Firehed’s Blog

Okay, I want an iPhone as much as the next guy (but I’m waiting a couple days to see if there are any major issues), but are we so obsessive as to actually want to watch a product unboxing in a live video stream? It’s nice to know what’s in the box, but the whole concept of an unboxing blog is lame enough. Now we need to see it through someone else’s eyes because we can’t deal with opening something ourselves?

I mean, someone in the live comment stream saying that “[s/he] totally plan[s] on putting the iPhone on a pedastal tonight instead of watching porn” is taking it just a bit too far. Especially with someone noting two comments down that it’d be better to just watch the porn on the new iPhone. Hmmm…
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Not a whole lot to say on the subject. They’re working on getting the network back up and running at work, and browsing through my news feeds just isn’t an option in the bit of downtime I have until things are back. Well, technically it’s all up again; they just gave us a defective data switch down in receiving, so only one machine gets connected until it’s replaced. I’m tempted to keep a spare network cable in my desk for my laptop, unless I just decided to bring in my FON router which I rather doubt they’d appreciate.

But I managed to throw together a fun graphic for the background of my QuartzClock in Photoshop (see below), since that’s about the only interesting thing I can do with my laptop until I’ve got a connection again. That and make a couple blog drafts that’ll get published once I’m online again. Like this one.

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I’m honestly not sure if these are legitimate or not, but some seller at Amazon has several Canon lenses listed at about 90% off list price (which is already a good ways below MSRP). Do with it what you will (as a Canon owner, I’m very tempted, but as I just got a new card, I’m not sure what my fraud protection is, just in case), but here are the links anyways:

$34 - 50mm f/2.5 Macro

$46 - 85mm f/1.8 USM

$51 - 60mm f/2.8 USM Macro (EF-S mount)

$32 - 28-105mm f/3.5-4.5 USM, Mk.II

$137 - 24-105mm f/4 L IS USM

$42 - 50mm f/1.4 USM

$72 - 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM

$55 - 28-135mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM

Hopefully these are legitimate - if so, the deals are absolutely amazing. I’ve been looking at picking up one of the 28-135mm IS USM which normally runs a bit over $400, but if I get a believable response from the seller, I’d probably pick up the entire set, at somewhere around the $600 mark if my midnight math is working out.

For the record, the seller is GizmosForLife, since I’m sure these prices aren’t going to hang around.

Oh yeah - they’ve got the Canon Digital Rebel XTi (400D) for a touch over $100 as well (Silver Body-only for $87).

Update: looks like those went away just as quickly as they showed up. Damn… maybe I should have ordered. But some screenshots are below just to prove I’m not completely insane.
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It’s not the first time I’ve seen articles noting the “little-known intellectual property agency IP Innovation LLC”, and according to AppleInsider, they’ve just reached a settlement over a patent on, get this - tabs.

I’m not saying that patents need to die, by any means. I see them as valid and helpful when used appropriately, which many companies do every day. But let’s examine the situation a touch:

• The patent was twenty years old.
• The patent, while it may not have been especially obvious at the time, most certainly is now. Likewise, it’s also extremely widespread; as far as I’m aware, Apple is the only one who’s been sued over it.
• The company holding the patent not only fits the definition of “patent troll,” but probably wrote it. Their entire business model consists of patenting anything that they can, and suing anyone who makes use of the technology covered.

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Spent today sketching out the demo lab in the new building in SketchUp instead of sitting around waiting for the UPS and FedEx guys to show up. Quite a bit more useful, and certainly more interesting. Granted, I’m probably quite underpaid for 3d modeling (not that SketchUp requires a ton of skill), but it’s not something that I’m doing every day, and in any case, it’s great to not have the day drag on.

Hopefully more of the same tomorrow - it’s nice to have Monday feel like a Thursday.

So far, a great many of the games on the Wii have been a big disappointment, with only a couple exceptions for what I’ve played so far. And it’s not because of the relatively poor graphics - in an immersive game, you don’t really take that much notice of them unless there’s a glaringly obvious graphical anomaly of some kind. No, it’s because of the new motion-sensing controllers, the Wiimotes, that caused everyone from Nintendo fanboys to grandparents to try getting their hands on the little white wonder. Yes, the thing that delivered so much hope and hype has been causing the biggest let-down.

Of course, this isn’t Nintendo’s fault. Well, not entirely. The Wiimotes have all of the functionality they need to make controls feel natural and intuitive - Wii Sports is a fantastic example of this. I’ve paired them with my laptop before and watched the real-time outputs of the three accelerometers, and they’re both sufficiently accurate and non-laggy to make a fantastic controller. No, this really comes back to the developers.

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I’m hoping to find a bluetooth mouse that doesn’t require a dongle and isn’t one of those tiny notebook-sized ones (the only full-size BT mouse I’ve found, a MS one, seems to require the dongle for some stupid reason, and won’t work with the internal bluetooth), but no joy there. I’d go for a standard RF model before a mini-sized one. Logitech seems to have a couple, but I’ve never greatly cared for the ones that are hand-specific although I won’t rule them out.

Any ideas?

Anyone had any experience with an Infrant ReadyNAS NV+? I’ve been looking for some sort of diskless device for a while and this thing seems to always fit my criteria when I look, although it’s certainly on the pricey side for what it is. But it has gigabit networking, four disk trays, and plays nice with all of your major operating systems (that’s to say, it supports Apple’s AFP, Windows’ Samba, and Linux’s NFS), plus it has all sorts of other server options (print, DHCP, slimserver) and other things that sound equally nice and useful.

Of course, it weighs in at over $600 without disks - a certainly not-insignificant chunk of change. But my current file server box is big, ugly, inefficient, and a huge power hog. Yeah, just an XP box stashed in the closet with network shares on, which doesn’t play especially well with my Mac (it works, but not that well), and is quite lacking in all of the other options.

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