January 16, 2005
Digital Happiness
To get over the temporary gloom in my life, I decided to bring in some digital happiness. I replaced my CRT monitor with a Samsung Syncmaster 17-inch LCD. Given its performance, I didn't bother to look at the BenQs and LGs making rounds at the local computer hardware shops. Supposedly Umax also has good performance LCDs. But nothing beats a Samsung when you club features, quality and price together (atleast here in India). There's one negative about this particular model, though. It does not have a DVI input. But that hardly matters. Plus having a DVI input shoots up the price of an LCD. So unless you are an imaging professional (they have better LCDs available to them) or a crazy geek, you are better off with an analog input. Oh and if you have never heard words like sub-pixel death, contrast ratios and ghosting, you should definitely take a look at Anandtech's LCD primer.
May 30, 2004
Nintendo DS
Like countless others feel, the Nintendo DS reminds me of the Donkey Kong Game&Watch video games of the 1980s. Although I never owned one, I used to play and envy one that belonged to my friend. Atleast now, I can download an emulator for DK. Oh, it feels like childhood again.:)
June 28, 2003
Zippo all the way
With a 70 year history and more than 300 million zippos sold, Zippo surely has a sizable fan following. But this - A site dedicated to Zippo tricks is what any fan could ask for. And if you want to personalise a zippo and then do tricks, it's possible too. What about me? Well, give me a reason to light a fire, I haven't any. What's a zippo? If you haven't guessed that, keep guessing.
June 16, 2003
Women of the species
How do you relate the words `geek' and `woman'? Not probably. Absolutely not when the words are `hacker' and `woman'. How often have you heard about a female hacker? While I have read about a few of them, till date, I have never met a girl geek. If you leave aside the sexist explanations that men generally have to offer, I am sometimes perplexed by the almost absence of woman from the geek culture. After all, there are lots of smart and intelligent women, more so in India.
I found some balanced reasoning on infotrope.net, CDNE and ABC News. There are a few more people discussing this.
May 15, 2003
Nmap Reloaded
With a big discussion going on Slashdot about a good Matrix:Reloaded review, it will surely increase traffic on the various P2P networks around the world. I'd rather watch it in a theatre. Especially when the guys are shown as using Nmap in the movie. Yeah! Nmap for scanning an IPV4 host and connecting to the host via SSH. As someone said, they haven't adopted IPV6 even after 5 generations of Zion! Check out the screenshots of Nmap used in the movie.
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January 17, 2003
Stealth Pranks
Far from the kiddish pranks we used to do in school and college to derive eternal pleasure, these guys from the New Mexico Tech college were up for some cool pranks. They had formed a small group called the Stealth Force Beta which did what they called "Constructive Vandalism". For example, they put up a rival college's banners on the tallest building of their campus to fire up their own college buddies and boost the school spirit. MIT has had such enthusiastic students for a long time. In fact they are the indisputable leaders in this prank playing business - hacks.mit.edu.
December 21, 2002
Software Defined Radio
You guessed it. GNU Radio. A radio whose channel modulation waveforms are defined by software. The waveforms are generated as sampled digital signals, converted to analog using a wideband DAC. For the receiver, a wide band ADC captures all channels and demodulates the waveforms using software on a general purpose processor. 
Can't seem to grasp all this? Doesn't matter. Just imagine that using a small hardware and some software, you can tell the radio to do things ranging from making beeps to receiving a FM channel. Or if you don't want to miss Radio City 91 while listening to Win94.6 or Radio Mirchi, it can play both the channels for you. You can even convert the box into a ham radio. All this with the power of Open Source. Salon says, "GNU Radio is a steppingstone to the ultimate hybrid device: a handheld PC that can be converted into a walkie-talkie one minute and an HDTV the next."
November 29, 2002
MTBlogTimes
Inspired by Brad
Chaote and Adam
Kalsey's never-say-not-possible MT plugins, I came up with a wierd thought
of plotting the post times of my blog in a timespan of 24 hours. And I knew
it might not be impossible, even though I had never ever peeked into the MT
code and plugin API. And here I am, after 3 days of poking and probing through
MT plugin API and Brad and Kalsey's plugins. This goes miles to prove how very
well Ben Trott has created the MT API. They are damn easy to code!
MTBlogTimes creates a chart which plots the time of your posts(in
a specified period) on a bar of the 24 hours of the day. I haven't found any
apparent advantage of doing so. Well, probably someone will devise a way of
using this too. Say like, analysing the blog patterns for various blogs (provided
everyone shared their blogtimes) .. or like finding out a true blogomaniac,
a person who blogs all day... Nevertheless the resulting graphic looks cool. Check it out -
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November 27, 2002
MIDI, MP3 & Piano
Digital Piano shootouts are done using a single MIDI file, from which an MP3/Wav is created on each digital piano. They are then compared for their closeness to a real piano and then rated accordingly. This is because digital pianos have wave samples using which they reproduce a real sound from binary data. As sampling = compromise on quality, it all really boils down to how close are the wave samples of the digital piano, to a real piano. Better the sampling rate, better the quality e.g. 44Khz(CD quality) sampling is better than 22Khz(Audio Cassette quality).
November 21, 2002
Geek Darci
Darci Wood, girlfriend of Kevin Mitnick, seems to be a hardcore geek. She works at TechTV, has worked on the TRS-80, likes the light saber, has [H]ardOCP and 2600.com among her favourite links and finally blogs about Kevin. Looks like Kevin has got the right match.
Don't ask who is Kevin Mitnick. Agreed, he was no better than other crackers in his deeds(if they were ever half as true), but he is a true hacker also. FYI, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak were phreakers before they started Apple.
September 26, 2002
37-on-1
I had made it only till 5 - RH Linux 6.2, Win98, Win2k Pro, QNX RTP and BeOS 5 Pro. Although i could have managed to push in 2 more, DOS 6.22 and Win3.1, I lost my patience after that. This guy managed till 37!!. He was able to put 37 operating systems on a single PC.
May 21, 2002
Samsung means to come.
June 03, 2001
Nether
If you have atleast heard of the Commodore 64, you sure will like this. Computer Workshops Inc. have come up with a web browser for the C64!! These guys have also developed a 3-D, texturemapping and lightsourcing action game in real time on a stock C64. It's called Nether.
Although, I never got the opportunity to use a C64, I used to dream about owning one when I was a kid. Heck, I have heard of some guys who have bought it and never unpacked it!! I cannot tell them how much they have missed all these years!! :-(
May 19, 2001
MIT hacks
[archive] Have you ever played a good funny prank on your professors? You must be short of new ideas. Well, you can learn from the MIT experience - hacks.mit.edu
May 17, 2001
WM Quake
So you are a hardcore Quake fan. And you want to play Quake I in a 64x64 screen docked in WindowMaker. Well, Here you are - WMQuake
Sketchy Quake
Sketchy Quake Does the term `Non-Photorealistic Rendering' ring something in your ears? And how it is related to Quake III ?? Puzzled??? Check out NPRQuake
