You would have thought I’d have learnt from Facebook to stay away from social sites in general however I’ve signed up on Mixi which is Japan’s answer to Facebook to get some help with my Japanese writing skills with some help from some Japanese friends. Besides the fact it’s all in Japanese they’ve obviously taken quite a bit from English sites with main topics of say, “Home”, “Diary”, “Community”, “Photos”, “Music”, “Reviews”, “News” and their weekly newsletter called Mikly.
Well, have to see how it goes. My Japanese is pretty laborious at the moment, so hopefully I’ll get better. At least I’m not seeing my inbox get filled with bacn - yet.
I decided to crack out the PlayStation 3 again and try and get GNU/Linux up and running now that the Cell SDK 3.0 has been released by IBM for Fedora Core 7. First step is getting the latest Fedora Core 7 PPC DVD. The second step is figuring out how to make the DVD boot properly so you can actually install Fedora. The issue is that when you boot, by default it reverts to the ridiculously low resolution of 480p which isn’t large enough to see where to click. To resolve this at the kboot screen simply type in ‘cd mnt/root/ppc/ppc64′, then ‘kexec -f –initrd=ramdisk.image.gz –command-line=”video=720p” vmlinuz’ to boot in 1280×720p mode which actually lets you install. (Thanks to Robert Rose for figuring it out here).
After that it’s pretty smooth sailing, however you should get the latest Cell CD from here to install the latest kernel which is snappier than the default Fedora one. After that, it’s installing the Livna repositories here to get the usual packages that aren’t in Fedora on like VideoLAN and MPlayer without a lot of pain going through dependencies. So far from my last tests with YDL the PS3 is able to play back H.264 and MPEG-4 media fine at SD (ie, 720×576 or below) sizes, as soon as scaling kicks in for 720p/1080i things bog down as there’s no SPU support. Oh well!
Now that I’ve got the Cell SDK on, maybe it’s high time to optimise the MPlayer software scaler…
Recently I dropped by Jaycar and picked up one of their new items, the MS6115 Power Meter. I’ve been wanting a power meter for ages in Australia like the US 120V Watts Up! or Kill A Watt to measure power consumption by standby devices and also see how power efficient devices are.
Image taken from Jaycar
The specs for the Power Meter:
Max Power Load: 10A, 2500W
Voltage Measurement: 210-301V AC +/- 3%
Amperage Measurement: 0.02-10A +/- 3% (+/- 0.03A)
Watt Power Range: 0-3010W +/- 4% (+/- 10W)
The function button switches between Volts, Amps, Watts, Max Watts, KW/h and Cost so you can see what a device is currently consuming and how unplugging devices affects the power consumption. For example, I plugged it into my TV/VCR power board that was on standby to discover my PSTwo power supply consumes 10w of power doing absolutely nothing, not even plugged into the PSTwo! Going into the settings you can set the price per KW/h for two different times (typically on/off peak) and includes a clock and day switch to get most cases (except for the very complex Synergy on/off peak + shoulder times), so I simply plugged in the standard rate of 13.94c/KW/h from Synergy.
So, after that it’s time to check out what’s drawing what. Of particular interest is the new consoles like the PlayStation 3, which consumed 9w on standby and about 165w powered on which seems a bit high from what other people are saying on the Internet, so maybe it’s just the Aus version with a different power supply. My laptop got 7w standby and 14w powered on (with the large LCD getting 50w and 2w on standby) so it seems fairly accurate even though it can have +/- 10w.
Anyhow, it’s a neat tool to see what devices are really costing you and is cheap at $40 from Jaycar here, there’s probably a few still in stores in Perth if you’re after one.
Mark Resenfelder gives his take on what English would be like if we wrote it like Chinese in his ficticious pictogram writing system he calls Yingzi. Read about it here. Have to say, learning Chinese doesn’t look easy (Japanese for me is hard enough!)
Clothing designer Aya Tsukioka has designed new clothes that can hide people from pursuers as vending machines. See it here.
Another image has shown up for the live action Blood: The Last Vampire movie produced by Ronnie Yu (of Fearless, The Bride with White Hair, Freddy vs Jason and Bride of Chucky) and directed by Chris Nahon (Kiss of the Dragon). Well known Korean actress Jeon Ji Hyun plays Saya (the titular last vampire) who hunts down chiropterans (mutant vampires) with her katana in a US army camp in Tokyo just after the end of WWII. Hopefully it’ll be a good adaptation since the French studio Pathé seems to be handling it.
Read about it from TwitchFilm and Films Actu here.
The mind boggles at how bad some customers can get when Aaron is accused by a mother that he sold and recommended that a teenager drink 1/2 litre of malt vinegar. After his store manager and territory manager start putting the pressure on him to apologise (even though the entire transaction was recorded on video tape with audio) he’s fired and the fun just begins…
Read it from Customers Suck! here. Unfortunately for us, it all happened in Melbourne, Australia. A good choice quote is “… he still hasn’t learned not to leave nasty messages on answering machines. The tapes on my machine are filling up so fast I had to buy a five pack from the local electronics store to keep up.”
I was browsing on the Internet when I came across a link to WierdMeat.com by Michael who wished to document his experiences of eating strange foods while he travels around the world. I’ve read several books about the exotic foods that other countries offer and find it’s kind of like unravelling cuisine evolution to try and figure out how people started to try to eat a specially prepared food in the first place. (I’m convinced hunger and desperation are high on the list).
Read about it here, just be warned that some foods may be disturbing or distressing.
I recently signed up to Facebook on the urging of a friend to view some pictures they’d uploaded. Unfortunately, this seems to have started a slow descent into filling my inbox with bacn with pokes, superpokes, invites, joins, zombie bites, vampires bites, gifts, and well, too much other stuff to list. I think Facebook is interesting but I can’t believe how much bacn I get out of it if I leave it for a while to accumulate. Anyone else inundated with it? I guess when people call it Crackbook they aren’t kidding.
Dongmei Li of NY claims Apple violated price discrimination laws when it dropped the iPhone 8GB price by $200 US just two months after it debuted and alleged it hurt her chances of reselling the iPhone especially as the 4GB model were given less favourable terms. She’s asking for $1M US in damages. A co-worker thinks it’s a vexatious lawsuit given the damages are way out of proportion to the value of the price drop.
Read about it here.
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