René Rebe

(Image courtesy Mac Rumors.)

I want one two! I never quite liked the chrome bezel of the iPhones up to now (1st, 3G, 3GS). The frameless style is exactly what I envisioned.

However, a slightly smaller display would not fit into my vision – I’d prefer a slightly bigger one (not just in terms of resolution), to make reading websites or other material more enjoyable. But then again, that might hurt iPad sales, so a smaller iPhone display would certainly favor people getting an iPad for reading. On the other hand I really prefer just to take one device “that fits all” around with me.

I really do not want to be the Apple employee who actually lost the phone in the bar! Unless, of course, it was an intentional leak – to make the media and us desperately long for it, awaiting the new iPhone in the summer.

In the past decade I lived without any Microsoft Windows flavor near me. However, for multiple reasons (e.g. being able to answer Windows questions to my parents in law) I thought it’d be a nice idea to leave the Windows 7 that came with the for occasional “let’s see how the menu item is named there” reboots.

While I initially had triple boot (via Chameleon, not GRUB, it just looks better) last autumn, it broken some time thereafter. As I said, I do not really “need” Windows for anything, less so abroad, so i left it in that un-bootable state for the time being. However, now that I injected an SSD I reinstalled anything, anyway. And just when I had everything installed and setup this stupid Windows 7 beast refused to boot, yet again (with the strange “hardware changed I can no longer boot” message I was already used to)! The Windows installer media repair function was no help, either.

The internet was silent on that matter as well (ok, guess not too many dual-booting their Hackintosh), so I invested some time to finally track this annoying thing down. After some intermitted hours of re-install and analysis it turned out the Mac OS X’s fdisk is the culprit! Zero’ing out the new and optional “disk signature” (4 bytes at offset 440 [0×1B8 in hex]) of the MBR:

— mbr.doesntwork.hex 2010-04-16 20:04:35.000000000
+++ mbr.works.hex 2010-04-16 20:04:26.000000000
@@ -25,7 +25,7 @@
0000180 bb 01 00 fc ac 3c 00 74 06 b4 0e cd 10 eb f5 c3
0000190 0a 0d 62 6f 6f 74 30 3a 20 00 65 72 72 6f 72 00
00001a0 47 50 54 00 74 65 73 74 69 6e 67 00 64 6f 6e 65
-00001b0 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 80 00
+00001b0 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 10 b8 29 01 00 00 80 00
00001c0 14 00 af fe ff ff 13 00 00 00 ad 60 49 06 00 fe
00001d0 ff ff 83 fe ff ff c0 60 49 06 c0 60 49 06 00 fe
00001e0 ff ff 07 fe ff ff 80 c1 92 0c 00 cd 0e 06 00 00

So Windows 7 (I assume since the new BOOTMGR was introduced in Vista) uses this disk ID to identify the boot device for startup, sigh!

Finally I know why Chameleon ships a custom fdisk, though their README could be clearer, e.g. using a “./” prefix in their sudo calls, and pointing out that preserving the disk UUID is vital for Windows versions since Vista.

Now after the WePad demonstration, which was just playing a mockup video inside the Windows Media Player, I guess Neofonie needs some private lessons how to build, and introduce a Linux tablet, even more so that the JooJoo tablet is already there, and is shipping:

• never ever show-cast it with Windows
• even less so if it is x86 based, there is virtually no setup cost, hell take any Linux, ChromeOS, Android or -as last resort- Ubuntu near you
• don’t claim a cheap Asian OEM device is “designed in Germany”, in times of the internet people will notice
• don’t just start importing an Asian OEM device when others (iPad, JooJoo) are already shipping, and don’t wait another half a year until your employees learned to create a Linux product, by that time the underdog is even less hot
• don’t name it like a utility to pee, the lesson should already be learned after Nintendo’s Wii

That’s was the basic introduction, as Mr. -red scarf- Neofonie is located in Berlin, too, he may feel invited to contact me for some more private Linux and marketing lessons (and Asian connections).

Yesterday I ordered at the Jacob Elektronik online shop for the first time. Although I have a mixed history with those non-major online stores, the price for the Intel X18 SSD was pretty good.

Long story short: it’s actually no long story, they shipped it it just some hours after I ordered, and it arrived in just 24h, that is today!

So you want to upgrade the quite slow Toshiba, MK1235GSL (4200rpm, quickly auto head parking, so that (any OS) UI freezes on FS object access until the disk spun up again).

Fortunately it is pretty easy to open, disassemble the Nokia Booklet. The keyboard can be flipped open by pressing back 2 clips with a plastic (like credit) card, and the keyboard sides with either a tiny plastic tool, or a fingernail.

(more…)

…but Sony indeed removed the OtherOS functionality with the v3.21 PS3 firmware update on April the 1st. So in order to use the primary function I purchased the 64bit PowerPC and Cell equipped small form factor workstation, I now have to carefully avoid to ever update the firmware again. Oh wait, there still is George Hotz to help out.

I’m crossing my fingers if that allows me to update to the more energy efficient PS3 Slim.

Certainly not the smartest move from Sony, to highly motivate some thousand, if not ten thousands, programmers -certainly some of the brightest minds, using it for super-computers in university labs- to regain access. Maybe even beyond the former restricted access, but now to the RSX, one more SPE, or Slim, as well.

From the Porsche designed VW Beetle to the modern – the Porsche museum in Stuttgart, Germany is definitely worth a look:

… more in the whole gallery

In Stuttgart you will also find the Mercedes museum, too. Unfortunately I did not yet have a free time slot to get there. However, I got some good shoots when they had a special 100 anniversary exhibition in a shopping mall in Berlin:

… more in the whole gallery

score 147
Microsoft Windows YlmF Ghost XP SP2 YE3.0 (#205409)
Vortex86 SoC @ 999 MHz (1 processor)

score 191
GBT___ AWRDACPI (#218595)
ALADDIN5
AMD-K6 3D+ @ 451 MHz (1 processor)

score 200
INSYDE CS553x__ (#43975)
Geode Integrated by AMD PCS @ 498 MHz (1 processor)

score 209
Linux PC (VIA Nehemiah) (#151851)
VIA C3, Nehemiah @ 999 MHz (1 processor)

score 464
Compaq Compaq Tablet PC TC1000 (#166888)
Transmeta Crusoe TM5800 @ 997 MHz (1 processor)

score 517
Linux PC (VIA C7 Processor 1500MHz) (#228756)

score 956
Linux PC (Transmeta Efficeon(tm) Processor TM8000) (#54706)
Transmeta Efficeon TM8000 @ 1.60 GHz (1 processor)

Some CPUs, such as the Vortex86 (formerly SiS 550) are particularly bad on the performance per MHz ratio, and the VIA C3 and C7 are not much better. For me it is surprising to see how well the old and “Code morphing” Transmeta CPUs perform for their time.

Some more results are also quoted in my Atom performance post.

Elsewhere I read others, like RedHat’s Fedora, SuSE’s OpenSUSE are dropping support for PowerPC – like Debian retired sparc32 in 2007.

I’d like to invite those, who are affected, to the T2 SDE Project, an unencumbered OpenSource project targeting all those architectures, without any plan to discarding support for any of those anytime soon.

We add, don’t take™.

Among other things we ordered six identical shelves for our living room book library from OTTO’s pretty polished yourHome.de online store.

However, Houston, we’ve got a problem: From this six boxes of shelf modules, three sides had misplaced holes. Just look at this:

In contrast, I have not yet experienced something that grave with IKEA.

We even got some more stories to tell just from this single order. However, I first wait how our reclamations are handled. Stay tuned …