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Social micro-blogging?
There’s been a fair bit of hubbub about the social network/micro-blog services twitter and most recently pownce. twitter is a bit of an interesting concept as it boils down to very short (less than 140 characters), text-only posts about what you’re up to. You can post updates in a variety of ways (web, email, im, sms message via cell, desktop client) and receive updates from your circle of twittery friends in a similar way (web, email, im, sms, desktop client, or rss feed).
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Joost coolness
I’m not sure how to describe Joost aside from on-demand, internet tv clips from the crew that put together Skype and Kazaa. A while back I managed to land an invite from Joost for their private beta test, and have enjoyed running it on my Macbook Pro (they support Windows and Intel Macs at this point). Very little lag when you first fire up a program, and haven’t had any issues once a show starts.
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Google Reader
So Google seems to be releasing all sorts of cool tech these days. You’ve got Gmail, which I’ve been pretty pleased with (all my email accounts forward there now). There’s Google Bookmarks that I think are tied into their “personalized home” stuff. I know you can view/add them via the Google toolbar in IE, but last I knew there wasn’t an equivalent for browsers that don’t suck (eg Firefox). It’s kinda nice to have a web-based place for me to store bookmarks (so I can access them at home/work/etc), but I wish there was a better way to add links independent of the IE toolbar (eg a button to add a bookmark vs.
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#define luddite
Pronunciation: ’l&-“dIt Function: noun Etymology: After Ned Ludd, an English laborer who was supposed to have destroyed weaving machinery around 1779. 1 : Any of a group of British workers who between 1811 and 1816 rioted and destroyed laborsaving textile machinery in the belief that such machinery would diminish employment. 2 : One who opposes technical or technological change. [Source]
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Apple Updates... higher res PowerBooks
Looks like Apple has finally realized that there are a lot of people who would like a high res notebook. Previously, their “pro” line of notebooks (aka PowerBooks) topped out at a piddly 1440x900 on a 17" LCD. Just think about that a moment. My Thinkbrick (that’s a couple years old at this point) does 1400x1050 on a 14" display. Their 15" was equally pathetic at 1280x854. They’ve just bumped up the 15" model to 1440x960 and the 17" to 1680x1050.
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Sanjay in CPU Mag
Sanjay’s in this month’s issue of CPU Magazine talking about life at AGEIA. Pretty neat! For those not in the know, Sanjay’s a professor in the ECE department here at UIUC and has been working as chief architect at AGEIA for a while now. AGEIA has been developing a custom physics processor to improve gaming performance/experience by pushing all such calculations onto a dedicated chip thus freeing up the cpu and the gpu to do what they do best (ie handle the ai and such and push pixels).
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Malkier back up...
Finally got the site back up. Turns out there was some sort of security breach this past weekend that slipped evil javascript into all of my php/html pages on the site. Looked like it was intended to be some sort of browser buffer overflow attack or something along those lines (the support folk at ipowerweb said it would download a virus?). Anyway, things should be cleared up and safe again for now.
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mobiBLU DAH-1500i
So I broke down and bought a new mp3 player to take with me when I go jogging… well jogging/walking… well really more walking than jogging, but I’m still building up toward that. Anyway, looks like it should be a pretty cute little unit. Key features: It’s about a 1" cube has a little OLED display comes in 256MB, 512MB, and 1GB versions (I got the 512) has an FM radio (can even record it at up to 160kbps) 8-10 hours of battery life when playing mp3s USB2.
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talk.google.com
There’s been some rumors making their way through the geek community that Google has been working on its own IM service (ala ICQ, AIM, MSN, Yahoo, etc). Turns out it’s live! Mike was ever so kind as to hook me up with an invite, and it seems fairly slick so far. Appears that anyone with a Gmail account can use it. They’ve only got a Windows client that integrates with your Gmail account and even supports voice chats, but their server’s running Jabber (opensource IM server).
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OpenSUSE
I know this was posted last week on slashdot, but it looks like the website for OpenSUSE finally went live. Pretty exciting stuff. First RedHat split their distro into a commercial, “enterprise” class distro and the bleeding-edge, completely open distro Fedora (open in the sense that more than just RedHat employees were actively contributing to its development and direction). Now Novell has opened up SUSE. If I remember correctly, it used to be an exclusively commercial distro if I remember correctly… wasn’t available for free download.
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