2nd Generation iPod Touch

I recently bought 16 Gb version of iPod Touch (1st gen) on eBay. What a fun little device. After 2.0 firmware you can install all kinds of fun applications and many are free! Despite all the cool factor of this very useful little gadget, I had a ton of complains about it's software limitations (music player for one is lobotomized: almost zero tweaks, just 4 dumb buttons and volume which is impossible to control precisely). But my today's blog is not about this. New version of iPod touch came out last week, and I couldn't resist it. It had few useful things that 1st player was missing. Namely actual physical volume buttons and built in speaker. I see many people don't understand what speaker is for, but I think it's a must! I'm not talking about blasting music on the train, no. When I'm at home I'm using it too, and I don't want to play games with my headphones on. Want to show cool video clip to your friends without sharing ear infection? :) There you go. Like to use alarm clock but don't want to sleep in the headphones? Very useful! And now calendar reminders finally make sense. Don't get me wrong, I'd still use headphones to listen to the music or watch movies on the train/plane.
There's however a HUGE bug in the 2nd Gen iPod Touch, and it's a deal breaker. Get this, WiFi DOES NOT WORK with many routers that use WPA/WPA2 security. Actually it's a bug in 2.1.1 firmware and it also affects 1st gen iPods. Difference is that you can't use older firmware on the new iPod. I spent about 3 hours, torturing my D-Link 4300 router, trying all kinds of settings and combinations, changing WPA password, no matter what I did it would not connect. Every other WiFi device I have works flawlessly. When I disabled wireless security, iPod was able to connect, but it's not an option. I went to apple forums, and it's a riot out there, so many people are having this issue. Someone suggested to do a Network Reset (it's an option in iPod settings). Surprisingly it helped me connect to my network once, and then it was no go again. I hope Apple is paying attention. If firmware is not fixed, I'm returning my iPod within a week...
Besides firmware bug, there's another issue with new iPod Touch. It seems they changed something so older chargers no longer work! I had no problems using my really old Apple made AC charger from 4th Gen iPod until I got new iPod Touch. Even 1st gen worked. Now it displays "Charging device is not supported" or similar message. It's not a huge deal to me, but people who bough $300+ Bose docking systems feel the pain... I wonder if there was any technical reason Apple did this, are they just being @ssholes and trying to squeeze more money out of consumer by making us buy new chargers...
Oh yeah one more thing. New iPod includes Nike + transceiver chip. Sorry but I have strong optionion about this one... I mean they actually had a chance to include bluetooth chip, but chose some proprietary technology that less than 3% of us use so some overpriced sneakers can now talk to the iPod. Instead we could've used wireless bluetooth headphones, or a bluetooth GPS reciever, maybe even a keyboard. Thanks alot Steve.
But what can you do. With GPS and Bluetooth iPod touch would've been COMPLETE. Since we don't live in the perfect world, I'm accepting what I have, proiding WiFi issue is fixed soon.

RAM holds data even after power is off, helps to break disk encryption

A group of Princeton researchers discovered a clever way to break virtually any disk encryption with help of an... air duster and a screwdriver! Secret lies in the little know fact that computer RAM memory doesn't actually loose all of it's data instantly after a power off! I was amazed to find out that some RAM chips will hold it's contents for seconds or even minutes after they stop receiving any power. And data doesn't fade all at once, but gradually. What's even more is that if you cool RAM chip down it can keep it's contents intact much much longer. And this can be achieved by a household air duster.
Now I'm getting to the breaking encryption part. Thing is that decryption key is stored in the RAM. So by dumping and analyzing RAM's contents one can find this key and decrypt contents of the hard drive. This method is not 100% effective, as it assumes that user already entered password before memory contents were wiped out.
Check out the video!

HD DVD dead and buried, format war is over

From engadget.com

It's official. Toshiba just made a statement saying, " it will no longer develop, manufacture and market HD DVD players and recorders." Cessation of the player and recorders are targeted for March 2008. Volume production of HD DVD disk drives for PCs and games will end in the same time frame. However, Atsutoshi Nishida, President and CEO of Toshiba Corporation did say that Toshiba will, "continue to assess the position of notebook PCs with integrated HD DVD drives." That's it folks, the format war is over, Blu-ray has won. Full press release after the break.

Read more: Two years of battle between HD DVD and Blu-ray: a retrospective

More nails into HD-DVD coffin

Netflix and Best Buy announced that they will not be carrying HD-DVD titles going forward, only Blue-Ray. While current inventory will remain for a while, nothing new will be added. This is another good news for consumers (well maybe not those who bought HD-DVD player) in HD format war. One format, means less confusion, more devices and better prices. Looks like Amazon is also liquidating it's HD-DVD players and movies, I've seen ongoing sales for 50% off. Microsoft also just announced slashing of the prices for HD-DVD drive for XBox 360. I wouldn't buy it if I were you ;) It is very unlikely now that HD-DVD will make a glorious come back. I'd be shocked if it did.

Evil empire is destined to fail

After January's announcement from both Warner Music Group and Sony about plans to drop DRM protection from their online music sale, Apple iTunes is THE ONLY company out there that still carries DRM infested music, and has no plans about removing it. iTunes - change or die!
DRM-free music can be purchased at Amazon's digital music store right now :)

Greedy bastards

Ok this is a straight re-post of the original article at gizmodo
I just had to pass it along...


The RIAA always claims that its looking out for the livelihood of artists when it sues the hell out of alleged pirates, but in reality it's really fighting to keep record industry executives rich by defending an outdated and unsustainable business model. While before the PR team at least made an attempt to make it seem like artists were priority #1, they seem to have given up: the RIAA is now trying to cut down artist's royalties on digital downloads.

Yes, the RIAA doesn't think the record companies are making enough and that musicians are clearly making too much. I mean, they get 13% now. Like they deserve 13% for writing and creating the music that people are paying for. Hogwash! Someone had to, you know, encode it. That's worth at least 40%. And hey, these shoes don't shine themselves! So they're pushing to get that rate cut down to a shameful 9%, giving artists even less of a slice of the pie than before.

Of course, Apple, Napster and other large online retailers make the RIAA look like a charity in comparison, with Apple pushing to cut the royalty rate down to an insulting 4%. Yes, Apple wants artists to get a 4% of wholesale royalty rate. Really looking out for those artists, aren't you Steve?

If there was ever a time for a band to try going completely independent, this is it. Why give over 90% of your income away to greedy sleazebags when you can sell your music online without the middleman? This industry needs to be burned to the ground and built back up again; it's broken and it seems less and less likely that it'll be able to be fixed. [Hollywood Reporter via Slashdot]

Thoughts on megapixels

I've been reading in the tech news about new Kodak's 5MP tiny censor. It's actually small enough for the cell phone cameras. So I thought to myself, great this means I would be able to take 5 Megapixel snapshot, but what about crappy lens? I haven't heard about many scientific breakthroughs in optical lens quality, so new phones will get great censor but old crappy piece of glass. Will this make pictures look better? Yes! I believe it will. What is the best camera in the world?

Human eye of course (well maybe certain animal's too). You have an amazing sensor (retina) with about 105 million photosensitive cells (100 million monochrome and 5 million color), most powerful in the world video processor (visual cortex of the brain), and really small lens. Image that you normally see is blurry, with lots of noise (veins) and a huge blind spot. Yet you see a crystal clear image thanks to our brain. It processes, fixes and enhances everything that eye sees. Same thing is done by the camera's CPU. The better this CPU is and more information it has to work with (megapixels) the greater resulting image will be. So I think that new 5Mp cell phone cameras will take great images even with the same crappy lenses on them. Of course not better than SLR with a good lens and same or better resolution, but still it might actually threaten point and shoot digital camera market.

Solid State Drives are here to stay (1.6 Tb drive released today)

Back in 1994 when I owned my first PC (well actually it was my dad's) I have been thinking over the idea of memory based hard drives. No moving parts, lightning write/read speeds, it's seems like a winner. My dad predicted that classical hard drives will be replaced my flash drives in matter of a year or two. But that didn't start to happen until middle of last year. There were issues with solid state drives which are just now being overcome. As it turned out Flash memory, was extremely slow for writes and reads when comparing it to the volitate memory (such as RAM). Even slowest of mechanical hard drives are usually faster than flash chips. That was one problem. Another one was that flash memory didn't have a great life span. Every chip is rated for certain amount of writes, after which it stops storing information. This sounds bad, but in actuality 100,000+ rewrites is not that small of a number for average computer user. Even better, problem was fairly easy overcame with special controllers which now spread out sectors of flash memory chip so it wears down evenly. It also maps out any bad sectors on the fly, so almost no data corruption occurs. Speed problem was solved recently too. Using new technologies Solid State drives are many times faster than mechanical HDDs. Capacity also was a culprit, but just today (Feb 5th, 2008) 1.6Tb SSD was announced by company Bitmicro.
I pretty sure that's currently more storage space than what HDDs offer. This drive really expensive of course (over $20K I think). All SSDs are expensive right now, but I'm sure price will drop dramatically by the beginning of the 2009. Dell and Apple currently the only two companies that sell laptops with SSDs as an option. Be prepared to see more and more devices implementing SSDs. I belive we will see SSD based iPod this summer. Fourteen years was a little bit too long to wait, but I'm happy to report that non-mechanical hard drives are finally here to stay.

Death to HD DVD!!!

Who is not pissed off by the getting in the stupid corporate crossfire between HD DVD vs. Blue Ray format wars, raise your hand. Ok you can put your hand down if you don't care about any of these formats. What's not to hate? Prices of new players are the stratosphere, some movies only come in one format, some in the other. There are players that can play both formats, but they costs pretty much like two units together anyway. And there's all this confusion of how one format is different from the other, constant debates which is better (btw, Blue Ray is better :P)
Cheers go out to Warner Brothers, who were the only company supporting both formats. Warner, switched exclusively to Blue Ray disks, abandoning it's HD DVD support. Now there are just TWO out of eight major movie companies left in the HD DVD camp: Paramount and Universal. Many think it's deadly blow to HD DVD format from which it will not recover. I say good riddance, let's now concentrate on the content rather than media and make better, cheaper High Definition video players.

Rant: FIOS vs. Cablevision roles reversed?

Back in January 2007 I was very anxious for FIOS to be available in my apartment complex. I've had it with horrible Cablevision customer service, their DVR box that kept missing recordings, TV service interruptions and other problems. When I finally was hooked up to Verizon it was like a dream come true. Friendly customer support representatives, ton of new channels, and great HD quality, super fast internet speeds, great router too! Sure I had few issues with billing (extra charges), but all it took one or two quick calls to get credit. Even despite of their POP3 mail issues I was one happy customer :) Unfortunately at the end of last year I had to move. And area where I live now doesn't have FIOS, so I had no choice but to switch back to Cablevision. It was difficult in the beginning, but I was really surprised by how much Cablevison's support has improved. Eventually I bought a Tivo HD box instead of Explorer DVRs, and while using Cablecards
wasn't without a problems, I had a tech visiting my home on the next, and sometimes on the same day after I called. One the phone experience was great too. Not all the stuff was knowledgeable enough, but they really tried to help. Maybe it's because of the rating system they have at the end of each call...
Meanwhile I was still wanted FIOS. Basically I'm spending few minutes every day on Verizon's site, checking my address availability. But I keep on receiving these "Final" bills from them. I got 3 so far. Each one has different amount, even tho I payed for everything 2 months ago. Last one stated that I didn't return Router so they charged me $114 for it (with taxes and some fees). They even threaten me with collection agency! I was really pissed, because one week after disconnecting service in November I spent 2 hours driving to their location in Whiteplains and personally returned DVR, Router, all the cables, manuals and everything I had... And few weeks before that when I was on the phone with Verizon cust. rep, she told me that I don't even have to return the router! I only returned it because I couldn't use it with Cablevision anyway. Obviously I called Verizon right away (it was after 6 pm)... Their automatic system is absolutely horrible. How
do you explain to it that I my old phone number tied to the disconnected account has changed? After about 10 minutes of trying to get to the live person, I finally got a message that "our offices are closed".
I called the next day during business hours. It was like talking to a robot. They couldn't comprehend the simple fact that I was charged for a router which I returned on time. They kept repeating to me my statement balance and that I have to pay it or else... After about 3rd call, I finally got thru to someone who had half a brain. I kept on being transfered from one department to another, until I finally got the same person I talked to initially. That's not funny people :) Anyway I finally got someone to fill out a form to refund the charges and they even promised me not to report me to collection agency. I can only hope they really did it...
This experience made me think... How did evil company like Cablevision became so customer oriented, while super friendly Verizon's support turned into a nightmare? They are facing some serious competition from other cable companies, and yet they treat their customers like dirt... Not a good move... Now I'm not sure anymore if I want to switch to FIOS, or just get Boost from CV. And I'm hearing they now require 2 year contract? Verizon is better get their act together, or they won't have any of my business.

Golden CPU, it's all about G0 Stepping

If you (like me) love to build computers, you might have already heard about G0 stepping revision of Intel's Quad Core Q6600 processor. When I found out about G0, a.k.a. Golden CPU, a.k.a. SLACR I did some research online, and couldn't contain my excitement. I had to tell all my friends about it. To my surprise none of them heard about this CPU, even tho it had been available since before August 2007! To my shame, I didn't know about it either. So what exactly is G0?
Each Intel's CPU has a model number (i.e. Q6600 or E6000) and a revision or stepping. Intel originally released it's first affordable Quad Core proc Q6600 in January 2007. This processor was a B3 stepping model. Q6600 has four cores on it, runs at 2.4Ghz and essentially it's two E6600 procs in single package. Every once in a while Intel takes existing CPU and revises it. Usually it's done to fix some issues, lower manufacturing costs, or add a feature. Think of it as a service pack for Windows. But this time, improvements done in G0 stepping revision were so great, that it allowed Q6600 chip run at lower voltage, consume less power, and thus it became extremely stable and easy for overlocking. Without much effort you can overclock 2.4Ghz CPU to 3Ghz, and you don't even need 3rd party cooling solution. Many reported that this proc will run under 50 C under heavies of loads using stock cooler that comes with it. But that's not all (now I fill like I'm doing one of those stupid TV commercials: "If you call in the next 10 seconds, you will receive second piece of crap absolutely three" hehe ) , Q6600 G0 stepping costs same as older B3 stepping part, and can be found for under $270 online. Trick is that sometimes you don't know which revision you are getting. Some sites explicitly advertise that they only sell G0 stepping, but sometimes they also charge few extra bucks for that. I think that chances of getting B3 stepping proc now are very slim, most retailers don't have any older B3 parts in stock, since Intel only produces G0 since it was released back in August.
If you are buying in real store, look at Box, last 5 letters of the product code should say SLACR

If you already own original B3 stepping Q6600 processor, I don't think it makes sense to upgrade to G0 stepping, but if you are in the market of upgrading older single or dual core CPU, I highly recommend you to get Q6600, but make sure you are getting G0 stepping. If you are good at overclocking and/or plan to use water or phase changing cooling solution, you can easily push this proc to 4 Ghz. Just make sure you know what you are doing, because overcloking potentially CAN fry your processor, and definately voids warranty. I personally think it's safe to overclock as long as you doing it carefully, but I will not be responsible for any miss haps you might have. Hope I didn't scare you too much;)
Happy New Year, and good luck with your upgrades!