Leopard Stacks in Quick Launch

Now you too can enjoy you wonder of the Leopard Stack in Windows. The program is called Standalone stack. I can't try it out on my usual

test machine(windows 7 doesn't play well with it), but it does work on other machines and it works well with a small memory footprint. This is great if you want stacks, but don't want a dock.

GMail Backup

(Screenshot from GMail-Backup)

GMail Backup is a tool that performs backups of your GMail account. It can also restore the backup to your account. It can be run from the command line(instructions here), and is compatible with Windows, Mac, and Linux.

GMail-Backup

Neat math trick

Lets say you need some random numbers, or at least ones that exhibit statistical randomness, and you don't have a calculator or computer will you. You know that 7=2*3+1. One divided by seven will give a series of semi-random numbers, six of them. This can be done for many different numbers. Here are the requirements:

Let a be a prime number.

Let b be a prime number such that b=2a+1

1/b will produce a string of semi-random numbers. The string will have length b-1.

I found this in the Wikipedia page for the multiplicative inverse. Happy pseudo-random trails!

Console controllers

(Image from Chewingpixels)

So its true, console controllers have become more complicated over time. The hands in the image remain constant in size so that relative sizes between controllers are preserved. The size of the controller seems to have peaked with the old X-Box controller, and is now something more reasonable. Its just interesting to see how things have changed.

Fonolo saves time on the phone

Fonolo works through phone menus to get you a direct number for a particular part of a phone tree.

 

(Image from the Consumerist)

Once is reaches the point in the menu that you want, it is easy to call directly to that point. Fonolo.

10 Hopes for 2009/2010

Having recently written up my five predictions for 2009, these are my hopes for 2009-2010.

1. Batteries on all laptops will last at least 5 hours, and netbooks will all last at least 10 hours on a charge.

2. Netbooks will have enough power to do more than just word processing and internet surfing. I don't expect to do gaming on one, but the ability to edit photos quickly would be nice.

3. The iPhone and iPod Touch will both be updated to last more than 10 hours on one charge.

4. Apple will release a tablet pc.

5. Mobile devices will start to draw power from their surrounding(so your phone can charge itself from ambient heat, light, radio signals etc)

6. Wireless power will be implemented on a fairly large scale.

7. Broadband will be affordable at 20mbps/20mbps.

8. Mobile broadband will top 10mbps/10mbps in practical, real world usage.

9. Flash drives, sometime in 2010, will beat hard drives in $/gig(less is better).

10. Windows 8(or whatever is in the works in 2009) will include a linux terminal(please!)

Predictions for 2009

With the year coming to a close soon, predictions about the next year seem appropriate. These are my five predictions for 2009. More may come later. In addition, there are ten things I would like to happen in 2009 which will also be posted later.

1. Touchscreen netbooks in the sub $350 price range will be available some time next year. This feels very scifi but it is practical, useful, and very likely. Intel has already demoed just such a device, its only a matter of time.

2. Windows 7 will be a big success, but Apple's market share will continue growing at a slower rate. I've been using first build 6801 and then build 6956 as my main os for quite some time, and it is a really amazing improvement over Vista, which is already a good produce. Apple will continue to gain market share, primarily because of their extremely effective advertising campaign. Some time later, maybe in 2010, Microsoft will start gaining marketshare back from Apple, or at least Apple will stop gaining on Microsoft.

3. Developers will really start accelerating programs with GPU processing. This has begun to a certain extent, but not on a large scale. The only good example of this is its implementation in Adobe Photoshop CS4. Hopefully processing done by video transcoders and distributed computing projects will continue to rely more and more on the graphics card.

4. The Playstation 3 will fall farther behind the Xbox 360 and Wii in the console wars. The Wii has a great control system and really fun games. Perhaps more importantly, it caters to a market that was previously almost non-existent, casual gaming. By its very definition this gives the Wii a huge market. The Xbox 360 caters traditionally to the more serious gamers, however it has made an effort into the casual market as well. It will increase its marketshare as more and more gamers are persuaded from both the PC and PS3 to the Xbox 360 by games like Fable 2, Gears of War 2(Amazing!), and the long awaited Halo Wars. The PS3 is a great piece of hardware with many uses outside of gaming, but the lack of good games is killing the platform.

5. Intel will introduce a 32nm line of processors, and will continue to gain on AMD. Intel has been gaining marketshare from AMD for some time. It all, arguably, started with the AMD-ATI merger. The merger left AMD with very little money and a bit of a reorganizing problem. In the time that it will take AMD to move to the 45nm manufacturing process, Intel will in all likelihood have moved to the 22nm process. This gives Intel a huge advantage where performance per watt and design flexibility are concerned.

Nvidia GTX 295

The main advantage(from my point of view at least) of being a console gamer is that you don't have to buy new hardware every other day just to keep playing the latest games, more like every 3-4 years. However, if you have some cash to burn and are a PC gamer and play Crysis with all settings on high at 2560x1600 with two screens, then I can see the Nvidia GTX 295 being for you. As Gizmodo so lovingly puts it, "its basically two GTX 200 GPUs hot-glued together", which sounds like the Intel Core 2 Quad(a great chip don't get me wrong). or standard SLI. It requires 289W of electricity, so don't expect this to just go into any system without a new PSU. Aside from that, you are going to need the latest and greatest processor just to feed this thing, although if you are considering buying it you probably already have 12GB of DDR3 and a Core i7. Expected to cost $500 upon release. So if you need a new space heater or just really love seeing FRAPs report over 100fps, this is for you.

Buffalo LinkStation Mini

Buffalo has announced the perfect device for a wonderful economy, oh wait..... This is a 240GB SSD, so it is silent. It can have either RAID1 for redundancy, or you can use the entire storage. It costs $1200, and so might not have been the best produce idea for a recession.

Buffalo

Flash drive linux

Part of every pc repair toolbox ought to have been a linux live cd, for when there is no hard drive installed, no hard drive accessible, or a broken hard drive. It also would let you see if the system or windows is at fault. With UNetbootin, you can install linux to a flash drive. The system can then boot off of the flash drive. Some distributions even support persistent images(so that you could use your flash drive as the primary boot device. UNetbootin is open source and available for windows here.

(Image from UNetbooting sourceforge page)

Codec confusion? Burn lots of codecs to DVD with DVDCoach Express

This little piece of software does one thing, but makes it easy, simple, and fast. You add video files to the list and click burn. It auto-converts codecs to DVD-friendly formats. The simplicity comes at the cost of customization, there are practically no options, no extras in the menu, nothing but the basics. Available here from kibisoft.