When Apple finally rolls this out (in the next 2 months hopefully), it’s going to be damn cool! Hopefully no need to buy DVDs anymore.
http://www.thinksecret.com/news/0603videoipod.html
http://www.thinksecret.com/news/0603movies.html
Hopefully they also will come out with an AirPort Express that can do video (current one only can stream audio).

Okay, this is kind of odd… this is a blender you scream at to make it work. (link to blueprint)
People induce the blender to spin by sounding the sounds of its motor in action. A person may growl low pitch blender-like sounds to get it to spin slow (Blendie pitch and […]

Someone has way, WAY too much time on their hands.
If you want to be really dorky, go to a shell (or command prompt) and type:
telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl

Does anyone know if the Windows Media Center Extender that is built into the Xbox 360 is a true client application to the Windows Media Center PC?
Basically I’m wondering if you could have 2 TVs, each with an Xbox 360 attached to it, both streaming unique content from the one Media Center PC.

You know what I want to know? Who in the hell invented the iPod? I know a ton of people played parts in it, but who came into work one day and thought… “Gee, this would be cool…”
Because whoever that guy was, Apple should give him a bonus.

I’m looking at the possibility of moving some stuff I’m doing to blade servers. Anyone have any experience with blade servers in general? And if so, now is the time to gimme some input!
This is what I’ve been looking at lately…
http://www1.us.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/pedge_1855
Then I could just pop in a new blade (computer) […]

Does anyone have a solution for playing music purchase at the Apple Music Store outside of iTunes or an iPod?
I’m going to be having a central audio distribution system in my house, but I just realized that music I purchase from the Apple Music Store isn’t going to work on anything outside of iTunes/iPod… […]

The rumors have started about Apple releasing a “true” video iPod at the end of March or beginning of April. If the rumors are correct, they will go from a 2.5″ screen (on current iPod’s) to a 3.5″ screen and do away with the click-wheel, and instead use an on-screen touch-panel interface.
Think Secret can […]

I need to get a good pan/tilt/zoom camera for the site of the house construction (to automatically make a time lapse of the house being built and also just to see what’s going on at any given time).
I’ve done a little research on it, and so far the Canon is the best one (for the […]

There has been a bunch of hoopla lately about CableCARDs finally coming to market this summer, so I decided to read about it a little more…
The CableCARD system basically lets you insert a PCMCIA card into your TV and then you don’t need a digital cable box to receive high definition signals. The CableCARDs […]

Those German bastards stole my idea about using Google Earth as a navigation system in a car…
What a bunch of little bitches.

A malformed UDP packet to your DNS server can cause it to respond to an IP address that never made the request (with the response being being more bytes than the request). So someone malicious could use one of your name servers to throw unwanted traffic at a 3rd IP address. Annoying… but […]

I have no idea what it says, but it has lots of links to tools I’ve created, so you know it must be an excellent article (heh).
http://www.computerra.ru/focus/249041/
I bet that the next time I’m in Russia, people will be asking me for my autograph… or not. {shrug}

If you ever need to figure out what is eating bandwidth on a server, tcpdump comes in handy…
tcpdump -n -i any
That will spew out everything, so you might be able to find anything that looks suspicious in there. Say you find the IP address of 1.2.3.4 doing something suspicious, you can zero in […]

Not to be outdone by his brother Wiggly, Yashi decided he wanted International fame… Today Yashi is in the New York Times business section (online and print edition).
http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/01/17/business/ecom18.php
I look kind of funny, but it’s because I was trying to keep from laughing while I’m pretending to actually do something on the […]

Okay… well *I’m* not big… but my forum is. In the first 21 months of it being around, its received over a half million posts. 500,000 posts puts you into the “big-boards.com” listing of big forums.
http://www.big-boards.com/board/1676/
Should probably break 1,000,000 posts by June.

Okay, I finally sat down tonight and figured out what I *think* I need (at least it’s a start so the experts have something to start with) to do centrally distributed audio/video for the house.
Audio
So I’m thinking every room (minus bathrooms, except for master) should be an audio “zone” as well as the pool house […]

eMagin is making a wearable iPod video screen. Apparently they didn’t realize iPods are more about their “cool factor” than anything else… But for those that want to walk around town looking like the borg, now you can!
“Suddenly you’ve got this big-screen, movie-screen, home-theater experience, wherever you are,” said Gary Jones, […]

I just realized that it’s been weeks since I had something dorky to say (like programming or something to do with MySQL for example).
Just so you know that I am still dorky, here’s some PHP code for you (from my post over here)…
This will put the keywords that someone searched on to reach your site […]

For the uber geek (hey, that’s me), having a blog in your robots.txt is a pretty fun idea.
http://www.webmasterworld.com/robots.txt
It’s a nice minimalist approach to content that I personally like. It’s like a throwback to .plan or if you want to go even further back the days of C=64 boards (as Brett mentions). I myself […]

Wow… there are half a million posts in my forum now. Craziness.

Yesterday, if someone asked me if I was friends with Google, I would have said, “Nah, we are just acquaintances… you know, “hi”, “bye” if we see each other at lunch or something.”
But today that all changed. Not only did Google send me a Christmas present (cool stuff too… 128MB USB drive, USB hub, […]

Yahoo’s APIs are really nice (and there are a ton of them). Google’s API for web search is about 15x slower than Yahoo’s (no joke) and has less features. I really wish Google would bring out a new revision for it (its been stagnant for about 3 years now).
Google’s Map API is still […]

Okay, I *thought* it wasn’t a problem (at the time), but it turns out, it just made it “less” of a problem.
After watching the server closely for a month or two I think I finally figured out what the hell is going on. mysqld is not really efficient with it’s memory (I finally figured […]

You ever wish you could have done something for years, only to realize one day you could have done it this whole time?
I have a couple tables that I was replicating across 3 or 4 MySQL databases because I didn’t think I could reference a table from database A while working with database B.
Today I […]

If you need to debug memory usage and segments on a BSD based unix machine, vmmap is the ticket.
vmmap [process id]

Someone must have seen that I wanted it (yes the world revolves around me). Because I saw this on digg.com today…
http://www.uneasysilence.com/archive/2005/12/4764/
Seems to work pretty well for me.

Gimme (please)!
http://www.appleinsider.com/article.php?id=1408

Look, I’m psychic (again)… “Hopefully that’s Front Row 2.0…” Funny
Quote:
“Apple’s Mac mini will be reborn as the digital hub centerpiece it was originally conceived to be, Think Secret sources have disclosed. The new Mac mini project, code-named Kaleidoscope, will feature an Intel processor and include both Front Row 2.0 and […]

Google Analytics lets you toggle between pie and bar chart, but it really seems logical to have a 3rd chart option that makes a line graph comparing the top 10 items from any report section. For example for web browsers you could see historically how the percentage of Firefox users goes up and Internet […]

It would be cool if Google automatically tracked AdSense clicks into Google Analytics… But until they do, here’s a little bit of JavaScript code you can use to do it. You can then setup an AdSense click as a “goal” within the Analytics interface.

<script type=”text/javascript”>
// by Shawn - http://www.shawnhogan.com/2005/11/track-adsense-clicks-with-google-analytics.html
// Put this at the bottom […]

Yay! My new computer is here (finally) after about a month of waiting. I’ve had the 30″ monitor that goes with it for more than two weeks, so now I can actually USE it for the first time.
Thankfully Apple has a migration utility built in that will just move all my stuff (users, […]

It seems Google has broken up with me. Not only did they not do it in person, they didn’t call or even bother to email me to let me know they have moved on from our relationship. This blog (not all of digitalpoint.com, only this blog) has some sort of weird partial ban […]

I really don’t get why Google hasn’t added live traffic data for major cities yet. The information is out there and freely available for anyone to use. It only took me a few minutes of digging around to realtime traffic data for all of California, so why can’t Google find/use it? For […]

Google Maps recently updated their API key system so you can use the same key within subfolders. And all I can say is thank f’ing GOD. Was so annoying that if you make a map and put it on your blog that it would need a separate key when viewing the map from […]

I really wish Apple would update the Xserve to use dual core processors (for a total of 4 cores) like their PowerMac towers because I need another Xserve (or 2) and I’m not sure how much longer I can wait for it.

Sony is in all sorts of trouble when they were recently exposed as to installing rootkits on user’s PCs without their permission in order to “protect the copyrights of their CDs” which can’t be uninstalled. That in itself is enough to get Sony in pretty hot water.
Hackers are now using backdoors in the rootkits […]

If you own a website or a blog, you need to be using this (really). It’s basically just Urchin 6 (Google bought the company earlier this year), but Google is offering it as a free service now (I think it was like $1,000/month or something before Google bought it).
http://www.google.com/analytics/

Speaking of downloading movies, I wish Apple would hurry up and deploy a full blown Apple Movie Store (they obviously have the ability to do video with the iPod Video and their ability to sell TV shows). If they sold DVDs you could download for $10, it would be the end of retail DVDs […]

Here’s a pretty funny site telling people the benefits of switching from Internet Explorer to Firefox…
Quote:
You’ll only see porn when you want to.
Sick of seeing pornographic pop-ups all over your computer while you’re helping your daughter with a research project? Since Firefox blocks pop-ups, you won’t get tons of porn in your face when you’re […]

Google wants to be the center of the information universe, so how long do you think it will be before they make a car stereo (which is much more than a standard car stereo of course)?
It can be done now if you want to hack it together, but it would be nice if it was […]

Uhm… people are reporting that they have been receiving their 10Ghz PowerMacs early (as in they already have them in hand). One guy said his estimated ship date was November 29, and he already has it.
So uhm… where’s mine? I just checked my order, and the estimated ship date is November 21 (still).
The […]

I know it’s really not news, but Apple recent filed from patent applications that show Mac OS X, Windows and Linux all running on a single computer (natively, without emulation). That will be nice if I can finally dump my Windows machines I use to test stuff on and just have one machine that […]

Motorola announced two new cell phones today based on the RAZR V3.
The RAZR V3i is basically the same phone, with the addition of iTunes (big deal… I don’t care) and a microSD card slot (which I *do* care about). More memory is always good.
The other one is the RAZR v3c, which will give Verizon […]

So I’ve been poking around this afternoon, and I’ve been finding reports about Cingular’s 3G (HSDPA) network rollout. Supposedly they started the rollout a few weeks ago, and it offers 400-700k data speeds.
The problem? Their website says nothing about it and even if it did, there are not currently any HSDPA enabled phones […]

Why do people pay $2 or $3 for a cellphone ringtone of a song? I don’t get it because most cellphones these days lets you just use an MP3 as a ringtone. Get a freeware/shareware application that lets you cut a certain part of a ringtone (no point in having a 5 minute […]

Well this one is a pretty big milestone I think… My first tool, the keyword tracker broke 1,000,000 keywords being tracked for users (that’s only current keywords and does not include deleted ones).
People seem to like it… hehe Not bad for a punk.

Based on some of the stuff I did for this, I made a system that can be used by any site (just copy/paste a tiny bit of HTML code and it automagically works).
Anyway, if you want to see where in the world people are from that visit this blog (or want to use it yourself), […]

Okay, I need to start making a list of things I want to be able to control from the home automation system for my house… So I’m just going to use this blog entry for that. If anyone can think of anything I’ve forgotten, please leave it as a comment and I’ll update this […]

Okay, this kind of sucks… I now have the most bad ass computer monitor you can get sitting in my office (a 30″ Apple Ciniema HD), but I have no computer I can actually USE it with. hahaha
I ordered a new computer specifically for the monitor (the monitor was a gift/bonus), but I’m not […]

It’s not the first time I used the Google Maps API, but every time I do something with it, I’m reminded about how damn cool it is.
It ended up being relatively trivial to show where in the world all the people currently visiting the forum are at in the world. Added some color coded […]

Rumors have been floating around that the quad processor PowerMac I ordered comes with a 1,000 watt power supply. I sure hope it doesn’t actually *use* 1kW while it’s on, because if it does, I might cause some California brownouts again.
Speaking of which, I hope the operating system has the ability […]

Have you ever used your cell phone as a flashlight? It’s not terribly bright, but just bright enough you can see stuff if it’s pitch dark (for example moving around your house in the middle of the night without tripping over stuff).
It gives off a faint/eery glow that lets you see about 2 feet […]

Here’s a handy bit of PHP code that will take the email variable, lookup the mail server for the domain, log into the mail server and see if it will accept delivery for that address.<?php
$split = preg_split(’/^(.*)<(.*)>(.*)/’, $_REQUEST[’email’], -1, PREG_SPLIT_DELIM_CAPTURE|PREG_SPLIT_NO_EMPTY);
$email = array_pop ($split);
$split = explode (”@”, $email);
$domain = $split[1];

getmxrr ($domain, $a, $b);
if ($a) {
foreach ($a […]

I know that Alexa numbers really are pointless, but it’s still fun to watch when you get below 10,000 or so.
The 3 month average dropped below 400 for the first time (389 specifically), which means only 388 domains are more trafficked than digitalpoint.com. According to Alexa’s top 500 list, we just passed MTV.com […]

The best thing about Windows is Windows Media Center, and it’s not as good as it could be (it lacks the ability to record HDTV). Apple really needs to come out with the TV recording solution I think, and it could be huge if they were to beat Microsoft to market with a HDTV […]

I finally solved a CSS problem that has been driving me crazy on the theme I created for this blog. The fact that if you use a border on a block item (a DIV or H1 for example), the border will overlap a floating DIV. The text will wrap properly, but the border […]

Okay, I ordered a 10Ghz quad processor PowerMac. It’s 3-4 weeks until the estimated ship date though, so it will be awhile. Hopefully by then the 30″ Apple Cinema HD Display that a certain company is “gifting” to me will be here around the same time (would suck to have that cool monitor […]

It seems as of last night MSN is now requiring end users to pass a cookie (specifically MC1) with all search and RSS feed requests. The cookie has 2 parts (V and GUID). V is always 3 for now (probably stands for VERSION), the second part is GUID which looks like an MD5 […]

Well… I decided to write my own PHP script to rip out the old comments (from when this was a Blogger blog), parse them, format them and insert them into the database for WordPress.
The cool part is it all worked on the first try. That’s pretty amazing if you ask me (and that’s why […]

Okay, so Apple *did* announce quad processor PowerMacs today. The top-end being a 2.5Ghz x 4 G5 machine. I know what I’m getting myself for an early Christmas present (they aren’t shipping them until next month though).
http://www.apple.com/powermac/
UpdateThe video card that comes with it (PCI Express GeForce 6600) supports one dual […]

Alek has setup his halloween lights this year so you can view them with a webcam. Even more fun is that fact that you can control them in realtime too.
Personally, I like raising Frankenstein from the dead, only to kill him off. hehe

Rumor has it that Apple is announcing dual processor PowerMac G5 towers with each CPU having two cores to give it four logical processors. If rumors are right, they should be announced on Wednesday (October 19th).
I have a 30″ Apple Cinema Display on the way, and it requires a dual link DVI video card […]

Mologogo is a free GPS friend-tracking service that works on Nextel phones with Java and GPS. Over at the MAKE: Blog, Phil Torronne took Mologogo for a walk. It’s a really cool use of the Google Maps API. This one lets two (or more) people you use GPS enabled phone to show on […]

Not that anyone would really notice, but I’ve switched this blog from Blogger to WordPress (finally). It’s been something I wanted to do for a long time, but I hated all the templates for WordPress. So I finally got off my butt and made my own.
Comments were lost… not that you guys had […]

After rumors have been swirling the last few weeks about Apple releasing an iPod that can do video, it’s official now. They have a 30GB and 60GB iPod with a slightly larger screen that is capable of doing video (realtime decoding of MPEG4 and H.264 with 260,000 colors). Pricing doesn’t change ($299 and […]

For the last two months or so, I’ve been having a strange problem with my primary MySQL Server that required that the mysqld process (not the server itself) be restarted. The first image shows the CPU usage of the server, with the red arrows being the points I restarted the mysqld process (queries per […]

If you are buying an HDTV anytime soon, make sure it has at least one HDMI connector on it. It’s pretty much the new standard for connecting audio/video (and soon computers) together. It’s built upon the older DVI interface, but it adds digital content protection for the content owners (keep the studios happy) […]

How come there isn’t any good options for a high definition digital video recorder? TiVo doesn’t have one, Windows Media Center can’t do it, etc. The only one I’ve run across (that didn’t end up being some home brew Linux setup) is the one built into some of Mitsubishi’s high-end TVs.
Weird.

Why do all home automation systems suck? It would be relatively easy to make a universal system that was modular (with just code) that could control anything… So I don’t get why all the “big players” are so proprietary.
Maybe I need to start a home automation company, because the guts (software) which is the […]

I’ve been doing a little tuning with one of my MySQL database servers today, and it’s pretty amazing how fast it is. Just ran a benchmarking thing on it before I applied some optimizations (so this is with no tuning), and this is what it looks like:
Uptime: 747 Threads: 1 Questions: 1409737 […]

If nothing else, Apple really does come up with cool ideas. They came up with the iPod, and seem to come with with something completely new as far as iPods go just about the time the competitors are getting around to copying their previous idea.
Anyway, today Apple did away with the iPod Mini model, […]

Here’s something for all the super dorks… The iPod Linux guys have started to port Doom to the iPod (they also were the ones to get video working on an iPod).
Check it out:
http://www.ipodlinux.org/Doom

So I’m thinking about getting a system for my new house where you can get an implant and doors will unlock for you automatically. But I also thought it would be cool if you could use those to track where someone (or a pet) was in the house in real time. Well I […]

A South Korean man (identified as “Lee”) died of heart failure stemming from exhaustion after playing an online video game for 50 hours.
Lee thought it would be a good idea to quit his job so he could have more time to play video games, which by the way, doesn’t seem like a solid plan for […]

So after my last post, I was poking around the Internet regarding RFID access control systems for buildings (for a house in my case), and I found a company called VeriChip. They offer systems that are wearable (what I originally was looking for), but also implantable inside your body, which seems pretty cool to […]

The US Department of Homeland security is going to start requiring foreigners to carry a “card” with them at all times. It will be an RFID type of card that can be read from 20 feet away.
Anyway… I don’t care a whole lot about that and the whole privacy concerns (I’ll let the privacy […]

Well, Microsoft has finally started beta testing IE7, which you can get (if you are a developer) over here.
Internet Explorer is a really sucky browser that I don’t really feel like going into WHY (because most people already know, and the ones that don’t already know, probably don’t care anyway). But hopefully they will […]

Just another note from me to tell you how crappy Internet Explorer is. Hope they fix it with verison 7.

Google Earth lets you generate .kmz files by right-clicking a marker and saving it. Pretty handy, but I wanted to be able to adjust the tilt and direction the default view comes up as, so I poked a little bit (well not that much… heh). The .kmz files are simply zipped .kml files […]

Okay dude, this thing is pretty cool. It’s a full blown computer packed into a double-DIN sized chassis. the thing is made by Infill (a Korean company). I still have a hard time believing they fit it all into the chassis without a hide-away unit, but it seems like they did. […]

Okay, I think I have it down to two companies for the home automation stuff…
AMX, which seems to be more widely deployed (the installers I met with last week have an office here in San Diego). It’s really impressive stuff (although for the price, anything is going to be impressive).
The other company is a […]

This is kind of interesting… it’s a mannequin that falls forever in a universe of balls, all the time obeying the laws of physics.

Also, you can throw her around with your mouse if you want.

Thankfully, I downloaded Google Earth a few days ago (when it first was announced) because they suspended new downloads for it temporarily.
It’s hands down the coolest computer application I’ve ever seen. It’s the entire earth in 3D. It brings together satellite images, maps and lots of other stuff Google does into a single […]

It looks like the Motorola RAZRberry is getting close to being released (the latest ETA is within the next 3 months). It’s a pretty slick phone. It’s about 1/4″ wider, .5″ taller and slightly thinner (if you can believe that) than the Motorola RAZR V3.
It’s codename is Franklin, has all the stuff the […]

Today at ninja school, we got our first uniform. What I want to know is how am I going to strike fear into my enemies wearing something like this? It definitely doesn’t make me look like I can kick ass.
It wasn’t quite what I had expected, but I guess it’s a good first […]

The Digital Point forum is now live with vBulletin 3.5 beta 1. I spent some time today and last night recoding all the little hacks I made on vB 3.0.x, and turning them into plug-ins for 3.5 (yay for the new plug-in architecture).
Along the way, I even found some bugs (some of which I […]

Well, it looks like CNet and the Wall Street Journal was right. Apple is indeed switching from IBM’s PowerPC architecture to Intel processors.
I think it’s probably a good thing for the long term, but not so hot in the short term. I bet Apple hardware is going to drop now that everyone knows […]

Looks like the iPod Linux guys have finally figured out how to play video on an iPod. Pretty neat for all the dorks out there. I’m not going to risk messing up my 60GB iPod Photo, but maybe I’ll mess around with my 1st generation 4GB iPod.
Check it out over here.

Apple switching to Intel processors has been an on and off rumor for more than a decade. But CNet is reporting that Apple plans on scrapping the PowerPC processors and move to Intel as soon as next year, with the official announcement coming next week at the Apple developer conference.
Personally, I find it a […]

Since people don’t have enough to worry about with all the spy-ware, hijack-ware, ad-ware, etc. these days, now they can worry about ransom-ware. A malicious program comes in and encrypts all your documents, and you get to pay for the encryption key to be able to decrypt them… Nice!
http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/internet/05/24/internet.ransom.ap/
One more reason […]

Tired of the sleek look of your iPod or PowerBook? Well now you can look like your straight out of the 70s and get a wooden case for them.
They are custom made by Peter Kinne out of, “about 50 percent recycled or reclaimed wood from old hot tubs and tables, and stainless steel from […]

Okay, so I’m addicted to XM Radio (satellite) since I bought my truck. I didn’t think I would use it at all, but it came with a 3 month trial (like a crack dealer… give you enough to get your hooked) so I tried it out. To make a long story short, my […]

Not new news, but something I just read… Motorola is working on a new version of their RAZR (which BTW is a really cool phone).
Basically it’s going to be as thin as the existing model, but wide enough for a QWERTY keyboard. It should also run some flavor of Windows Mobile as the operating […]

I have a cool bluetooth enabled phone now, and it’s handy for being a wireless Internet gateway for my laptop when I’m traveling, but I also want to be able to use it handsfree in my vehicle. Can someone tell me why there are no good after-market options for this?
I heard through the grapevine […]

Microsoft’s “next generation” operating system (Longhorn) has been pushed back again… this time to sometime in 2007. If memory serves me correctly, it’s now 3 1/2 years behind schedule, and truthfully, I would be surprised to see it before 2010 a this rate.

Just like I predicted, Google has utilized their acquisition of Keyhole and added satellite imaging to Google Maps.
Looks like they are updating all their maps too, because some areas have poor resolutions (like an area outside of San Felipe in Baja California), where you can see where the high res imaging meets the low-res stuff.
Up […]

When I was waiting for my lunch today, I was flipping through a magazine and saw a little blurb about this… I guess it’s a “game” for 3G cell phones. Basically a virtual girlfriend… But the thing I thought was hilarious (genius actually) was you need to buy her things to keep her happy. […]

I had an idea this morning.. Why not write code to mimic evolution where needed?
For example a search engine… their algorithms are constantly being changed and updated to fight spam and whatever else comes along.
It wouldn’t work as well on a small scale, but if you have a large number of end users (like a […]

Mucked around with the Yahoo API a little bit, and I must admit it’s pretty nice. I wish the Google API was as fast and had as much features.
My first useful thing I did with it was I added to the keyword tracker so it can track historical search engine rankings for Yahoo (I […]