The right price point for a display

When shopping for parts, there are three general strategies: budget, best bang/buck, luxury. The first and last of these is easy to describe, you either price optimize with minimal attention to performance, or “performance” optimize with minimal attention to price. The middle approach is more complex however. The main difficulty is coming up with a […]

5 years of XP

An article in the Washington Post talks about the “5 years of XP”:http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/23/AR2006092300510_2.html. One thing that always seems funny to me is that most people see XP as the upgrade from Windows 98, and that XP was the one that provided real ‘stability’. But before XP, there was Windows 2000, and before that there was […]

DIY notebooks

I remember hearing about standardized notebook components and DIY notebooks a long time ago, but I didn’t realize they had come this far. There’s even a “verification program”:http://www.intel.com/cd/channel/reseller/asmo-na/eng/products/mobile/271262.htm run by Intel.

iTunes application could not be opened

So I upgraded iTunes on my TV machine today, and tried to load it up for the first time and ran into this error. I found that “Apple has documented it already”:http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=304318, but unfortunately, they fail to mention that their described settings changes don’t work if you’re in an RDP session. Get out of RDP […]

Stupid Stupid Stupid

“Real plans to develop its own DRM format”:http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060918-7767.html for “Rhapsody”:http://www.rhapsody.net. Great, as if WMA wasn’t bad enough. I know they’re trying to copy the ‘closed ecosystem approach’, but it seems like it’s too little too late. Unless it’s somehow more ‘open’ the WMA (I’m not sure what that really means when you talk about DRM […]

That sounds about right

A study says that most iPod users “don’t buy from the iTunes store”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/5350258.stm. Surprise surprise. In the 1.5 years of owning an iPod, I’ve bought maybe 20 tracks. Anything I really care about, I buy the CD and rip it. This gives me higher quality rips, and the freedom from DRM, while only paying slightly […]

Browser proxy app

Ok, this new “Projects” section is for me to document ideas for little random apps that I want to write some day. This is the first one. Here’s the problem: I use vpn and then a MS terminal services client to work from home. The problem is that, running a browser through RDP is pretty […]

Zune Zune Zune

Lot’s of news about it today. I’ll let you google for it yourself. I tried to a little bit, but I still came away with questions. They seem to make a big point about how PlaysForSure isn’t dead. But what’s the relation then exactly? Does it use something like PFS? Can the device play tracks […]

Apple Announcements

As anyone who cares about Apple stuff probably already knows, Apple “announced some new stuff”:http://www.macworld.com/news/2006/09/12/showtime/index.php today. Lots of “meh” items, but a few noteworthy ones. * iTunes videos are now 640×480. That’s pretty good, almost DVD. Makes the value proposition much better, and the quality will be very comparable with torrent-able HDTV recordings. Where is […]