Amazon is going to sell their new e-book reader. Sure, I wouldn’t buy a proprietary device that serves as a purchase tool for a particular seller. But a more interesting thing is that they advertise access to Wikipedia several times in their blurbs. I’m curious whether Amazon is going to support Wikipedia, e.g. by donating…
Film scanners are often claimed to be superior to flatbed scanners when scanning 35 mm films. The harder thing is to find actual facts supporting such claims. Actually it’s possible to find samples suggesting there is no significant difference between the scanners. And even Minolta was able to find the only relevant argument for film…
Mike Oldfield’s Incantations is a nice piece of music to listen to during hot summer days. Like many Oldfield works, it may not sound that great on the first (maybe also second or third) listening (“huh, who would like to listen to all the long repetitions?”) but then, as aptly expressed by someone on the…
Well, I switch the revision control system I use for the third time during last years. When I decided to try something else than CVS, I started with GNU arch. This was a good choice as GNU arch made a good basis of modern free software revision control systems. Unfortunately problems in GNU arch development…
Sharp Zaurus SL-C1000 is shipped with its own Linux operating system based on Qtopia. The system is not bad, it is stable and although it requires some updates to become really usable, it provides nice PDA environment covering many areas of use. But it suffers of some problems: it’s incompatible (as it uses Qtopia instead…
One of the main advantages of digital photography over film is that all the process is in your hands. With film at least its development is usually left to a laboratory. And this is a problem, I’ve experienced a lot of troubles with it: scratches, sticked garbage, fingerprints, even exchanging my roll of film with…
My first X Window workstation ran pretty will with just 8 MB RAM. Nowadays even 2 GB RAM (i.e. 256 times as much) is not enough for personal use. My workstation runs 24/7, so I sometimes check what consumes all the memory capacity. I can usually identify the following processes being the cause: Firefox 2.…
I’ve recently listened to (), the untitled album, by Sigur Rós. It’s an interesting piece of music. I can’t say much about it, try listening to it yourself.
I’ve recently looked for free software related to civil engineering. To my surprise there is probably not any. There are several projects that could potentially be used in civil engineering but none of them is directly usable for that purpose. For example 2D drawing tools may be good enough for electrical or mechanical engineering but…
I don’t understand why webshops put so much effort into making buying goods in them more difficult. My favorite hardware shop used to be ALFA COMPUTER, one of the reasons I liked them being their simple and well arranged web pages. That’s gone now. They’ve recently introduced new web pages. The worst thing in them…