It almost makes me wish I had an iPhone by HMX
Having recently come into possession of an iPod Touch, I am now learning the joys of the App Store. For what I need, the Touch is great but there are times when I wish I had a built in mic like the iPhone. One reason, to record lectures and meetings, is functional while the other is pure fun. I don’t care about VoIP. The number one reason for Touch owners to demand a mic is a app by Smule called ‘I am T-Pain’. It’s an auto-tuner in your pocket that I believe allows you to sing along with various T-Pain tracks. It may allow you to do more but I’ll never know as I have no iPhone and I don’t see the iPhone moving to a decent carrier in the US anytime soon. For those of you with iPhones, the app is $3 and is sure to keep you and your friends entertained long enough to justify the cost. Video after the break. (more…)
On ‘Real’ Math vs ‘Fake’ Math by HMX
How hard drive space has been a contentious issue for quite a while. The issue is that when one purchases a 500GB or worse, a 2TB hard drive, they get home only to discover that their new drive shows up as anything but what it is listed as. Some attribute this to hard drive manufactures using ‘fake’ – or base 10 – math to accurately represent the metric kilo, mega, giga and tera prefixes. The confusion comes from the historic fact that at one point in time 210, a value of 1024, was approximated with the metric kilo prefix. As I’m sure you are well aware, 1000(or 103 as implied by kilo) ≠ 1024(210). When it was first used, the error involved ~2.34%. For an 80MB hard drive, this was acceptable. As hard drives increased into the 100s, 1000s and 1000000s of MBs, the error involved in this historic approximation became more and more pronounced as manufacturers stuck to the strict SI definition of each prefix while operating systems continued to rely upon base 2, or binary, definitions. (more…)
On Discovering Discovery by HMX
In the late summer of 2003, when I had the pleasure of hearing The Postal Service being played in a Biloxi Hot Topic, I must admit that I was smitten. Being a fan of 80s synthpop bands such as The Petshop Boys and Depeche Mode, I immediately latched on to this new band and was even treated to a delightful tale as to how they came to name the band. It has now been 6 years since that faithful trip and I have remained faithful to the Postal Service, but with no new album in site, I have had to begin looking for new sources of similar sound to fill the gaping hole left by Ben and Jimmy. (more…)
Update: New Look! by HMX
Here is something that I’ve been working on for the past few weeks. I originally took inspiration from Photocrati Lightbox theme, but couldn’t see myself paying for something that I could recreate myself. This has been a long, and frustrating, endeavor as I attempted to automate and integrate as much as possible. I wanted to keep the webcam, but I wanted it fully integrated with the Nextgen Gallery plugin. After many late nights, I believe I have come up with a solution that works. As I have only tested it myself, I thought that I could roll out the new design – in celebration of the Blythe New Year – and leave a camera pointed out my window while Oppenheimer and I take a trip to warmer climates.
During that time, I hope that what few readers I have will visit and enjoy the view from my living room window. If you notice that anything is broken, please leave a comment here and I will try to address it as soon as possible. Commenting should be open, so there is no need to register. You’re comments might not immediately appear the first time, but once I approve them then you should be good to go from now and until eternity. Let me know what is broken, how the site looks in whatever browser you are using. If something is off, could you try to do a screen capture and post it here for me to see along with your browser name and version.
I admit, if you use IE then things will probably look horrid. I am a Mac and linux user and I’ve viewed the site primarily on webkit/khtml and gecko based browsers only. I have tried to stick to standards and there is some CSS3 thrown in – mostly for @font-face support – so as long as your browser is well behaved, the site should be well behaved. In the case of IE lte 7, your millage may vary. That being said, even with IE 8 something things might not look as I expect them to. As it stands, the site on my MBP looks almost identical in Firefox 3.5 and Safari 4. When I land in Phoenix tomorrow, I’ll check things and try to post screenshots of what the site should look like. I’ll also be posting more pictures of a younger Oppie that were left on Blythe’s machine.
Update: Commenting should now work, I hope. If not, send me an @ msg on twitter or find me on fb.
Links:
Safari 4
Firefox 3.5
Opera 10
