Entries Tagged 'hardware' ↓

After a long time with my old Athlon 3000+, I decided it was time for an upgrade. After not-so-careful choosing, here’s what I got:

• Motherboard ASUS M2N-X.
• Processor Athlon64 X2 5000+.
• Memory 2GB DDR2 800Mhz

Most of what I had before has been preserved, like hard drives, monitor, etc.

So no huge difference, except now I have dual core in the desktop (already have a dual core laptop) and I can do virtual machines at home.

Anyway, not going to bore you about how cool this machine is, how easy it was just to rebuild initrd, etc etc etc.

What matters now:

• There is a new poll in my blog. Tell me what kind of computer you have.
• The remainder parts of my old machine are for sale.

Let the fun begin.

Opa! Já temos TV digital em stick USB. Pena que oficialmente só tem suporte a Windows. Se alguém aí tentar no Linux, comenta aqui.

Começa a operar no Brasil mais uma das novidades que eu mencionei para 2008: WiMax. De acordo com o portal Teleco:

Rede WiMax da Embratel
Início de operação: Março 2008.
Cobertura inicial: Belém, Belo Horizonte, Brasília, Curitiba, Fortaleza, Goiânia, Porto Alegre, Recife, Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, São Luiz e São Paulo.

Por enquanto o serviço está disponível apenas para empresas. Claro, assim eles podem cobrar mais caro, e compensar os investimentos.

Bom, com isso concretizam-se todas as minhas previsões.

I know it’s old news, but I decided to write something here after I received a newsletter from Sony with the title “The world has decided”.

In 2006 I said that I would go with PS3 (if I could afford it). Well, by the time the opportunity came, I could not, so XBox360 was the obvious choice. So, what does that all matters? If you read my post about PS3, you’re going to see that back in 2006 I was already prising Blu-Ray over HD-DVD, because by that time I already made my choice of format.

No, I’m not saying “I knew it”, I’m just writing this post to say that Microsoft lost this war.

Nobody knows for sure why M$ was going against the obvious (some have a few ideas why), but the fact is that the battle has come to an end, and the obvious has come to surface. Search around the web, and you’re going to see how many sites talk about companies declaring HD-DVD EOL. Even M$ did it already.

On Wikipedia, the official death of HD-DVD has been marked as February, 19, 2008, after Toshiba decided to EOL it’s production.

That’s it. It’s over. Good luck. Bye bye. Now let’s move on to the next format war.

[Update on Mar/13] Microsoft publically stated their Blu-Ray support.

I had a problem at home: 2 HDMI devices, 1 HDMI input on my TV. Solution? An HDMI switch.

So, I bought the Terk HDMI-31 . The automatic switch works beautifully. It jumps to the most recently switched on device, and jumps back to the last active device when you turn off the current. It also has a button so that you can manually switch, in case your device does not support manual.

Simple solutions for complicated problems. Better than buying a hole new TV.

I just bought a new DVD player. An LG DV298H. It’s interesting that it’s has been officially released by LG in Australia only, but I could get one fairly cheap in retail stores in Brazil.

Looks good, plays fine, and is my first DVD with HDMI. That will fix the fact that my XBox can’t play region 4 DVDs, neither DivX with subtitles (even though the subtitles in the LG look bad, which will need a firmware update). This is not the best player around, but will do the trick.

More fun.

AFTER SEEING ALL the hype last week about the Macbook Air, I am left in complete awe at how stupid the mac fanboys, the general public, and sadly almost all of the IT press is. Some get it, and I think Anand was the only one to put 2 + 2 together, Apple did diddly squat here, Intel did, but it gets no credit.

Read the full story on The Inquirer.

I was testing an old printer we had stored in the company, and got a very nice message:

kernel: drivers/usb/class/usblp.c: usblp0: on fire

Haha! It’s actually not on fire. It’s just out of ink.

Pois é, as novidades do ano que vem já começaram no Brasil:

- A TV digital está aí, e a NET já tem um decoder com DVR (TiVO).

- A Claro acabou de lançar o 3G em SP.

Haja dinheiro pra tanta novidade.

As coisas vão ser muito boas por aqui em 2008:

- Mais petróleo.
- Mais álcool (combustível).
- 3G.
- WiMax.
- TV Digital.

Muita coisa boa vem por aí!