A new line of iPods were announced and if I knew someone who bought an iPhone, I’d have a grand day making fun of the dumbass. But I still won’t buy an iPhone. It’s the iPod touch, an iPhone without the phone, that’s got me interested.

I want a small Internet device that I can bring around with me and the iPod touch sounds like a good candidate. But since I’m a Linux fanboy, I have to be impartial and say that the N800 is what I’m looking for.

Both devices are in the same price range. I still can’t decide which is better because each device has its own set of cool features.

The iPod touch has 16GB of storage, a sleek UI and multi-touch. But third party apps are very limited and Linux is not officially supported.

The N800 has a huge community support (plus a head start), it runs Linux and I can play openTTD on it. But I still have to buy two 8GB SD cards to get the same amount of storage that the iPod touch offers.

There’s also a major hold up on the N800: It’s not sold locally. It’s available at Amazon though. I’m pretty sure that the iPod touch will reach our islands before the N800 does.

Take a deep breath and think about it. Which one would you choose?

Apple diehards will only be tolerated at a certain extent. Don’t push it!

In chronological order:

1. Finally learned how to install packages in FreeBSD. I’m getting the hang of it and I’m sorta starting to like it.
2. “Cover your ass” — backup and backup backups.
3. Got to triple boot CEntOS, Debian and FreeBSD. Did this for one whole day (yes, I am that dense).
4. FreeBSD’s console has the coolest screensavers!
5. CEntOS takes a lot of time and CDs to install. Not to mention that Debian and FreeBSD are more advanced.
6. Debian is sooooo sexy.
7. When reformatting partitions, don’t forget to edit fstab.
8. In network interface configuration, NETWORK != GATEWAY (D’oh! Isn’t that obvious already?)

I’m pretty sure you didn’t notice but my blog was down yesterday and the other day. I forgot that I jumbled up the partitions of the server this blog is on. That was months ago and I didn’t get to update fstab. I reformatted a partition that was mounted as /swap but I had to reboot the server to use the new swap partition. It was live so I couldn’t just reboot it.

Days, weeks and months passed by until I forgot about it. A power maintenance was scheduled last Sunday and the servers were set to go down. Actually, I forgot about that too. I was all set to do some hacking when it went down.

It was 3 hours later when the other servers went up. I thought somebody forgot to turn on this server. I waited for a couple more hours. Sent text messages, emails then finally got bored and decided to make some calls.

I finally got in touch with somebody within reach of the rack. I was told that it’s running but it goes to recovery mode. I was told that an indicator with an exclamation mark is lit. I actually thought that the server was left with two drives and one of them was dead. I have backups of my stuff but most of them are on the same machine. It scared the hell out of me. When will I learn my lesson?

When I got there last night, it turned out that it couldn’t mount one of the partitions. I’m wondering if it should’ve been designed to handle the error and continue mounting the rest of the partitions. The warning indicator is for the redundant power supply. They said something about the cable about being something.

In very rare idle moments, I wonder and think if I want to be a sysad. It’s thrilling and there’s a lot of suspense [at the very first days] and you don’t have to think so much. Plus I love watching LEDs blink. Sysad or sysdev? Hmmmm…

First off, iPodLinux won’t install on my iPod. It just keeps failing. I’m heart broken. Second, can’t Apple screw the fancy design for practical use? I always have a hard time unplugging the USB cable.

I’m still not in the mood to upload my songs. I’m putting up with Apache’s indexing until I get MythTV installed. My GNUMP3d installation is messed up. The last 5 seconds of the tracks are clipped off. I’d try to hack it but I’m no PERL genius.

My iPod is now brick. All my songs are gone after using iTunes. I want to format it now and try iPodLinux.

It’ll take a lot of work to upload all my songs since all of them are on my media server. My imagination is going crazy right now. I’m thinking of building a car PC that connects to my media server via GPRS/EDGE. And since it’s a PC the possibilities are almost endless. Think VoIP on your friggin’ car!!!

Somebody was selling here an embedded SOC board less than a third of an iPod’s price. The bandwidth I need to stream most of my music is about 30KB/s. That’s not hard to achieve with 3G, right?

Somebody else willing to collaborate or build a couple of units? Buying the parts in bulk could be cheaper. I checked eBay and the average price of GPRS/EDGE/HSDPA modems is around US$50.

I’m supposed to conclude this post but another thought just popped out: Google Earth on your car!! Got other ideas? Do the latest mobile/smart phones play streamed music?

I’ve mentioned here that my desktop is kaput. The motherboard gave up on me. I bought it January 2006 (hardware doesn’t last as long as they used to). It’s a socket 939 AsRock. AsRock is the low-end version of Asus. I like Asus but being impatient and going with 939 was a bad move because socket 940 (AM2) came out the next quarter and prices nosedived to less than half.

Now AMD is phasing out the 939 line and I tried to buy a replacement last week but the store wouldn’t sell it to me without the bundled processor. And that board was an ECS. I hate ECS. I experienced buying three boards by them (K7-VTA3 series) years ago and they all failed.

It’s a bad year for AMD and a very good one for Intel. I think now is the good time to move back to Intel. There’s been a lot of good reviews on Core 2 Duo and 45nm fabrication is a major breakthrough. A lot of analysts say that it will take a couple more months for AMD to switch out of 65nm.

The last Intel processor that went in my hands was an Intel 233MHz. I was an AMD fanboy since I left Intel’s side (where else would one go anyway?).

Can anyone recommend a decent board? I don’t overclock but I want to keep my options open for new technologies and further upgrades. I don’t have SATA drives yet but it should be supported. Linux support should be strong too.

I can’t believe that this was created in the 90s. It feels so new. Sir Joel has been promoting this as the link from the offline world.

A QR Code is a matrix code (or two-dimensional bar code) created by Japanese corporation Denso-Wave in 1994. The “QR” is derived from “Quick Response”, as the creator intended the code to allow its contents to be decoded at high speed.

- Wikipedia

It works by printing or displaying a generated image that contains a code. The user can take a picture of the image with their mobile phone then have the message revealed on the fly. Cool, eh?

Looking a step back, it looked pointless. It seemed that it didn’t make sense. One could just take a snapshot of a URL and open the image when needed. The last camera phones even have a better resolution than my El Cheapo camera. If the photo is clear enough, you can also use OCR.

This is what the QR code of this blog’s URL should look like (generate your own via http://www.patambrosio.com/tel/foo [replace foo with your text of choice])

Then I saw it applied. The Washington Nationals (Baseball) are selling tickets directly to your mobile phone using QR codes (covered on TeXtra too*). All you need is an MMS-enabled phone (no camera needed). Fancy!

*I can die happy if Natali Del Conte married me.

Here’s a quick rant for the day. I’m annoyed that my amp is borked. Before it was just the right channel that suddenly drops down. Now it’s both channels and the left channel is worse.

There are remedies but it’s only temporary. To fix the right channel, I have to turn off the speakers, put the amp on full blast and play something loud. For the left channel, I have to ground it and sometimes it doesn’t work at once.

The thing is, I can’t find something as simple as the one I’m using. I mean I like analog knobs (everyone loves knobs). I guess it’s time to move on to the future.

On a side note, maybe I can sell it. Then again, I could just keep it and preserve it. Anybody up with repairing a 20-year old Marantz PM 350?

I like to call this the Linux Fanboy Mod Project. Like I wrote before, I’m not going to upgrade my two year-old laptop until 9 months (at least). The lid is now full of battle scars and the paint on the part where the wrist rests is either fading or getting dirty (by libag). Even the AMD badges are starting to turn yellowish.

Right now, it looks like this.

I want to repaint it. I’m not sure what color yet. I guess any color will do as long as it’s not cheesy. Or maybe I could just strip all the paint off and get that brushed steel look (just on the lid). I also want to put a[n] LED-backlit Tux on the lid like on the Apple notebooks.

If there’s still space, I want to make use of my LPT and place a 20×4 LCD panel and display cool shit on the lid. Dennis offered to help. I’m thinking of having this done professionally though (is there such service?).

Any other ideas?

My boss gave me an iPod Remote. I was thinking of making a stop animation of the remote but I don’t have a working camera lying around and time isn’t something that I don’t have a lot this month.

First off, I first thought that it was the Apple Radio Remote. I love it and it helps to keep that low profile I’m trying to get by hiding the iPod. It’s most useful when I’m driving or when I have to talk with someone. Most of all, I can switch songs when I’m in the shower!

One problem is that it’s so small that it keeps falling off of my hand. It has a clip but it’s more convenient to hold it. Another is that I keep forgetting where I last left it. It has to happen at least twice a day.

All I need are good headphones equipped with an FM radio to get that complete wireless combo (iPod+AirClick+FM Transmitter+FM Headphones). Butsikuy once said when I was packing my stuff from work, “Ang dami mo namang gadgets.”

I wonder if there’s a voice-activated remote.

The title is from one of John Mayer’s last album. It’s one of my favorite songs. Anyway, almost everyone I know just got a laptop upgrade recently.

As much as I want to upgrade as well, I can’t and I think it’s best to wait. I’m expecting to buy sometime in the fourth quarter of 2007.

One of the things I’m looking forward to are the upcoming flash-based hard disks drives. Another are the LED-backlit LCD displays. I think improvements on batteries will improve in the next coming months. I’m hoping for a battery life of 8-10 hours with all these technologies.

CPU isn’t much of an issue for me. What matters to me is faster buses and memory (both RAM and hard drive) since I multi-task a lot. And maybe by that time, 802.11n might go out of draft.

Right now, I’m planning to just mod my current laptop. More details on another post.