Har har har… you might think the IT industry at large may have learned a small lesson from the millennium bug (Y2K bug). Well most professionals probably did but Microsoft still manages to screw up bigtime. In this case the Zune 30GB version has a leap-year bug. It will not start up properly due to the bug. Fortunately there is a fix at hand… Just let it run out of battery capacity. Recharge the battery and start it after noon GMT and your Zune will be fine. You got to love those Microsoft products.

With the Zune you get the full Microsoft experience. Think of continues thrill and exitement the Zune is offering you… is it going to work or will it blow up in my face? It’s like rebooting after a blue screen of death… you’ll never know whether your system will successfully restart or not. Microsoft gives just that little more excitement…

Do you still feel comfortable with Microsoft products being used in nuclear submarines?… Happy New Year, enjoy it as long as it lasts.

Oh this is nice. Some hackers have been able to boot Linux on their iPhone. A lot of the iPhone hardware is not supported (yet) but it boots and you can enter shell commands (using USB). Nice hack…

Today I got a link from my good buddy Emiel about a wasp sucking machine. It turns out the inventor (Matthias Wandel) has a website with a lot of strange contraptions and weird thingies that he built. I must admit I highly admire the creativity and craftsmanship of Matthias. He reminds me a lot of Wallace (from Wallace and Gromit). Not convinced? How about his Jenga Pistol or his Binary Marble Adding Machine or how about his 1-pin dot matrix printer? Check out his website it is really great. If there is ever going to be a MacGyver award it should go to Matthias Wandel. From his creations you can see this incredibly cool guy combines craftmanship with a lot of humor. I’ll be spending a lot of time on his site.

Forget about the blackberries and the iPhones of this world. It’s old technology. Within a few weeks anyone using an iPhone will look like a dinosaur, the blackberry people will feel like fossils. New technology is here, baby! Make way for the new generation. The new generation of mobile computing and communication will be Smart Mobile Utility Telephone or SMUT for short. You’ll find an image of my new SMUT below.

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Now what would make your workspace a lot more fun? There is plenty of gadgets, toys and other geek stuff on sale to put on your desk. Some of these things are downright amusing nevertheless they start to bore me after a certain amount of time. The only thing I had on my desk that never ever bored me was this super cool plasma light. Take a look at the picture and image you see this in full motion…

The beams slowly find their way on the inside of the bulb. The beam walks a path for a while and then dies. New beams will replace the one that just passed away. When you put your fingers on the bulb the beams are attracted to the spot where you touch the bulb. When you do that long enough it will burn the bulb and your finger at the same time. Nothing beats this plasma light until I came across this ubergeek desktop thingy on YouTube. It is, of course, Japanese. I don’t know if you can purchase it anywhere or what it costs but I think I like this. It is not very well suited for the workplace since it requires you to play music but still, when you do play music… Ah just watch this video.

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How’s that for a lucky bastard. Yesterday I got my brand new Apple MacBook Pro to replace my somewhat aged, but still well functioning Dell Inspiron 9100. My employer got me the 17″ version with the high resolution screen (1920 by 1200). It has plenty of memory (4GB) which might come in handy for all my virtualization needs. This is my first Mac and already I’m loving it to death.

First of all the hardware. This is such an elegant machine. I used a Dell inspiron 9100 which has a height of 5 cm. People always thought the Dell came with a builtin docking station. I’ve had my share of mockery but the Dell was fast with a desktop Pentium4 3.2 Ghz. Now this Mac is from another planet. It’s height is only around 1.5 cm. Sure it is bigger since it is a 17″ machine but it is all pixels, baby, just what I need.

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UPDATES (see below). Last update: 2010-11-28

1. The device works as X11 input device (pointer)
2. Added the results of a sketch on this device
3. Added link to python version of .top to .svg converter (thanks to Jorik)
4. Photo & description of refills
5. Java open source top conversion tool (Java 1.5+) (thanks to Valeri Corrado)

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Today my eye spotted a nice gadget on sale at Aldi’s in the newspaper. It is a digital notepad. Well digital, you write on actual paper using a pen with real ink. All your strokes on the paper are stored in memory. Vector by vector. It has 32MB memory to store pages. You can use an SD card to extend that memory. You get the digital notepad. One pen. Two refills. Two plastic refills. Loads of (windows only) software. Best feature: batteries included, you are ready to go…

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