A friend of mine give me this picture showing the products by Apple since the early days…. I think its way cool. I hope everyone likes it the way I do.

My OSx86 installation is not helping at all (the DVD I got is version 10.4.5). I had make the box kernel panic at least twice - by tweaking the wireless for both build-in and pcmcia card (still not working though). I hope that i will be able to try it out again soon (when I got more information on the setup and tweaking). For now, I’m learning OpenBSD 4.1 stuff.. based on this book and the man pages, of course.

OpenBSD is one cool BSD distribution which emphasizes on security and portability (yes it runs on various platforms). Currently OpenBSD is at version 4.1; released on May 1, 2007. I have known about the distro for couple of years, but so far, I haven’t get the chance to grab the official CD nor the official CD ISO image from the net. Why? Its their way of distributing the distro, so that users will need to buy the official CDs thus funding the ongoing OpenBSD development. Usually, what I do is grab the so-called ‘unofficial’ ISO images from various sites on the internet… (doing a bit of googling will help). So far, all the ISO i’ve downloaded is workable and I manage to built a working OpenBSD box.

For years, it has always been CD-based ISO images for me, until recently when I found this site - http://ftp.linuxcenter.ru/iso/OpenBSD-4.1/; which provide a DVD-based ISO image (around 4.7GB in size) of the ‘unofficial’ OpenBSD 4.1! So, now I don’t have to download the software/application CD ISO image coz I can just grab the software from the DVD! Way cool… .

I’ve resetup Mac OS X 10.4.3 on my hackintosh box… but, seems like the disk is having problem (I notice alot of scratches) and when I leave it idle for sometime, it will show the message below:

At first, I didn’t know that the message was telling me that it has gone ‘panic’. Only later on when I tried playing an anime video using VLC player, it crashed. Then, I tried adding the fix to my Linksys wireless PCMCIA card (Broadcom chipset), but it didn’t work either (I’ve setup the card before and it suppose to be straight forward).

Later when I was checking some information on Linux, I was ‘taken’ to this Wiki page which confirms the problem with my OSx86 installation; which most probably the result from the bad DVD..

I guess I will need to get another OSx86 DVD from a friend and resetup the box again… this time most probably it will be Mac OS X 10.4.6 (or who knows, if I could get a 10.4.9 instead?). By the way, I have to push aside Leopard for the time being since I don’t seem to find an image available with patches for hackintosh boxes.

The guys at [H]ard|OCP had spend 30 days each using, playing and testing Linux (Ubuntu), Windows Vista and Mac OS X Tiger. Read on each of the article below to find out their experience:

• 30 days with Linux
• 30 days with Vista
• 30 days with Mac OS X

Honestly, I think their findings are rather interesting.

To be exact, it is a transparent Cat5e UTP cable. But kinda looong - 7 meters!.. Well, actually, I saw the cable at Tesco Penang when I went to shop for my groceries and I just had to visit the IT Cable Section and saw the cable… (honestly, I didn’t aspect I’m gonna find cool stuff like the cable there!)

Anyway, sorry, I don’t remember the price anymore.. haha. But, if i’m not mistaken, the price range between RM10 - RM15. So far, I had use it several times but since its too long, I think I will cut it into 2 (each 3.5 meters) and recrimp each end. Most probably, I will leave one at home and the other I will keep it in my bag (so I could use it at work.. ). Well, I won’t take a 7 meter network cable to work anymore - I had the experience of my senior (in fact he’s a CCIE in Routing and Switching) laughed at me jokingly because I was carrying a 7-meter network cable everyday to work! Check out the pics below. It was taken by Raz when he visited my house on Sunday last week (Thanx man! Well, he had come over to my house to learn how to crimp network cables!)

Indeed. Thats the title of the ‘about’ page of Revision3, an internet based media company that blends information with entertainment, providing downloadable technology-related videos mainly to geeks.

There are various different shows ‘airing’ at Revision3:

• Ctrl-Alt-Chicken - cooking where the chef don’t know how to cook
• Diggnation - tech/web culture
• Geekdrome - debate on movies, comics, music & video games
• iFanboy - comic books
• InDigital - latest gadgets & high tech products
• Infected - technology effects on the world
• Mysteries of Science - answers to great mysteries of science
• notmtv - inside the independent music scene
• PixelPerfect - learn the tips and tricks of digital pictures
• Systm - DIY geeky tech projects
• thebroken - underground technology show
• The Totally Rad Show - geek news
• Web Drifter - behind the websites
• XLR8R TV - behind the scenes covered in the pages of XLR8R magazine

The video shows are easily distributed and work in various platform since it can be downloaded directly or downloaded via Bittorrent and encoded in various different format - Quicktime, Theora, WMV, Xvid as well as flash! Cool isn’t it?

Currently I’m downloading systm in Quicktime format. So far, I’ve downloaded 5 episodes and will be downloading all the aired shows as well as subscribe to the upcoming shows. I think everyone interested in technology should take a look at the site and start viewing the shows!

One more thing I should add - If you had watched The Screen Savers, a TV show previously aired on TechTV (shown in Malaysia via Astro’s TVIQ Channel), you would remember some of the faces in the videos. So now you can expect the quality of the presentation and content of the shows rite?

I love watching music video… but sad to say, my car doesn’t have an LCD, nor it have a DVD player. So i’m stuck with a car cassette player that comes with AM/FM radio player as well as a CD player/changer equipped at my car’s trunk. I had to listened to radio stations everyday; which is boring - since radio stations only play songs repetitively and Radio stations will only play singles of a singer/band if the song is already released to the radio station by the record company, singer or band. So, you might like a song so much, but you won’t have the chance to hear the songs being played since its not yet released to radio stations. Boring.

Since music video is out of the story, I tested playing my mp3 CDs. Not working (it detects the file, but not able to play it). Reading the manual also shows no signs of mp3 being supported. Duh, Boring 2x. I guess I have to figure out something else.

Well, I actually did. Since I have a bunch of videos from Youtube and my Firefox browser already equipped with the right extension to download online videos, why not download the videos and convert it to AudioCD? I’m not sure if the idea is realistic, but i am willing to give it a try. Then, I started googling around for couple of days and I finally found a software called MP3/AVI/MPEG/WMV/RM to Audio CD Burner from Ether Software. The cool thing about this software is that it helps to convert audio and video files to AudioCD easily. Files format supported are:

• mp3/wav/wma/ogg/ac3,
• avi/divx/xivd, mpeg/dat,
• wmv/asf/asx,
• rm/rmvb, mov/qt,
• mp4/m4v, 3gp/3g2, and
• flv files!!!

And not just that, this software also have cool features such as:

• Able to write to CDRs and CDRWs with the size of 650M(74min),700M(80min) or 730M(83min)
• It needs just ONE click to burn the AudioCD after loading the audio and video files
• Simple and easy to understand UI - so that you won’t get confused and accidently spoilt your CDRs!?

Now, I’m a happy driver having my favorite songs playing when I’m driving. But, please remember, the download copy of the software is only a free trial (and it only burns 5 files to the CDR/CDRW) - yes, its not totally free. Anyway, for now, I will stick to this software until I find a replacement software (hopefully Open Source) or some other methods that can help me get my music video files to play in my car. Anyway, please give it a try if you are curious! Good Luck!

Nuff said, the title speaks all. Actually i saw the announcement in Slashdot back in January about giving away Solaris 10 DVDs for free. So, w/o waiting any longer, I logon to the Ordering Site and make my order. There are 2 options; 1st option is Solaris 10 DVD Set and the 2nd option is Solaris Express Developer Edition DVD. I’m being totally NOT in development had choose the 1st Option.

Well, I honestly thought that SUN had decided that I’m not eligible to get the DVDs… but i was wrong. After couple of months waiting (January until end of April) I got the DVD set last Monday. Its a 3-disk DVD Set; 1x Solaris 10 OS for SPARC platform DVD, 1x Solaris 10 OS for x86/x64 platform DVD & 1x Developer Tool DVD (with SUN Studio 11, Sun Java Studio Creator 2 Update 1, Sun Java Studio Enterprise 8 & NetBeans 5.0).

Getting the parcel from SUN made me smile that day. But, I never thought that I will get another set of DVDs from SUN couple of days after that. Checking my mailbox on Wednesday evening, just after returning from work made me shocked. Another parcel? yes indeed. Its a different packaging this time and comes from a different address. Since its written DVD on the parcel, I didn’t wait to return home to check the content of the parcel. Wow! Its OpenSolaris Starter Kit DVD Set.

The OpenSolaris Starter Kit contains 2 DVDs; 1st DVD contains various OpenSolaris Distribution: Belenix LiveCD Distribution, Schillix LiveCD Distribution and Nexenta LiveCD/Install Distribution. Besides that, OpenSolaris source as well as learning materials is also included in the DVD. 2nd DVD contains the Solaris Express Community Edition b57 - which is SUN’s binary release for OpenSolaris developers. It is built from the latest OpenSolaris source and additional technology that has not been published in the OpenSolaris source base.

So, I guess, I will need a working system to play around with the DVDs. Currently, I can play with the LiveCD using my Thinkpad and read the learning materials in one of the DVDs. For installation, I think I will have to setup a PC to try out. I’m not sure if my PC is able work, since It was having some memory problem (I might have to replace it)… oh well, we will see.

Have you guys heard about TMNet EZnet? its a pre-activated dialup service, which is available to all TM phone line subscribers! the cool thing about this is that you don’t have to register to use it! Means, you just need the phone number to dial, which is 1315… and you are ready to browse the net! No username and password required! this could be really handy when you just need to go online somewhere, and there are no hotspots, no broadband connections available… (that’s what happen to me actually, and as aspected, I’m currently using EZNet to blog.. ). As for the charges, it’s 4 cents per minutes which sums up to RM2.40 per hour. Remember, dial up connections are at the limit of 56.6kbps - its slow. So, if you do a lot of download, please get a broadband connection instead - you get a better return for ‘value for money’.

for more information, please visit TMNET EZnet’s website.

Back in early March ‘07, I just had to stop at the magazine shop at Tesco to buy a magazine for my wife… and to my amazement, there is the ‘Linux For You’ magazine March issue at one of the magazine rack. The magazine is from India, cost RM14.50 (now the price has increased to RM19.00) and highly informative on Linux, of course. The cool thing about the magazine is that it is usually bundled with 1x DVD of Linux distribution and 1x CD with Linux softwares.

I haven’t been following the magazine for at least 3-4 months and now, when I finally wanted to buy a copy for myself, it came bundled with a Slackware 11 Installation DVD! Isn’t that great?? I have always wanted to get the original printed-cover Slackware installation DVD/CD (since its my favorite Linux distro)…. This is very inspiring!

I guess I’m back on track. Its time to starting working on stuff that I love to do. I have to start planning! No lookin’ back!