Category Archives: Geek

Best product of CES 2011

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The annual Consumer Electronics Show is over. Sadly it was not the latest and greatest technological innovation that caught my eye amongst all of the product announcements. It was an April Fool’s Joke. Specifically, it was yet another joke product from the minds of the screaming monkeys at thinkgeek.com. Every year for April Fool’s day they come up with a series of fake products to advertise and sell on their site, and inevitably they rook a few hundred people into trying to order them. Past fake products included: caffeinated meatloaf, USB Desktop Tanning Center, Wireless Extension Cords, and the ZapCam – YouTube Tazer. You can experience the joy/frustration of thinkgeek’s April Fool’s page directly be clicking here.

But the irony is that several of their joke products have gone on to become actual products sold through their site, and rather successfully at that. Here’s at least a few:

Well, the latest product to make the jump from joke to sale aisle has just been announced at CES, the iCade (iPad arcade Cabinet). The iCade is a Bluetooth enabled arcade joystick with buttons, as well as iPad stand. It’s being built by ION Audio in conjunction with Thinkgeek, and they are working with Atari (and possibly unnamed others) to bring classic arcade games to the platform. So far, Atari has shown Asteroids as already working and ready for use with the device. The iCade is expected to ship for $99 ($50 less than the fake version), and will be available in two styles, the April Fool’s version available exclusively from Thinkgeek (pictured above) and a more generic one sold through various retailers (shown below).

And yes, I’m looking forward to owning one of these.


Byte Review of the Original Macintosh

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Since byte.com is being revived soon, and in spite of the fact that the new incarnation sounds lame, I’ve had a good time going back and revisiting some of the publications of the day. You can find archives of Creative Computing here and here, as well as Compute! located here.

But the initial review of the Macintosh in Byte is great, partially because I didn’t see it at the time, and partially because it reminds me of how new the concepts that the Mac made popular were at the time. The author describes WYSIWYG, menus, the mouse, and the entire desktop metaphor. Finally, there are the quaint touches of a bygone era — using Sieve of Eratosthenes as a Benchmark, defining RAM and ROM, noting the high-resolution (512×342) display. The article gave me a chance to at once look back at the Mac as it was born, and Byte at it’s best.

Christmas Day 2010

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Now that the orgy of torn wrapping paper and discarded cardboard is over. The gifts I gave seem to have been mostly duds. Kim doesn’t like the sheets for the bed, and the girls don’t seem interested in building any of their projects. I had planned on spending the afternoon busily assembling the minor DIY type projects with them, but instead I’m posting a blog update.

At the moment all the ladies of the house are working on a puzzle from the Nancy Drew game that the older munchkin got for her hackbook. At least it’s good to seem them puzzle solving and getting some entertainment out of the computers. I’m mostly messing with the fire since we apparently bought very expensive, but not totally seasoned, firewood.

I did make out like a bandit though. I got an Xbox Kinect, three Xbox games, a Micro CNC kit, a Lego Midi-scale Star Destroyer, and a lovely gray heather henley shirt from the girls.

Of iPads and eBooks

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The best thing about the iPad is that it removes the clutter from reading. Traditionally, there’s a stack of books next to my bed that I’m currently “reading”, which is to say that I’ve started them, and not finished any. With the iPad (and the iPhone before it), I have that stack of books in a convenient digital device. I’ve been using the Kindle app mostly, since it manages to keep my Mac, iPhone, and iPad synced with my current position in each book, so that I can use whichever is most convenient at the moment. Most importantly, you don’t need to actually own a Kindle.

But recently I’ve been somewhat ticked off at Amazon. I purchased a couple of eBooks from them 4 years ago, and they’ve since closed down that particular store and associated format. I have my original (encrypted) PDF files, but they’re now worthless since Adobe has shutdown the associated authentication servers. The result is a bunch of bits I “own”, but cannot access. Amazon customer service is no help and based on comments in their own forums, I don’t think Adobe would be either.

So this week I’ve taken to converting all my Kindle books (of which there are many). It works out to be a fairly easy process once you gather all the software. I’m using iPhone Backup Extractor to retrieve the eBook files, a Python script to “modify” the files, Calibre to handle format conversion to the open ePub format. On the devices iBooks and Stanza read the results in pretty close to the same quality as the Kindle apps (sans location syncing). All but one of my eBooks was painless, and that other book was handled by a different tool that I don’t expect to need very often. The nice thing about this setup is that the Python script can be configured as a plugin to Calibre, and once you get the Kindle PID for each device (for instance, using kindlepid.py ) that part becomes seamless. If I can figure out the PID for my Kindle for Mac, I’d be able to eliminate the backup extraction, and could do everything from inside of Calibre.

As a side effect of all of this, I can convert and read any PDF I have handy on the iPad/iPhone as well. More importantly, I’ve future-proofed my eBook purchases against another boneheaded move from Amazon. Now I just need to figure out how to access those older files…

Vintage Star Wars Posters

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I ran across these while looking around Zazzle last night, and frankly I just had to order one.  Modified from vintage WPA travel posters of the 30′s, these Star Wars posters just hit too many pressure points for me not to love them.  I ordered the Hoth version, but really both are great.  I’m not sure why they never got around to the Coursant version they planned.  More importantly where’s the obvious Endor variant made in conjunction with the creators of  this poster.