Haibane.info

Month: October 2007

  • Asus EEE PC

    ASUS Eee PC 4G - Pearl White Intel processor 7
    One of the more surprising products to come down the pike of late has been the Asus EEE PC. Here are the basic specs:

    • Intel Celeron M ULV 900 MHz processor
    • Storage: 4 GB of flash-based storage (solid state)
    • RAM: 512 MB
    • Screen: 7 inches, 800×480, with speakers on both sides
    • Ports: 3 USB, 1 VGA out, headphone/mic, SD card reader, Ethernet
    • Extras: 0.3 MP webcam, 802.11 b/g wireless

    Thats’s almost a perfect distillation of the most-used hardware features. Note that there’s no hard drive, just a 4GB SSD disk. That cuts down on power and weight, at the obvious expense of storage capacity (but 4GB is plenty for basic office documents and such. You can’t expect to drop your Picasa or iTunes folders on here).

    The software stack is also strong – Asus worked with Xandros for a customized distribution and window interface, that comes preloaded with a very well-thought out list of preloaded apps, grouped into tabbed categories: Internet, Work, Learn, and Play (and Settings). The apps include Skype, Firefox, a universal Messenger client, Open Office, a media player, and shortcuts to Wikipedia and Youtube. If this isn’t enough, Asus does plan to introduce a Windows version in 2008 (presumably at a higher price point).

    The review at Notebook Review was gushing:

    In the end, the Eee PC is the single most impressive notebook we’ve seen priced below $400. The technical specs might look sub par, but the usability and overall performance of the Eee PC rivals notebooks costing several thousand dollars more. Granted, you can’t install Photoshop on this little notebook and you can forget about playing Bioshock on this thing, but the Eee PC can do just about everything you “need” to do with a notebook while on the go.
    […]
    As it stands now, the Eee PC is a truly impressive ultraportable with a value much higher than the sale price suggests. The Eee PC can’t replace a full-featured desktop or notebook, but it makes the perfect choice if you are in the market for an ultraportable notebook for school, work, or vacation.

    Note however that with three USB ports (more than I have on my Thinkpad T42, note) you can basically extend the machine’s capability in true flex computing fashion. In fact it makes sense for the PC to be as”light” as possible in a flex computing environment; just add a external graphics card, disk drive, DVD player, and a few other bells and whistles and you’ve got a complete workstation.

    tiny asus eeeThe bottom line is that this little PC pretty much suffices for the vast majority of casual users who need a PC for travel, wireless internet access, basic office work, and managing media. And it’s tiny (2lbs) and cheap: $399 retail at Best Buy or online at New Egg.

  • Eye-Fi wireless SD card


    eye-fi    This is just too perfect a convergence to ignore. Imagine a SD storage card, with 2GB capacity, that also houses a Wi-Fi transmitter. It’s real, and apart from the corniest name ever (Eye-Fi) it’s probably the single coolest product I’ve seen in a while (yeah, including the iPhone). Here’s what it does:

    • Uploads photos automatically from Eye-Fi Card inside your camera. Built-in Wi-Fi connects to your home network.
    • Provides free and unlimited photo uploads to your computer and your favorite photo or social networking website via the Eye-Fi Service. Photo transmission is secure and private.
    • Supports sharing and printing websites, including KODAK Gallery, Shutterfly, Wal-Mart, Snapfish, Photobucket, Facebook, Webshots, Picasa Web Albums, SmugMug, Flickr, Fotki, TypePad, VOX, dotPhoto, Phanfare, Sharpcast and Gallery.
    • Handles full-resolution jpeg images and intelligently re-sizes photos if limited by your chosen photo or social networking website.

    As long as you’re within range of a hotspot, you can upload your pics for effectively infinite storage. And if you’re out of range, you’ve still got a respectable 2GB of storage on board. For someone like me who does a lot of family photos and videos at home, this is basically a godsend (esp considering that I am presently relying on a mere 256 MB card for storage).

  • blogrolling

    I’ve been asked why I don’t have a larger blogroll on the site and I felt it was worth a public response. At any rate this is one of those painfully meta topics so I’m shoving the rest below the fold.

    UPDATE: Nick comments. with footnotes. oooo, drupal envy!
    (more…)

  • paging Sophocles

    Steven has, unsurprisingly, an insightful take on what would ordinarily be a trite topic. My only comment is that you never see what happens after the guy gets the otaku dream girl, in anime or for that matter in any genre. That’s where the real challenge, and the reward lies. In a large sense the market for otaku dream girls is driven by the adolescent audience’s inability to look past the first goal; even though on a temporal basis, that goal is only the first and (hopefully) briefest stage of a very long journey.

    And to get an idea of how long that journey can be, emotionally speaking, let us heed the wisdom of aged Sophocles, as quoted in Plato’s Republic: “most gladly have I escaped the thing of which you speak; I feel as if I had escaped from a mad and furious master. ”

  • the battle at Fazlullah’s Keep

    I do my Very Serious Analysis elsewhere, so permit me this flight of levity on what would normally be a Very Serious Topic. I just love the headline on this story:

    Battle at Pakistan Cleric’s Stronghold

    PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Oct. 26 — Pakistani security forces exchanged heavy gunfire with militants at the sprawling seminary of an increasingly powerful extremist cleric in the troubled North-West Frontier Province today, according to regional police officials.

    Is it just me or does this evoke images of a D&D campaign? My “DM-mode” is already fired up:

    A desolate series of hills rises above your party. Sprawling across their barren shoulders rises the great Keep, a seminary where the dark cleric Fazlullah amasses his army of minions. The grizzled veterans in the town of Kabal, largest in the northwest realm of Swat, spoke fearfully of angering the cleric, having borne witness to his whims and fancies – including many of their daughters, for his appetites, and their sons, for his troops. Your task is to penetrate the Keep and retrieve the Book of Mustafa, a powerful tome which the evil cleric has used to further his own ambitions at the expense of the good folkspeople of Swat, and beyond.

    Two things occur to me. One, where’s the market for adventurers? If this really was a D&D world you can bet that dark clerics like Fazlullah would be attracting greedy bands of loot-obsessed PCs left and right. Don’t we have an analouge of high-level single-classed fighters in our world? (we certainly have rogues.)

    Two, I wonder if there isn’t enough material in the real world campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq to provide adequate fodder for a “DM of the Rings” style parody. Now that would be just be the awesomest.

  • news flash

    The price of the Nintendo Wii will remain unchanged for the holidays. I think they’re trying to obvious us all to death.

    UPDATE: I predict that Nintendo will be forced to drop the price to $200 after the holiday season. I explain why below in the comment thread.

  • tagged by Dexter and not impressed

    Haibane.info is now running version 2.3.1. The 2.3.x upgrade brings tag functionality to the WordPress core. At present I only have one tag, “wordpress” – I need to sit down and think about a strategy for making best use of this functionality. As it turns out, it also breaks my blog in an interesting way… and leaves me highly skeptical of whether tags are meaningfully different from categories at all, despite the prevailing dogma that insists they are truly separate things. (more…)

  • Battlestar Galactica Razor: Flashbacks 1-4

    Galactica: RazorSciFi has a series of seven “flashback” teaser webisodes that they are revealing each week in the runup to the broadcast of Galactica: Razor. There have been four flashbacks aired so far, and while they appear sporadically on YouTube, the best way to view them is directly on SciFi’s website. Here are links and brief description of the four flashbacks so far:

    1. Day 4,571. “William “”Husker”” Adama prepares for his rookie combat mission as a Viper pilot.
    2. The Hangar. A moment in Galactica’s hangar rattles young Adama’s nerves before his first combat flight.
    3. Operation Raptor Talon. Vipers and Raiders face off in a brutal firefight above a remote world defended by the Cylons.
    4. Free Fall. Losing his Viper is just the start of rookie William Adama’s problems today.

    Intriguingly, these flashbacks are set during the First Cylon War, and center on Bill Adama as a young rookie. The plot of Razor however will center on Lee Adama’s command of the Pegasus. So it will be quite interesting to see how these elements tie together. Incidentally, the DVDs are also available for pre-order on Amazon.

  • Which action hero are you?

    I’m a sucker for quiz sites. There’s a new one called Brainfall that’s loadde with movie and television quizzes. Example:

    Which Action Hero Are You?
    You are MacGyver. Ingenuity is your game. Don’t leave home without your sundry office supplies: rubber bands, paper clips, and the like. Life and death situations are your forte, but you may be getting too old for it. In today’s eyes you’re an old legend, but your first season mullet will always be remembered.

    apparently, I am also Dumbledore (which character in Harry Potter are you?) and a combination of both Belle and Pocahontas (Which Disney Princess are you?).

    Obviously the accuracy of any single quiz is always suspect, but I think that certain outcomes are going to be correlated. Thus, if you had a lot of people take a lot of these tests and compared the results in aggregate, you might actually get a pretty good picture of someone’s personality. Part of this might be because movie and television characters are in a sense personality archetypes; they are designed to be somewhat more focused on certain traits (of usefulness/threat to the protoganist or for the sake of the plot). So they make pretty good basis functions for personality. One might even call them, ahem, personality prototypes.

  • Before there was Calvin

    via Brian, This is quite a find: an exhaustive collection of pre-Calvin and Hobbes artwork by Bill Watterson. Sources for these scanned pieces of art include his Ohio college yearbook, a political cartooning magazine he worked at, and even a brief stint at the Cincinnati Post. I’ve put some of my favorites below the fold, but the whole thing deserves a leisurely browse.

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