Sunday, October 28th, 2007
Last Friday, I installed Leopard, the sixth major release of Apple’s Mac OS X.
After 2 days of playing around with it, all I can say is: Incredible! Not only is it notably faster than Tiger (Leopard’s predecessor), its new features are simply fantastic. Of course, I’ve used things like backup software (Time Machine) and virtual desktops (Spaces) before, but somehow, Apple always manages to implement things just a little more streamlined and polished than the rest.
I’m very happy, and Leopard once again remembers me why I love OS X so much. 
Filed under Software and tagged with Apple, Leopard, Mac OS X.
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Saturday, October 20th, 2007
Today, in San Francisco an event called “Lights Out San Francisco” takes place. Basically, everyone there is asked to turn off al their lights except for one compact fluorescent lamp between 20:00 and 21:00 hours tonight, to raise awareness of the need to reduce energy consumption.
Google supports this initiative by serving a black home page to people living in the San Francisco Bay area.
Google users in the San Francisco Bay Area will notice today that we “turned the lights out” on the Google.com homepage as a gesture to raise awareness of a citywide energy conservation event called Lights Out San Francisco.
http://www.google.com/lightsoutsf/
Well, I don’t live anywhere near San Francisco, but I am treated with a (rather ugly) black Google home page:
Google with lights off
So far nothing really special. But apparently, everyone else I’ve asked gets the standard white home page. I haven’t pulled off any tricks, I’m not connecting though a proxy, and my IP address is a Dutch one. In fact, Google redirects me to www.google.nl when I visit www.google.com if I don’t turn that off manually (by visiting www.google.com/ncr once). So Google actually knows my IP address is a Dutch one. Everyone else with a Dutch IP seems to get the white home page.
Filed under Internet and tagged with Google.
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Thursday, October 4th, 2007
Almost 2 weeks ago, the smiley celebrated its 25th anniversary. Today, the celebration is for Sputnik 1. Exactly 50 years ago, on October 4th, 1957, it became the first man-made object in outer space. Technically it did little more than sendig radio beeps back to Earth, but more importantly, it set off the Space Race between the United Stated and the Soviet Union, lasting well into the 1970’s.
In my opinion, this event is still one of the most significant technological breakthroughs in history. After all, if the Soviets hadn’t launched their “football with antennae” into space, the entire Space Race might never have took place, and countless innovations that space exploration has lead to, might never have been made.
Today, the Russians still play a major role in manned space exploration. If it wasn’t for their Soyuz Program, the International Space Station would have probably been abandoned after the 2003 Columbia disaster. In fact, while the United States are struggling to design and build a replacement for their Space Shuttle, the Russians are still sucessfully deploying their 41 years old Soyuz rockets — though somewhat modernized along the way — and are not planning on retiring them any time soon.
I’m looking forward to the next 50 years of space exploration. There are some interesting missions underway right now. But despite all the probes and manned missions we’ve sent into space since 1957, our own Solar System still remains largely unexplorered. Let alone what lies beyond. I predict that the age of space exploration — whether it be with probes or manned space craft — has only just began.
Filed under Real life and tagged with history, space.
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Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007
My Logitech MX1000 died this morning. 
They’re excellent in surviving free falls from half a meter. But accidentally stepping on them kills them, just like it would a real mouse. And that’s exactly what happened this morning. It served me well over the past few years. I did try Apple’s Mighty Mouse for awhile, but its scroll ball stopped working, so I went back to my MX1000.
But now it’s dead. So I needed something new. Something just as comfortable and preferably with the same or even better features.
I went to Logitech’s web site to look at their current line of mice. There, my eyes fell on the MX Revolution. It’s shape is similar to the MX1000. It has all the features the MX1000 has and more. But what appealed to me the most was what Logitech calls the “MicroGear Precision Scroll Wheel”.
That thing is amazing! I give the wheel a good swing, and it goes into free spin, like a flywheel. Inside a scroll wheel are ratchets onto which a notch pushes that make it “click”. The MX Revolution has a mechanism that can retract that notch, so the wheel has no more friction and can spin freely.
Scrolling through long documents or web pages (Wikipedia has some good examples) is now blazing fast and super easy. I do fear that the complex mechanism is more sensitive to free falls. So I’ll try to be a little bit more careful with this one.
Here’s a pictures:
Logitech MX Revolution
Filed under Hardware and tagged with gadget, Logitech, mouse, scroll wheel.
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