The real social network

Catfish, a documovie about virtual relationships on Facebook.

Catfish  movie

"They used to tank cod from Alaska all the way to China. They’d keep them in vats in the ship. By the time the codfish reached China the flesh was mush and tasteless. So this guy came up with this idea that if you put these cods in these big vats, put some catfish in with them. And the catfish would keep the cod agile. And there are those people who are catfish in life. And they keep you on your toes, they keep you guessin’ they keep you thinkin’ they keep you fresh."

Catfish Facebook family

Megan Faccio

Netgear DGND3300 a lemon?

I bought the NetGear DGND3300v2 RangeMax Dual Band Wireless Router in the beginning of the year wanting a router with a range greater than the Netgear DG834 to cover all the rooms in the house. I saw the youtube video of the smart antennas and fell for all the marketing gimics. Surely a wireless router from a manufacturer which is more expensive than the entry level model will have a better range.

Wrong. I have tweaked all the setting and tried all the possible permutations for the Wireless G. There is nothing I can do to make it work with a proper range. The range is just as the same or worse than my 10th of the price Linksys router. So I bought a Wirless N stick but the range for it is worse than the Wireless G. Go figure. 

Hoping that a future firmware update would improve range.
So in December 2010 firmware V2.1.00.46  came around via an auto update and suddenly wireless range decreased to a maximum of 2 meters. Manually reverted to V2.1.00.42 firmware again after scratching my head wondering what happened. Seems like Netgear support put a faulty firmware update on their server and only removed it after a week despite knowing about the problem due to so many users reporting it. Some users even reported Netgear was asking for paid support to look at the issue.
Here is a forum post on the Netgear support forums describing the issue.

This device is much better than the standard Billion router however I would suggest for a large house to buy a router that has removable antenna which you can adjust, replace or hack with your own.

Short Lenovo Laptop Battery Life

Over a period of 12 months my Lenovo T500 laptop battery life has deteriorated from about 2.5 hours to 1 hour.
Today the battery just suddenly died and the battery indicator keeps on flashing orange.

  "A battery error has occurred. The battery cannot be charged. Replace the battery."

 12.5 months battery lifetime.(Sanyo 42T4619)

In the Lenovo Power manager 3 softtware there is a link to buy a new battery.
For my model the Thinkpad T500 they list 40Y6799, 40Y6797 and not my 42T4619 as the replacement battery.

Improve your typing speed

Like most people who uses computers every day I can type with both hands without looking at the keyboard.
This I learnt from a DOS typing program. Today someone showed me a free fun typing program in flash on the internet called TypeRacer.

You type a paragraph and it shows you the number of words per second. However the best part is you can compete against multiple friends (or random people) at the same time and the typing progress of each player is shown as a car race.

Some good fun.

BBC's clown of fire

Error 500 - Internal Error when I try to access the BBC's website.

It is just me or is the clown in the BBC's errror page disturbing?
Looks to me like a psycho clown just started a fire. All that is missing is the background music to Prodigy's "I am the Firestarter".


I'm the trouble starter, punkin' instigator
I'm the fear addicted, and danger illustrated

I'm a firestarter, twisted firestarter
You're the firestarter, twisted firestarter
I'm a firestarter, twisted firestarter

I'm the bitch you hated, filth infactuated - yeeeaaaah
I'm the pain you tasted, fell intoxicated

I'm a firestarter, twisted firestarter
You're the firestarter, twisted firestarter

I'm the self inflicted, mind detonator - yeah
I'm the one infected, twisted animator

I'm a firestarter, twisted firestarter
You're the firestarter, twisted firestarter
I'm a firestarter, twisted firestarter

Splice

Splice a movie about splicing human with animal DNA.

 ... turns into a movie about splicing horror with romance.

Adrien Brody having sex with a rabbit. What was he thinking?

Gina Carano look a like found

Toothless is Gina Carano's lookalike?



Might sound far fetched but How to rain your dragon's Toothless does look similar to Gina Carano.

Both are the lead characters in a movie. B

oth kick ass.

Both don't speak in their movies. Toothless can't speak because well he is a dragon. Gina Carano's real voice is not used but is dubbed in her movie Haywire.



Time to upgrade to Visual Studio 2010

Visual Studio 2010 Version differences

Microsoft, one step closer towards turning developers into architects.

Modeling tools design functionality such as sequence diagrams do not come with Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate by default so download the Visualization and Modeling Feature Pack. 

VS2010 is very extensible make so check out the Visual Studio Gallery for useful tools Microsoft and the development community creates.

AC Ryan Playon DVR

Picked up an AC Ryan PlayonDVR PV76120 media player and 1Tb from Esquire so I can watch my movie and video collection directly on a TV.

The media player component works well and played all the video formats I threw at it. During testing comparing with my PC for some movies the background music & sounds were louder than speech and for one large 5Gb blueray mkv rip I tested the background video was flashing . Possibly due to how the videos was encoded but otherwise I am happy with the media player.

As with all of the popular media players the device supports Yet Another Movie Jukebox software which allows you to scan your media collections for information like: year, language, fps, audio & video codecs and fetches information and photos from sites like imdb and generates the indexes in HTML format that you can view while using the jukebox mode in the media player.

Connectivity options are a strong point with USB, ESata, Cat5 and WiFi (optional) supported. Connection to television is through RCA or HDMI.

What make the PlayOn DVR different compared to the PlayOn HD is that it  can also play and record digital television signals and comes with a basic antenna with a magnetic foot if you don't have one for input.
South Africa  has only analog TV but there is a Sentech test digital transmission for the SABC channels in my area using  DVB-T the standard the device supports.
During testing I was surprised how good the quality was when I used the little antenna indoors. Huge difference compared to analog TV with bunny ears.

Basic recording and scheduling works as expected. However that is only for digital channels where you can watch one channel and record another.
Satellite/DSTV device can be  recorded but you have to use the PlayonDVR AV-IN for this purpose meaning you can't watch another channel while recording.
The drive wanted a separate partition for timeshifting on first use and you can only select between the range of 1 Gb and 4Gb depending how many minutes you want the time shift period to support.

Unfortunately only very specific internet features are supported.
These are :

• Add and view your own RSS feed 
• View Picasa and Flickr RSS.
• Add & listen to internet radio channels 
• Bittorent 

So the device makes you wish it could do more on the internet side. Would have been nice if it had more internet features like an inbuilt browser to surf the internet on or even support for sites like youtube.

From the PlayOnDVR website you can download the source code all models including the 76120 but as of yet haven't found a active community modifying the source code.
The support forum  for the device is very quiet and firmware updates only fix bugs so in does not compare that well in this regards to media player only devices like the Medi8or.
After updating the firmware to v8.3.2.r3582 I saw no no extra functionality or visual changes.

So in summation if you are looking for a media player and recorder combo the PlayonDVR is decent and probably the only the device on the market that combines a media player,TV,DVR & basic internet  functionality making it a cool gadget.
However keep in mind in future the first manufacturer that combines a media player, DVR and  an opensource product that allows you to make full use of the internet will shake up this market. Embedding the open source operating system Android or ChromeOS with  media player/DVR devices is definitely the future and will happen. The question is just when. Up until then I need a media player v1 so I am happy with my PlayOn DVR.

Use google charts - Dynamic world map

Google charts can dynamically generate charts based on data. Using it you can create a front end, pass the data as parameters to a google url to generate your charts.

One example is world maps. An example of implementing this can be found on this site.

I used it to generate an image of all the countries I have worked and lived in.

Google uses their own dynamic charts (Pie charts, world map) in the google blogger stats section. Colours on the map to indicate weight.

zaozzie's new blog

This is my personal blog and contain on all the stuff on the internet, software development & movies I think other people will find useful, interesting or unique.

zaozzie(at)gmail.com.