Posts Tagged ‘Tech’

Tragedy Averted!

Mar 25th, 10 / 0 Comments

sony-prs505-image So yesterday I added some more books to my Sony Ereader, nothing special. I use Calibre as my EBook management software for reasons that are apparent to anyone who has used the Sony Reader Library, it fucking sucks.

So after transferring my files and disconnecting the USB cable, the Ereader  could no longer read the SD card. OK, no real big deal, I’ll format the card and replace the books on it, it was getting bloated with read books anyway. I thought the SD might not be loading properly because of a corrupt .lrf file in it. So I had reloaded it and put it the device main memory.

Five minutes later and the now, the Ereader not only doesn’t see the SD card, it is stuck in a perpetual loop of starting up! So now the damn thing is not reading it’s memory or the SD card. This must be a corrupt file somewhere, so I deleted the media.xml files I found on the main memory, and reformatted the SD card as FAT. Still no good. OK, now I’m panicking.pissed-off-kitty

I downloaded the firmware app for the Ereader and attempted to update that thinking the device just needed a swift kick in the pants and it would be working fine. Well, Sony’s firmware update tool would not update because it was already the latest version. Now I’m mad. 

There is a typical pinhole Reset back on the device. So I push that in with a lead pencil, and restart it. No progress. Well after a bit of research, that you MobileRead forums, there is a fucking 2 nanosecond window after the “Starting…” screen disappears that you can stick a USB cable into it and it will go the USB connected page.

After 20 minutes of what I will refer to as practice for the Big Show, I finally had it connected. I deleted everything I could find, disconnected and restarted the Ereader. It started! A glimmer of hope in this nightmare of a situation! IT WASN’T BRICKED YET!

So now I fired Calibre back up connected the device spent a crap load of time updating meta data and cover art and all sorts of shit for the books I was going to put on there and sent them over.

It fucked up again…

disappointment

Well at this point I’m certain that the issue is Calibre, so I figure I will just reconnect and then use the Sony app to load the books. After 10 minutes of practice, I manage to make the 2 nanosecond window and get the device connected. Wiped the memory, formatted the SD card. Started the Sony Library app.

Unhandled Exception.

Uninstalled Sony Library crap. Downloaded it. installed it, had to make that 2 nanosecond window again because evidently Sony doesn’t like the device plugged in at this time. Then used the app to pass my ebooks over to the Ereader.  At this point I was already browsing for other Ereaders just in case this shit all failed and I broke the damn device over my knee in a fit of tech induced rage.

Surprisingly everything worked like it should for once, and I tentatively unplugged the Ereader and said a little prayer to Hermes, The Dude, He Who Makes Tech Work, and others and unplugged the Ereader and restarted it. For the first time in about 3 hours, it started without issue amd I was happy once again.

The moral of the story? Fucking update Calibre when it tell you to.

Books, Humor, News, Personal, Tech

The Droid Cometh

Nov 11th, 09 / 2 Comments

So yesterday I received my first phone upgrade in almost 2 years, Verizon’s new Motorola Droid. So far there really are only two things that I can say negative about it.

1. The antenna is noticeably weaker than it was in my Blackberry 8830. However, the 8830 has the best cellular antenna on any phone I have ever seen so it wasn’t a surpise to me.

2. The keyboard is just slightly smaller than I would have liked. But again, it is huge in comparrison to the minute keyboard on the 8830. In fact this post was placed using the Droid.

The email app also doesn’t seem to support rulesets, but again this isn’t a huge issue.

The good attributes are simply too long to list. The screen is amazing! And video plays with seemingly HD quality. The unit is very responsive and I am generally in love with it.

I cannot as of yet give an accurate account of battery life as today is the first day of a full charge, but I will let you know later.

Pics follow, sorry for their quality. I only had access to a camera phone. ;)

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Geek, Tech

Blades, Culture, & Shells

Nov 2nd, 09 / 0 Comments

{Use of Weapons}Img100 Well I finally finished Joe Abercrombie’s Best Served Cold. About three-quarters of the way through and I started getting really pissed with Mr. Abercrombie and the somewhat predictable nature to which he tends to place in his stories. But alas, he has redeemed himself and the ending of Best Served Cold was far far better than the so-called ending of the First Law Trilogy. He still tends to have an issue with leaving characters alive that probably should have died, but honestly this novel is filled with death. So characters not dying was against the grain. I have to say that I will read anything else that Mr. Abercrombie produces.

On a second note, I have started reading after much delay, Use of Weapons by the great Iain M. Banks. This marks the third in the Culture series, which has taken its place as being the best Sci-Fi series that I have read ever. I have only gotten about 50 pages deep into it, but I cannot tell you how nice it was to bridge the gap from epic fantasy to space opera in one day. It was like a long awaited homecoming. More on this novel later.

I have managed to finally come to terms with Windows Vista. I replaced the shell. Yes in the 90′s fashion of Win200 and XP I tried several old favorites (Litestep, BB4Win) and some new ones (Geo-Shell, Object Desktop) but it was SharpE that grabbed my attention. SharpE is a very polished and usable shell that can be used without heavy customization, although some tweaking won’t hurt at all. If anyone is fed up with the default Windows shell environment, the window manager for those in the know, then I highly recommend SharpE!

Books, Tech

The Pirate Bay is being Sold

Jul 2nd, 09 / 0 Comments

400px-Skull_and_crossbones.svg After years of constant legal battles, the guys behind The Pirate Bay are selling one of the world’s most popular internet sites for just under 8 million dollars according to the website’s own blog and Ars Technica. The reasoning behind the sale, from what I can gleam from the blog and a the Twits from one site admin, Peter Sunde Kolmisoppi, is extreme burnout.

And honestly, who can blame them? For six years these guys have been around providing the world with not just the best torrent tracker on the web, but also a continuing front line for digital freedom. And according to Kolmisoppi, only TPB is being sold, the other apps and websites that the group owns will remain intact.

What sort of impact will this have on the torrent scene in general? Well, it is hard to say but this is definitely not the first time that the p2p subculture has seen things turned on its ear. So most likely, things will continue on with another website rising up from the ranks to fill the void.

It might mark the end of an era, however, the fall of TPB might just signify the drop in widespread pirating of media, especially as more and more legally free streaming routes become availiable (hulu, last.fm, pandora, etc.). But ultimately only time will tell.

News, Tech, Web

The Dice-O-Matic

Jun 16th, 09 / 0 Comments

 

This is a 7 foot tall, 104 pound dice rolling machine capable of processing 1.3 dice rolls per day. It is really quite impressive… dare I day a thing a beauty?

Geek, Tech, Web

Boxee Alpha testing for Windows

Mar 12th, 09 / 0 Comments

boxee_logoIn case that you have been living under a rock lately, or running Windows exclusively, you might not have heard about Boxee. Boxee is basically a 10-foot interface for you computer to be displayed on your flat screen tv. Where it differs from most though is that not only is it possible to view your local content (videos, music, pictures, etc.) but you can also view lots of content that is streamed down from the internet.

Boxee is not the first people to do this, the Popcorn Hour device will also do it, but it has a dedicated hard ware device. Boxee can just run similar to Media Center for Windows on top of everything else. Oh and all of the feeds for the internet tv are RSS so you get all sorts of great stuff from Hulu to PBS to Joost and the BBC.

So anyway I signed up a few months back to take part in the alpha phase testing of Boxee on Windows and I got the email last night to download the app. So far they have done a great job, the only issue I have had as of yet is that the items from the BBC would not play last night. But over all I am very happy with it so far.

I will keep everybody up to date regarding the findings as they happen.

Personal, Tech, Web

Temp Emails

Jan 8th, 09 / 0 Comments

frustratedEveryone has spam, everyone hates spam. It is a rule of life that is rarely broken, those Spam-Poetry guys are the only known exception in my world. Most of the spam that we receive are blind carbon copies that are scripted to know you, but that is not the point here. The point is that most of the time all of those crazy sites that you sign up to ad nausea across the web is the damn problem.

You know what I am talking about, you want to get to the damn forum, or porn, or whatever but first you have to receive an email with a confirmation link. You and I both fucking know that you are never going to go to most of these sites again, in fact you are hoping that you are never going to see that damn site in your inbox again. These are the guys that are likely selling their subscriber lists to “advertising” (read “spammer”) companies. And once you are on one list you are on them forever.

So, the only options that you have are not enter an email address (which means no porn and we all know that is not a real option), enter in your email anyway and hope you won’t eventually get flooded with spam (not likely), create a temp email address (this is too much damn work), OR enter in a temporary email address that will disappear after a set amount of time.

That is where this post comes in. There are a couple of sites that allow you to do this very easily.

Will Hack 4 Food

WH4F.org – Will Hack 4 Food

The talented and amazing guys at Binary Revolution came up with this solution along time ago, I know it has been there for at least three years, to fight spam issues. The first step that you need to do is goto WH4F.org ahead of time and setup your random email address, <something>@wh4f.org for instance, and choose a password. When you set up that account on that forum or other website, you give an email address of <something>@wh4f.org. Go the WH4F.org and log into to your temporary email account, click the damn confirmation link we want and voila! No fucking spam.

WH4F.org does give you the option of choosing how long the temp email should hang around, anywhere from 8 hours to 1 week. Now this site has been around for awhile and it is a little more trouble than normal, unlike the next option but it lets you have a longer address in case you need multiple levels of email confirmations.

Slopsbox.com

Slopsbox.com

Slopsbox.com is the next generation of the venerable Will Hack 4 Food site mentioned above. When you get that itch and have to sign up for a site just create a damn random email address, <something>@slopsbox.com. THEN goto www.slopsbox.com and enter in the fictitious email account and the security code. That’s it you have email. Simple. The only problem with Slopsbox is the account will delete itself after 24 hours.

Now using either of these two sites will DRASTICLY reduce your spam levels in the future. It won’t slow down the shit you have pouring in already, but it will keep it from increasing.

Tech, Web

Popcorn Hour A-110

Jan 4th, 09 / 0 Comments
Popcorn Hour A-110

Popcorn Hour A-110

For Christmas I got the awesome piece of tech called the Popcorn Hour A-110 Networked Media Tank, commonly known as the NMT. Basically, the NMT is a media device that will hook to your home network and allow you to either stream content from the web straight to your TV. The NMT is also capable of playing media files from an external HDD connected via USB or from an internal SATA HDD that you can add in on your own.

This little guy handles damn near every format that I can think of including Matroska and VOBs with menu support. The NMT will even download torrents to its internal hard drive on its own.

The only down side that I have noticed so far is that the otherwise perfect remote must be pointed directly at the unit for it to respond. Besides that the remote is a high quality Blu-Ray styled remote control.

There is a nice community of people and developers that are willing to help on any problems that you might encounter and add-ons that you might want to create.

Long story short, if you have a lot of media that you want to easily watch or listen on your TV, then this is the perfect solution.

Personal, Tech

Everex VA1500V Laptop now at WalMart.com

Mar 10th, 08 / 1 Comment

everex

ANOTHER UPDATE: Well this has just turned ugly. My friend’s NewEgg account was closed today and the order for the laptop was completely voided, then they said that the bank told NewEgg that his account was closed, which was a total crock of shite. So all told there will be no laptop coming, and I likely lost my online order buddy. So thanks for nothing you NewEgg fucks.

This kind of shit always seems to happen to me whenever I want to actually buy something for myself. I am not a rich man by any means and any amount of money over abotu $10 that I spend affects my budget in some manner. So, to trust a company with my hard-earned cash and to be treated in such a demeaning manner is fucking typical of my history of ordering tech. I know it wasn’t my account that was closed and whatever, but it was my fucking money and, would have been, my fucking laptop. I suppose this is just a way for the man to stomp on my ballz and tell me that I shouldn’t be spending $400 on a uber-cheap linux running laptop when I have a perfectly malfunctioning Thinkpad T-23 at home, and gas is over $3.00 a gallon.

Update: Ordering from NewEgg.com has been an exceptionally aggravating process for some reason. I had to order the item twice, cancel both of those and then have a friend buy it from his account. So now the order didn’t start processing until late Friday afternoon. Hopefully, I will have the damn thing by about Thursday of next week.

The Everex VA1500V, the Cloudbook’s big brother, is now available at Walmart.com for $398.00. But this means nothing to me personally since I just purchased this guy from NewEgg.com. They are processing the order and I should have it early next week. I can’t wait!!

Personal