Rubenerd

My post on Twitter just before I went to bed at 03:25:

The fact is the “iPod Classic” is still technically the best iPod, but it has the outdated interface. The “Touch” is a glorified Nano.

Just finished watching the live text and photo feeds from Tom Krazit on News.com, Ars Technica and MacDailyNews of Wednesday's Apple music player product launch.

From the features I typed up in my last post that I did and didn't want to see, it was really a mixed bag. It's great that Apple released the iPod Touch with the same interface and features as the iPhone; including the WiFi connectivity of which Singapore has a bountiful public supply; but my worst fear that they decided to use flash memory came to pass!

As they did with iLife 2008 by bundling the older version of iMovie because they knew the newer version wasn't that crash hot (you can hear my rant on Rubenerd Show 225), Apple have kept the iPod Classic line going with hard disks despite the launch of a newer flash-based iPod Touch. I can't help but wonder if the iPod Classic is really just to give the excuse that they're still providing decent storage without actually having to provide it at the high end.

Despite the attractive WiFi functionality in the new iPod Touch which as I said above would work fantastically in Singapore, I think I'll have to side with Frank Nora and keep my iPod Video and Nokia e61i for the time being.

I can't help but see though, the price for the 16GB iPod Touch is the same as the 8GB iPhone. It makes you wonder if they're really just using the Touch as a stepping stone to convince people to move over to their phone, and with it their data plans with their approved carriers that they receive commissions from. Why buy just an iPod when the iPhone is the same price?

Okay, okay it's almost 03:00 here in Asia, I'm off to bed.

Everywhere is abuzz as to what Apple will be releasing in San Francisco today… actually it's already yesterday for us on the other side of the world in a positive time zone, but you get the idea.

The last thing the internet needs is another Mac or iPod user babbling on about what they predict will be introduced, so instead I'm going to just make a brief list of features I'd love to see in a new iPod. I never saw the point in the iPod Mini, Nano or Shuffle so I'll stick the "classic" form factor.

The iPhone without the Phone: GOOD

Seems to me to make perfect sense, and it’s probably what everyone’s expecting. I’d love to be able to use the touch-sensitive scroll features, the widescreen video playback, the ability to make phone calls… wait scrub that last one.

Flash memory: BAD

Flash memory has come down in price over the last few years, but it’s still substantially more expensive per gigabyte than hard disks. I want to be able to afford the next iPod!

Flash memory: BAD

Haha, okay there are two reasons why I don’t want this, the other being that I want an iPod with a decent capacity. The current iPhone’s measly 8 gigabyes could barely hold one television show series let alone all my music. Please no flash memory!

Radio tuner: BAD

The whole point of having an iPod is so you don’t have to listen to advertisement saturated, mind numbing chatter and boring music selections that commercial radio has. To me there’s absolutely no point having a tuner in a device you’d stock with your own music and podcasts. We have New Time Radio!

Classic coloured Apple logo on boot: GOOD

A pointless fantasy that would never come to fruition… pun intended

A on-screen clickwheel: BAD

This would really be a really stupid idea because it’s redundant. What’s the point of having a fancy touch screen if they just slap on a virtual wheel on it? Isn’t the whole point to allow people to scroll through their list of music just like the iPhone? Isn’t the whole point not to use the phrase “the whole point” more than twice in one post?

Video in DivX and XviD: GOOD

Frank was right about this! I’d love to be able to just to play video I’ve downloaded without having to go through time consuming conversions first. With their QuickTime and H.264 push though, I doubt they would though :(.

Ability to sync with Google Calendars: GOOD

iCal is great, but I love the way I can access my Google Calendar on any machine on the planet. If I could sync them with an iPod without having to go through expensive third party software first it would be sweet. With all their collaboration thesesays I wouldn’t think it’s entirely impossible.

Open APIs! GOOD

As much as I love (and own) all the iPod games, I’d love to be able to create my own little applications for it, and download others. And no I don’t mean crappy WebKit Safari pages, I want the real deal!

Playlist folders: GOOD

I love organising my playlists in iTunes into folders, so why can’t said folders also get synced onto the iPod?

Wow, I'm more of a pessimist that I thought!

I'm having an unusually free day today. Aside from taking my mum to oncology and doing some light programming catchup work for university things have been smooth sailing. So I thought I'd spend the morning at Sim Lim Square, one of the two heavyweights in the Singapore dedicated computer shopping centre scene.

My mission was to buy a replacement processor and motherboard for my dad's desktop which was turned into a brick on the move back from Kuala Lumpur. I ended up getting the dual-core energy efficent 65W Athlon 64 X2 4000+ CPU and an ASUS M2NPV-VM motherboard bundled for SG$240.00 and some stock PC6400 1GB RAM for SG$64.00.

The prices blew me away mostly because I could remember just a few years ago when the X2s were so elite and high end they were in the thousands of dollars. It's amazing how yesterday's high end chips become today's value ones so fast.

By no means is the motherboard state of the art, but my dad has two very large capacity PATA hard disks and two expensive optical drives so I had to get a board that hadn't jettisoned their legacy internal connectors for SATA. They're becoming more difficult to find.

With all these awesome parts for such peanuts, it sure makes my NetBSD Athlon XP 2800+ look crappy now!

On Sunday my dad and I went to the COMEX computer trade show at Suntec City Convention Centre. It was so vast this year it was spread out across floor 3 and the entire floor space of floors 4 and 6. We ended up spending over six hours there and only covered about three quarters of the exibits!

Unlike the IT Show in Singapore which focuses on general consumer technology like high definition televisions as well as computers, COMEX is almost entirely computers and computer-related goods, though there were also many booths for cameras and a few sound system displays.

For me it was an experience in itself because it was the first time I used the camera in my Nokia e61i and used the 3G wireless to instantly upload them to Flickr while I was there. You can view the pictures on my Flickr COMEX set page.

All in all I ended up getting for peanuts:

• a 160GB SATA 7200RPM notebook hard disk to upgrade the 100GB drive in my MacBook Pro – even in a place like Singapore it’s still quite hard to find SATA notebook drives
• a flexible cover for my mobile phone
• an external DVD+RW dual layered drive and media – my MacBook Pro’s SuperDrive can read dual layered media but can’t write to them)
• some 2700 rechargeable batteries for my camera and MadPlayer
• and a set of Apocalpx computer speakers with… wait for it… a valve tube amplifier!

I'm listening to these speakers now and the quality is just stunning. I played Roxy Music's Avalon from a CD and the clarity was absolutely breathtaking. I'll definitely have to put up a dedicated post about them here and review them on the Rubenerd Show.

There's something about a glowing bulb showing up on your desk at night while you listen to a smooth jazz track that's just… nice :).

I finally caved and re-registered my Pro Flickr account. My experiment with Zooomr was fun, but Flickr is way more reliable and still easier to use. The smart sets feature in Zooomr which can create sets automatically based on tags is nice, but often backfired so I couldn't use it seriously.

So to celebrate my return to the Flickr realm, I've posted a VERY funny picture in the Singapore StarHub cable TV guide for this month!

That's right, they called him NILL O'Reilly! He's nothing, his opinions are worthless, he's NILL!

If you don't have the pleasure of knowing who Bill O'Reilly is, he's a self confessed "traditionalist" who tries to seek the truth "without spin" but is in reality a loud conservative pundit who yanks the microphones – and screams over the top of – people he disagrees with. Very entertaining television if you don't take him seriously.

But now he's being shown in Singapore? Argh where's Keith Olbermann when you need him?

Podcast: Play in new window · Download

1:10:00 – Testing a new Rode NT3 microphone, flying these days is a bitch, discovering Uranus on the 13th, Adobe Photoshop 7, quotes from Leo Laporte's 2003 TechTV Technology Almanac, a brief history of TechTV from the outside, Leo Laporte's evil smile, out of sync background music, needing QWERTY on a phone, academic discounting, Aeroline buses between Singapore and KL, Merdeka 2007 in Malaysia, ridiculous numbers of PCs, South East Asian colonialism, the southernmost tip of the Eurasian mainland, Freecycle, resetting GNU/Linux passwords, Larry Craig Pervert Scandal Is Tip Of The Iceberg, Warp's Artificial Intelligence series, silly sports, Patrick Norton installing GNU/Linux in 2003, hardware router firmware things, WinPopUp, Schmap Guide photo finalist photos, driving from Inverness to Singapore, airports in the middle of nowhere, way too much time on Mobile Twitter, a Nokia e61i mobile phone review, Frank Nora's Bagel Report and his head on 3G, fantasy football in America, FreeBSD versus Linux security, people on Twitter (Felix, Frank, Andrew, Dave, Manny, Roel, Dadaist), ticket and medical guinea pigs, cable versus DSL, and meeting people on the stair, posting 666 sites in del.icio.us, moving back from Zooomr to Flickr, secret Windows software, waging on horses and people who walk up the stairs who aren't actually there.

Some overdrive audio errors in parts of this episode. I've calibrated this new mic for the next episode.

Recorded in Singapore. Licence for this track: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0. Attribution: Ruben Schade.

Having moved over to Zooomr in the last month (and contemplating paying for my Pro Flickr account again after Zooomr related trauma) I hadn't checked my venerable old (and quite embarrassing!) Flickr account in a while, and given the quality of most of my photos there, is it surprising?

I was surprised though when I loaded the Welcome Screen I found a message waiting for me from Schmap Guides:

Hi Ruben,

I am writing to let you know that three of your photos with a Creative Commons license have been short-listed for inclusion in the third edition of our Schmap Adelaide Guide, to be published early September 2007.

Best regards,

Luke Ritchie,
Managing Editor, Schmap Guides

Apparently they saw two photos I took at a railway museum back in 2004 and another shot I took with my then-roommate Chris Szeto at Mount Lofty. I was really shocked because not just because some of my photos had been chosen, but because of the quality… I'd taken most of them with my 2003 vintage Panasonic 3.0 megapixel consumer camera, and the focus (pun intended) was just taking quick snaps, certainly not ones I would submit for anything important.

I guess as the (modified) adage goes: upload thousands of photos and one of them will turn out fine.

Anyone who used the internet in the 1990s would remember Netscape Navigator, the standalone web browser before Netscape Communicator that you originally had to pay for: the software that Microsoft was so successful in burying all those years ago in the first internet browser wars. I used Netscape Navigator, Eudora and ICQ… sniff, so many memories!

Well I'm now typing away on Netscape Navigator 9 for Mac OS X. After all those years of feature creep, slower speeds and bloated executable sizes, the new Navigator is lean, mean and noticeably zippier. It's based on Firefox instead of the former Mozilla Suite and it shows. Plus, it supports nearly all the Firefox plugins and themes too.

Aside from the obvious changes under the hood, the new Navigator has also been redesigned on the surface. The new toolbar icons are much clearer and instead of a separate search button next to the Address bar there's a dedicated search box. The toolbar, tabs and titlebar with these changes noticeably take up less space. Compared to Safari and Camino (my current primary browser) the difference is tiny:

Really I can't see enough compelling reasons to switch if you're already a Firefox user, but for me there's something so nostalgic and pleasing to grace my modern computer's dock and Applications directory with that venerable serif N on a black planet scape with the teal sky. I'm so sentimental (^_^).

Despite my borderline manic obsession with BSD on my own systems, I chose Ubuntu Linux on my mum's laptop, mostly because she just wanted a really basic system with a computer-illiterate-proof update mechanism, a web browser and that's it.

So I was downloading it last night and glanced at the transfer rate. 2.2KiB per second? This was going to take longer than I thought. Until I read it again… 2.2MiB per second! In less than 4 minutes I had the latest version of Ubuntu Linux sitting on my desktop, a 697MiB file!

Compared to the internet I've used in Malaysia (argh TMnet!) and Australia (TPG is fairly reliable but slow), Singapore has it going on :).

That's a lot of orange! That reminds me, I need more F&N… Orange

NetBSD is one of the last Unix-like operating systems still shipping by default with the XFree86 X Window Server as opposed to the new de facto Xorg distribution. From what I've been able to find out doing a quick Google around is that given the system's strict requirement for portability it's going to take a lot of work to get Xorg working on every port. I respect that.

So enter pkgsrc and modular Xorg! Modular Xorg is an exciting new way of distributing Xorg because it allows you to cherry pick only the drivers, applications and other whatnot that you want instead of installing one huge package.

For me, I'm using a fresh install of NetBSD 3.1 in a VMware Fusion virtual machine, so you'll obviously have to take these steps as a guide for your own system.

During the initial install I chose the Custom Installation option and de-selected the X11 Distribution Set. This means I avoided any mess right from the beginning, just as I did when I changed from Monolithic Xorg to Modular Xorg on FreeBSD.

Once you've installed NetBSD, do your usual configuration of /etc/rc.conf to enable your network, and add X11_TYPE=modular to your /etc/mk.conf file. DON'T add a X11BASE line!

Then go grab yourself the latest pkgsrc tree and update it.

Now it's just a matter of make install clean clean-depends -ing each package we want. If you really wanted to, you could just install all the meta-packages:

• x11/modular-xorg-server/
• meta-pkgs/modular-xorg-drivers/
• meta-pkgs/modular-xorg-fonts/
• meta-pkgs/modular-xorg-apps/

… but that really defeats the purpose of going modular! For me, I installed the base server, the entire fonts meta-package, only the drivers I needed, and the minimum required apps:

• x11/modular-xorg-server/
• meta-pkgs/modular-xorg-fonts/
• x11/xf86-input-keyboard/
• x11/xf86-input-mouse/
• x11/xf86-video-vmware/
• x11/xauth/
• x11/xinit/

Obviously when I said minimal I wasn't kidding! These packages are enough to get an X session started, but that's about it. If you're installing a desktop environment such as KDE, Xfce or GNOME you can go right ahead and install their respective packages, but if you're using a vanilla window manager such as OpenBox you'll really need to install at the very least a terminal emulator. I like urxvt.

It is defintely more work to install modular Xorg, and in many cases the default XFree86 distribution Is Good Enough™, but I like the added control this gives me, plus then I have the added convenience of using similar software on my other BSD and Linux machines. Right Mai?

Is she pissed off or distracted somehow? I don't know. Maybe she runs OpenBSD instead. It's 01:52, maybe I actually need to go to sleep now.