tin_the_fatty weblog

I have heard of it, but never seen it before, until yesterday. In Justco, Shenzhen Nantau. Kyocera ceramic knifes. White blade. Cool looking. Light and well balanced. Very sharp. Wicked.

Not cheap thou.

I bought a Panasonic DV camcorder soon after Jasper’s birth, and after 5 and a half years of faith service, it has just died, flashing “GET SERVICE” in red on the screen. I have been looking at a replacement for a year or two now, but never got around to it due to budget and too many conflicting choices. It is usually usability (i.e. small and lightweight) vs performance (battery life, low light performance and image quality). I would have happily grabbed the standard DV workhorse Sony PD170 but its cost remains high at about HK$20K eventhou the model is on its last leg and Sony wants everyone to upgrade to HD video so they could sell more HD plat panel TVs.

So I went windows shopping in Tuen Mun yesterday. Broadway was very helpful, and showed me the Panasonic SD9. It’s 3CCD, HD, tiny, takes cheap SD cards, and not terribly expensive. It takes a new type of battery and the older models do not work anymore. The standard battery only works for about an hour, it’s close to HK$1K according to the Broadway guy and needs to be specially ordered as they don’t have it in stock(!) Some way to sell camcorders.

While I have no complain on my Pana DV, the Sony offerings are somewhat superior, for their line of accessories, e.g. wicked wireless microphone, BMF battery. I also prefer the Sony nightshot mode: you lose all colour and get a green image but at least you see what you are shooting, unlike on the Pana you get a blurry image when the subject moves, which isn’t exactly usable. The Sony CX7 is Pana’s counterpart. A little bigger, 1 big CMOS sensor (better for low light), and a little more expensive. It is listed as out of stock on Sony’s Hong Kong and US websites but I found one at the local BEST. I suspect it’s about to be replaced by a new model. BEST also has a Pana GS230 (SD DV). It is 3CCD, cheap, got mic input but no OIS image stablizer (only inferior EIS).

These HD camcorders using Flash memory and hard disk as media record in the AVHCD format. Quality is not bad (compared with HDV) for the recent models. One major problem thou. While transferring video from memory card/camcorder to computer is fast, to do editing the video file needs to be converted to a non-compressed format, which takes about 2X real time. DV capturing is real time, but the captured file is immediately editable. One major advantage of the DV is that one get an archive of the original footage. For AVHCD one needs to worry about backing up the video files.

So I was pretty set to go check out the Sony HC9, an HDV camcorder, so I could access my old tapes. Well it’s nowhere to be found in Tuen Mun. The shops say they don’t do tapes anymore. Crap.

I’ll go check some more out in Mongkok.

Ubuntu encrypted partition is very good. All data strongly encrypted. Bootloader asks for password when booting or waking from hibernation then it all works transparently.

Performance of X30 with 768MB RAM running Ubunto 8.04 was a bit slow but still quite usable. I even wrote a long paper on it using the excellent Kile (LaTeX editor) and put the project on git (source code control/versioning). Backing up to USB thumbdrives was slow ‘cos it’s USB v1. Try to avoid USB wifi adaptors ‘cos they tend to overheat after ~20 minutes (at least for my ASUS and Buffalo). Avoid the latest greatest MIMO adaptors ‘cos they probably don’t have OSS drivers and may have difficulty running under OSS OSes. The old Linksys 802.11g PCMCIA works okay but YMWV, ‘cos manufacturers keep changing the chipset and the latest may not be OSS-friendly.

The Lady needs a Chinese Windows laptop so she could go work in the library, so I tried installing Windows XP on the X30 with the install CD. The machine would just hang. After a couple of days of fiddling, it turned out that for some reasons Windows doesn’t want to touch those Ubuntu encrypted partitions, and failed because there was no partition to install on. So I had to boot into a Ubuntu rescue shell and blasted away those encrypted partitions. It stops Windows from installing. A truly great side effect.

Modern as in, available for sale today.

Around August 2006 I set up a computer running Ubuntu for my old man as he wanted something for the Internet. The Intel Celeron chip was a late version just before they went multi-core. Not too shabby for the day, and works okay.

Then the computer died. I suspect it was the power supply, as my old man has been complaining about the computer hanging for the last couple of months. I looked at the motherboard last night. All the capacitors appeared to be in good order. No bulging. I’ll take it back to my own place and stick another power supply to test it, but that would be an exercise for another day.

My brother Mike was using my old man’s computer, then he wanted to do Chinese over MSN, and Ubuntu doesn’t have IME he is used to, so he bought his own computer just before my old man’s computer died, from our old friend Jumbo in MKCC. It cost him HK$2,600, 160GB HD, 2GB RAM, Intel Core 2 Duo running at 2GHz (older version, ‘cos the latest version starts from 2.4GHz), cheap motherboard. No DVD writer. Onboard graphics and audio (Mike’s not into gaming). Oh, and an Antec power supply, which was probably the 2nd most expensive component in the whole computer. It was FAST. In fact it was so fast the Internet felt much faster. I was very impressed.

So now my old man’s computer is dead, he wants a new one. We went shopping in Tuen Mun the other night. Seeing the speed of Mike’s computer, I’d say one could get a very fast machine for well under HK$3K. We went to the two big DIY-type computer shops and picked up a few quotations. Then we went to the PCCW consignment in Justco to check out those big-name machines. The Apples were just way out of the old man’s budget. The HP big boxes were ugly and the small boxes were expensive. They have a Lenovo ThinkCentre small box for ~HK$3.5K. It comes with a nice keyboard (i.e. not mushy), an LED optical mouse, 2GB RAM, DVD writer, C2D running at 2+GHz, a cheap Canon printer/scanner (worth HK$500!), 2 years on-site service, and interest-free installment plan for up to 18 months (no payment until June!) My old man went straight for it. I’ll help him create the system restore DVDs, then put Ubuntu on it, and migrate his Firefox user data.

While waiting there I also looked briefly at the HP Mini-note. It looks pretty solid, and gives those crappy Asus Eee PCs a run for their money. The keyboard looks nice and although HP did something really clever here (shrinking the keyboard down to ~92%, by decreasing the gaps between the keys but keeping each key big enough) but because all the keys are flat and one can’t really feel the gaps between the keys, it is not so easy to use. The screen is also a little too small for this guy w/ failing eyesight to read. I am still considering whether I should get one of these small computers (and run Ubuntu) for Jasper, but he doesn’t seem to use computer for anything except games.

My Lenovo Thinkpad X61 runs a fast C2D chip and a 7200RPM HD, but for some reasons it feels a lot slower than Mike’s computer. I think that’s because I have it running on low power to keep it cool and quiet. Also it runs Windows Vista, which is supposed to be much slower than Windows XP.

I have had my iMac Core Duo for over 2 years now. Absolutely nothing to complain about. But the latest iMac 24” looks absolutely stunning and I suspect A LOT FASTER. Not to mention I can stuff it with 4GB of RAM. Maybe I’ll get it from PCCW/Justco, taking advantage of their Eon installment plan, when I finish paying for the X61.

Pretty good, as the reviews on the Internet say. But not as good as Spiderman.

The previous version 7.10 Desktop running on my newly acquired old Thinkpad X30 has poor stability when it comes to Wifi connection. The connection would work for 10-20 minutes and then die. This happens w/ a Linksys 802.11g PCMCIA card running on some voodoo Win32 blob driver over an emulation layer, as well as an ASUS WL-167G USB Wifi adaptor, which is OSS-friendly and is supposed to be well supported by all Free OSes. Hopefully 8.04 fixes this.

The preferred upgrade method is thru the Internet in Windows-upgrade style. I initiated the upgrade but cancelled it when I saw that it would take over 5 hours to download ~700MB of stuff. It is possible to download the CD and upgrade from there. It was already late last night so I fired up the Bittorrent client and left it overnight. The Desktop CD was ready in the morning but it was the Alternate CD that I need for upgrade. Bummer.

I just got the torrent file for the Alternate CD and started downloading. It was very fast for my dingy 3Mb ADSL line. Download rate fluctuates a bit from ~100KB/s to ~250KB/s. Power of the swarm.

UK Office of Government Commerce cracks one off.

Hint: turn the logo clockwise 90 degrees.

Craptacular. Microsoft said it is a spoof. This proves yet again that the Borg has no style whatsoever, even when it is spoofing itself.

Considering what the Wikipedia has to say about the Olympic torch relay:-

The relay of the flame from Greece to the site of the modern games had no ancient precedent and was introduced by Carl Diem, with the support of Joseph Goebbels, at the controversial Berlin Olympics as a means to promote Nazi ideology.

I don’t see what is so sacred about it. Unless the CCP is equalling themselves to the Third Reich or an extension of it.

We went to the local public library last Sunday w/ Jasper to pick up some English readings. There I found Arthur (ex-NPCer) with his gigantic desktop computer in the children’s section, occupying one round table all by himself. He recognized me so I went up to him and was just about to ask him WTF he was occupying the children’s section, when he showed me what he was up to.

It turned out that he was doing some contemporary history research, namely, Hong Kong people jumping off from high places, and needed the public wifi for access to Wisenews. He was going through the local news looking for incidents when someone had done the bungee jump w/o the bungee and didn’t survive, and plotted the locations on Google Maps. He finished the one for 2008, and was about 1/3 through 2007. The news archive he has access to goes back to 1998 so when the project is completed it would be for 1998-2008, and he’ll do a short video clip showing the trend over the years and put it up on YouTube.

Arthur told me his idea came from one of his old course mates jumping off not too long ago, and there is on average one death from such jumps every two days.

Anyway, the Bungee Jump w/o Bungee blog is here.

So Crankberries are selling extremely well. While I really enjoy using mine and wish them well, I am a little worried that the good sales may not last and there might be some tight time ahead.

I have been told that one of the major U.S. law firms has entered a serious budget crunch. The normal write-off period of the standard desktop computer has been prolonged from 3 to 5 years, and for one of their offices in South East Asia no new crankberries (which I believe is now a necessary business tool) are to be issued until further notice.

Hold tight. Rough time ahead.

I’ve just got hold of a nearly mint IBM Thinkpad X30. The one with the legendary keyboard. No, my Lenovo Thinkpad X61 keyboard is nowhere as nice.

The problem was, the X30 only had 256MB of RAM. I wiped out the harddisk containing WinXP Home and installed Ubuntu Linux. The machine simply wasn’t usable because of the constant HD activity. I didn’t expect Linux to be so resource hungry.

I pulled a bar of 512MB PC133 SO-DIMM from an old laptop of the same era and put it into the X30, and it now seems to be quite usable.

Well chuffed

I didn’t know that they sell pastry cakes.

While the HKSAR Govt is still p*ssing about with the language of instructions, we really should be reviewing the whole of education. Excellent talk. Take education of your children, back into your hands.

Link. RIP.

A client is about to adopt a new corporate logo, and I did a trade mark search, which reveal an identical logo already registered by an unrelated company. It turned out that the logo was “designed” by a designer in their in-house design department in China. The client didn’t think too much of it, but only asked the designer to do another design, this time without direct copying someone else.

This is actually serious professional misconduct. The designer copying a design from someone else is dishonest. The fact that the design was about to be used as their corporate logo could have led the employer into serious legal consequences. The designer should have been fired.

I have just found out about it. Hurrah! With Google Sync, you may now sync Google Calendar with your Crackberry.

It doesn’t work with my ancient Crackberry thou. I couldn’t download the software. Insufficient memory! Crap.

I might have over-committed myself. It has gotten pretty bad that I am somewhat behind on a few things. MUST. SLOW. DOWN.

For the modern homo sapiens with very primitive flint knapping skills (that is, me), once the flint core is smaller than say the size of my fist, direct percussion is a dangerous affair, as demonstrated yesterday. The wound on my hand is not too bad, but I could still squeeze a couple of drops of blood from it this morning, after nearly 12 hours.