Early Morning

      Most people like to wake up to the smell of coffee, read a newspaper, check out the news online, perhaps stretch a little, maybe even have sex and that's a great way to start the day. But for me ..honestly speaking there's nothing better than a panic attack and a great feeling of dread, to get you out of bed.

      Besides waking up with a headache ( as usual) today I also woke up to find that my PC was not working. On turning it on it would simply stand by, with both fans at max power and do nothing.  My first thought was that there might be something wrong the the CPU ..in which case I was screwed. But after about 30 seconds the motherboard ( Asus P5KC) beeped. One long beep followed by 3 short ones. That was a decent sign for me, so I got out my handy "Beep codes and you" manual ( i'm kidding I got the mb's manual) and found out that one long beep followed by 3 shorter ones means there is no VGA input. So the video card was to blame( nVidia Geforce 8800 GTS 512). Now this may have also screwed me, because upon adding the second fan to my GPU aka ..opening it up I had lost my warranty. I checked the connections, the wires and everything because it's easy to dislodge the board out of it's proper place, but there was nothing wrong.  I then proceeded to taking it out, and putting it back in. Fortunately that worked and everything came back to normal...almost. Because after I booted Windows i quickly got a BSOD, but it seems it only was a one-time event. Now I'm off to have my coffee. Cheers

iPhone Bug

This is probably the weirdest thing that ever happened to me on a phone, not just on a iPhone.

Today I was sitting next to a friend, both of us with iPhones. I was using the new Yahoo Messenger app while he was streaming radio over 3G. Meanwhile another person, outside of the building, with another iPhone sent HIM an SMS message. Now here comes the weird part: I received the message, and it displayed it with the contact info from my friend's phone. And I didn't even have that person's number on my cell!

Most people would jump and say it was addressed wrong or that I was using the other phone, but I wasn't and it wasn't. When the 3rd person came by, we all checked the addressing ( which was a reply to an earlier message), the numbers and everything.  When I checked my SMS app, the message was gone, it was never saved, nor opened, only displayed. Everything was correct, but I got the info/sms and my friend didn't receive anything. 

We then proceeded to test the phones in different scenarios to try and recreate the bug but we couldn't. I checked around the net for anything related to this but it seems this is the first ever.

PS: here's some info on the phones: all of them are 3g phones, my friend's and the 3rd person's being jailbreaked while mine is legitimate.

 If anyone hears anything about this I'd appreciate a reply or something. Cheers

Yahoooo Messenger

     As some of you may know Yahoo announced a few days ago they would be launching a new app for the iPhone, the Messenger app. Well today was that day and the app is out. You can find it on the AppStore, but right now it's only available on the US Store. So I decided to check it out.

    The first thing you must remember is that YAHOO! is NOT THE SAME THING as YAHOO! MESSENGER. I had no idea there were two apps flying around, both official yahoo stuff. The first one "Yahoo!" would actually be cute if it wasn't utter crap. It's an app designed to give you all your yahoo stuff, such as e-mails, news, messenger, flickr, etc all in one app. The idea is nice, the design is actually very nice but the implementation is very bad. The app is slow, refreshes all the time and  I actually made it crash twice by pressing two buttons on the screen at the same time. You don't get any notifications on new messages and well ..it's simply useless. The only thing it would be good at ( in my opinion) is for reading the news but of course you can do that via Safari or any of other 1000 news related apps.

    The second app, and the one I was originally looking for is Yahoo!Messenger. Their icons are the same except the Messenger one has a yellow smiley on it. Well this app is great. Though a friend of mine complained it was sluggish, I didn't experience any problems with it. The design is great, simple and direct, you can change your status, you can even host a link, you can send pictures ( tried it and it worked great) either from your library or by taking a pic right there. Aaaa it still has a few more features but I don't remember them right now. Anyway it really is excellent, supersedes Palringo and OneConnect and especially Fring.

 If you want a full list of features, and some more info you can visit the Y! Messenger Blog. Oh and I also embedded the presentation video for the app. Cheers

OnLive at GDC 09

 I've seen the future and I love it.

Here's a great and descriptive article about OnLive, a service/platform/thingy that may actually revolutionize the way we download, buy, and use games as well as making consoles obsolete. I wish I had the time (but I don't) to write about it a little more.

Be sure to read it, it's great, it's amazing and it sounds like the future. Thanks V for the article.

Cheers

iPhone OS 3.0

       Hello. A few days ago, Apple had a developer conference in which they revealed the new software for the iPhone and iPod touch. the 3.0 OS that will be released some time this summer, and alongside it the new 3.0 SDK ( which is already available as a beta). I have to say it's packed with features, some useful some not so much, some that should have been there from the start, but overall it's going to be a nice release, fixing many problems and making life just a little easier. Here are some of the most waited for and most important features you can expect :

• First of all for developers, the SDK features about 1000 new APIs for you to use while coding. These include, the ability to insert a google map into your app, the ability to add in-app payments ( such as for subscriptions and buying new levels for a game) and many many more.
• Now for the average consumer. Well they added the so much awaited and anticipated copy/cut/paste feature that works across all basic applications. You can now select part of a text, or the whole text and paste it wherever you like whether it is in a note, sms or e-mail.
• They also added MMS support. Yes you can now send multimedia messages, sounds, pictures and even contacts over the cellular data network.
• They finally added search across many applications, not the least being the iPod app.
• Alongside search, or as an extention, they added Spotlight. Yes the same spotlight as on the Mac OSX. Every time you drag towards the right of the home-screen you'll go to a whole new screen where you can search in the entire phone for a name, a number or an address. It finds everything from contacts and songs, to calendar appointments.
• Another new and awaited feature they added p2p ( peer to peer) connectivity  over bluetooth. You can now play multiplayer games over it, and if i remember right you're also able to send contacts via bluetooth from one phone to another.
• They tweaked around different apps, added the "landscape" mode for the keyboard ( meaning the big keyboard) in apps such as SMS and E-mail so you can now write easier and faster.
• They also added some extra support for different calendar appointments stuff ( i never use those)
• They added Push support for many many apps and now developers can encode push into their apps for you to use.
• Safari has a few improvements such as phishing filters.

 There are many many new features alongside these but these are probably the most important and most sought after ( alongside Flash support which is still nowhere near in sight). If you want to watch the whole keynote you can find it here.

In case you were wondering, this update is absolutely free for everyone that has an iPhone ( including 1.0 firmware), and costs about 12$ for the iPod Touch. And it will be shipped some time during Q2 or even more likely Q3 of this year.

That's it. Cheers

Macgyvering Around

Wohoo Oh my God ..it's great to write this. I've had a truly great day in such a geeky fashion.  First of all ..I was asked a few days ago to get together a few pieces to try and make a decent computer out of them that would last for another 3-4 years.  So I put on my " buy geeky stuff"� hat ..and got together an Asus P5QL-PRO, an Intel Core 2 Duo at 2.8 Ghz and a Gigabyte GeForce 9600GT GPU. This was only the beginning of everything.

I came back home with  everything and started assembling them. I had no box, so I just put them together on the floor to see if everything checks out and to install Windows. Unfortunately I had no more money to buy RAM so I'm just using my old cards which are 2x Geil 512 ~ 667. So only 1 gig of RAM and Windows 7 still runs excellent, I'm really hyped about it.

When I started to piece everything together I realized I had only one power source powerful enough to get everything running and that was inside my own computer. So I took apart my own PC which was kind of painful to do ..mostly because nothing really fits the way it should inside the box and it's all macgyvered together. Anyway I took out my power source and installed Win 7 on the new PC.

Meanwhile a friend of mine was playing around with my own GPU Asus nVidia GeForce 8800GTS 512. And we got to talking about how it gets really hot ( it idles at 70C) and the box that I have is in no way helping and how there should be a second fan on it.  Then, noticing I actually did have a spare fan around, we reckoned we should do our best to fit it on the card. Now ..the next part of the story is told in pictures so bear with me.

This was what we were trying to do: to fit the fan on the left on the radiator of the GPU after we had taken out the plastic part that belonged to Asus.

We cut through the plastic with a heated blade, making an air intake.

Meanwhile my own PC seeing what we were doing to the poor card had begun to "turn into monster"

After almost 2 hours ..yes that's how long it took us to cut through that useless plastic, this was the end result. A double fanned GPU. And though it may not look much ..that little fan actually keeps my card 20 degrees cooler, maxing out at 61C after 2 hours or heavy ultra graphics gaming. Yeap, that was my day and I have to say I had tons of fun with it. Cheers