For years, I’ve been discouraging people from buying HDTV’s for two reasons…

1. To date, there are very few shows in any sort of HiDef format or resolution
2. HDTV display technology is changing rapidly and improving by leaps and bounds while prices continue to drop

There’s still very few shows to watch in HD… and while there was once simply CRT, LCD, DLP, and Plasma… there’s now LCoS… which appears to be the “new hotness”:

Liquid Crystal on Silicon, LCoS, is a relatively new and obscure display technology that is now making its grand entrance into the HDTV marketplace. What is really impressive is that instead of taking the traditional path of entering at the ground floor with mediocre performance compared to the established technologies and then trying to percolate up to the top tier in picture quality, it is starting out right at the very top. Already, LCoS provides the highest resolutions, the highest non-CRT Contrast Ratios, and the most artifact-free images of any display technology. For people that are sensitive to flicker and eye-fatigue, LCoS operates at the highest refresh rates (120 Hz) for the smoothest, most flicker-free images. This article will be an in-depth examination of 5 LCoS HDTVs, all but one of them prototypes, in order to get an early look into this unfolding technology.

LCoS Display Technology Shootout Part A

I decided to order one of these “Sleepmate” thingies… we’ll see if it works… 🙂

Have you ever laid awake at night wondering, “What do I have to do to get a peaceful night’s sleep?” as your neighbor’s dog barks all night and traffic roars by?

Why Constant Noise is the Perfect Sleep Solution

This is really cool – Its free… now you can finally recommend a solution for your friends for hosting their email for their own domain names…

20 accounts per domain, 250megs of storage per account…

Its basically Hotmail but instead of having “[email protected]” you can get “[email protected]” and use all of the normal hotmail features like spam filtering, web access… even syncing to Outlook.

Bitch’n!

Windows Live Email Service

I admit it, I have a bit of a fascination with the Rubik’s Cube.

Growing up, the best I could complete was two adjacent sides… then I’d just get frustrated and dis-assemble the whole thing, and just put it back together the correct way… which I felt was a far-superior way of solving it than moving the stickers around (like my cousin did). 😀

Here’s a short video clip of this year Rubik’s Cube Competition.

Video: A puzzle gone wild

My favorite part is the blind-folded competition… insanely cool. 🙂

It turns out that all the YouTube acquisition rumors… are just all that… rumors.

On the other hand, it was exiciting to think that someone could have bought YouTube after only being alive for 11 months (founded in Feb. ’05)… oh well. 🙂

YouTube Acquisition Rumors

Phil sent me this link this morning, turns out there was someone spying on us – well, ok, so the photographer was walking around constantly in plain sight – but its still a bit amusing to find us on the web like this… 🙂

TED Simulcast

After digging thru’ the site a bit, I found another shot of us in the Gallery (on Day 1, photo #27) playing with glow sticks at dinner:

TEDphotoGALLERY

Going clockwise from me (with the glowstick-chopsticks) – Jim Young (co-founder of Hotornot.com), Dirk Elmendorf (co-founder of Rackspace Managed Hosting), Evan Williams (co-founder of both Blogger.com and ODEO), Max Levchin (co-founder of PayPal and founder of Slide), James Hong (co-founder Hotornot.com), and Philip Kaplan (founder of both Fuckedcompany.com and Adbrite).

This is amazing… FOUR gigs on a high-speed SD card, and its only 200 bucks! And its not vapor-ware! You can buy it today! Incredible!

Surplus Computers has the A-Data 4GB 150x Turbo Secure Digital Card for $200 with free shipping.

A-Data 4GB 150x Turbo Secure Digital Card $200

Ya know, I kinda wanna own a Mac… but I’m attached to Windows… I know, I know – “MacOS is better – yadda, yadda…”

Anyhow, the question was – can one run Windows on the new Intel-based Macs?

With the announcement of the Intel chip based Macbook, the door is now open for running the Windows OS on Macintosh hardware, right? jaypatrick writes “BetaNews reports that along with the announcement of the first Intel based Macs yesterday, many users have rejoiced in being able to dual-boot both Mac OS X and Windows. Unfortunately, this is not the case; due to Apple’s use of the extensible firmware interface (EFI) rather than BIOS, current Windows releases will not run on the systems.” I guess not. But, wait… Big Z writes “Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice-president of worldwide product marketing, said in an interview Tuesday that the company won’t sell or support Windows itself, but also hasn’t done anything to preclude people from loading Windows onto the machines themselves.” I think someone actually trying it out is the only way this is going to get straightened out.

Windows on Intel Macs – Yes or No?

Wow, sounds like everyone’s better off just sleeping-in than trying to rush into the office if you’re still a little groggy…

If it takes a while to clear the cobwebs after waking up, that’s understandable — “sleep inertia” leaves some people so groggy they might as well be drunk, researchers said on Tuesday.

Study: Waking up like being drunk

Its not often when Google gets beat by someone…

… Hitwise has crunched the traffic data, and YouTube indeed overtook Google Video in market share, shooting up 83% in one week …

Guess I Was Onto Something

And if you haven’t seen the “Lazy Sunday” Saturday Night Live sketch you can view it below… its pretty funny – DOUBLE TRUE!

SNL – The Chronic of Narnia Rap

Easy Ubuntu is cool, but this is just as useful:

This is a graphical interface for installation of a lot of apps on UBUNTU BREEZY and for tweaking a few things to get your Ubuntu box up and working in full throttle in the quickest possible timespan.

Automatix (Automated GUI installation script)

This is great – I’ve already used it four times in the past week:

Unlocker overrides those annoying Error Deleting File or Folder messages. When you want to delete a file and Windows won’t let you, use Unlocker to free the file from system processes holding it hostage. Unlocker will delete stubborn files, free files from a captive process or kill process that won’t let go using normal means in the Windows Task Manager.

Unlocker

It appears that Audible updated their website – they cleaned it up a bit… its a bit faster… you can now download mulitple titles at once. All in all its an improvement.

I also noticed that if you upgrade to their newer Platinum Listener account, you can get a free iPod shuffle as long as you stay on-board for 6 months. Since I’ve been a member for some time, I just figured I’d upgrade to the newest account to get the free iPod.

At first this was fine… I cancelled my older subscription, then signed up for the new promo… everything was great… until I went to check my “Next Listen” queue.

Its gone. >:(

It seems that they’ve eliminated the “Next Listen” queue in favor of providing “roll-over” credits… which is fine. Except now I have no idea what it was I wanted to listen to for the next few months.

Hey Audible – how about moving all the “Next Listen” items to the wishlist!? Or possibly just alerting the user to the fact that you’d be losing the items in the queue!?

For all you physics geeks out there… 🙂

These pages explain quantum entanglement by way of colourful pictures, helpful analogies, and absolutely no math.

Quantum Entanglement

Ok guys… the newest WRT54G v5.0 does not run linux… and you can’t run linux on it. So if you plan on getting one, you’d better go pick one up now and hope you can find a v3.0 or older on the store shelves.

However, you can still pick up the WRT54GS units, which still run linux (for now)… which is probably the better one to own since it has twice the memory and flash available for hacking.

There is also a rumor of a WRT54GL coming out, where the L denotes Linux… which may solve the problem of getting them in the future – we’ll see.

Clearing Up the Confusion: No More Linux on the WRT54G?

The folks over on the Manufacturers’ Blog (Coolstuffbeingmade.com) have videos of interesting manufacturing

Coolstuffbeingmade.com

Ever wonder what all those BIOS settings mean?

The Definitive BIOS Optimization Guide

Check this out:

With Millennials/Gen-Y entering the workplace, managers are starting to feel the effects of over-involved Boomer parents. Like, say, after Johnny gets a not-so-glowing performance review, Johnny’s mom calls his boss: “The best way to motivate Johnny is not through negative feedback!” reprimands Mom. That isn’t going to fly in this company, you might say, but guess what, this is your new workforce (born between ’79-2000). So you’re going to have to learn deal with it.

This is Your New Workforce: Gen Y