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The saddest part is I wouldn't even know if I didn't read the Concept Ships blog. I have admired Ralph McQuarrie's art for many years and didn't know who he was. From some of the things I've read he influenced heavily what Star Wars would like when George Lucas worked on it. Anyway search for his concept art on the web, you'll find many fascinating things things.

I amtem about to return both tablets to their respective stores. We were going to purchase them on points and those won't arrive for another couple of weeks. I am typing this up on the Xoom. 1. Battery life is great on both devices, lasting me a whole week with only a single recharge. 2. Xooms virtual keyboard has more lag between presses, especially so when typing fast with two fingers. 3. Xoom's Chrome browser often enough glitches. Buttons are not functioning. Facebook freezes up. 4. It's very difficult to attach files to emails on ipad. The device gives you very little control to what's on your system and limits you to iTunes and apps. 5. This control however results in a nicely tuned system. 6. I played Contract Killer on both systems. It froze several times on Xoom, but its impossible to tell if it's the app or the unit. Xoom in theory should have more power than ipad. 7. Which makes it the final point. Android market is a mess with few apps designed specifica...

Because I can be an indecive bastard once in a while, I've picked up Motorola's new Xoom tablet. I am going to compare both tablets in the next couple until I make up my mind by the end of the week. First impressions on both units. 1. Xoom is a little more solid. It weighs more, according to specs by .3 lbs. But it feels like if I drop it, nothing will happen to it. iPad2 feels very light and very compact, but I am afraid I can drop it. 2. Both units are blazing fast, as fast a my ocassionaly laggy Wi-Fi can be of course. I have downloaded Contract Killer on both units, and FPS rates for a 3D game seems good. 3. I would have to get used to iOS, although it seems pretty straightforward and user friendly. On the other hand, I am fairly familiar with Android OS, and Honeycomb doesn't change the basics but improves on a lot of fronts. 4. As far as hardware goes, Xoom is a much nicer stacked unit. Both front and back cameras are higher resolution and there is an expansion slot f...

Chalk one up for the Space Flight. Awesome! Sometimes I think that private spaceflight is the only way to get people up there.

What has happened over the weekend. I love the stores that own-up. I also love the stores where customer satisfaction seems to be the primary concern. Over the weekned I have purchased myself a new shiny toy. I've been feeling that I need a super portable computer. So, after much research I settled on a netbook, I need a something that I can do light computing on, and light enough not to regret lugging it around. The netbooks are pretty good right now, about as powerfull as a Pentium M. I have bought a HP Mini 210 initally on Saturday. ABT matches any price of authorized retailer, and they often enough drop some percentages to boot. They had the base price based ont he fact that they promised a 9h battery life for the computer. However, and this is always happening to me, I've noticed that battery draining rather fast, and when paying closer attention to the box I saw that it indeed possessed a 3-cell lithium ion battery. The standard life for 3-cell is 4 hours max. I called A...

First off, i stole this from Vince as it is perfectly represents my attitude towards iPad. Printing from iPad. Anyways. I have decided that I need a portable computer. I have my desktop, which I use for heavy-duty stuff like gaming or video making, but it sits in the office and I don't like to spend much time there. I watch TV in the evenings, and I would like to have something sitting on my lap (BE QUIET!) that I can casually look at, or read emails, or some such. Problem is, I would like the laptop/netbook to look and feel good. I don't want heavy15 inches and I don't want to squint and jam my fingers at a tiny keyboard. I don't care about things like that with my desktop. I've build them year-in and year out, and usually end up with a black box crammed full of computer goodness. Why is it that important that my portable computing device looks good?

Once a year, after my birthday I buy myself a gadget. This time around I thought it would be a laptop. But after looking around my office at home, I realized that I don't need a laptop. I still have my PC and I like it. What comes next? I've been a little jealous of my wife's Sony PRS 505, which I gave her as a present (never presented her with a gadget before). So I was thinking maybe getting an eReader myself. I started reading a looking around, still can't decide if I want a Sony or a Kindle. Both of them have features that I would like to have. Then I remebered that couple of months ago I read about a device being prepared by ASUS or Google. I can't find it anywhere anymore , but the device would be a dual screen, one eInk for reading the other a small color display for surfing. I just found it enTourage eDGe . That's what I need and want actually. But these toys are not available until March. Then lo and behold, I have accidentely read about the iSlate from...

I kinda like windows 7 right now. There is a certain number of convinient improvement over XP. For example, if you have multiple IE's open mousing over the IR icon on the task bar, pop-up a window shoing you everything you have open. The XP compatibility mode is interesting enough. My graphic tools collection installed without a glith, and working beautifully (I think. I only launched the damned things, haven't tried to create a movie yet). The UI is beautiful and the desktop slideshow is a nice touch. I still have to put it through paces, with heavy duty processing like movie making or some 3d graphic renderings. Thank you a have a great Weekend.

Granted I have a fairly clean Install, but Windows 7 launched under a minute.

Being part of the IT department, which has our dirty little hands in the MSDN subscription, I have gotten my grabby little fingers on the Windows 7 RTM version. I am about to kill my home desktop and use my work laptop for the rest of the day. Hopefully I can use my computer later in the evening. I'll let you know how the install went. Follow the process on the right in MY TWITTS---->

I have this pestering problem. I've said it many times before but my music colelction contains now approximately 6500 mp3s. About half of them are the Russian music that I always listen to. The problem comes when the Russian information is displayed in any number of MP3 players around my house, including my own PC. See some of the players refuse to play files that have unicode characters in them (read cyrillic alphabet), except my iPod and SanDisk players refuse to show mp3 information in correct manner. To make it even more frustrating once in a while my preferred Library method (MediaMonkey) on occasion translates unicode in ASCII characters, meaning anything Russian gets translated into googly letters. What I have done is wrote a little winform application using .NET. It has two portions. The first portion took all of my music that had russian characters in file names and transliterated them into latin. That part was fairly easy. I did have to manually build a libabry of russian...

I have found today that you can watch full episodes of StarTrek TOS on IMDB. Sweet! http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060028/videogallery

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor . Stole from Jason

I stole this from Brian "..tell him to by iMac, it's a computer specifically made fro id... ahem.. mommies and daddies.." Music to my ears.

I know it will move my previous awesome post down, can't pass it up though.

I've told you I collect Star Wars Legoes. Well here they are Enjoy. I wonder if Star Trek Legoes are going to be made. I'd love to have Enterprise D in my collection.

I have couple of counters throughout the site. I look at them everyday, but not obsessing (yet). I use the Cluster Maps and Google Analytics. Here are some of my visitation statistics from around the world. United States (US) 464 United Kingdom (GB) 30 Canada (CA) 4 China (CN) 3 Russian Federation (RU) 2 South Africa (ZA) 1 Lithuania (LT) 1 Finland (FI) 1 Ukraine (UA) 1 Bulgaria (BG) 1 Israel (IL) 1 Australia (AU) 1 India (IN) 1 Romania (RO) 1 And here are some stats for the US based readers. 1. Illinois 165 - I read myself a lot 2. New York 19 - Relatives and parents surfing when at work 3. New Jersey 10 - Hi Mom! Hi Dad! Hi, Blogger! 4. Alaska 3 - Only a couple of bloggers I know come from Alaska (Welcome, Jim) 5. California 2 - I know a couple of people from California and they would be from Orange and San Jose area (is SF San Hose area?) 6. Florida 2 - not sure! but Welcome anyways!...

The computer is finally built. I had two problems so far. The APEVIA PSU came DOA, calling to NewEgg, they were good enough to ship a new unit overnight, without having to wait to recieve the dead one. I opted out of APEVIA and went with a much better reviewed Rosewill 500 Watt PSU. Worked out beautifully. While you can still hear the hum of the new PC, it's like a wisper. Very very quiet powersupply, and very quiet Rosewill 80mm fan in the back providing the cooling. I haven't run any benchmarks yet on the computer but that's to follow. Another problem was installing the XP. It seems that the old copy of the XP that i've been using forever now lacked the driver to support the SATA drive. I had to scramble to find a solution. Two came to mind after research. There is a program that allows you to stremline an SP2 installation into your XP original one. I made the image, but haven't tried to install it yet. I also found an old copy of XP with SP1 in it. That actually ...

After much deliberation and wondering (I can't believe i spend so much time on it, never before I had to spend so much time thinking about what computer to get) I have decided to build a computer myself, again. I've looked at prebuild desktops by Dell and HP, i've looked at laptops, and I realized that they don't really give you enough of value for the amount you pay. Sure, a lot of them look nice, and would be OK for the things I do, but I was never sure if it was enough. Here are some of the thigns I need in a computer. Good processing power - I play an occasional video-game and do a lot of graphic, 3D, and movie editing. Quietness - I tend to leave the computer on for days, for downloads or renderings. Small size - I am trying to take as little space now as possible. While most of the desktops provided prebuild offer decent power and good RAM sizes the video cards in them SUCK!!! Big time. For the laptops the same, plus for leaving the computer on and connecting it t...

Love this! StarWars Store