Ubuntu Linux on Sony Vaio UX series

Found this at jkOnTheRun: Installing Ubuntu Dapper Drake onSony UX17.

Google Maps + Google Video + Mashup - Claude Lelouch's Rendezvous

Now you can see the famous video and the accompanying map at the same time.

BTW: according to Memory of the Stands, the car was not a Ferrari, but the Mercedes of Claude Lelouch, who was driving himself.

Cars movie starting in September

The new Disney/Pixar movie Cars is starting in Europe in September. In the US the DVD is coming in November.

NewerTech ATA/ATAPI/IDE/SATA to USB 2.0 universal adapter

NewerTech has a ATA/ATAPI/IDE/SATA to USB 2.0 universal adapter, too.

Luxury, please.

From 11/16 to 11/19 the Luxury, please. the luxury experience, is happening in the Imperial Halls of the Hofburg Vienna, Austria.

Rallye Trieste-Vienna

Today, August, the 26th, the 4. Trieste-Vienna Classic Rallye ended at the Rathausplatz in Vienna, Austria. Very rarely you see so many gorgeous cars in one place.

Skyday 2006

The Skyday 2006 takes place from 8/25 to 8/27 in Vienna, Austria, at the Papstwiese near the Danube Tower.

Pirate Party launches world's first commercial Darknet Relakks

The Swedish Pirate Party launched a new Internet service called Relakks, that lets anybody send and receive files and information over the Internet without fear of being monitored or logged. In technical terms, such a network is called a "darknet". The service allows people to use an untraceable address in the darknet, where they cannot be personally identified. Cost is 5 Euros per month.

minixpress external case for 2.5" S-ATA hard drives

Transintl.com has an external case for 2.5" S-ATA hard drives called minixpress 825. It offers USB2, FireWire400 and 2 FireWire800 ports. The empty case to put in your own hard drive costs 99$. Especially useful if you put a bigger hard drive in your MacBook, MacBook Pro or Mac mini. Now with the minixpress you can use your old drive as a backup medium.

megazoomer, full screen windows for MacOSX

megazoomer 0.4.1 brings full-screen windows to MacOSX. Just press Command-Enter, and the front-most window grows to fill your entire monitor. Press the same keys, and it shrinks again. Only works for Cocoa apps. BTW: the older versions of megazoomer caused errors in AppleScript based apps, e.g. iSquint.

Alsoft DiskWarrior for MacOSX offers scavenge mode

Just found the following hint from Rob Griffiths at macworld.com about Alsoft DiskWarrior:

DiskWarrior Scavenge mode: If you hold down the Option key in DiskWarrior’s window, the Rebuild button changes to read Scavenge. In Scavenge mode, DiskWarrior will look at the entire directory structure, not just those portions that are damaged. Note that the technique used in Scavenge is the same as that used in Rebuild; it’s just that all of the directory is examined. As such, you only need to use Scavenge when the disk’s directory is fine, but you suspect that there’s data missing. As explained in the DiskWarrior manual: Therefore, you do not need to make DiskWarrior scavenge the directory except when DiskWarrior states “All file and folder data was easily located” in the DiskWarrior Report, but you suspect that files and/or folders are still missing from the replacement directory.

BTW: even though DiskWarrior is still my number one tool for fixing problems with hard drives, don´t forget there is no support for Intel Macs and RAID volumes, yet.

How to build a panoramic tripod head for $10

How to build a panoramic tripod head for $10.

Huawei E220 3.6Mbps HSDPA USB modem

Huawei now has an external 3.6Mbps HSDPA USB modem called E220. Works with any standard powered USB port (no luck for Nokia 770 users!) and should be compatible with MacOSX pretty soon.

portable Macs can use internal WUXGA displays

Baxter Brittle had a great idea: he replaced the 1280*854 pixel display in his Apple PowerBook 15” with 1900*1200 display. As the PowerBook 15” uses a 15.2" display, he had to use the display casing of the 15.4” MacBook Pro.

The hardware modification on a MacBook Pro is even easier, as you only need to exchange the low res screen with a highres screen of the same size. Unfortunately, MacOSX does not automatically recognize the new display. There seems to be some issues with different vendor codes, that are missing from the standard MacOSX install, but with some patches this issue should be resolved soon. I really can´t wait to finally get myself a MacBook Pro 15 with internal 1900*1200 display.

IPdrum mobile Skype cable on MacOSX via Parallels Desktop for Mac?

Since a year, the IPdrum mobile Skype cable is available, but you need Windows XP to run the supplied software. As I read the Virtual Machine Hardware Specifications of Parallels Desktop for Mac I found the following:

2-port USB controller 1.1 (USB 2.0 devices supported at speed close to native) AC'97 compatible sound card, sound recording is supported

So just looking at the specs it should be possible to use the IPdrum mobile Skype cable on MacOSX via Parallels Desktop for Mac. I will try to test this scenario ASAP. Has anybody tried this already?

ElGato EyeTV Hybrid USB stick

ElGato announced the eyetv hybrid, an analog and DVB-T TV-tuner for 149 Euros. You can use it to receive analog and digital (DVB-T) terrestrial TV, and even lets you digitize analog video via an analog video in port. There is a special pass through mode, so EyeTV Hybrid’s uncompressed analog video signals appear on the screen with zero latency. Great for connecting game consoles. P.S.: there is a NTSC/ATSC version for the US, too. Costs 149$. So with these two sticks and a portable Mac you should be able to receive terrestrial TV around the world.

THE website for HTC devices

If you have a HTC PocketPC device, e.g. the T-mobile MDApro, take a look at xda-developers.com.

Samsung Braille mobile phone

Samsung won an IDEA Gold Award 2006 for its Touch Messenger, Braille mobile phone, that allows you to send and receive Braille text messages.

Scythe Kama Connect USB2.0 IDE, SATA external adapter

Scythe has the Kama Connect USB2.0 IDE, SATA external adapter including power supply for 29$.

Matrox MXO

The Matrox MXO takes the DVI output from your Mac computer or laptop and converts it to broadcast-quality video for 995$.

USB to SATA-IDE universal kit with one touch backup

USBgeek has theUSB to SATA-IDE universal kit with one touch backup for 40$.

Syncbridge

Syncbridge is a server based calendar event synchronisation tool that permits you to share your calendars and to dos with friends and colleagues you have invited to view and edit your calendars.

MacOS running on PocketPC

Just a few minutes ago, I managed to install MacOS 6.08 on my MDApro/HTCuniversal using the Mini vMac port by Fabio Concas. Right now it is only QVGA (320*240) resolution, but I heard, a new version will support the full VGA resolution pretty soon. That way you would have a truly portable Mac (up to MacOS 7.55). Even Hypercard and MCL (Macintosh Common LISP) should run without problems, then.

ALA | 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990-2000

ALA, the American Library Association published a list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 1990–2000.

Apple announces Mac Pro and Xserve with Quad Intel Xeon chips

At the keynote of its annual World Wide Developers Conference WWDC Apple introduced the Mac Pro and the new Xserve with Quad Intel Xeon chips up to 3 GHz.

The Mac Pro has four hard drive bays, two optical drive bays and is available as built to order with 2GHz CPUs and 160GB hard drive for 2124$. 2.6GHz and 3GHz CPUs are available, too.

The new Xserve can use either S-ATA or SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) drives and has a miniDVI port on the motherboard for attching a monitor without using one of its two eight-lane PCI Express slots. One slot can be configured as a PCI-X slot for compatibility with older expansion cards.

Diskology Disk Jockey

Diskology has the Disk Jockey, the world's most versatile hard disk diagnostic and copy tool. Disk Jockey can be used with your Windows or Macintosh computer connected via the high-speed Firewire or USB 2.0 ports or it can be used as a stand alone unit. Disk Jockey lets you mount drives to your desktop, mirror (RAID 1) or span hard disk, copy data between hard disks at lightning speeds, verify, test and erase hard disks for 349$.

SoonR for MacOSX

Now your phone can access, view, share and forward files from any Mac via SoonR.

Home&Garden from 8/3 to 8/6 at Schönbrunn Castle in Vienna, Austria

From 8/3 to 8/6 the Home&Garden, Europe's leading lifestyle exibition takes place at Schönbrunn Castle in Vienna, Austria. Opening hours: 10am to 7pm. Entry: 10 Euros (includes exhibition catalog).

Pirate Party founded in Austria

The Piraten Partei Österreichs, the Pirate Party Austria has been founded and tries to participate in the next Austrian elections on October 1st. Therefore they still need 2600 supporters to officially sign a Unterstützungserklärung until August, the 25th.

Their program: free culture, protection of privacy and a reform of the patent system. The first Pirate Party was founded January 2006 in Sweden, and now this movement is spreading like wildfire all over Europe.

BTW: their website is mostly in German, but there is a one page English PDF document. It is a PDF with the text saved as an image. I had to manually retype it, so people with mobile phones, PDAs and other small screen devices can read it, too:

Pirate Party Austria

Pirate party?

Compared to the ongoing developments in the information society the state is reacting very slow to changes. Austria and the rest of Europe are following a rather dangerous path in terms of privacy, copyright and patent systems. Being part of a large international network, the newly born Austrian Pirate Party stands for human rights in the digital era.

What do we want?

Laws which are passing now and relate to IT are setting up our way in terms of cultural constitutional development for the next decades. Europe is now on a rather direct way to becoming a surveillance state. We want to avert that! Monopolies and patents are preventing innovation, progress, research and development which Europe is needing desperately to continue to compete on an international level.

Meanwhile the music industry is issuing tons of lawsuits which affect mainly young people and children. We demand the industry to stop making whole parts of the Austrian people to criminals!

Pirate Party Austria

www.ppoe.or.at

Sanyo Xacti HD1a HD camcorder

Sanyo announced the sucessor to the Xacti HD1, the Xacti HD1a for 700$. New features are a 16:9 widescreen still video mode, in camera video editing and a 30 frames per second 320*240 MPEG4 mode optimized for the video iPod.

DVB-T in Austria

Even though DVB-T is supposed to start in Austria on October, 26th, 2006, in many areas of the capital Vienna you get nice DVB-T reception since July 2006. Especially the DVB-T USB sticks like the EyeTV for DTT are great for watching and recording TV on the go.