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Top 10 Of 2010

Frank — Wed, 29 Dec 2010 05:51:37 +0000

Another year is almost behind us and thanks to our dedicated and loyal readers our 3rd successful year bringing you the latest in gadgets, gaming, technology and the bizarre.

We have brought the monkeys in (by monkeys we mean a crafty worded perl script) and have compiled the the most viewed posts here on tech.nocr.at. This list doesn’t just contain posts from 2010, it contains the top ten most viewed posts this year regardless of when they were created.

Without further ado, tech.nocr.at’s top 10 posts of 2010:

Let us know in the comments what were your favorite posts of 2010.

Top 10 Of 2010 originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2010/12/29. Reproduction of content not allowed without consent.

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Emulate a PSP on Your PC

Frank — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 02:35:49 +0000

PCSP – the PSP emulator for Windows just got an update to 0.3.0. Although most games don’t work properly yet it’s a step in the right direction. The latest upgrade brings an overhaul to the graphic engine which now renders textures better and speeds gameplay.

Some of the major changes include:

Plenty fixes on GE engine including new shader render.
Joystic support!
Analog pad support
Lot of fixes to HLE

For a complete changelog or to download the PCSP emulator check out their site.

Emulate a PSP on Your PC originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2010/08/24. Reproduction of content not allowed without consent.

Use Your iPhone To Control Your Car

Frank — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 02:11:47 +0000

You knew it was bound to happen. With the iPhone already having apps to control everything from your iTunes to a remote computer you knew that someone would come up with an app to control a car.

The Spirit of Berlin team have developed an iPhone app that remotely controls a minivan. They developed the app for the 2007 Darpa Urban Challenge, so the likelihood of you getting the app from the app store is slim to none.

The iPhone connects with the driving circuitry via WiFi and offers a button for gas and brake as well as a wheel to turn the vehicle. The camera mounted on the front of the minivan transmits video to the iPhone in real-time.

In the video below you can see the operator in the camera’s view on the iPhone. It seems that the top speed of the van is limited (thank God!). This is every big kids dream, a real live RC of an actual car, problem is that this can be extremely dangerous. Plus, WiFi? I hope that their is some sort of kill switch if the van goes out of range or else there can be some serious consequences. Check out the video after the break.

[Link to iPhone RC]

Use Your iPhone To Control Your Car originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2009/10/31. Reproduction of content not allowed without consent.

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Water Drops At 2000 FPS

Frank — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 03:45:51 +0000

High speed video can be so much fun. Watching something that we normally take for granted on high speed film can really be amazing. Remember the bullets that were shot at 1,000,000 fps? Normally when we see a bullet being fired it happens in the blink of an eye, but when it’s slowed down you can actually see how the impact happens.

Take this video of a water droplet hitting a container full of water. You can actually see the droplet bouncing thanks to a thin layer of air which separates the drops from the water surface. Check out the video after the break.

Water Drops At 2000 FPS originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2009/10/27. Reproduction of content not allowed without consent.

Super Fast Robot Hands

Frank — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 03:02:04 +0000

I was blown away when I first saw this video. This robot hands moves so quickly that they had to slow the play speed of the video just so you can make out what the robot is actually doing.

This is just more proof that someone somewhere is building SkyNet and these robots will be taking over the world. Remember the lesson we all learned while watching BSG? Forget the upcoming zombie onslaught, we have to be worried about these fraggin robots.

Super Fast Robot Hands originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2009/10/19. Reproduction of content not allowed without consent.

Bullets At 1,000,000 FPS

Frank — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 05:11:37 +0000

I’m not a big gun fan but watching a bullet is some metal at 1,000,000 frames per second slowed down to 30 frames per second is quite amazing.

To put in perspective how fast the camera was that created this video lets do some math. Video is typically shot at 30 frames per second. This video was shot at 1,000,000 frames per second that’s over 41,000 times the speed of regular video. When slowed down to the regular 30 fps you get this super slow video that shows every little detail of the bullet. Quite amazing.

[Kurzzeit]

Bullets At 1,000,000 FPS originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2009/10/11. Reproduction of content not allowed without consent.

More Linux Distros That Don’t Suck

Frank — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 23:56:37 +0000

Following Linux Distros That Don’t Suck from earlier this year here is a comprehensive list of, you guessed it, more Linux Distros that don’t suck. Some of these are more obscure lesser known distros that are quite powerful and very useful. Some of these come from personal use some of them came from the great comments you readers posted the first time I did this.

Remember that this is just a personal list, nothing more, nothing less. I’m not trying to start a holy war since that’s what usually happens when you open something like this up. With that being said, let’s us know in the forums what your list of Linux Distros That Don’t Suck would be.

SLAMPP – A Slackware based Live DVD that can only be described as a one-stop server system. Right off the DVD your up and running with pre-configured services including an HTTP server, FTP server, DHCP server, DNS server and a whole lot more. This is the perfect Distro for those “I really don’t know when I will need a fully functional small network server” times. Best of all, you can run it all without ever having to install anything on the host machine.

Pardus – Pardus, which is the scientific name for the the Anatolian Leopard (watch out Apple), is a Turkish Linux distro which is extremely underrated. It’s wonderfully crafted and has a lot of polish to it. You can tell that the developers have really put a lot of time and energy making this not only run really well but also make it really sexy. I would easily recommend this distro to novices and experts alike.

CrunchBang – Think of CrunchBang as Ubuntu for the advanced. It offers speed and style as well at the bleeding edge of packages. It’s highly customizable and comes with the nimble openbox window manager. No bloated Gnome or KDE here. This is the perfect distro if you really like Ubuntu but don’t like how it’s geared towards linux n00bs.

Sabayon – Sabayon promises to transform your computer into a powerful Gentoo Linux system in under 5 minutes. It’s a livecd (with the option to install) of the uber geek popular Gentoo. It’s very powerful and very polished like you would expect from any Gentoo system, but best of all it still acts like an other Gentoo system allowing you to use portage to pull from the Gentoo repositories.

PC-BSD – Alright, I know it’s technically not Linux, it’s BSD based, but it tries really really hard to be Linux. If you are more of a BSD fan but like the Desktop functionality that a standard linux distro offers then PC-BSD is perfect for you. Much like any out of the box distro you can listen to music, watch some video, work with office documents and you can even install applications with a gui. Best of all, it’s a rock solid BSD core that powers everything.

CentOS – Based on the rock solid RHEL, CentOS is one of the most reliable distros you will every find. It offers quick errata, package management that offers stable applications and has a very strong community behind it. They even get upstream fixes from RHEL. If you want a solid server based OS you can’t do much better than CentOS.

Slackware – The oldest of the bunch. Created in 1992, Slackware is the oldest surviving distro. It orginally came on 24 floppy disks as was built on top of kernel 0.99 and it was one of the hardest things to install. Thank God that things have changed. It’s now a highly technical and clean distro. No fancy tools for settings, you have to do everything by editing text files. You know what they say, if you learn Ubuntu you know Ubuntu. If you learn Slackware you know Linux.

There you go, another list of distros that don’t suck (according to me). You millage may vary. I really don’t want to start a holy war so I open it up to you to add to the list by visiting our forums and letting us know what you like.

More Linux Distros That Don’t Suck originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2009/10/06. Reproduction of content not allowed without consent.

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LED Hard Drive Clock

Frank — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 04:03:09 +0000

There have been many “Clocks” built out of old hard drives, but this one has to take the cake. Ian Smith this super cool clock from an old hard drive he had laying around. By using some tri-colour LEDs, a PIC microcontroller, and some simple vision techniques he has built something that not only functions as a clock but as a pie chart by the looks of it.

The platter has a slit cut through it so that as the disk spins the illumination of the LEDs shine through. Due to the speed (5400 RPM or about 90 revs a second) the eyes are tricked into seeing a colour. So by turning the LEDs off and on at just the right time you can make this thing display a clock, pie chart, or any other circular art you can think of.

[Link to LED Hard Drive Clock]

LED Hard Drive Clock originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2008/10/20. Reproduction of content not allowed without consent.

Walking iPhone Robot

Frank — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 03:29:23 +0000

Sometimes you just don’t have your phone handy when you are waiting for an important call, even if the call is from Bill Gates or Larry Page as depicted in the video above. This guy has the perfect solution. He was looking for a way to get his iPhone to come to him when it rang so he decided to put robot legs on it.

Now I will give him points for creativity, but from the looks of the speed that the iPhone is traveling he would either have to have the iPhone close to him or turn off his answering service. Plus, I don’t want to put my iPhone on a table and have it decide to commit suicide and throw itself off a table.

Walking iPhone Robot originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2008/10/19. Reproduction of content not allowed without consent.

CrossOver Chromium Brings Chrome To OS X And Linux

Frank — Tue, 16 Sep 2008 04:48:57 +0000

The crafty open source developers at Codeweavers have beaten Google to the punch and release Mac OS X and Linux native versions of Google’s Chrome browser.

Before you start to jump for joy, this is more a proof of concept that and actual production run browser. The developers don’t recommend that you run their port of Chrome as your main browser. In my testing with the Mac port of the browser I quickly noticed that it was missing that smooth look and shine that you get with the Windows version. This might be okay if you just want to test drive Chrome and don’t have a Windows machine, but not something you might want to use day to day.

Maybe this will light a fire under Google’s butt and speed up development of Chrome for other OSes. Then again, maybe not.

[Link to CrossOver Chromium]

CrossOver Chromium Brings Chrome To OS X And Linux originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2008/09/16. Reproduction of content not allowed without consent.

Apple Sept 08 Event: Wrap Up

Frank — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 02:30:48 +0000

Now that the “Let’s Rock” even has come and gone, let’s take a look at what Apple has brought into our laps.

HD TV Shows

Right off the bat Steve announced the arrival of HD TV shows to the iTunes store. The shows will cost you $2.99 a pop (instead of the $1.99 you pay for SD shows), but unlike HD Movies, HD TV shows can be watched on your computer, not just an Apple TV. Also, after a much publicized breakup, NBC is back. I wonder if they came back on hands and knees.

iTunes 8

The newest version of the worlds greatest music management software was also released today. A new Pandora-like “Genius” feature is now included that can generate playlists of songs that go together based on a seed song you pick. I’ve been playing with this tonight and my Genius seems quite stupid, but I’m sure they will smarten him up in the next update.

New Nanos

We all saw it coming. Kevin Rose let the world know a few weeks ago that the “Zune” like nano would make an appearance at todays event, and it did. The new nano is “the thinnest iPod” ever made. It has an oval, tapered shape with a black wheel. The new Nano can also create Genius playlists on-the-fly without the need to connect to iTunes. You will also get a built in accelerometer like the iPhone and Touch so that you can view Cover Flow art, photos, and video when turned sideways.

New iPod Touch

The new touch has the same 3.5″ display but is thinner with a tapered stainless steel back. The touch will also gain integrated volume controls on the side and a built in speaker. You will also be able to channel the Genius without the need of iTunes. The new touch is rated for 36 hours of music and 6 hours of video. 8GB for $229, 16GB for $299, or 32 GB for $399.

OS 2.1 for iPhones and iPod Touches

Rolled into all of the excitement today, Steve also announced the arrival of the 2.1 firmware for both the iPhone and iPod Touch. The major update includes fixes for better battery life, dropped calls, backing up speed, and general bug fixes.

One More Thing

The was no “One More Thing”. Too bad, I was hoping a rev on MacBook Pro’s since my son spilled a full bottle of water on my MacBook Pro yesterday. I guess I will have to go out now and just buy whatever the local Apple store has in stock.

Apple Sept 08 Event: Wrap Up originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2008/09/09. Reproduction of content not allowed without consent.

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How To Speed Up WordPress With Nginx And WP Super Cache

Frank — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 03:43:16 +0000

Edit: Fixes suggested in the comments have been applied to this howto

We recently moved tech.nocr.at over to a bunch of VPSs in order to achieve some decent load balancing and speed. Even though SliceHost isn’t a sponsor, I’d like to give them a quick plug. SliceHost is easily the greatest VPS provider bar none. You pick the Distro you want, you tweak it, you set it up, all ports are available, you do as you wish. If you setup multiple VPS with them you can even have private IP’s between them in order to load balance or cluster. Prices start as low as $20/month. If you use them, click this link so that I can get some referral love. Now on to the article..

WordPress can be a blessing and a pain at the same time. It’s great for displaying dynamic content yet it’s displaying that exact dynamic content that can put a massive stress load on your system. WordPress’s query routines aren’t exactly the best. Let’s not even go into how much of a hog Apache can be, but for running dynamic content and prettying up your url’s, mod_rewrite can’t be beat. By using WP Super Cache to help reduce the load on your SQL queries and by placing Nginx in front of Apache as a reverse proxy, you’d be amazed and how quickly your site will load and respond, even enough to withstand a digg of slashdot effect.

Here’s what you are going to need.

This how-to system assumes that you have your Webserver running under a debian style distro like Ubuntu, but It can easily be modified for other distros like Fedora or CentOS.

Assuming that you already have WordPress running under Apache the first thing we are going to do is install the Wp-Super-Cache plugin and active it under your plugin folder of your WordPress installation. Pay close attention to the installation steps in the included readme.txt file, you have to follow each step properly in order to ensure proper caching.

Wp-Super-Cache creates static html files of your pages lessening the load on your SQL queries. Once you have it running and working let’s move on to our next step, reconfiguring Apache.

Apache can be a resource hog, especially when it has to span multiple child processes in order to serve up content. We are going to have to do some tweaking to apache’s conf file so that it will work behind Nginx.

Open up your /etc/apache2/ports.conf file

sudo nano /etc/apache2/ports.conf

We need to change Apache from port 80 to 8080 as Nginx will be server content to the real world via port 80.

Listen 8080

Next we are going to turn KeepAlives off on Apache since Nginx will be dealing with all of the actual browser connections. This will ensure that all of the child processes in Apache die quickly and don’t hang around chewing up memory

Find the KeepAlive entry in your /etc/apache2/apache2.conf file and set it to off

KeepAlive Off

Now that we have made the needed changes in apache we need to restart it so that they take effect.

sudo /etc/init.d/apache2 restart

Next we are going to install Nginx which is a powerful and extremely lightweight http server that is perfect for reverse proxying or load balancing to backend servers like Apache.

sudo apt-get update | sudo apt-get install nginx

Once nginx is installed we are going to need to modify it’s config file located at /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

sudo nano /etc/nginx/nginx.conf

Your conf file should look like this.

user www-data;
worker_processes  2;
 
error_log  /var/log/nginx/error.log;
pid        /var/run/nginx.pid;
 
events {
	worker_connections  1024;
}
 
http {
	include       /etc/nginx/mime.types;
	default_type  application/octet-stream;
	access_log  /var/log/nginx/access.log;
	sendfile        on;
	tcp_nopush     on;
	keepalive_timeout  3;
	tcp_nodelay        on;
	gzip  on;
	include /etc/nginx/sites-enabled/*;
}

Now we need to move on to the actual site config file for our Nginx setup

sudo nano /etc/nginx/sites-available/default

Your file should look something like this (replace domain.com of course)

server {
        listen   80;
        server_name  domain.com www.domain.com;
        error_log   /var/log/nginx/domain.com.error.log;
        access_log  /var/log/nginx/domain.com.access.log;
 
# Main location (path to you blog, relative to your domain root)
        location / {
            proxy_pass         http://127.0.0.1:8080/;
            proxy_redirect     off;
 
            proxy_set_header   Host             $http_host;
            proxy_set_header   X-Real-IP        $remote_addr;
            proxy_set_header   X-Forwarded-For  $proxy_add_x_forwarded_for;
 
            client_max_body_size       10m;
            client_body_buffer_size    128k;
 
            proxy_connect_timeout      90;
            proxy_send_timeout         90;
            proxy_read_timeout         90;
 
            proxy_buffer_size          4k;
            proxy_buffers              4 32k;
            proxy_busy_buffers_size    64k;
            proxy_temp_file_write_size 64k;
        }
 
    # Static files location
        location ~* ^.+\.(htm|html|jpg|jpeg|gif|png|ico|css|zip|tgz|gz|rar|bz2|doc|xls|exe|pdf|ppt|txt|tar|mid|midi|wav|bmp|rtf|js)$ {
            root   /;
        }
	# if the requested file exists, return it immediately
	if (-f $request_filename) {
	break;
	}
 
	set $supercache_file '';
	set $supercache_uri $request_uri;
 
	if ($request_method = POST) {
	set $supercache_uri '';
	}
 
	# Using pretty permalinks, so bypass the cache for any query string
	if ($query_string) {
	set $supercache_uri '';
	}
 
	if ($http_cookie ~* "comment_author_|wordpress|wp-postpass_" ) {
	set $supercache_uri '';
	}
 
	# if we haven't bypassed the cache, specify our supercache file
	if ($supercache_uri ~ ^(.+)$) {
	set $supercache_file /wp-content/cache/supercache/$http_host/$1index.html;
	}
 
	# only rewrite to the supercache file if it actually exists
	if (-f $document_root$supercache_file) {
	rewrite ^(.*)$ $supercache_file break;
	}
}

The above (especially the if statements) help Ngnix pass the static html files that are created by WP Super Cache directly to the users thus freeing up Apache to do nothing more than handle the dynamic requests.

Now it’s time to restart Ngnix and get the whole ball of wax working

/etc/init.d/nginx restart

What we have essentially done is taken the load of serving static files like images, css, and js files off of apache and passed it on to Ngnix which runs a lot faster and leaner than apache for serving static content. All requests for any dynamic content like php still gets passed on to apache. Clean and simple.

In closing let me mention that this is just what works for me, i’m sure that there might be a better way to use WP Super Cache and Ngnix to speed up WordPress, but what you see above has really helped with the load on both of the tech.nocr.at front-end web servers.

How To Speed Up WordPress With Nginx And WP Super Cache originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2008/08/11. Reproduction of content not allowed without consent.

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3G, GPS, MobileMe, Oh My

Frank — Tue, 10 Jun 2008 00:30:22 +0000

After all of the rumours (what else is new) the 3G iPhone is finally here.

Hits the shelves on July 11th (in Canada too!)
$199 for 8GB, $299 for 16GB
Black, with a white 16GB model
GPS

In a clear action of trying to play catch up to Google, Apple also announced a suite of software that will be revolutionary. (If they decided to roll it out in 2002). MobileMe is a much needed update to the .Mac system. MobileMe will let users log into a website using a billion dollar url; me.com, to access their email, address book, and calendar for a mere $99 a year, you know, much better than Google’s $0 a year charge.

On the plus side it will now be compatible with Windows, errr, oh yeah, Google’s bee there and done that too. Sounds like it should me meh.com and not me.com

For all of you hardcore, here’s the official Apple press release …

SAN FRANCISCOâ€”June 9, 2008â€”AppleÂ® today introduced the new iPhoneâ„¢ 3G, combining all the revolutionary features of iPhone with 3G networking that is twice as fast* as the first generation iPhone, built-in GPS for expanded location based mobile services, and iPhone 2.0 software which includes support for Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync and runs the hundreds of third party applications already built with the recently released iPhone SDK. In the US the new iPhone 3G is priced at a stunning $199 for the 8GB model, and just $299 for the 16GB model.** iPhone 3G will be available in more than 70 countries later this year, beginning with customer availability in 22 countriesâ€”Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, UK and the USâ€”on July 11.

â€œJust one year after launching the iPhone, weâ€™re launching the new iPhone 3G that is twice as fast at half the price,â€ said Steve Jobs, Appleâ€™s CEO. â€œ iPhone 3G supports Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync right out of the box, runs the incredible third party apps created with the iPhone SDK, and will be available in more than 70 countries around the world this year.â€

iPhone 3G gives users ever faster access to the Internet and email over their cellular network with quad-band GSM and tri-band HSDPA for voice and data connectivity around the world. iPhone 3G supports Wi-Fi, 3G and EDGE networks and automatically switches between them to ensure the fastest possible download speeds. The new iPhone 3G also makes it easier to multi-task with simultaneous voice and data communications, so with iPhone 3G you can browse the web, get map directions, or check your email while you are on a call.
iPhone 3G includes the new iPhone 2.0 software with both the iPhone SDK and key enterprise features such as support for Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync to provide over-the-air push email, contact and calendar syncing as well as remote wipe and Cisco IPsec VPN for encrypted access to corporate networks. The iPhone SDK allows developers to create amazing applications that leverage the iPhoneâ€™s groundbreaking Multi-Touchâ„¢ user interface, animation technology, accelerometer and GPS technology on the worldâ€™s most advanced mobile platform.

iPhone 3G includes the new App Store, providing iPhone users with native applications in a variety of categories including games, business, news, sports, health, reference and travel. The App Store on iPhone works over cellular networks and Wi-Fi, which means it is accessible from just about anywhere, so you can purchase and download applications wirelessly and start using them instantly. Some applications are even free and the App Store notifies you when application updates are available. The App Store will be available in 62 countries at launch.
Additional features available with the iPhone 2.0 software include the ability to do real-time mapping and track your progress with GPS technology, mass move and delete multiple email messages, search for contacts, access a new scientific calculator, turn on parental control restrictions for specified content, save images directly from a web page or email them to your iPhone and easily transfer them back to your photo library on your MacÂ® or PC. iPhone 3G delivers an amazing 10 hours of talk time on 2G networks and 5 hours using 3G, with up to 5 to 6 hours of web browsing, up to 7 hours for video playback and up to 24 hours for audio playback.

iPhone 3G takes advantage of MobileMeâ„¢, a new Internet service that pushes email, contacts, and calendars from an online â€œcloudâ€ to native applications on iPhone, iPodÂ® touch, Macs and PCs. With MobileMe email, messages are pushed instantly to iPhone, removing the need to manually check email and wait for downloads, and push keeps contacts and calendars continuously up-to-date so changes made on one device are automatically updated on other devices. With iPhone, you can even snap a photo and post it directly to a MobileMe Gallery to share with friends and family.
iPhone 3G will be available in the US on July 11 for a suggested retail price of $199 (US) for the 8GB model and $299 (US) for the 16GB model in both Apple and AT&Tâ€™s retail stores and requires a new two year contract with AT&T for qualifying customers. iPhone 2.0 software will be available on July 11 as a free software update via iTunesÂ® 7.7 or later for all iPhone customers. For further information about iPhone 3G pricing and availability in the US and internationally, visit www.apple.com/iphone.

*Based on 3G and EDGE testing. Actual speeds vary by site conditions.
**Based on iPhone 3G (8GB) and first generation iPhone (8GB) purchases. Requires new two year AT&T rate plan, sold separately.
Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple II and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the Macintosh. Today, Apple continues to lead the industry in innovation with its award-winning computers, OS X operating system and iLife and professional applications. Apple is also spearheading the digital media revolution with its iPod portable music and video players and iTunes online store, and has entered the mobile phone market with its revolutionary iPhone.

3G, GPS, MobileMe, Oh My originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2008/06/09. Reproduction of content not allowed without consent.

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10.5.2 Is Here

Frank — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 14:00:28 +0000

The latest release for Macâ€™s latest OS, Leopard, is now available. The Update fixes a whole slew of bugs and quirks which have been plaguing the OS.

After installing 10.5.2 itâ€™s also recommended that users install the 48.9 megabyte Leopard Graphics Update 1.0 to fix some other issues that will speed up you system.

While you can visit Appleâ€™s site here to get a full list of bug and security fixes, these are the highlights:

Resolves Airport issues that result in kernel panics when running certain programs
Updated Stacks option adds “folder view” for all of us annoyed at seeing a document or file instead of our folder of choice.
You can turn off menu bar transparency (that should thrill many) and overall menu translucency has been reduced.
Fixed an issue where set-up assistant could randomly start up
Adds a menu bar option for accessing Time Machine
Additional RAW and iSynch support for new devices

All in all a worthy update.

10.5.2 Is Here originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2008/02/12. Reproduction of content not allowed without consent.

USB Time Waster

Frank — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 15:46:15 +0000

Here is just what everyone needs, a useless USB toy to take up hours and hours of your time. Iâ€™ll give it credit, itâ€™s a lot of fun. The USB boxer adds some fun to itâ€™s on screen game. Punches are controlled on the keyboard while the boxer throws his best at the speed ball.

Unfortunately you can only pick it up in bulk (minimum order of 12) for â‚¤29.99 each here

USB Time Waster originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2008/02/05. Reproduction of content not allowed without consent.

IR Speeds Hit 1Gbps

Frank — Sat, 19 Jan 2008 00:09:10 +0000

Truth be told that the IR (Infared) port on my PDA’s and old laptops never saw much use since it was painfully slow to actually do anything via IR, and with Bluetooth and WiFi dominating the wireless transfer airwaves why would anyone bother with that old IR technology? KDDI R&D Laboratories are about to change the way you look at IR with it’s new technology that enables the IR transfer speed to hit a whopping 1Gbps shattering the old theory that you could only get 4Mbps out of it. Not only that, but they achieved the 1Gbps in a stable environment. KDDI claims that they can transfer an entire music CD in under a second.

I sure hope that can retrofit this new technology into my old hardware. Infared never looked so good.

IR Speeds Hit 1Gbps originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2008/01/18. Reproduction of content not allowed without consent.

MacHeist – 12 Days Left

Frank — Fri, 11 Jan 2008 14:56:56 +0000

The uber-ly popular MacHeist is back, and you only have 12 days left. For those of you who don’t know what MacHeist is, it’s a way to purcahse a bunch of apps together at one low price.

Based on the number of packages that are purchased more applications are unlocked for your loving. For example once they hit 5,000 bundles sold they will unlock CSSEdit. As for Snapz Pro and Pixelmator we will only know the number of bundles require after the 5,000 for CSSEdit has been hit.

Confused yet? I was, but if you stroll on over to macheist.com you’ll get a better flavour for how all of this works. It has been greatly successful in the past and you get some awesome software for $49. At the time of this release here are the packages that are already available.

1password – Password Manager
Coversutra – iTunes Controller
Cha-Ching – Money Management
iStop Motion – Stop Motion Video
Awaken – Alarm Clock for your Mac
Speed Download+ – Download Manager
AppZapper – App Uninstaller
TaskPaper – Task Management
CSSEdit (5,000 buys) – CSS Editor
Snapz Pro (Locked) – Screen Capture
Pixelmator (Locked) – Image Editor

If you haven’t jumped on this great bundle of software then do it now. I want my Pixelmator.

MacHeist – 12 Days Left originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2008/01/11. Reproduction of content not allowed without consent.

Automator Image Tweaking

Frank — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 22:12:27 +0000

When you write for a blog one of the most time consuming things you do, besides actually working on the text, is to work on images. Resizing, cropping, etc..

The guys at tuaw have come up with a pretty easy step by step on creating an Automator plugin that will allow you to manipulate images quickly. You will need Pixelmator installed to pull this off, but let me tell you something, it will greatly speed up the process of making quick tweaks to your images.

tuaw – Link to article

Automator Image Tweaking originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2008/01/08. Reproduction of content not allowed without consent.

RAID Primer

Frank — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 16:44:32 +0000

Now that some of us got shinny new external hard drive units that support RAID I figured we might as well go through a basic RAID primer for all so everyone know the difference between 1, 0, and 5, I know it gets confusing.

With technology advancing at lightening speeds what was once only available to higher end users or server based environment is now available to the average user. RAID is the best way to ensure that you have some form of redundancy for your data. RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, RAID 1+0 all of this can be very confusing.

RAID (Redundant array of independent disks, formerly redundant array of inexpensive disks) is in short a failover system for hard drives. A certain number of hard drives (2-4) work together as one logical drive. If anyone of those disks fails at any time none of the data is lost, you simply have to replace the failed drive and the system will automatically rebuild the array.

RAID comes in many flavours.

RAID 0 (also known as a stripe set or striped volume). This is essentially a JBOB (Just a bunch of disks) configuration and provides no data redundancy and is not recommended for maintaining data integrity. Essentially you add up the space of two hard drives (or more) and it will show up as a single big drive.

RAID 1 creates an exact copy or mirror of a set of data. This is great for ensuring that data integrity is maintained because if any disk fails the other one immediately takes over and is completely transparent to the user.

Raid 5 uses stripping to both provide performance and redundancy. By using a min of 3 disks you can achieve super fast speeds and complete data redundancy, as long as only one drive dies. If multiple hard drives fail you will lose all your data. You generally get 75% of your total drive capacity in order to maintain speed and redundancy.

Bottom line is if your external storage unit supports RAID then don’t be afraid to use it, you’ll eventually come to a point when a hard drive fails, and believe me they do, and you’ll be thankful that you have some form of redundancy available to ensure your data hasn’t been lost.

RAID Primer originally appeared on tech.nocr.at on 2007/12/29. Reproduction of content not allowed without consent.

416GB Solid State Drive