Its not the hardware (tablets)

There has been all this talk about tablets lately (thanks to apple) but I hear so many reasons why tablets haven't taken off (and MS has been pushing tablets for close to ten years); to me its the software. I am typing this out on my HTC TyTN II and it, even though it is mobile is sub optimal in terms of software, I try to just use my fingers for some apps but others I must use a pen, and still others I have to flip out my keyboard... Its the software people, make software where people can effectively us all apps with their fingers, and encourage useful innovative apps on of course reasonable hardware and tablets will be gold. I wouldn't mind having one if I cal run home automation software, home theater/universal remote software, multi-format ebook reader, front mounted camera for video chat and yeah I might splurge... I am really leaning towards some sort of Android Internet tablet as I don't see the need for much storage when I have multiple terrabytes of network accessible storage in my house. There are lots of android tablets out there now but there is talk that the next version of android will have lots of tablet optimizations so as hard as it will be I think I will hang on a bit longer and take a looksee at tablets with this new Android tablet optimized OS when it comes out (sometime next year). Until then I will continue struggling with trying to set my 6.x WinMo phone up as my univ-remote... sigh.

Heating Issues

Heating Issues
Originally uploaded by gaikokujinkyofusho

Well I am in the middle of a Southern Azeri winter, which is about like winter in the Southeastern US, pretty mild. This is my second winter in Azerbaijan so I had an idea of what to expect, of the weather and I thought of the heating in the house I am staying in. Many of the houses here are heated by steam radiators which would be ok if there was enough gas; the primary heater in this town, little surprise given Azerbaijan's oil but the surprise was that the gas pressure was pathetic last year and would often go out (which was a particular pain because here the water tank heating mechanism consists of an open pipe spewing gas that you just light a match and pray it doesn't set off some chain reaction throughout the town). The person that lived in the house before me apparently didn't like heating with wood stoves so I got through most of last winter with a dinky wood stove and the leftover wood reserves. When I was first told “there is a wood stove stored at your house” by my staff I envisioned a nice old cast iron stove… oh well. This one is made of sheet-metal and while it doesn't retain heat worth anything it does heat up the room. This year the gas pressure is pretty good AND I got a heater that has a auto-shutoff mechanism on it so if the town gas goes off then back on this stove shuts off and stays off (as opposed to just a pipe with no mechanism which would just spew gas as soon as the gas came back on). Anyway, after a bit of thought I don't really remember seeing cast iron stoves outside of the N. America and Europe.

Fantasies of a computer hobbyist

Asides from the obvious (lewd) ones which I will not go into I am dreaming of an i7 Core with USB v3.0. Yup, those are the two biggies for me. Of course gratuitous amounts of memory (4+ gigabytes, which means i would need a 64bit OS which again means i would need a realtively powerful [or at least new] computer), a really fast hard drive etc but right now I need a fast processor and speedy external storage.

I am working on three huge tasks which require CPUs of the workhorse variety.

Task #1 Graphics: I have about 35,000 photos that I am sifting through and organizing. This involves everything from image stitching to geotagging to retouching to IPTC keyword tagging etc and in large batches.

Task #2 Audio: I have about 28,000 songs to sift through, the sifting is apparently the most laborious part as I have whole albums that I only one 2-3 songs out of but there is other stuff such as adding acoustical fingerprints, MusicBrainz IDs, finding duplicates, etc.

Task 3# Video: I have video from the internet, and tons of video from the past 8 years of digital camera ownership. I want to start chopping, cropping, combining, and editing this stuff into something watchable (to just string all the stuff together would be insanely boring to watch).

Geekness (techno geek, not the chicken head eating geek): This isn't a task but is a point dealing with techno-lust. I  love linux, i don't use it nearly as much as i would like primarily because the majority of applications i need are  windows  only (though the things i use the most , like Opera, are also available in linux). There is a way to run two operating systems at once (wrap your head around that!) with virtualization but that requires heaps of memory and a hefty CPU doesn't hurt. As I alluded to previously a 32bit operating system  has a 2 gigabyte memory limit, that is i don't think it can use more than 2gb of memory no matter how much memory you actually have installed so to run dual operating systems (running windows 7 inside of linux) would require alot of memory and in order to use all the physical memory installed you need a 64bit OS)... got it? Not to mention that alot of video/audio/graphic editing (especially batch editing) requires insane amounts of memory.

All of the above requires semi-to-very serious processing power (which the i7 will handily be able to provide) and serious storage (not to mention read/write speeds). A geek reading this might say “what about eSATA?!” but if you look at the USB v3.0 speeds (4gbit/sec) compared to eSATA II (3Gbit/sec) there is no comparison. Of course the biggest problems now are that 

#1 Due to my globetrotting line of work I need something semi-portable (which means a mobile Core i7 [Clarksfield] which won’t be out for another month or two and won’t come down to a price that mere mortals can afford until after the new year) 
#2 USB v3.0 isn’t expected to be out en masse until mid 2010, Windows 7 doesn’t even have drivers for it yet.

As painful as it will certainly be I am thinking I need to hold off until the second quarter of 2010 at least before I get something. By then hopefully USB v3 will be out, prices will have come down, software support will be out (with major bugs fixed)… but damn that’s a long time to wait.

GPS Rox!!!

Well I *finally* got around to incorporating GPS data into my pictures, first I had to get my hands on a GPS device then some software that could match the time stamps of the photos to the times that each coordinate was taken (Turn on tracking on the GPS device) and viola! The Latitude and Longitude data is embedded in the JPEG photo. I know most people are like “so what” well with this you can see exactly where you took the picture. There are softwares that use online maps (IDimager, Picoplo, and WWMX to name a few) and there are online services that will automatically place the pictures on a map. I use Fickr.com and they have this service so if you click on some of my newer pictures and then select “map” (on the right under “Additional Information”) it will show you where the picture was taken on a map, nice!

Water/Thermoelectric cooling for everything!

Ok, not for everything. I was thinking about how hot my office chair gets and how to avoid the sweaty back syndrome. The chair is oh so cushy (good) but I am not sure the same level of cushiness could be maintained if ventilation was added so I was thinking why not a cooled chair? My folks have a Volvo and nice as it is my favorite part (in the winter at least) is the heated seats if it works for warming a car seat then why not cooling an office chair? Well I’m no engineer but having tinkered with computer overclocking and modding I have toyed (a wee bit) with peltier coolers and it seems to me that a combo of water and peltier cooling could make for a pretty comfy chair… though I could be wrong.