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7:08 PM
Geofox One
This startup company called Geofox has
a new palmtop called the Geofox One. It's based on Psion's EPOC32 handheld operating
system and is supposed to be E-mail and Internet ready. Sounds cool, but I don't
know if there's a place for this thing with all the WinCE 2.0 machines coming out.
RC5 56-bit challenge completed
Wouldn't you know it, I checked their web site last night for the first
time in a long time and today they finish up the job. Visit the web site at http://www.distributed.net/rc5/. Not
being ones to rest on their laurels apparently, they are jumping right in to RC5-64!
It only took 250 days for this last encryption attack, lord knows how long this
will take.
ZDNet's Story
1:15 PM
Oh yeah...
They're here! Our NEC MobilePro 400's, that is. So far, they
look really cool. I mean, a lot of the built-in stuff is just useful Windows apps
like Excel, Word, and Inbox/E-mail. What more do you really need? There was a
minor mix-up though. 1 of the 4 machines is screwed up. My friend opened it
and came back and asked me, "Hey, there were 3 options there at the beginning, which
one did you pick?" I said, "What?" I had no idea what he was
talking about. So he tried to turn it on and it wouldn't turn on. We thought
it was broken. Finally, I took out both the main and backup batteries and let it sit
for a while and put them back in. When I turned it on, all I saw was a text screen
with the title "ROSE V1.05 R1D2 Diagnostic" or something like that. After
fiddling with it for a little bit, we figured that the refurb guy must have forgotton to
take the diagnostic ROM out and put the Windows CE ROM in! Oof. So we are
gonna try to get that replaced ASAP. Unfortunately, that means somebody gets
shorted, and as it turns out, the guy who isn't here to pick his up yet is the one.
If you're reading this, Vu, sorry! We'll get you yours as soon as possible!
By the way, I found a stupid bug in the MS Web Publishing Wizard included with
FrontPage. I named two different sites to publish to, http://www.stwing.upenn.edu/~rkuo and http://www.stwing.upenn.edu/~rkuo/planaudio
for that new project web I was creating. As it turns out, it can't distinguish
between the two names and so when I changed the setting for the planaudio site I was
actually changing the site of my Game A/V Page too. Boy, that took a while to figure
out. So once I changed the names up a little, everything worked ok.
4:34 AM
WinCE 2.0 product details
Mobile Planet has details and pricing
on the next generation of WinCE palmtops. That Sharp Mobilon looks slick, doesn't
it?
3:03 AM
More FrontPage
I just discovered the Auto Thumbnail command in FrontPage. Can you
believe I missed that?!?! It is so damn useful! By the way, I churned that
project web page out in no time and it looks pretty nice, even though the content is
rather sparse. More sophisticated stuff like search and discussions won't work
because the web server is running on a SPARC, not a Microsoft web server. Take a
look if you want, it's at http://www.stwing.upenn.edu/~rkuo/planaudio.
New SB16/AWE 32/AWE 64 drivers for
Win95 available
You know, if these people had a lick of sense in them, they would post
what the difference was between these new drivers and the old ones. I wish I knew!
Screw it, I just want to see those WinCE machines in my hands tomorrow morning.
http://www.creaf.com/wwwnew/tech/ftp/ftpnew.html
11:59 PM
I hate FedEx
I've gotta hand it to FedEx. Their so-called overnight guarantee
doesn't mean squat. I swear that a third of the time I ship something overnight, it
doesn't get here overnight. And what do you get when they screw up? Your money
back. That's nice, but if I wanted to save money I wouldn't have shipped it
overnight!!! I once had something shipped overnight that didn't make it, and I had
just left for another city. Boy, did that turn out stupid. I didn't get my
package for 4 days, because it was a holiday and a weekend too. At least they agreed
to send it to me there. They don't even agree to expedite the package by weekend
delivery or anything like that if they screw up.
Why am I ranting? Becuase my WinCE machines should have gotten here today, but
they didn't. My friend got his though...all seven of 'em! He likes his.
HTML time
Tonight I'm gonna be doing a lot of work in FrontPage. I just
slapped up a sparse reviews section in the TOC for the two I've done just recently.
I have to put up a web page for a project in one of my classes, so if everything goes
according to plan (actually, PLAN is the name of the software we are using, so that might
be considered a bad, but certainly unintentional, pun), the included FrontPage themes
should let us have a snazzy looking page up in no time. I'm really starting to
appreciate FrontPage, although sometimes it just refuses to lay out the page the way to
want it, so you end up having to adapt the page slightly to it. Content is king,
though, so who cares!
4:13 PM
Preliminary review of Daytona PCI up
I added a very preliminary
review of the Daytona PCI sound card from Turtle Beach to the site. I still
haven't said everything I want to say about it, so I'll be adding more stuff eventually.
It looks like I need to go ahead and add a reviews section to the TOC too.
2:54 PM
Fuzzy pass-through on the Righteous 3D
If you are experiencing fuzzy video pass-through on a Righteous 3D, there
is a fix which involves a little hardware hacking. There are several surface-mount
inductors on the board which are presumably there to comply with FCC regulations but which
also cause for some people rather serious image quality issues. By bypassing these
inductors completely, you may be able to produce a drastic improvement. Obviously,
if you don't have a problem, there's no reason to do this. Take a look at the
following site for more details.
http://www.radix.net/~rem/r3dstuff.htm
12:16 AM
Got money to burn?
If you are a die-hard Quake fan too, you might be in luck. Details
of the new Quantum 3D accelerator cards have been released. The prices for these
cards are still well beyond what I would consider reasonable (starting at $795!) but there
will undoubtedly be the occasional gadget freak or two who just has to have one.
Apparently these cards make use of Quantum 3D's scan-line interleaving technology.
Basically there's two of each chip on the board and each set renders every other line.
Next Generation's article
10:07 PM
Golgotha Beta 5 demo available
Well, somewhere in the whole Quake shuffle Golgotha seems to have been
lost a little. There's a new beta, be sure to go check it out.
Download from
BluesNews
Daytona PCI = S3 SonicVibes?
I just got this card...so far, unfortunately, it doesn't seem to provide
multitrack audio, although combined with the SB16 I have, it kind of does. The thing
that gets me is that the card has almost nothing on it but the S3 SonicVibes chipset.
From what I understand, this chipset/card can be picked up for about $40-45 OEM!
So what the heck am I doing paying $90 for it? That's a question I'm going to
have to answer. It does pretty much everything I need it to do so far, though, so
I'm not complaining yet. The cool thing is that by having two sound cards, any sound
event that can't go to the primary sound device because it's in use will cascade over to
the next device. That means I can be playing an MP3 and still hear sound events, or
talk to a friend over Netmeeting while I browse through some songs or AVI's.
The other thing I wanted to try was to measure the noise floor level of the card.
It seems like there's something really weird about my system, i.e., it's really EM
noisy in there. Decent would be about -70dB, but I'm at around -50dB? My
friend is getting around -72 to -74dB, which is a lot better than me! I'd like to
find out what's happening there. Both my SB and the Daytona are exhibiting bad noise
characteristics, so it may be something systemic and not the fault of the cards
themselves.
3:15 PM
The next step in hard drive technology
What's next for hard drives? First it was MR heads and PRML
technology, now the next big shift is going to be from ball-bearing to fluid-bearing
motors. Fluid bearings avoid problems with mechanical wear and heat generation, plus
they just spin faster. Basically this all means you can expect to see faster RPM
drives in consumer level products.
EE Times's story
4:20 PM
Taking a look at NECX
I order a LOT of computer stuff from NECX Direct. Probably too much stuff actually.
They're kind of like your basic on-line computer superstore...selling all kinds of
components. However, you don't typically go to these places to buy motherboards.
Well, at least I don't. But maybe all that's about to
change, since NECX is apparently offering a nice selection of motherboards from your
favorite motherboard manufacturers at ultra-competitive prices. The one to note for
today? ASUS P2L97 for only $187.95. That's nuts!
I just ordered the Daytona PCI from them, we'll see how that sound card turns out.
I'm still waiting on that massive order of NEC MobilePro's I made, too. They
said 7-10 days, I'm hoping we get it a lot sooner. Supposedly they'll be restocking,
so be sure to check http://www.pcfactoryoutlet.com
often if you really want one. And please don't hesitate...I had a couple of friends
who were wondering "Do I really want one?" and meanwhile hundreds of them were
selling out by the hour. Get real! At $69 anybody would buy these things!
I've also ordered the Ricoh MP6200 from them for my parents. It seems to be
the CD-Rewritable drive of choice right now, and it's going for about $520 - $100 mail-in
rebate. I honestly don't know why my parents need this drive, but I'm not going to
argue.
2:38 PM
Microsoft catches a big one
The DOJ thinks Microsoft has gone too far with IE 4.0, apparently.
They are requesting that Microsoft be fined $1 million a day for trying to bundle the
browser with the desktop and force it on PC manufacturers. Even with that, you still
couldn't bankrupt Bill in his entire lifetime! Still, it's a sign of things to come,
eh?
ZDNet's story
Free stuff for MS Office 97
Speaking of stuff from Microsoft, one thing they don't force upon you is
the free add-ons for the various components of Office 97. In particular, Outlook,
the mail client and scheduler in Office 97, gets some serious sprucing up done with these
add-ons. My personal favorites are the Rules Wizard, which allows you filter mail to
the appropriate folders (and other thing too), and the Internet Mail Enhancement Patch,
which enables support for Internet style quoting and other goodies. The 3-pane
add-on is great, too. It opens a new pane which displays the e-mail you have
selected immediately.
The one thing I really really hate about all this is the registration every time I try
to get this stuff. It's a bunch of crap and I think you have to reregister every
time you use a new browser or reinstall because I think it puts a cookie on your hard
drive. Arrgghhh!
MS Office 97 Free Stuff
1:39 PM
Quake 2 Test released
Well! Better late than never...they missed the 12:00 midnight mark
by a good deal but I woke up this morning to find it released. Thanks to Joe
Kellner, who let me know via e-mail that the demo got released around 5:00 AM (sniff...I
was actually up around then!) and that he has also made the demo available at his own FTP
site, listed below. You can, of course, check the regular Quake news sites like Blue's and Redwood's
for a definitive (and very slow! arrgh!) list of sites.
ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/idgames/idstuff/quake2/q2_test.exe
- 11MB
ftp://24.92.11.33/c/inetpub/ftproot/q2_test.exe
- Courtesy of Joe
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