Musing, Muttering, Meandering Through Life

I had several people ask for my impressions of the G1 so I put a video together instead of spending a lot of time typing. In general, it’s pretty good for a first generation device. I don’t really like the bar with the roller obstructing access to the keyboard, but I’m starting to get use to it already.

First Impressions: T-Mobile G1 from Don Thorp on Vimeo.

I was touting the wonders of the iPod Touch to a friend, when he mentioned that he wouldn’t buy one due to the lack of a replaceable battery. I originally thought he was worried about the end of life issue. The real issue is what do you do with a small child when the video device runs out of power at 30,000 feet. Enter the external USB battery pack.

My current “go to solution” is the APC Mobile Power Pack, 10 Wh (UPB10) unit from APC. Surprisingly, it gets used for my phone much more than for my iPods.

Looking through APC’s Universal Mobile Device Batteries product list, I saw a AAA battery powered unit the APC USB Battery Extender (UPBX). This might be a good device to have around when you won’t have power for charging the UPB10.

I’ve worked at my "day job", CREDANT Technologies, Inc, for almost six years now. I happened to run across an article in the Dallas Business Journal and found out that Credant investors ante up $5M in ‘top-off’ funding round. Not completely surprised, but I definitely wasn’t expecting it.

While I can’t so myself, I have friends that can and enjoy doing so. Yuki Mori a Ph.D student, at Fine Digital Engineering Laboratory Research Center for Advanced Science and Technology (RCAST) The University of Tokyo, has developed a system called Plushie that enables you to design and create patterns for 3D plush toys.

Yuki Mori, Takeo Igarashi. Plushie: An Interactive Design System for Plush Toys. ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2007), vol.23, No.3, Article No.45, San Diego, USA, August 2007 (Link to the PDF is available on her site).

They don’t provide measurements that I can find, but the LAKS USB Memory wristwatch looks pretty cool.

It works on Windows, Linux, and Mac. That implies that it’s driverless. If you are really adventurous, you can order them customized (minimum order 100). The 128MB version is 93 USD.

A friend of mine told me about GizModo today. Here is an except from their about page.

Gizmodo is a weblog dedicated to everything related to gadgets, gizmos, and cutting-edge consumer electronics.

I’ve been fairly motivated lately to start getting some of our pictures online. To
that end, I installed Photo Gallery
an open source tool for managing and displaying collections of photos.

Note to friends and family. An account is required to view some albums.
If you remember it, it is the same username and password that you use to access
the friends and family link. If you’ve forgotten it, email me and I’ll send it to you
again.

function sister() {
cd “`pwd | sed -e s/$1/$2/`”
}

function sist() {
sister main test
}

function sism() {
sister test main
}

I’ve added archives of past articles to the site. It will take me a while to get the templates configured like I want them, but I noticed that some information was dropping out google so I wanted to get it back in.

Believe it or not, I’ve finally converted to Moveable Type. It only to a couple of hours and now I have it spitting out the xml format I was using before. It is impressive how easy it was to convert. I still have a lot more work todo to incorporate archives and categories, but it will be much easier to add entries than it was before.