I Can't Shake Him! (then turn up the volume)

As Engadget pointed out, these TIE Advanced-shaped Speakers should be the perfect fit for your $2500 R2D2 projector.

Hardware Come, Hardware Go

My 38th birthday last month proved to be full hits. My little drinking night was a hit, my already wedding-night damaged Canon Digital camera took it's final hit, dropped to the tile floor in Havanas, cracking the LCD. One of our guests took a nastier hit on his way home, tripping over the under-construction sidewalk and landing on his mouth (shudder!), and my wife was a huge hit for buying me a 2GHz Intel MacBook.

This was an awesome achievement for her, as it was a surprise to me, and indeed when it comes to techie stuff, I am notoriously hard to buy for as I usually have researched ad-nauseum for exactly what I want. Her reasoning? Getting me a laptop gets me to bed sooner, rather than sitting downstairs on the iMac. Bravo wifey, no wonder I love her so!

With my spanky new MacBook, I am running Windows XP inside an evaluation copy of Parallels, basically as a test for work where our Dev and Design teams are moving towards Mac Pro's (why? because they were evaluated by our traditionally Microsoft IT team as the best bang for the buck - how the world turns). It's pretty sweet, especially with "coherence" whereby each Windows app runs inside its own Mac OS X window, meaning you can switch between them seamlessly. The only thing I run there is some streaming TV video program (shonky Chinese rebroadcast of soccer matches), and IE for some ancient work admin tools.

So with this topsy-turvy new world order catching on (the number of people in the last 6 months buying Macs, even to run Windows, has been quite astounding), is it any surprise then that the latest posters advertising Microsoft's new Vista OS features a white MacBook?

Wow indeed.
(Thanks to Engadget, hkkevinc and Lkr721993)

Putting HD in Perspective

I went through the process last year of starting the hunt for a HD television. My RCA tube was showing blacks as blue, and muddy brown-reds in the bottom right corner. I had 42" to spare in my TV cabinet, so I had a yen for some LCD-love. As is my way, I was soon mired in analysis paralysis mousing through hundreds of reviews, consumer ratings, obscure HD blogs and Costco price-compare tools.

To cut the tedium outta the story, in the end I decided that I didn't watch enough HD content to justify the purchase, and too many of the screens looked rough watching SD. The technology has a small amount of maturing left (and maybe a format wr of two with a few new technologies around the corner), but I suppose I just wasn't ready to commit. For xmas, I ended up getting GW a little LCD for the bedroom, which has been a good way to test what they can do at the low price end anyhow..

All this is a roundabout kind of way to introduce this cute little Wired News article by Lore Sjoberg, whose style is sarcasm personified. Enjoy his version of The High-Def FAQK.

technorati tags:HD, humour

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Finding your inner morning person

Anyone who knows me, knows I am not one of those "morning people", who by definition are either high-energy frustratingly "peppy" people, or parents. Indeed, I am fortunate enough to be able to sleep just about anywhere, it's the waking that hurts me. So here's a few possible alarm clock options (unverified as real or vapourware) that may break the inertia my phone-based morning alarm usually fails to overcome...

Wake or go boom! To turn off this alarm, you gotta reconnect the three wires. Based on the principle that you need to be awake to work electronics, I am sure after a month I could re-fuse this in my sleep. As Engadget correctly noted, not easy to bring through customs, not liable to be much fun in Boston.

To snooze this hanging alarm, you need to slap it. When you do, it retracts on its cord to move ever closer to the ceiling for the next buzzing. Finally, an alarm clock that literally makes you hit the roof.

Clocky adds computer smarts to an approach we have all tried, putting the alarm across the room so we have to get out of bed to snooze it. I tried that, but just became so fast at traversing cold winter floor tiles it was like watching a cat clear a swimming pool without getting wet. Once you snooze this cruiser, it just rolls away, finding a new spot each time. So next time, you gotta find it to turn it off. Love it. There's even a carpeted version, I imagine so that the fall off your night-table is softer, and the camouflage is greater!