Insanityville

LaCie sure offers great products like this suggestively named key shaped USB drive, or this new, also suggestively named, Rugged Safe external Hard Drive. You’ll notice right away the thumbprint scanner that ads extra security to the device. Pretty nice feature if you ask me.

Now, a little on the specs as stated on the LaCie official website:

• Biometric authentication: up to ten users
• 128–bit AES hardware encryption for full data protection
• Bus–powered and compatible with Mac® and PC
• Shock–proof rugged design
• Design by Neil Poulton

You can buy it in two versions. A 500GB version at $189 or a  1TB version at $299 (out of stock momentarily).

More pics below:

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Browsing the web I came across the photos the FCC made when they checked the iPad in the review process.

The gallery can be viewed here.

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I haven’t seen in a while a concept anything that is truly different than other mass production products. The Gridlock Concept wrist watch from Tokyoflash looks like it comes straight from a Star Trek movie.

You’d think that it’s difficult to read but you’d be wrong.  The trick to it is that the hours are displayed on the left side as a circle and the minutes on the right side as a filled box. Once you get the catch, it is quite comfortable.

This would make a great gift if it were on the market. For now we can only admire it.

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It seems that the USB port escapes the multimedia device case and moves to the wall socket. This is the U-Socket from FastMac and it will be ready for shipping in October. You’ll be able to purchase one for about $20. The original design that was supposed to be priced at $10 had to be redesigned due to safety issues but now comes with a few new features.

In addition to relocating the USB connectors, the safety boards have also requested some other internal changes which will make the U-Socket safer & easier to manufacture. Since we were asked to redesign the U-Socket, we’ve gone back to the drawing board and rebuilt the product from the ground up to incorporate the following additional features:

a) USB 3.0
b) 10W Charging support so you can charge 1 iPad at full speed or 2 iPads @ half speed. This also means you can charge 2 iPhones at the same speed as Apple’s AC adapter.
c) Energy Star- U-Socket meets and beats the EPA’s Energy Star requirements by more than 10x their minimum when compared to the energy savings achieved by a typical Energy-Star compliant AC Adapter FYI, only 2 mobile phone manufacturers (Nokia & Samsung) make Energy-Star compliant AC adapters.
d) TruePower Technology- custom ‘TruePower’ energy efficient AC/DV converter and power management ICs
e) Custom UL-approved transformers that are smaller than even those found inside Apple’s impossibly-small iPhone AC Adapter

All of these modifications/ upgrades will result in a reschedule of the shipping date to October end at the latest.

Pretty cool and handy.

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Based on the image above, a lot of jokes were made around the Internet. I found a few of them online and I grouped them into a little gallery. You will find a template to create your own joke based on this image or can send me links to other jokes like this to extend the gallery.

See gallery here: Steve Jobs vs Bill Gates

Enjoy.

[Image Source]

This is an update on my unbootable laptop. For the initial repair operation you can read here: Ubuntu saved me once again. It seems that my fix using the Ubuntu was just temporary Today when I arrived from work, started my laptop but surprise, it didn’t boot again.

It entered the recover console again. I waited until it was finished trying to repair my system and the I read the generated report. Again there were some reminiscent files from the bad game installation. I wrote them down on paper so I could locate them after a reboot.

These files that kept me busy for 2 days are:

• sfsync02.sys
• sfvfs20.sys
• sfhlp02.sys
• sfdrv01.sys

I should mention that the recovery report only contained 2 files at a time… so I had to run it a couple of times. After the first restart, I booted into Ubuntu and followed the steps mentioned in the previous posts but after restart, it still didn’t boot. After another restart the problem persisted but I had identified all the bad files.

I found myself face to face with the recovery menu so I chose to get into the command line.  I navigated using the cd command to the C:\Windows\System32\drivers folder where the bad files were located and I deleted them using the following commands:

> dir sfsync02.sys # will display the file if it exists
> rm sfsync02.sys # will delete the specified file

After removing all the files, I went to C:\ and noticed a suspicious folder named .Trash… something. After looking into it I found copies of the files I had just deleted.

I removed the folder using the following command:

> rmdir /s .Trash # will delete the folder and all subfolders and files

After all of these operations I rebooted and my Windows 7 x64 Professional finally booted normally. I double checked this time to prevent an unpleasant surprise later

I hope that my mishap will help you to fix your system faster and easier.

Today at Google I/O, Google had the coolest giveaway yet by gaving everyone present their latest Android phone, the Evo 4G. But that’s not all.

Nobody guessed that the phone wasn’t the only thing that Google was giving away. On their way out, everyone received one sample of Google’s latest project: Google Socks.

Now they can literally step on Google whenever they want or they can have Google at their feet

See photos below.

Well, maybe that’s what I get get for trying to play Prince of persia – The two Thrones without the original CD and without installing the crack

I installed it using an image of the game taken from a tracker but somehow forgot to overwrite the original files with the cracked files. I restarted at the installers request but Windows wouldn’t boot anymore because of something the game installed without asking Instead of booting normally the system rescue system started up and tried to fix the system without success.

After reading the detailed report of the recovery operations, I knew what the problem was. It said that the root cause is that C:\Windows\System32\drivers\sfsync02.sys was corrupted.

I took a Ubuntu 9.04 CD and I booted into Ubuntu without installing it. I went to the drivers folder and deleted the broken file. I restarted the laptop and I was able to boot into Windows again.

Ubuntu, once again, saved me from reinstalling my system (last install was last week). The next thing I did after this incident was to change the bootloader to Grub just to be safe

Below are some cool Ubuntu logos for you to enjoy.

Is this a real OS?
Is this insanity?
Caught in a niche buy,
No escape from the GUI.
Open your eyes, look into your files and see,
Bill’s just a rich boy, he needs no sympathy,
Because it’s sloppy code, full of bloat, really crap, really slow,
Any way to sell ‘dows doesn’t really matter you see; s’not free.

Linus, just killed a corp.,
Put a gnu against its head, read the licence, now it’s dead.
Linus, my code had just begun,
And now I’ve gone and ftp’d it all away.
Linus, GNU, Didn’t mean to make(1L) you compile,
If your prompt’s not back again this time tomorrow,
switch to /dev/ttyp1, and kill the PID that matters.

Too late, shutdown(8) has come,
Sends SIGTERM down my spine, cron jobs failing all the time.
Logout, ev’rybody, It’s got to go,
Gotta re-compile the kernel; patch the goof.
Linus, d00d, don’t want to lose uptime,
I sometimes wish I’d never been touch(1)’ed at all.

<cue MIDI-embedded web page of hampsterdance doing the guitar solo>

I see a little silhouetto of a plan,
ESR, ESR, is it catherdral or bazzaaro?
Underground of coding, very, very worrying Bill!
(Mo-no-poly.) Mo-no-poly. (Mo-no-poly.) Mo-no-poly. Mo-no-poly figures he, Magnifico? Eric; poor rich-boy, everybody loves he.
He’s just a poor boy from a vi(1) family,
Spare him his life from this emacs-monstrosity.
Easy come, easy go, will you let me code.
Mozilla! No, we will not let you code.
(Let him code!) Mozilla! We will not let you code.
(Let him code!) Mozilla! We will not let you code.
(Let me code!) Will not let you code.
(Let me code!) Will not let you code. (Let me code!) Ah.
No, no, no, no, no, no, no.
(Oh Jolt-Cola, Jolt-Cola.) Jolt-Cola, let me code.
Billzebub has Windows put aside for me, for you, for thee.

<cue frenzied accordian playing by Mahir>

So you think you can install it and spit in Bill’s eye.
So you think you can lilo(8), then leave it to die.
Oh, baby, it’s not that easy, no baby,
There’s little support, there’s little support for your games.

Porting really matters, switch to BSD,
Porting really matters,
Porting really matters to me.

Anyway, it’s “Wind’blows”…

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I don’t want to be malicious but it’s kinda true. Daily I must struggle with the shortcomings of Internet Explorer so the message above is very well intended. So, please, don’t use Internet Explorer for your day to day browsing needs. Use it strictly to download a better browser.