Recent Posts

251

General Software Discussion / Re: 10/GUI

« Last post by Mark0 on October 13, 2009, 09:24 AM »

Did they talk about where the keyboard would go though? If their 'touch interface' goes where the keyboard normally would - it would have to double as a keyboard too?

-tomos (October 13, 2009, 09:20 AM)

Yes, they show it near the end of the video. Think about a laptop keyboard, with an oversized trackpad.

252

General Software Discussion / 10/GUI

« Last post by Mark0 on October 13, 2009, 08:01 AM »

Just seen a link on reddit about this. It's an idea about a new take on windowing systems and general interaction with computers.
Take a look at the video / demo:

http://ignorethecode...g/2009/10/13/10_gui/

Bye!

253

Living Room / Re: RobotWar and the Army of Clones

« Last post by Mark0 on October 07, 2009, 07:00 AM »

That brings back memories. I always liked this kind of coders' games. 
I too wrote a DOS software for Corewar on... well, too much time ago: 1992! 

254

Living Room / Re: DIY - Home made in-car camera mount

« Last post by Mark0 on October 05, 2009, 12:38 PM »

I wonder if you could use it in a more settled area without problems?

-40hz (October 05, 2009, 12:28 PM)

I read about photographers caught in similar unpleasant situations often in the U.S.A.
Luckily here it isn't a problem at all (we have many others to worry about, of course).

BTW, I live near Venice; if people taking photos around were to be seen as "suspect", there would not be enough policemen in the whole nation!

255

Living Room / Re: DIY - Home made in-car camera mount

« Last post by Mark0 on October 04, 2009, 02:34 PM »

Definitely. I had planned to do 1 shot every seconds, but I left the refocus on every time, so it ended up doing one every about 3 seconds. The LCD display also staid on insted of going off, but luckily the batteries lasted just enough!

256

Living Room / DIY - Home made in-car camera mount

« Last post by Mark0 on October 04, 2009, 12:59 PM »

Maybe this can come handy for someone...
The story: 1 day before a trip in the Dolomiti mountains, I tought it would be a nice thing to make one of those time lapse - accelerated video, with a digicam shooting a photo every second or so.
But I didn't have any suitable camera mount for the car, so this is what I come up with:

Basically it's just two plastic tubes, hold together with two screws, that get closed around the headrest support.
Two neoprene strips make for a better fit and suppress some vibrations.
On the tubes then any suitable support can be attached: I just used a flexible Gorillapod that I bought some time ago.
Considering the quick & KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) approach, I have to say it worked quite well: at least, the camera didn't fall to the floor!
As for the digicam, I used a simple Canon A570is, with the CHDK firmware and an intervalometer Lua script.

Here's the resulting video:
YouTube - 3 mountain passes in 3 minutes
(next time I'll remember to double the shoots x sec.; too much sharp turns on the mountains roads!)

And a log of the trip (with stats, altimetric profiles, some geo tagged photos) courtesy of EveryTrail (a great web service, IMHO):
EveryTrail - Raduno Montano Hybrid Synergy Forum    - Trentino-Alto Adige, Italy

And a photo (of another friend) that sum it up:

And the 1 month old camera car:

Bye!

257

General Software Discussion / Re: the best hand-held pdf reader?

« Last post by Mark0 on July 21, 2009, 08:43 AM »

I would say an iRex Digital Read:

http://wiki.mobilere.../IRex_Digital_Reader
http://www.irextechn...ogies.com/irexdr1000

Battery life isn't spectacular for an eInk screen device, but it's around 12 hours.
It's also on the pricey side.

Bye!

258

Living Room / Re: Google demonstrates new communication platform "WAVE": mail, chat , wiki, ..

« Last post by Mark0 on July 21, 2009, 04:35 AM »

Just got a "You've been invited..." message from Google... but it was for Google Voice. DOH! 

259

Living Room / Re: Show us the View Outside Your Window

« Last post by Mark0 on May 31, 2009, 04:40 PM »

Rainbow today!

  (click to zoom)

About 20 minutes later...

260

Living Room / Re: Google demonstrates new communication platform "WAVE": mail, chat , wiki, ..

« Last post by Mark0 on May 30, 2009, 06:55 PM »

It seems to have the potential to change how we normally do a lot of things online.

261

Living Room / Re: Recommend some music videos to me!

« Last post by Mark0 on May 16, 2009, 01:04 PM »

Rodrigo y Gabriela on Later with Jools Holland - Tamacun

262

General Software Discussion / Re: music dictee software

« Last post by Mark0 on May 16, 2009, 12:51 PM »

A couple I have seen mentioned in similar threads (but never tried):
intelliScore Ensemble
AKoff Music Composer

Bye!

263

General Software Discussion / Re: Blog Essay: AutoHotKey is NOT a Virus, Worm, or Trojan!

« Last post by Mark0 on April 29, 2009, 09:12 PM »

I think that's depend on the fact that the bundled executables AHK create are packed, and many AV software have a seriously bad attitude regarding to compressed EXEs.

264

Living Room / Re: Has anybody ever tried a FON router?

« Last post by Mark0 on April 25, 2009, 08:38 PM »

No experience but just wanted to add that a great thing is that the new version support even some 3G USB dongle. At the price it's a bargain for a 3G / WiFi router.

265

Living Room / Re: Who else is sick of difficult word verifications on the web?

« Last post by Mark0 on March 28, 2009, 06:36 AM »

Enter 3D-based Captcha:
news.cnet.com - 3D-based Captchas become reality

Can be tried here, for example:
YUNiTI.com - registration

266

Living Room / Re: Samsung's 24 x 220MB/s SSD RAID

« Last post by Mark0 on March 20, 2009, 06:07 AM »

At AnandTech there's a very long, but very interesting article on SSDs:
The SSD Anthology: Understanding SSDs and New Drives from OCZ

267

Living Room / Re: Scenes of the Recession from around the world

« Last post by Mark0 on March 19, 2009, 08:13 AM »

Sure, I wasn't suggesting that it wasn't correct.
Just a matter how "how long before", or "how bad before".

But of course a bit of optimism is welcomed and probably necessary too.

268

Living Room / Re: Scenes of the Recession from around the world

« Last post by Mark0 on March 19, 2009, 08:00 AM »

<duplicated! sorry!>

269

Living Room / Re: Scenes of the Recession from around the world

« Last post by Mark0 on March 19, 2009, 08:00 AM »

eventually things will get better.

-gexecuter (March 18, 2009, 11:36 PM)

Someone, somewhere, have probably said that some billions years ago, before the last Big Bang! 

270

Living Room / Re: Building a Quiet PC

« Last post by Mark0 on March 18, 2009, 05:49 AM »

I know this is not even taken in consideration by many but... the iMac I bought about 3 years ago is almost completely silent. During the day, I can't say if it's turned on. At night, about the only thing I can hear is the HD.
With an SSD it would be almost perfect. I would probably buy one within some months if I weren't planning to give it to my sister or brother and bring something new at home.

271

Living Room / Re: How to *really* test if your HD has bad sectors or not...

« Last post by Mark0 on March 13, 2009, 10:20 PM »

Using the tools/diagnostics by the maker of the specific HD should also be a good idea. For example:

Seagate Technology - SeaTools
Western Digital support- downloads

272

Living Room / Re: Samsung's 24 x 220MB/s SSD RAID

« Last post by Mark0 on March 10, 2009, 09:42 PM »

Additionally, who cares if it can access it super fast if it can only access it 500 times before the drive is dead. How does an SSD compare with an HDD when it comes to durability and the number of times data can be written to the disk?

-Deozaan (March 10, 2009, 09:39 PM)

That's simply a non-issue with moderns SSD (acutally, it wasn't anymore by sometimes).

273

Living Room / Re: Samsung's 24 x 220MB/s SSD RAID

« Last post by Mark0 on March 10, 2009, 09:40 PM »

TechReport had a nice article some times ago, about the new Intel's SSD. There are both wordloads in witch there wasn't much of a difference, and others in witch it was dramatic (concurrent access to the drive):

TechReport - A look at four X25-E Extreme SSDs in RAID - iPEAK multitasking

274

Living Room / Re: Samsung's 24 x 220MB/s SSD RAID

« Last post by Mark0 on March 10, 2009, 08:46 PM »

Another pseudo-random consideration: I think that startup time benchmark for this kind of comparisions is quite a bit unuseful. Eventually it can be of some interest for laptop users on the go (i.e., the ones that actually need to start / stop working), but surely isn't a very good indicator of the HDD vs SSD, because of all the pauses / fixed times needed for things like hardware initializations.

Also, simple load of one app often equal to just a transfer rate test, more or less.
Sometimes it can be more complex, for example with apps that then load lots of plugins (Photoshop, Acrobat Reader, etc.), or do a lot of I/O processing before showing something (Outlook, since it need to scan the mail & activity database, etc.); here the delta in favor of the SSD can be very noticeable.

As a (obvious) rule of thumb, whenever there's a lot of HD's heads trashing, an SSD can do wonders! 

275

Living Room / Re: Samsung's 24 x 220MB/s SSD RAID

« Last post by Mark0 on March 10, 2009, 05:48 PM »

Most of the perceivable speed increase from SSD don't come from the transfer rate (witch is multiplied with a RAID 0 setup), but simply by the near access time that's about 3 order of magnitude less than a fast HD.
Sometimes even my terribly underpowered Eee PC surprise me for some workload, thanks to the (slow!) flash drive.

There was an interesting Slashdot news some days ago, given DonationCoder's target:
Slashdot - Can SSDs Be Used For Software Development?
As usual with /., the good part is especially in some of the comments:

[...]
I use SSDs for my (both) development systems--the first was for the work system, and after seeing the improvements I decided I would never use spinning-platter technology again.

The biggest performance gains are in my IDE (IntelliJ). My "normal" sized projects tend to link to hundreds of megs of JAR files, and the IDE is constantly performing inspections to validate the code is correct. No matter how fast the processor, you quickly become IO-bound as the computer struggles to parse through tens of thousands of classes. After upgrading to SSD, I no longer find the IDE struggling to keep up.
[...]

Bye!