – last year, I spent some time at the Supercomputing ’05 conference in Seattle. There, I met lots of great hardware engineers and software developers. Since then, lots of us continued talking and we formed a new company. Over the past few months we have been building a new low-cost datacenter and setting up our own state-of-the-art computational cluster in a secret warehouse using Sony Playstation 2’s.

The amount of innovation and ingenuity I’ve seen with this new team rivals that of any tech company including Google and even Space-X. I’m very proud of what has been accomplished in such a short period of time.

We are in the middle closing our A-series round of founding of about $27.5million and if goes well, look for the official announcement of my new Grid Hosting Company(tm) later this year!

Wow – this is really cool.

Basically you take your cameraphone (1 megapixel or better), take a picture of a whiteboard or document, and then email that photo to scanR – and it’ll email back a PDF version!

Very cool.

Try scanR now. It’s fast, easy and FREE!

Telephones are just supposed to work. No fuss. Pick it up, dial a number, and you’re connected.

Cell phones shouldn’t be any different – but they are.

In the case of my I-Mate K-Jam, the thing is simply too slow. And often times, it looks like its frozen – while its actually just chugging through something.

Last night I decided I need to do some research on overclocking this thing. Turns out, someone else had the same complaint and already had a blog entry about it. Here it is:

Smartskey update, overclocking integrated

The standard clockspeed was 132mhz, and now I got it running at 264 – twice as fast. Its only been in this state for about 6 hours, but its like having a completely different phone – its a huge improvement.

The only thing left is to see what it does to the battery life… 🙂

Ok, a lot of these are very, very trippy….

Illusions, Magic Tricks and Puzzles: When Your Perception Turns Against You!

Optical Illusions Blog

Some these are amazing – like the full size Lego SUV…

It’s time for our weekly Top 10 list and this week our editors bring you the “Top 10 Strangest (or Coolest…) Lego Creations”.

Top 10 Strangest Lego Creations

Yay!

You scored 90% or more!

Guy Kawasaki’s Entrepreneurial IQ Test
Brought to you by Tickle

In December, I got a new cell phone after deciding that my Treo 650 was a piece of junk.

I ended up replacing it with a I-Mate K-Jam – which is also known as an HTC Wizard… and is now also known as the Cingular 8125 or the T-Mobile MDA. Since I bought the unlocked version before it was officially released in the US, I paid a fortune for it. (You can read a recent review of the Cingular 8125 here and another one here.)

The K-Jam is nice… it has a huge screen, a 1.3megapixel camera, built-in Wifi and its still about the same size as the Treo 650 (if not exactly the same size).

The past few months of owning it have been pretty good – most importantly it doesn’t have the reboot problem like the Treo has. I only have two complaints about it:

1. Its not built for one-handed operation like a typical cell phone or the Treo. Which is a real pain when you’re trying to make a call while driving, or even walking.
2. The processor on it is pretty slow. I can get it to slow down to a crawl while surfing and emailing at the same time (which happens a lot, apparently)

After seeing how little Palm did to improve the one-handed operation of the PocketPC OS in their latest phone, the 700w, I wasn’t all that dissappointed in the end about the first issue. But the slow processor issue was a bit of a problem.

Until the new firmware update came out for the K-Jam! 🙂

The phone seems much more responsive now – only time will tell if it is really faster. They’ve made some tweaks to the apps here and there… but the biggest addition is that the new version of the OS supports true push-email on Exchange… it works, its fast, and its pretty sweet.

All in all, I’m glad I switched to the K-Jam – I’ll take slow over rebooting any day… and now that it does true push email, theres no reason to consider switching to a Blackberry. W00t! 🙂

I’ve been using Verizon’s EV-DO service for the past couple of weeks, and I have to say that I absolutely love it.

Its fast…. its VERY fast.

I almost never worry about trying to find a wifi hotspot anymore since I can get around 500kps on the EV-DO network most of the time (and faster if I have really good signal strength.) And to solve the signal strength issue while I’m in hotel rooms, I got a small external antenna…

I’m still waiting for my Kyocera KR1 EV-DO wifi router so I can share the connection… and a mag-mount EV-DO antenna for my car.

I highly recommend it. 🙂

As I said before, I continue to tell people NOT to buy HDTV sets for various reasons… one of which is the fact that the HDTV “standard” is a bit of a moving target.

A couple of years ago at CES, 1080-progressive, or 1080p, had become popular… (not there was any content for that format as the 1080p format isn’t supported via ATSC or QAM as far as I know)… turns out that 1080p will be supported in the new hi-def DVD formats coming up.

So lots of people I’m sure started buying 1080p televisions to make sure that they’ll be able to display the new Hi-Def DVD material…

But as it goes, the Hi-Def industry has moved the cheese again, and even if you have 1080p capable tv set, you probably won’t be able to display any HD-DVD content since they changed the DRM spec….

HD DVD to Screw Early HDTV Adopters

I imagine that the HDTV “standard” will evolve a few more times before its done… so to hold me over until then, I bought four standard-def TV’s the other day that were on sale. 🙂

Lots of folks in the advertising business have been poo-poo’ing the whole TiVo and PVR revolution… but I’m glad some advertisers are finally starting to adapt to the new technology instead of bitching about it:

Advertisers are running into a jam. With more and more people using digital video recorders, people are just zipping through the ads.

One company says you won’t want to do that with their latest commercial.

KFC says its latest ad has a hidden message. Apparantly, if you watch the ad in slow motion, you can decode the message, and get a coupon for a free sandwich.

KFC Unveils “Tivo-Proof” Ad

(Thanks to Vikram for pointing out this article – usually I’m on top of such things, but I was traveling when this article came out… 🙂 )

I had been looking for a new phone headset and I had a few minimum requirements:

• Wired – No Bluetooth – I love BT, but I don’t want to carry (yet another) charger with me
• Boom Mic – I hate the dangling mic on the cord, and I think that mics in the ear-piece still pick up too much noise (no matter what noise canceling tech is being used)
• Easy to carry – I have been carrying a GN Netcom headset around with me, and its been great but its a bit of a pain to carry around with its metal headband and all.
• Sufficient volume – The main problem I’ve been having with cell phones is that its difficult to hear the other person on the with so much background noise in the car or whever I may be at the time.

Speaking of volume – the Treo 650 I had was barely audible in a car or airport with the volume cranked (even with Volumecare), and the I-mate K-Jam I have right now is better, but not much of an improvement.

Instead of trying to boost the audio, I decided that maybe blocking out the ambient noise was better… While I was at CES this January, I had the chance to stop by the Shure booth and play with some of their newest sound-isolating ear-buds. I own a set of E2c ear-buds and I love them. So I wondered if they made phone headsets – and it turns out they do!

You can read about them here: Headsets For Mobile Phones

Mine came in today, and so far, I love it… it has a real boom mic, and its light-weight, and since it blocks out all the other noises around me I have to turn the volume down on my phone to its lowest setting so it won’t blast my ear. Sweet!

I went to the local Verizon store today to buy a Treo 700w. But I didn’t.

Its not to say its not a great phone:

• The sound quality is awesome – its loud and clear (finally!)
• The proc is pretty quick – but its not quick enough… I managed to get it to slow down when switching apps.
• The one-handed operation of the 700w is better than any PocketPC phone I’ve owned (or played with) but its not as slick as the Treo 650’s UI.
• It has EV-DO for data access and I can only sum it up with one word – “WOW!” Its wicked fast.

So the upside is that its probably the best PocketPC phone I’ve seen… but the downside is that since its on the PocketPC platform its really hard to make it that much different than anyone elses PocketPC phone… I mean, is there really THAT much difference between one company’s WinXP machine to another’s? (I’ve not thought so in quite some time.)

Ultimately it didn’t make sense to buy it at the Verizon store even if I did want to go home with it since Amazon.com has a $350 (after rebate) price on it while the walk-in store had it for $500.

Ok so people continue to ask me – “Does this ColdHeat thingy really work?”

I actually got one as a gift from Dirk, and quite frankly – I like it. It does take a little while to get used it – this is not your father’s soldering iron. But once you realize that its not the same thing, and treat it as something different, it actually does a pretty decent job soldering joints on wires and pcbs.

As an invention, Cold Heat seems to have everything. At first glance, it does something old (soldering) in a new, potentially better way (without a hot soldering iron and the risk of burns). It has the “Why didn’t someone do this before?” factor.

How Cold Heat Works