"Because we dont have a potato sack."

I had a good laugh today.  There are those few rare times when your children say something that is completely unexpected and oddly funny.

When I came downstairs I found my daughter was jumping around the kitchen inside of a garbage bag making all sorts of noise.  Slightly annoyed that she helped herself to a garbage bag, I sternley asked "Why are you destroying a garbage bag?"  She replied "Because we dont have a potato sack."

Cant argue with that... ;)

Did Apple iPhone invent the Multi-Touch UI? Think different!

We know who took the spotlight, but who envisioned this really? According to the 'pedia Bell Labs and documented further here.  However, these folks have a quite impressive display of it back in 2006.  Check the video to the right for a multimedia "experience" ;)

http://www.cs.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirtouch/index.html

This site has some really neat projects on it, besides just multi-touch.  Worth a few minutes of life to explore it a bit.

 http://www.cs.nyu.edu/~jhan/

Bullet Proof Fasion

Miguel in Columbia creates bullet proof fashion clothing.   Supposedly Obama was sporting one of his creations during the inauguration.

http://www.vbs.tv/video.php?id=1125865361

My next phone - Palm Pre

Finally a smartphone that focuses on Personal Information Management with the elegance of a touch based UI, Palm presents its new flagship product the Palm Pre.   Follow the video to get all of the details (an hour or so viewing).   Im guessing that the magnet / induction power will find more uses than just simple charging (think backpack powered accesories)

http://www.palm.com/us/products/phones/pre/palm-pre-ces.html

Best of all, it runs Linux ;)

Radeon 2600 HD HDMI with Ubuntu 8.10 working

Well, never thought I'd see the day where I would be playing 1080p movies from within Linux over an HDMI w/audio.   The day has arrived!

Following a link that was sent to me, https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RadeonHD  I was able to download the latest RadeonHD driver version which included the following enhancements from the stock Ubuntu Ibex 8.10 release:

- Xvideo Support ( allows you to actually view movies at 1080 without lag )
- HDMI Audio support ( 2 channel stereo for now, ALSA updates coming soon for AC3/DTS output )

These updates finally allowed me to ditch the analog VGA connection to our Sony Bravia and remove the complexity of my existing audio routing via the receiver.

In order to get audio working, I needed to abandon the Xorg.conf free installation and create simple Xorg.conf file that enabled Audio explicitly:

Section "Device"
Identifier "Radeon Driver"
Driver "radeonhd"
Option "Audio" "on"
Option "HDMI" "all"
EndSection

To celebrate, I just finished watching the Wall-E blueray on my Mythbuntu machine in all of its digital glory ;)

Excellent video of a lightning strike >20meters away

Just bumped into this while browsing "The Tube". Just skip to 3 mins in and watch from there.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hm-2WvzEGM&feature=related 

Sprint expected to release Samsung Google Andriod Phone in June

Sprint expected to release Samsung Google Andriod Phone in June based on the Instinct and Omnia phones.   This may be the phone I will ultimately select to replace my 1.5yr old Mogul.

http://english.etnews.co.kr/news/detail.html?id=200812190010