3D Cinema

I saw Martin Scorcese's Hugo in 3D in the cinema last night. Everytime I go to the cinema in the last while I'm dissapointed by the small screens, often lack of surround sound, and appalling shutter speeds. The 3D was good, and the movie was not too gimmicky about it, but did use it. BUT! I could not help thinking: yeah that ball looks great coming out of the screen, but why am I seeing eight of them when it moves? It really seems like they're slapping 21st century technology onto 1970s tech, and I guess that's what they are doing, but really they need to update these projectors properly if they want the cinema industry to survive. I think a lot of people have large flat screens and possibly 5.1 surround at home these days. Surely they should increase the framerate and screen size by updating old tech or moving over to digital projectors? And for the love of jaysis turn on the feckin surround sound if you've got the equipment!

Atomic Wiring

Researches have just made and tested wires that are 4x1 atoms thick! Small eh? They used it to verify things like Ohm's Law at this scale. Read about it here.

Viewsonic VG2436wm-LED

My awesome new Viewsonic VG2436wm-LED monitor (pics pending). Another fantastic gift to myself ;-) Thanks Ros! No problem, anytime Ros.

24" 1080p, colours look vibrant, contrast ratio is high. Viewing angles are no great shakes, but no worse than other monitors. The most stand-out feature is pivot support (rotation) so that monitor can go into portrait mode. This is great for reading long articles, and should be fantastic for writing long functions when I get around to programming again. I have only tested this function on my laptop so far with Intel drivers, works great! Simply put mouse pointer on screen you desire to be rotated and then use the CTRL+ALT+arrow-direction keyboard shortcuts to rotate to desired screen orientation, very quick and easy to apply. The height can be adjusted to quite an exteme to allow for easier rotation, it makes the unit a little prone to shaking about slight vibration though, and may need a sturdy desk/worktop surface.

All in all, a nice little number, and the cheapest 24" monitor with pivot adjustment support built in and decent screen specs.

[UPDATE]
New monitor in action:

OCZ Agility 3 60GB

Santa's been! Actually I bought this one myself. I have a Lenovo R400 Thinkpad, it takes about 4/5mins to boot up and hard drive always seems to be thrashing. Seemed to be getting 40-60 MB/sec moving large files off the hard drive which is pretty shit. Bought myself an OCZ Agility 3 60GB and fuck me it's fast! Seem to be getting impossible speeds. It has SATA 150 interface (i.e. 150MB/sec theoretical upper speed limit) but testing with numerous softwares are getting figures of 200MB/sec and over???

It's booting and shutting down breathtakingly fast, i'm actually stunned as to how fast it is, PLUS the drive is designed for SATA 600 interface! I have SATA 300 in my main PC, i will run some tests on that machine at a later date, but stunning results so far! SSDs really do live up to the hype!

[UPDATE]
In retrospect, clearly the Lenovo spec sheet was wrong. Laptop must have SATA300 interface. Getting contiguous large file reads of 250MB/s during testing, but have recorded burst rates of ~298MB/s by monitoring actual system performance using HDTune Pro. Impressive stuff! Alas now, in the inevitable race ever upwards, I am noticing the limiting factor of my laptop's CPU power, and my once proud RAID disk system is beginning to feel a little challenged, regular defragging is now needed and the once seemingly quick boot times seem to take an age as I restart my laptop several times for fun as it does one single boot..

Funny

Google this "what defines an english person". First hit, hilarious.

Dennis Ritchie is dead. Long live UNIX and C!

Sad news and no fanfare for the passing of this s/w giant =(

Father Of C And UNIX, Dennis Ritchie, Passes Away At Age 70

Virgin Media Business study

A Virgin Media Business study found that 70 percent of smartphone owners would rather give up alcohol than be without their phone.

Are you a smartphone owner and which would you choose?

Ditch Irish for Chinese

Teaching irish language in irish schools is a quaint idea for keeping the language alive, but lets face it, it's useless. When will u ever use it? Anytime i've spoken irish to an irish person (with my extremely limited vocabularly) ppl just give me that confused vacant stare because they know even less irish than me after 14 years of force fed gaelige. Chinese on the other hand is going to be the lingua franca of international business if current trends continue. Any other nationality already has a head start on us by learning a widely used international second language from the beginning of schooling. The mandatory teaching (notice i didnt say learnning) of irish language is in fact a hindrance to the prosperity of irish ppl. Anyhow, enough raggin on irish everyone knows it already, but what about teaching chinese to toddlers eh?

food crisis update!

There are now twice as many obese ppl than those dying from starvation according to the red cross. Good news no?

Meteor mobile broadband.

hooked my laptop up to my phone with a usb cable. so i now have internet at home, wahey!
here are my stats from speedtest.net, bathe in their glory ;-)



Hot shit no? My emails are blazing down in mere minutes!