Posts

If you glance around my computer museum (I mean office) you will see the following mobile devices: WebOS Maemo Android PalmOS Blackberry (no 10 devices yet) WinCE (don’t ask) And up until a few years ago many an iOS device scattered around. Part of my job is learning what the latest and greatest is capable of and implementing for my customers. It was after helping one of them recently that I realized my iOS knowledge was becoming a little dated and as such I found myself in the Schiphol Airport paying way too much for a Retina iPad Mini 32GiB. ...

Contents 0.1 News 0.2 Music 0.3 Moving Images 0.4 Tech News 0.5 Dumbest Things of the Year 0.6 Extra Sauce: <li> <a href="#Share_this"><span class="toc_number toc_depth_1">1</span> Share this:</a> </li> I skipped 2012 for some reason. I think I was just super busy, but then again I am more busy now. No standout moments in 2012 so nothing lost. Events ...

My requirements for the next laptop were pretty simple: 3rd Generation i7 or better 16GiB of RAM Light and thin (jealous of the wife’s Macbook Air) Fingerprint Scanner Pointer thingie Run Linux Additionally I had hoped for a Nvidia GPU, but realized the Intel GPUs have gotten to the point they can play Civilization which suffices for me. Unfortunately the trend appears to be less is more for the ultra-portables out there. The toughest of the above requirements was the 16GiB of RAM. Most of the machines are maxing out now at 8GiB which is not enough for honest VM work. The HP zBook that was released was a good choice, but the ATI graphics and stupid pricing pushed me away. ...

I have run the hotel/apartment room server off a BeagleBoard-XM for a few months now. I had no case for it, so I was a little worried to have an exposed computing platform hanging out there while the cleaning team and visitors were around. This put me on a search for a ARM-based platform that was small, silent, and could run Arch Linux. Up till this point I had used the Beagleboard with Ubuntu due to the ease of install. Yes it is capable of running Arch, but it isn’t a seamless process. Additionally, being ARM v7 it was not able to run Plex which is my media streaming platform of choice for the ouya ...

I like to look back at the year and see how good (or bad) my investments were in stocks for the year. As the rest of the year is going to be crazy busy I wanted to type this while I couldn’t sleep last night. I doubt there will be any huge swings from now till 31 Dec. I buy and hold-on to stocks vs. quick trades so my goal is not to make a quick buck on a flip. There were a few interesting surprises and fails this year. I am leaving my overall investment dollars out so you just get percentage gained. Overall my portfolio is up 21% which isn’t my best showing, but better than zero. If anything this reaffirms that I should stick to ETF and Mutual Funds for 2014 :) ...