Google+ the new take on social networking

I do not have a Facebook account. I am being pressured for years by people and circumstances to create an account but I simply say 'No'. It's like the drugs your mother warned about. Don't use them just because your friends say they will make you cool. I do not like being found by anyone in order to connect with them. Even if you have the option to not be searchable someone that you do not want to connect with asks your for you Facebook account in real life. For social reasons you give it to them and you end up seing every kind of crap that he/she uploads. You do not want to share the same information with everyone. Why your boss has to see that recent weird photos from when you were drunk. No sir, this is not something I want to do.

Google just started a closed beta of the company's new spin on social networking. It seems to address most of the issues I have with Facebook. I still do not buy on the social networking through these kind of services but maybe I will give this a try. I prefer to think that I can keep in touch with anyone that matters to me through other means than silly youtube videos. I just hope that it is not mandatory for the use of the rest of the google services 'cause this will make me a really angry user.

Check out the presentation videos below:

Saving my Data. Convert Dynamic Disk to Basic

Recently I moved to Luxembourg. Before that big change took place, though, I had to sort out all my stuff to see what I will bring with me and what not. Of course my data would travel with me but since I had all kinds of things to do to prepare my departure I left the computing stuff for the last minute. I would take my trusty Macbook Pro with me and I would leave my old Windows PC behind. All my data though was in my PC that acted more as a media box. That machine had 3 HDs in it including the one I would take, a WD Green Caviar 1TB. I bought an external Enclosure for the disk but when I put the HD in the enclosure, I found out, to my horror, that neither the PC or the Macbook could read it. What went wrong? I put the HD on the PC again for sanity check and the data was there. I tried another HD with the enclosure to check that it was ok and it worked just fine. What was the problem? Unfortunately I did not have time to find out so I got the enclosure and the HD with me to figure it out when I had time.

That time was today. I tried using the HD with an another enclosure just to be sure but it acted the same. Mac OS X was managing to see that it was a drive but one that could not be read. Before you jump in, I have to say that the drive was, as I thought, NTFS and Mac OSX reads NTFS just fine in fact by installing NTFS-3G you can read AND write NTFS partitions in *NIX operating systems.

After checking with the Mac's Disk Utility I found out that the partition was not, in fact, NTFS but instead it was 'Windows LDM'. What the hell is Windows LDM? After some googling I found out that this is basically Dynamic NTFS partition. What had happened is that when I installed this HD on my old PC, Windows decided that it was a good idea to make this drive Dynamic since it already had two other HDs in the same machine. The problem is that by making it dynamic it can only be read as an internal HD from a Windows machine. Not even Windows machines could read it if connected externally, but only recognize it as a massive storage device that could no read. The anger!

Running TestDisk

Naturally, I had to find a way to change the structure of the partition back to basic NTFS without jeopardizing the data. Microsoft, on their support page, suggests that you should reinitialize the disk. Of course that means that you will loose all the data something I did not want to do under any circumstances. So, no Microsoft , thank you. After some googling I found some Windows utilities that can convert an HD from Dynamic to Basic on the fly. Since I had only the Macbook and the external enclosure, though , I had to make do somehow. I installed the demo versions of a few windows utilities such as Partition Magic using crossover but unfortunately none of them could "see" the external disk.

After more googling I found a fantastic Open source utility called TestDisk that could do exactly what I wanted, among many other things. Being Open Source it was native to Windows, Mac and Linux. I downloaded it and run it. It "saw" the external disk immediately and after following some simple steps it restructured the partition back to basic NTFS. Hoorah! You run the utility from the terminal select the drive, check the partition type(in my case it was "Intel PC") and when prompted, select to "write" the structure. That's it! Mystery solved, mission accomplished and I can again enjoy my data.

Watch YouTube videos from your PS3

I have bitched a lot about the performance and usability of YouTube on the PS3. It is very very bad. It is abismal. There are two ways of watching YouTube videos from your PS3. From the normal YouTube site or from the YouTubeXL. The first choice simply does not work. The javascript on the site is very heavy for the lame PS3 browser and you cannot even click on the search button to look for something. Abandon this way altogether. The YouTubeXL service is badly implemented and it does not allow you to view all the videos on the service. Official music videos, for example, are out as the service informs you that you cannot play this video from your device (the TV). It is the same thing that happens with certain media players that have an embedded YouTube player. In addition the XL site rarely renders correctly or in full screen.

But wait, there is a third method that actually works! Thanks to a friend of allroundgeek Mac Perlinski I can now watch YouTube videos from my PS3. Mac suggested to use the www.youps3tube.com service which removes all fancy javascript stuff from the page and thus allows the crappy PS3 browser to render the page correctly. At the same time it allows all the videos to be played since it is not the XL version. The video quality from the PS3 browser is not great but I can live with that since it actually works. If you are having the same problem with me give www.youps3tube.com a try and be a happy camper.

Google's app allows you to create your own android avatar

In an unlikely move Google released something that is totally useless but at the same time hip. Today they released an android app called Androidify that allows you to create android avatars for you and your contacts. With its intuitive, easy to use interface you can customize your droids with clothes, hair, glasses, accessories to produce cool/cute droids.

It sounds extremely cheesy and it is. I think someone whispered them that they should be more hip in order to get younger audiences and women just like Apple has done with iPhone. It's not a bad move I like free software! For all of you who are wondering, yes, this is me on the left. I think I 'll use this as my general avatar as well.

NOKIA and Microsoft announce partnership for smartphones

NOKIA is one of the mobile phone giants that for the past ten-fifteen years dominated the industry with devices for all ranges. During the past two years, though, something was going really wrong for them as they had a really hard time catching up in the smart phone range with the likes of iPhone and Android devices. Earlier this week NOKIA's CEO, Stephen Elop, admitted in an internal memo that they are sitting in a "burning platform". Today they announced their partnership with Microsoft to fully incorporate Windows Mobile with their hardware.

I am not sure how this played out. It is sudden and happend a few days after the memo was leaked. Does this have anything to do with it? Or maybe the memo was leaked to pave the way for the announcement. Either way I am sure that NOKIA's CEO being an ex-Microsoft executive played a role.

Even though I am an Android user and respect what iPhone has brought to the industry, this is very interesting stuff. Micrososft was struggling for years to get decent Windows phones in the market and utilise(or capitalize on, if you prefer) their existing services. Crappy software and bad implementations was dooming the windows phones to annoying unusable gadgets. This is different though. NOKIA knows how to produce good hardware but they lack the services and the cutting edge software. Developers were limited on both sides since Windows did not have the install base to interest them and NOKIA did not have decent software to produce a wide range of apps like we see on iPhone or Android devices. Bringing them together creates a mobile phone ecosystem that can rival the other two big players in the market, namely, Apple and Google.

In the following video you can watch NOKIA's CEO and Microsoft's CEO, Steve Ballmer , announcing the alliance. It is an interesting watch.

Skynet on the works, Robots are about to take over

Ok, not exactly, but it sounds really cool right? I mean, what will be the first thought that would pop into my mind after countless robot vs humans movies, games and comics. When I tell you this, if you are truly a teminator-brought-up geek you will think the same thing. The Swiss Federal Institute of Technology created a initiative for a system that would allow robots to share information about our planet, habbits and pretty much anything in order to accelarate the process of making them learn.

The system is called RoboEarth and is basically a universally accessible database that allows robots to upload and download information, maps and other usefull data. The project is funded by the European Union and is currently maned by 25 researchers.

I say kick them in the nuts before they realise they are more awsome than us, exterminate us and take over. Why don't those idiots hand them a super big-ass red lazer in order to shoot us as well? I am joking, of course, but I could not resist thiking silly stuff like that when I read it. Would you?

Philip K. Dick's new robotic head

Philip K. Dick is one of my favourite, if not the favourite, Sci-Fi authours. He alone managed to grasp the dark scent of the future and remain relevant. Underappreciated in his time he rose to mass fame after his death thanks to many of his novels becoming top grossing films. Classics such Blade Runner, Total Recall and more recent such as Minority Report and A Scanner Darkly allowed people to get to know and love novels such as my personal favourite Ubik.

Hanson Robotics funded by the dutch VPRO built an amazing robotic head of Philip K. Dick. It is so lifel-like and creepy at the same time. Apparently there was an old one that got stolen back in 2005 and they wanted to replace it. Dick would be proud!

Director Panel discusses Blu-Ray

In Panasonic's booth at CES they took a break from promoting super-duper gadgets and they made up a panel of well known directors to discuss Holywood Technology. The trio consisted of Oliver Stone, Michael Mann and Baz Luhrmann. Since this was a technology booth they all ofcourse said that Blu-ray kicks ass and supported the format.

They expressed their own opinions as well though which were interesting. Mann said that the format would be here for the next 6 to 8 years but also said that the technology still can't capture his special photochemical film technique used for the Last of the Mohicans. Stone after bashing watching movies on small screen with interuptions, suggested that Blu-Ray will be the last hardware format before everything goes all digital distribution. He also suggested that we should go collect Blu-Rays since they would be great vintage collectibales that reason just like old comics.

Here is small part from engadget

Visualizing Facebook Friendships

I am not a fan of facebook, hell, I am not even a user of facebook. I cannot deny though the revolution it has caused in social networking and global communications. On the other hand, I am a fan of maps and graphs. I enjoy looking how nodes connect and try to digest the info. A facebook employee recently showed a graph the shows visually how people are connected globally on facebook.

It is very interesting to see the spread of connections throughout the map. Dark areas, light areas, all have a meaning and an explanation. For example the whole of china is dark since facebook is not allowed in China. Check out how different parts of the world are connected. South America is mostly connected to Spain and Portugal, which makes sense since they speak spanish and portuguese.

Click on here for full size (3.8MB)

This guy has the biggest pool of data in the world. Facebook has more than 500 million users which is basically the whole western world. Having such a dataset is something that you can almost envy. On the other hand, one corporation having such a dataset, about people and how they connect, is not something to be taken lightly...

Minority Report type interface with Kinect

Remember the really cool hand gesture interface that Tom Cruise is using the in movie Minority Report? Cool hah? Well, some guys from MIT have started experimenting with Kinect and they came up with something that is very close to its sci-fi equivalent. It is all very impressive, but I still find using a gesture interface, were I have to move my arms constantly, tiring. Don't let me ruin the fun though....everything is getting very exciting.

YouTube on PS3 sucks!

YouTube on PS3 sucks donkey ass. It is as simple as that. I am a PS3 owner for more than 2 years now and from the very beginning one of the main subjects I was complaining about was that YouTube's performance on the console was abysmal. In fact abysmal cannot even begin to describe how awful watching YouTube videos on the console is. I mean, you have a big screen TV you have the most powerful console in the gaming industry and you are still unable to properly watch even the most simple of videos. HD content is out of the question...

Browsing on the PS3 browser is bad but I don't care since I do my browsing from my computer. Thus, render glitches here and there, bad controls or even slow rendering would not bother me as long as it would properly render YouTube, either the normal or the XL version of it. I will lower my expectations even more. I would not care about proper rendering of the YouTube site as long as it would playback the videos properly. It doesn't even do that.

The interface is okeyish when it renders correctly

When you load a video, the video quality is really bad. It is worse than my mobile phone. It is not only that though, it is that the video is jerky, it is that the audio and video very rarely synchronize, it is that the playback would sometimes stop even though the whole video has buffered. That happens either on the normal site or the XL site. Normal site is even worse since you cannot navigate properly, since you have to play "hide and seek" with the buttons and the cursor. The XL site is not better though, since many times when you go from full screen to normal window the site will not resize properly and will only render on half the screen.

Obviously the rendering problem is due to a bad html rendering engine of the PS3 browser. Use another engine like WebKit goddamn it. It is open and free and used by everyone with excellent results. You do not need to use the sucky engine written inhouse probably by a couple of japanese undergrad students working as interns in Sony. The playback issue is obviously a problem of the really, really, really, bad flash player of the aforementioned crappy browser. The whole of Sony cannot implement a proper flash engine? You are a multinational. Work with Adobe like everyone else if you cannot do it on your own, i don't care.

To top all that many of the videos are restricted from XL version. Music videos for example that can be viewed normally from the normal view are not even searchable from the XL version. What shoddy business takes place behind that?

As it seems this is not going to happen anytime soon on my TV screen

Such things 4+ years after the launch of the console are inexcusable, plain and simple. Supposedly PS3 is more than a gaming console. It is marketed and used as a media center as well, and not being able to use the most popular video service on the web is stupid. Low badget media servers that cost, no more than, 60-70 euros support Youtube much better. In every new update of the system I expect it to be fixed allas with no results. I think it even got worse than 2 years ago. GET IT FIXED ALREADY!!

We are still alone.

A few days ago NASA ignited the imagination of everyone with a laconic press release about a news conference to announce a discovery in astrobiology.

The internet being what it is, the rumors began to grow and grow with most ignorant people thinking it would be concerning the discovery of intelligent life (unfortuantely, no intelligent life has yet been found on the internet*).

Of course that was not the case. The most ideal scenario would be the discovery of some micro-organism outside Earth.

Well they did find a micro-organism in the most bizzare and alien place imaginable: California!
The amazing thing about this bacteria discovered in lake Mono, is that it uses arsenic, a deadly poison, instead of phosphorus in it's DNA chain. This is the first organism we have discovered that can replace one of the six fundamental elements of all life (hydrogen, oxygen, carbon, nitrogen, sulphur and phosphorus).

This completely changes our conceptions of how life can evolve and it widens the spectrum of locations were we should be looking for evidence of life.

In the immortal words of Jeff Goldblum: "Life finds a way!"


*credits to hotshuk for this joke :P

Linux.fm: Broadcasting the code

This must be the geekiest most useless project in the history of geek IT projects. Linux.fm is an internet radio station that broadcasts a read version of the source code of a random kernel source file. WTF? It uses eSpeak synthesizer for reading the source file. Each time you reload the page it reads a new source file. The whole project is dedicated to Dr. Sheldon Cooper, the asexual super geek character from Big Bang Theory. You 've got to hear it to believe it....

Has the first evidence of extraterrestrial life been discovered?

It has been announce by NASA that a news conference will be held on the 2nd of December. The details are embargoed until then but the press release by NASA states that the topic will be "an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life".


Could it be that some evidence of extraterrestrial life has been discovered? If that is the case, what kind of organism can it be? 


I always firmly believed that life must be abundant in the universe, but the sheer vastness of it would make it difficult for us to discover since we are in our technological infancy.


Will our view of the universe change in 2 days? Will we live in an age when proof exists that Earth in not the only planet which supports life? Will science fiction become science fact?


I eagerly await the news conference to find out!

Support Wikipedia

If you have visited wikipedia the last couple of days you should have noticed a banner on top with a personal appeal from Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's founder. In this appeal he is asking wikipedia users, that's us, for a small donation. Yesterday I received an email from a friend in a mailing list asking the list if she should donate money to Wikipedia. The answer from the majority of people was that they had already donated or that they will.

I myself, am a daily reader of Wikipedia. I either quickly check up facts or read for hours sections of interest. By capitalism standards what is offered in wikipedia is pretty damn expensive, but is offered entirely for free, as it should be. Knowledge should be free and accesible to everyone and wikipedia is doing just that. That is why it is so important to donate. Not as a thank you, but as means to keep it free and free of advertisements and shady business.

If you have not already done so, support Wikipedia. Do yourself and every other Wikipedia user a favor and give something back. Even 20$ will do just fine. Just think of it as an investment. Just 20$ for all the knowledge in the world.

Kinect: we are too old for this shit...

Today it was raining, I was driving around the city for two hours for various chores and I was bored out of my mind. I just wanted to go home. While in the car onnateldome, a long time allroundgeek friend, called me. He was about to buy Kinect for his Xbox360 and he called me to go to his house in order check it out. Of course I could not refuse even though I had more serious obligations. Yesterday was the european launch day for Kinect, how could I say "no"?

When I entered his house I found him in shorts, sweaty and broken with a big smile on his face. He was jumping around like a monkey shouting "I wish I had this when I was 15!" and "I can't go on, my legs hurt!". Immediately I joined him in co-op mode in a rafting game. I was jumping around and laughing like an idiot! In 5 minutes it became apparent that I needed to get myself in shorts, as well. So, I did. Don't try to play Kinect adventures in your jeans. You simply cannot play properly.

You really need shorts for this

We spend the better part of the morning and afternoon exploring the various games that were available. The controls are remarkably responsive and technologically it is very impressive. I mean, you being the controller, as microsoft's marketing department slogan goes, feels very natural and novel. 4 years after the Nintendo Wii release, that revolutionized this sort of gameplay mechanics, this still feels novel. It is very impressive to see your avatar perform every move you make with your whole body. Your arms, legs, hips, head, everything really respond to your movements. What felt difficult, was navigating through menus with hand gestures. It was unnatural and slow. I would prefer it, if it let you chose between the normal controller and the gestures.

Despite having great fun I am still reluctant and not a big fan of this kind of peripherals and mechanics for video games. A few years back I bought eye toy kinetic combat for the PS2. For its time it made a novel use of a camera peripheral in video games. Then, the Wii came out and sold like crazy. It sold like crazy to mostly non-gamers due to its casual approach to video games. Casual games bore me to death. Like in Wii after the novelty wares off you are left with something you have to put effort on and it does not feel like a video game, it is not relaxing and it lacks gameplay depth. There is a limit into how many hours you can spend jumping around. We are in an age that you simply want to chill on the sofa holding a normal controller and play a normal game that offers you depth, action, be challenging for your wits, or simply distract you from real life and get you in a fantasy/scifi/mob/post-apocalyptic world. I play to relax. If I want to exercise I can go outside for some running.

He is still jumping

Having said that, this still is excellent fun for everyone and really is party video gaming. I expect more games to come out in the following months that make better use of the kinect technology. Microsoft preview videos prepare you for awesome applications of the technology. I am not saying that their are lying but it is just not there yet. It all depends on the developers to think of new ways of using it and of course on Microsoft to support its new platform and integrate it with the rest of the xbox functionality.

As I am righting these words onnateldome is still jumping around like a monkey and we are waiting for the rest of the crew to join us in mindless fun. I think I ll rest for now. I am too old for this shit.

Livin' la Mobile Vida Loca (...or how a smartphone replaced my computer)

I am back! After months, I finally finished my tour of duty! I finally came back to normal life to rejoin my geek comrades who did a fantastic job on keeping allround geek live and kicking. Kudos EraserheadX and Ebenet! Army life was hard on my geek habits especially at first during the bootcamp. The last 6 months, or so, though, I got myself an android phone (HTC Magic) and things were not as bad. I still had very limited access to computers and a proper internet connection but Magic made my life much easier.

HTC Magic is a first generation android phone but has all the goodies on and is a very powerfull device. It features a 320x480 display, GPS, WiFi and 3G connectivity and a 528Mhz processor, but most importantly the android OS that offers all kinds of software packages for day to day activities.

Normally, most people, do all their digital activities using a computer. Many have a smartphone but they are not forced to using only their phone. They will do some browsing on the go, play a casual game while they wait for the train and that's about it. They leave everything else for when they get home or at work. I was like that. I always had a smartphone (I was a big fun of the SonyEricsson P series with UIQ interface) but I have to admit that I was not using more than 20-30% of its capabilities. As any geek out there, though, I loved having such a fantastic gadget. But when I was stripped of the ability to use a proper computer all my digital life's burden fell on the poor Magic.

Obviously, just because I did not have a computer available, it did not mean that I would stop communicating and reading the news. Fortunately for me, android phones sport a webkit based browser that does an admirable job. I had no trouble viewing most websites. Of course the occasional flash heavy site was a bit slow on the rendering but I blame the limited processing power of Magic. Modern android based phones(such as Nexus One or the HTC Desire) wont have any problem. But why am I complaining...iPhone users are not even able to view any sort of flash based graphics. The build-in android browser has tab functionality so I could load multiple pages and navigate through them with ease. Surfing on 3G though is a bit expensive but I got a nice data plan with 10 euros for 300MB per month, which is not bad at all. 300MB were more than enough for serious surfing everyday. Downloading stuff was out of the question though and when I had to download something (such as new application from android market) I had to limit my surfing, or did I? As most people I usually read specific websites, blogs and online newspapers. That is were Google Reader came to play. By adding all these websites on the reader I was able to save a significant amount of data since the reader only loaded the articles themselves and not all the other data and graphics on the websites. In addition, it is very convenient to go through a list of news instead of navigating from site to site and news article to news article. I strongly suggest using the Google Reader on any device or computer really, as it is very convenient to have everything in one place. I alost tried using the Opera Mobile browser that significantly saves data usage (up to 80%-90%) but I did not really like it. I found it more difficult to use and it just did not cut it for me.

Having only a smartphone meant that all my communication needs would have to be sorted using the device. That means emailing, instant messaging, social networking and of course
calls and sms as well. Magic being an android phone is able to organise all your contacts as google contacts. I sorted all my contacts with all their information (name, phone number, email address etc) and then synchronized with my google account. I am never going to loose my contacts ever again! Android offers a very convenient gmail application so receiving and sending emails was a breeze. It is a standalone application that synchronizes with the gmail account so I did not have to use that somewhat inconvenient mobile gmail website and using the application was significantly faster than any website through a browser would be. In addition a standalone gtalk client meant that I could chat to all my google contacts in real time as I would do through the gmail website. Even though I am not a big fun of MSN, I have many contacts there, so, I installed a free msn client (MSN Droid) that did an admirable job and was very easy to use. For my twitting needs the official twitter android application sufficed but I preferred the HTC one. Unfortunately, after twitter changed its login protocol a couple months back, the HTC application broke.

Digital life does not only mean communication and information. It also means entertainment. Not having my playstation console, my music collection, my computer games and my bookshelves what could I do? HTC Magic to the rescue! I can honestly say that this small device managed to keep me entertained and then some! Magic having a microSD is able to load all sorts of media and of course loads of music. The music application on the Magic may not be as good as iTunes on iPhone and iPods, but it performs well and is easy to use. For video I used the yxPlayer with mixed results.

What about games though? The android market is full of small gems to keep you entertained for hours. Of course, it is full of your usual fart apps as well, but finding the good games is not difficult thanks to the rating feature. Being an RPG fun myself I spend many hours playing a fantastic action-RPG named Zenonia. I strongly recommend it for anyone. The game is out for android phones as well a iPhone, PSP and Windows Mobile as well. Honorary mention goes to android chess, Abduction, Robo Defence and Speedx 3D since they are some games I thoroughly enjoyed. The most fun I had with the device though was with snesoid, a Super Nintendo emulator, that offered me countless hours of fun playing this classic console's gems such as Final Fantasy 6 and Chrono Trigger.

Donkey Kong Country on a mobile phone. Who would believe it?

One of the most important roles of Magic in my army life was its role as an ebook reader. At first I was thinking that it would not be comfortable reading books from the small screen but, boy was I wrong. I finished many a books with ease without getting tired from the screen's size. I tried a selection of ebook reader applications but I settled for amazon's kindle application. It was very easy to use. I liked the configuration options for brightness, font size and its bookmarking options. Most importantly though I liked its great selection of books and the fact that I could synchronize everything with any device. That means that I can access the same books ,with all my bookmarks still there, from my macbook or any other current or future supported device. Everything is stored on my amazon account waiting to be synchronized.

A few years back all this would not have been possible with a single device and it definitely would not have been cheap. The mobile devices are getting seriously powerful. Most importantly though, the mobile software platforms are getting friendlier and are supported by the developers and, thus, can offer us the tools to cover all our digital needs. I can't wait to see what's in store for the future mobile devices. Thank you HTC Magic, you have been a fantastic familiar. Oh...and it's great to be back!

Geeking out low tech style...

Hello, hello!! It's been a long time since my last post in allroundgeek(the rest of the team is alive and kicking though) and, as eraserheadx explained in a previous post, I am doing my obligatory 9-month service in the Greek army. I am serving as, I cannot tell you what, stationed at, I cannot tell you where. HeHe, I always wanted to say that. Bottom line though is that the army life has certain restrictions and its nature does not endorse, encourage, or help, the use of my geek gear (which got looted the minute I left home, by admission of the guilty parts). I still wanted to communicate with the rest of the world, I still wanted to listen to music and still wanted to be entertained not having a PC available or a super, does it all, mobile phone.

Solving this is not as easy as it sounds. Some one might say, ok just get a phone an mp3 player and a DS....or an iphone for that matter. The question is: ok, which phone and which mp3 player? I first have to explain something; camera phones are not allowed in the army camps for obvious reasons. This restriction tends to fade away after the bootcamp but in bootcamp there is a very strict policy regarding that. Most of the phones today are camera phones. Most phones without cameras are some really shitty ones with no extras (like a browser). In addition a very important matter is talk-time. In bootcamp with shitloads of other people and very little time of your own, charging your phone is never easy (having to fight for a powersocket). Also on my previous phone I had many contacts and I really was not in the mood to enter them one by one. I badly needed some sort of mobile browser so I could tweet my news to friends and relatives in a bulk way. Believe me, it was not easy, but i found a phone that does all that and does not have a camera! Samsung E1130B. No camera, 10 hours of talk time(which essentialy meant I charged it once a week tops), bluetooth to transfer contacts and a small functional browser that I use to tweet and read news. Plus it is water and sand resistant! All that for 50 euros. After the army it will be my main camping phone!

Getting an mp3 player was easier than getting a phone but it had its difficulties as well. The problems arose from the nature of army life again. I needed an mp3 player that does not need some specialized software to be installed to get song as a personal computer was not available in bootcamp(and in other people's computers or netcafes I have no admin rights). Internal batteries are out of the question since it would prove as problematic as charging the phone. USB charging is out of the question again since in bootcamp I had no easy access to a computer. That leaves us with needing an mp3 player that uses normal batteries and when connected to a computer works like a usb stick with no extra software. Well...I found just that...Crypto Colorline 003. For just 20 euros(4GB storage) it is an excellent product for its purpose. Again, this will be my main camping music player for much of the same reasons with the samsung phone.

No. Unfortunately this is not part of army entertainment

As far as being entertained though things were not easy. In order to play games I resort to netcafes (that is when I manage to get out). It is not half bad though, as I have great time going there with my platoon mates and kick each others asses in CoD4:Modern warfare. For more immediate in-camp entertainment I prefer sci-fi books as they help getting your mind off things.

All this though, are about to change!!!! I just got my first Android phone: HTC Magic !!! It kicks serious ass even though it is a year old model. I got it in a very good deal switching between gsm carriers. It will be my main communication/entertainment device here and I am sure it will do a very good job. More on that in a future post.

We live in the future: Mega-Corporation vs Super Power

The last couple of days have been witnesses to something that was only possible in William Gibson stories. Those stories spoke about a future where mega-corporations would be as powerful as states and would be at war with the world's Super Powers. If that is the case, then we live in the future. That is the only way I can perceive the bomb Google dropped on China a couple of days ago.

The story is simple. Google gets hacked, with what is saying was a very sophisticated way, last month. Google says that the target was the accounts and data of numerous Chinese activists. In addition said that numerous other IT targets were hit for more information. What Google does not say directly but strongly suggests is that behind the attacks was the Chinese State itself! Basically China, the country, attacked Google. Google being certain of this declared that it is closing down its Chinese office (like withdrawing their ambassador), stops all operations in China (like pulling out all investments and money) and finally stops censoring search engine results from Chinese IP addresses (Google was had agreed with China to censor anything the Chinese government thought it was threatening to the state. Thus Google basically attacks the Chinese disinformation operation).

This is all very exciting. A country(superpower basically) attacks a mega-corporation, the mega-corporation is pissed off and retaliates and finally the country fights back. WooHoo. Whats next? Robotic cops? VR cubes in our houses? Cables sticking out of our necks? Prosthetic arms that can interface with our computer? We live in exciting times!

A Technical Overview of 3D Viewing

Now that Avatar is upon us, it's worth indicating that it's the first movie to really capitalize on the emerging 3D technologies. One of the striking things about Avatar, is that like all quality commercial products, it is offered using various formats, offering different price and quality ranges. I'll try to present an outline of the various viewing modes:

1. Standard 2D - It's obviously the cheapest, but also the worst way of viewing the movie.
   
2. RealD - it is the most standard way of projecting stereoscopic 3D images, utilizing cheap disposable polarized glasses and an alternate circular polarity projector. This can cause the unavoidable "ghosting" effect, which can blur the details of the 3D image. A sliver screen is required, in order to reflect as much light as possible and to prevent any viewing losses due to polarization. Brightness levels are usually low, and combined with the glasses and the silver screen tend to create a "greyish" haze that misinterpret the actual movie colors.
   
3. Dolby 3D - a more advanced but also more expensive method, it utilizes reusable passive glasses on a normal white screen. The projector uses a rotating wheel, spinning 6 times per frame, displaying the 3 basic colors (RGB) for the two stereoscopic frames. Gosting effects are not present, and the viewing experience is not affected by tilting. At 144Hz, no rainbow artifacts are created, similar to ie. DLP projectors. One disadvantage of Dolby 3D is the increased cost for the glasses. Brightness issues are natrually still present.
4. XpanD - an even more expensive system, uses active LCD glasses that are remotely synchronized from the projection system to alternatingly block light from each eye using an LCD shutter. These glasses are obviously much more expensive, but several disadvantantages are countered, such as ghosting and tilting. Brighness levels are also improved due to the lack of filtering.
5. IMAX 3D - it offers basically a larger curved screen and usually a more elaborate sound system. It uses cheap reusable glasses and a linear polarity projector. Brightness issues are rectified, due to projector intensity and screen size. One disadvantage of IMAX 3D is that viewer placement needs to be exact, due to screen curvature. If the viewer is not facing directly the screen, the stereoscopic perception is destroyed. This leads to fewer seats in IMAX cinemas compared to normal screens.