British Airways

At least they’ll have at least one good movie on the flight to London:

OpenDNS

I’ve recently been using a cool, free service called OpenDNS. It is basically just a free alternate DNS service, that advertises faster speed and better uptime than, say, Earthlink or another ISP DNS server. I tried it out by just adding the IPs (208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220) to my current DNS list, and it was faster. It also is more forgiving than most DNS servers. If you mistype and hit miss a letter in your top level domain (.com instead of .com for example) it knows and will go anyway. Or you can just leave off the TLD altogether and it is still fine.

However, these things are not the best part. If you create an account, still quite free, it lets you do all sorts of cool things. You can filter content, based on keywords or lists, whitelist pages, and, best of all, create custom shortcuts. For example, if I type wiki followed by anything, it knows I want to do a wikipedia search for that topic. This can be applied to all sorts of sites and even applied to an administered network (for instance, a SysAdmin might set “support” to be a shortcut that goes to a company’s internal support page).

Totally cool service, totally free, totally worth it.

Tor

The Onion Router (wikipedia) is a great way to anonymize traffic or to access pages that might otherwise innaccesible. I’ve recently started using it more, with talk from some people around the University of Arizona about censoring some web pages. I want to have it ready in case such an event occurs.

on mac os x

I use the latest unstable release of Vidalia which automatically loads all needed Tor and Privoxy sofware. Together with a copy of Firefox that has Torbutton and NoScripts installed I have a fairly secure and private system for anonymous browsing. One problem is that vidalia, part of the privoxy installation, is not intel native. This is irritating.

speed concerns

Since Tor uses multiple proxy layers, speed is a concern, but even more of a concern is ping time. Note this not very scientific comparison of native and Tor proxy enabled download speeds. (Note the difference in ping time, and the Japanese ISP.)

Tor disabled:

 

 

 

 

 

Tor enabled:

 

 

 

 

 

Miglia Harmony Audio

This is the best firewire sound card I could find in 2007 that was mac compatible and had surround sound output. I think it’s still the best. It costs less than the equivelent from Griffin (griffin firewave) and actually is a far superior piece of equipment. The harmony audio is based on the Oxford 1607 chipset so it needs no drivers to be installed under mac os x: it’s plug-n-play.

It has eight channels of output (over 4 stereo miniplugs) that can be configured however you like using Audio/MIDI setup. It has two channels of input over either seperate 1/4″ plugs or a single stero miniplug. It has headphone output (same as channel 1/2 on the back, but it is on the front and has a volume knob).

I bought it for doing surround sound with my 5.1 logitech speakers and and macbbok pro. It works great. The firewire interface has no noticable latency and integrates perfectly with core audio. It is powered over firewire too, if you have a fw400 that is full size.

I would highly recommend this for anyone wanting to improve the sound quality of their mac.

Logitech z5300e Speakers

These are a basic 5.1 surround sound computer speaker set. Powered through the subwoofer, they use three stereo miniplugs for input. You can do stereo mode or quadrophonic as well, if you don’t have a sound card that supports the proper outputs.

These are plenty loud for a dorm room, I don’t think I’ve ever really turned them up all the way: it would be just too loud. There is a little bit of a problem, however, in the bass region. I think they are too bass heavy so I turn the bass all the way down on the wired remote. Furthermore I modify the equalizer settings like so:

This gives a bit more natural of a response and removes the sometimes “muddy” sound that occurs in the 125hz region. I think that it might be the cutoff for the subwoofer, so it can’t handel it as well. (Likewise, I think 250hz is the lower end for the speakers themselves so they need a boost for proper response at the low end [and the high end].)

I run the speakers through my Miglia HarmonyAudio firewire interface and they work great for movies, music and just about everything else.

I got them for about $120 shipped about two years ago, I think it’s a discontinued product line now. (The 5500 series is so much better I think.)

Elgato EyeTV Hybrid

Highlights:
-Recieves digital and analog over the air; analog cable (I think it would do unencrypted digital cable if it was in ATSC. I’m not sure what I just said but I think it’s true.).
-Accepts s-video and component inputs.
-Very small in size (slightly larger than a flash drive.)
-Cost: about $130 on Newegg (I got it for $120 shipped in 2007.)

The scoop: Works flawlessly with the included EyeTV 2 software (and apparently EyeTV 3 now), which includes the ability to schedule recordings using the built in channel/program guide among other things. It even exports to iTunes for easy loading onto an iPod (or Apple TV and all that jazz). Using a Terk HDTVi HD antenna, I recieve flawless HD signals which work wonderfully on the Mac Book Pro.

Samples:
30 second 1080i sample from “Nature” (4 May 2008 KUAS HD 27-1 Tucson: MPEG-2, 1920×1080, 29.97 fps, Dolby Digital, 48kHz stream)

Still Sample

Bottom line: Excellent peice of hardware at a better price than some computer TV tuners. And it’s made for a mac, so that’s a plus.

Resistance: Fall of Man

The best game yet (that I have played) for the PS3. Aside from the bad (non-existant) story line and mediocre graphics and game play, it is a great game. Wait… that leaves… sound. Yes, sound is the best part of this game. What other game lowers the sound level to simulate shell shock? Basically, the game is fun because you get to kill inncoent, peaceloving animals, also known as Russians.

Bottom line: it’s actually a pretty good game. The graphics are pretty cool, especially with actual high def. Sometimes the skins suck, but oh well, it’s just a freakin’ game. Where you kill Russians. I’m not sure it’s worth the $60 they charge, but hey, I wouldn’t buy a PS3 either, so that’s sort of a moot point…

From April 13, 2007