Category Archives: gadget

pointless 3d desktop fancyness

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XP eye candy screenshotI came across this link to something new and super-shiny called BumpTop 3D. It’s a 3D representation of a real desktop (like on top of your desk, where that word came from in the first place), where you can manipulate files (the digital ones) by moving them, and piling them like you would on a real desk.

Neato.

Well at least it looks neato. But I don’t see the point really. I keep my desktop as clear as possible when it comes to shortcuts and files, so why on earth would I feel like piling them on top of each other, making it only harder to find them right?

While imitate a real life mess into a digital desktop if you can sort everything out with a good (desktop) search tool. Like Google desktop search, or any of the other around which are probably nearly equally good. That’s the kind of power the digital realm can offer, and frankly I wouldn’t mind some more search functionality in real life either.

Think of a big cabinet at work where everybody simply dumps his files and documents in. Wouldn’t it be great if you could just search that cabinet in under 5 seconds and get what you were looking for? Now that would be innovative.

i love my usb phone

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Looking for a new cellphone a while ago, I was going to look out for a few things I learned from my last phone. Now that was a cheap Toshiba model (yup, they make phones as well, or at least made phones…) which did everything a basic phone needs to do, make and receive calls and write text messages.
The phone did have a battery which didn’t last long and sometimes it just died in mid-conversation, which just plain sucks, so it was time for something newer an fancier (oooh). I wasn’t going to go for an odd brand again, but something well known. This at least should make it easier to find spare parts, which turned out to be a real problem when my previous cells adapter short-circuited on me…

Connectivity was also very limited with the old phone. You had to buy an expensive data cable to be able to connect to get some ringtones and more of that fancy gimmicks on it, or use iMode… which is also expensive.

So basically I was looking for a new phone which has the following qualities:

  • priced under 200 euros
  • good looking
  • open connectivity, eg. BlueTooth
  • realtones : no shitty midi-tunes plz as ringtones
  • T9 text messaging, with learning capacity if possible

So while looking over some sites, and comparing models, I fell in love with this baby. The motorola v360.
Yummy innit?

This one has all I wanted, and more. Like a 64MB memory card for tunes and pictures, and the obligatory digital camera of course (it’s hard to find a phone without it these days) but it turns out it’s power cable for recharging is actually a plain USB interface! My digital cam uses exactly the same kind of port to connect to my PC, and so I use the same cable to download and upload to my phone. Don’t even need a bluetooth USB dongle on my PC or anything, ain’t that sweet? The T9 rocks on it as well, but the USB interface is brilliant, and it’s not even in the listed features.
I always liked Motorola, so that doesn’t have to change I guess.

One shitty thing about it though, the phone is branded with the cellphone company logo’s. No way to remove it. If anyone has any experience on how to get rid of that without fucking it up, I’d appreciate some pointers.