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Category Archives: Commentary

Opinions

Compressive Sampling: Beating the Nyquist Limit for certain signals

Thursday, June 12, 2008

Compressive Sampling is a new field of sensing theory that sidesteps the traditional Nyquist sampling limit. The Nyquist limit is an information theory result that says to perfectly capture a signal which is bandwidth limited at a certain frequency, X, you must take 2 times X samples per second.  So for example, if you want [...]

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Fixing a missing bluetooth icon, battery charge indicator, and update notifier in Ubuntu

Tuesday, March 25, 2008

For the last week my battery indicator and bluetooth icons had been missing from my top panel in Ubuntu. When I did Bluetooth stuff the pop-up "speaker balloons" from the bluetooth applet would still appear at the corner of my screen, but the Bluetooth applet itself was "invisible". I finally figured out [...]

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Ipod Touch (8GB) Review

Sunday, March 23, 2008

An Apple iPod Touch review, with special attention paid to use with Linux and open formats:
Pros:

Very nice high resolution screen. (480×320 at 163dpi)
User interface is very slick and easy to use after a minimal learning period.
Built in WiFi (802.11b/g) with very good mobile browser (Safari).
Methods to hack (jailbreak) it and install 3rd party software are [...]

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Best applications for a Jailbroken iPod Touch / iPhone

Friday, March 21, 2008

If your iPhone or iPod Touch is jailbroken, you can use the Installer.app to load and install many different applications. Below is the list of the applications that I found to be useful, fun or interesting: 

Organizing multiple pages of applications:Categories
Downloading/Watching YouTube movies: MxTube
Photos alternative: PhotoBoard
e-Book reader: Books 
Information Lookup: weDict , iMoon , iTrac
Networking: Stumbler, [...]

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Hacking the iPod Touch - Jailbreak to 1.1.3 w/ extra apps

Wednesday, March 19, 2008

General info:
How to put an ipod touch into restore mode: Plug it into your computer, and turn on iTunes, then: hold the power and home buttons down until it resets. Release the power button, but keep the home button held until it enters recovery mode.
How to restore to a specific version of the firmware [...]

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Human powered generator

Sunday, February 10, 2008

Lots of people have built human powered generators. I like this one for two reasons:
1. It's designed to harvest waste energy. (It helps your body stop your knee from swinging at the end of the forward swing, something your body uses energy to do anyways.)
2. The evaluation included serious medical [...]

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Failing power supply

Monday, January 21, 2008

For my MythTV media computer I use a network based HD-TV tuner from SiliconDust . I've been very pleased with how it works, the form factor and feature set. However, over christmas it suddenly went dead due to no fault of it's own. The 5V 2A power supply had failed. (It is plugged into [...]

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My Reading Habits: Korean

Saturday, December 1, 2007

Google Reader (a web based RSS reader that I use to track and read various sites and blogs) has a recommendation system that will give you recommended blogs to subscribe to. It uses the RSS feeds that you are currently subscribed to, and then looks to see who else is also subscribed to those [...]

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3G is better than EDGE for me!

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

Some idiot makes the claim that EDGE is just fine and you don't need 3G for web-browsing. The author claims that pure bandwidth doesn't matter, and that latency is more important to the user experience (which I totally agree with) but then goes on to state that 3G has worse latency than EDGE, which is [...]

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Unlocking my Cingular / AT&T phone

Thursday, October 4, 2007

AT&T allows some customers to "unlock" their phones. This allows the use of a SIM card from a different provider (for example, VodaFone) while traveling. (It also allows you to use the phone with another GSM provider in the US after your AT&T contract is finished, which is one reason AT&T and other carriers lock [...]

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