What you see right now is the product of several weeks of brainstorming, tinkering around in Photoshop, staying up late with SubEthaEdit and a significant amount of trial and error. I had planned to get this done by spring break, but it took much longer than I expected. Thanks for everyone that gave me feedback on my works in progress, whether it be from flickr, the K2 or 9rules forums.

Before I continue, I would like Continue Reading »

Okay so first it was the Core Solo to Core Duo CPU swap that was all the rage. Now it appears as though Intel’s upcoming mobile processor, codenamed Merom, works in the Intel Mac Mini flawlessly and boasts up to a 19 percent speed increase over the 2.16GHz T2600 Core Duo (keep in mind, the Core Duo Minis that Apple sells only sport the 1.66GHz model). My friend and roommate for next year, Chris Morrell, has the rest of the story on his site.

Apple Computer has recently joined the ranks of BAPCo, the Windows benchmarking consortium. While still only speculation, Gearlog seems to think that this means Apple will now concentrate on Windows drivers to help the benchmark scores of Windows XP loaded on Apple’s Intel-based computers. From other news I have read, I can support their stance. Other rumors indicate OS X 10.5, dubbed Leopard, will feature Virtualization Technology or VT, as I talked about a while ago. Continue Reading »

Today I will be looking at a set of iPod accessories from the so-called experts in iPod connectivity, the German company Sendstation. They specialize in small and affordable products that are all about convenience and functionality as we will see shortly. There are the PocketDocks, which as the name leads you to believe, are small, portable adapters you can use to connect your iPod to any computer via standard USB and Firewire cables that any geek should have lying around whether at home or work. Then we have my favorite of the bunch, earBuddy. Simply stated, it is a safe home for your treasured iPod earbuds. Continue Reading »

A little while ago, I had mentioned that Sprint had invited me to be a member of their Ambassador program. Well today, the Samsung A920 phone had finally arrived. So what is the Ambassador program all about? To the best of my knowledge it is Sprint’s attempt at guerrilla marketing, targetting the real news makers, bloggers themselves. They equip tech bloggers with a Samsung A920 and unlimited Power Vision (Sprint’s net/media bundle) service for 6 months and only ask for simple feedback in return. Continue Reading »

As hard drive storage has started to dramatically increase, now with up to 500GB on a single drive, manufacturers have had to research alternative methods of storage to yield these outcomes. Traditionally more storage meant more platters, and not touching the platters’ density. Take for example my favorite hard drive, the Western Digital Raptor. It first debuted as a single platter 36.7GB 10,000RPM disk. Then a few months later, a 73.4GB Raptor was released. How do you think they did that? They added an extra platter. Now just recently, a 150GB raptor was released. You get the idea; this one had four platters. Continue Reading »

One of Adobe’s employees, Scott Byer, maintains an Adobe blog named Living Photoshop. Yesterday he discussed some of the reasons why there will not be any current versions of Adobe software released or patched to be a Universal Binary to run natively and therefore faster on Intel Macs. Scott brings up some good points that I had not thought about before, such as the fact that they use development environments that are more advanced than Apple’s Xcode currently is. To get the application to be a UB, it has Continue Reading »

Browsing MacUpdate late last night for some universal binary goodies, I ran across a rather neat application. Bye Bye Dashboard lets you disable the dashboard, which is notorious for being a system resources hog. I can see this type of thing coming in handy for the IT guy that wants to make all the Macs he rolls out as efficient as possible. A company boss might also find this handy to get rid of time-wasters Continue Reading »

Spotted at the CeBIT convention, Shuttle will be releasing another SFF computer, this time based off of Intel’s Core architecture. This might be the Mac Mini equivalent on the PC side. Yes, I do remember that AOpen MiniPC, but that’s slow compared to the new Shuttle x100. Here are few specifications to get you riled up: T2400 Core Duo (1.83GHz) CPU, DDR2 RAM, ATI Mobility Radeon X1400 graphics, Gigabit Ethernet and support for a SATA II 3.5″ hard drive. That last one has Continue Reading »

After at least 2 years of being faithful to Mozilla’s Thunderbird email client, I am switching to Apple’s Mail. This might be temporary if Mozilla comes out with a universal binary soon, but Mail is just so much faster. Thunderbird takes a while to launch and even longer to display messages that have already been downloaded. This is because Thunderbird for Mac is still a PPC Continue Reading »

After arriving home for spring break, I was greeted by several packages that I had ordered. I opted for an Apple Intel Mac Mini with a SuperDrive and a 1.5GHz Core Solo processor. Before you start knocking on the Core Solo, I must say that this is only temporary and will be replaced by a faster 1.83 or 2GHz Core Duo once those CPU prices become reasonable. Upon opening the package, nothing really caught my eye compared to the old Mac Mini’s packaging with the exception of the inclusion of the IR remote, ideal for Front Row, which has many uses. One thing I did notice was that the power supply had a slightly thicker cable going to the mini; likely more insulation and Continue Reading »

Andy Peatling’s project, CSS Tweak, is a fantastic online tool that can optimize your CSS files. Simply provide CSS Tweak your CSS file, either by pasting (temporarily disabled currently) it or selecting it to upload and configure the options to determine how tweaked you want your file to be, ie to remove comments, whitespace, etcetera. Hit the tweak button and you will quickly be greeted with your new, smaller file in addition to a percentage number of how much smaller it was Continue Reading »

It’s finally been done. With the recent news and video of narf2006 running Windows XP on his Intel iMac, everyone was wondering when his solutions would be verified. Well today, Colin from OnMac.net, where the contest is held, verified narf’s solution and it was made public in a nice zip file with all of the things necessary, minus Windows XP, to dual-boot Continue Reading »

I’m not exactly sure why but my WordPress database went haywire overnight, presumably around 5am as told by FeedBurner’s FeedMedic. I should have seen that coming, I had a few database hiccups yesterday and the day before. Out of desperation, I immediately filed a support ticket with Media Temple and called them to take a look at possibly repairing the database. Thankfully I have nightly backups and was able to make a new database with them in Plesk and edit the wp-config.php file to tell WordPress to use the new MySQL database. All of this in my CS2260 class on my laptop. I only lost a few comments, but if yours was one of them, sorry about that - feel free to drop a comment again. I guess today was a reminder that you need to backup your database/filesystem frequently. If Continue Reading »

With all the hype surrounding online storage services such as Box.net, Amazon has decided to get in the game with their new service S3, Simple Storage Service. Before I go any further, I must say that S3 isn’t aimed at the same market as Box.net. S3 integrates well with REST and SOAP interfaces which are things that only developers are familiar with anyways. Amazon has fully grokked what developers want and S3 will be offered with just about any amount of storage as developers require. A possible use Continue Reading »

Slightly larger than a PDA and weighing less than a pound, OQO’s Model 01+ is the smallest Windows XP computer. OQO has been working on this device for several years now, but Tom’s Hardware was finally able to get their hands on one. The OQO sports a 1GHz Transmeta Crusoe processor, a 1.8″ Toshiba 30GB 4200rpm hard drive, a 5″ 800×480 resolution screen, USB and Firewire ports, a micro-sized keyboard with a joystick for a pointing device and 512MB of DDR266 which is soldered onto the mainboard so that eliminates upgrades. The keyboard might scare many people away, especially Continue Reading »

A user named narf2006, a reputable Mac hacker on the WinXP on Mac forums, has been able to get Microsoft Windows XP SP2 running on his Intel iMac, as noted by ArsTechnica and his revealing flickr stream. He has given some detailed instructions to the contest holders and is under review for the $12,000 WinXPonMac contest prize. If this turns out to work, it would be a breakthrough. Continue Reading »

Last night at the SXSW Interactive web awards, Bryan Veloso won for Best Blog of the Year for Avalonstar, beating out Shaun Inman. A bit later in the evening, 9rules won for Best Community Site of the Year obliterating 43Folders. Congrats guys! I want to see some flickr pics of the award!

It’s a known fact that BitTorrents can be abusive on hard drives, especially when running more than a few downloads. Things are constantly being written to the hard drive, file space being allocated, file contents verification and more. If you use Azureus for BitTorrent you can help out your hard drive by going to Preferences/Options » Files » Performance Options. Enabling disk caching is a must for Azureus users utilizing a 2.5″ or smaller laptop-style hard drive, such as in a Mac Mini, which tends to get overworked rather easily.

Continue Reading »

A demo of a new Linux X server architecture, Xgl, has been created by Novell, which plans to incorporate Xgl into the next version of its operating system. The demo video was distributed to show the powerful UI enhancements that Xgl brings. In the first screenshot you can see how virtual screens are seperated across an animated cube and that windows moved across virtual desktops can be split. Windows exhibit some physics and therefore sway when being dragged, a rather impressive feature. Every window also Continue Reading »

Right now, tons of techies are having the time of their lives at South By Southwest, a convention of sorts that brings all many people together. People like Mike Rundle, Paul Scrivens, Matthew Oliphant, Bryan Veloso, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg and Flock’s Chris Messina. Thankfully, flickr is on my side and a quick trip to the SXSW2006 tag brings me a constantly updated feed of photos. One year I will Continue Reading »

Matt has posted WordPress 2.0.2, which is a security fix release. If you run a WP blog, update it ASAP - you don’t want to wait until people figure out how to exploit the security flaw in WP 2.0.1. Continue Reading »

Fellow tech blogger Michael Arrington has scored some exclusive screenshots of Google’s upcoming AJAX-powered Calendar web application. Dubbed CL2, Google Calendar is a fairly long way from a public launch and is currently under a very strict private beta. As expected, Google services such as Gmail will be able to integrate with CL2 and might even feature SMS notifications, that is sending a text message to your mobile phone as Continue Reading »

Twice a year, Intel holds the Intel Developer Forum where software and hardware developers gather to share their latest offerings and propose their plans for the future. The Spring IDF just began in San Francisco today and Intel came prepared. There was a discussion about Intel’s success on the 65nanometer CPU fabrication platform and plans to move to 45nm fabrication for RAM chips. Improvements to the Core Architecture, responsible for the current line of Intel processors, replacing NetBurst, were also discussed. These improvements Continue Reading »

The guys at XtremeSystems.org, the home of hardcore modders and computer enthusiasts (they always dominate the Futuremark Hall of Fame for benchmarking), have finally proven that my prediction was correct. It is possible to purchase the cheaper 1.5GHz Core Solo Mac Mini and upgrade it to a Core Duo processor, such as the 2.16GHz Core Duo that XS member Fugger did. I went more in depth about this over at 123MacMini, where I Continue Reading »

I’m not sure how many of you that are Mac users are aware that I have made a widget for this blog. The link has been buried somewhere in the about page, but I finally got around to cleaning it up and submitting it to Apple. A few days later Apple accepted it! You can take a look at this Apple widget page and download it there as well. If any of you have a blog, making a widget is a great and fun way to boost your blog’s visibility and get more subscribers, especially for those readers that aren’t too keen on using RSS.

Continue Reading »

ZDNet points out that Google is planning a new online storage space, similar to what Box.net offers, as reviewed here. However, there is one key difference to note about GDrive. GDrive is said to map to your computer like a simple network drive, enabling drag and drop usability. It would essentially function as a G:\ drive in Windows. GDrive is Google’s response to peoples’ Gmail hacking efforts attempting Continue Reading »

Today was the day that just about everyone that ordered a mini on the 28th received it via FedEx. Tons of pictures of the Intel Mac Mini’s internals flooded the internet this morning. Shots of the double-layered DDR2 200pin SO-DIMMs slots, the IR port next to the optical drive responsible for the Front Row remote control feature, the new Serial-ATA hard drive interface and more surfaced. However, one thing that caught my attention was the use of a socket for the CPU rather than a soldered-on, unreplaceable processor. Continue Reading »

School work, business proposals, universally accessible storage, data backup, important documents - there are many reasons why you might want to have secure online storage. Having all of your important files online is more convenient and safer than toting around a USB memory stick. A relatively new and revamped web service called Box.net plans to make online storage as easy as possible without skimping on the features. With 1GB of storage for free and up to 5GBs for a small fee, you can easily safekeep files and share them with contacts.

Continue Reading »

PaulStamatiou.com is currently the 57th most favorited blog according to Technorati. Take a peek at this link. If you missed out on how to use Technorati’s fairly new favorites feature, visit this previous post. You can easily add PaulStamatiou.com to your Technorati favorites, click this link (must be logged into your Technorati account). Hopefully with your help we can beat out Robert Scoble, who has Continue Reading »

BarCamp comes to Atlanta! If you live in or near Atlanta and have moderate geekiness, check out the BarCamp Atlanta wiki page. I can’t really explain what BarCamp is as I have never been to one, but with big proponents like Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress, and Flocker Chris Messina (thanks for letting me know), you know it has be good. It’s basically a Continue Reading »