ioDrive Duo SSD

Words cannot describe how much I want this thing.

From HotHardware, via Engadget/Gizmodo.

The Inner Game of Tennis

Here's a video that I've been trying to track down for a while. I saw it once during a lecture in one of my college Computer Science classes, and it has stuck with me ever since. I was recently telling some friends about it, and decided to give it another Google.

It's a presentation by computer pioneer Alan Kay, in which he plays a clip of Tim Gallwey, author of The Inner Game of Tennis, from a 1975 segment on ABC's Evening News (with Harry Reasoner and Howard K. Smith). In the segment, Gallwey teaches a "55-year-old lady, 40 pounds overweight, 5'2" in a mumu", who had never tried the sport and had not exercised at all in years, to play tennis in under 30 minutes.

Is it possible to get someone to hit balls consistently — that too using a wooden racket with a 65 sq. in. head — just by having them watch another person and say "bounce, hit, bounce, hit" to the rhythm of their shots? See for yourself:



If you're interested in user interfaces or computer history in general, I'd recommend watching the entire video. It's quite fascinating.

Alternate Links:

• YouTube — Part 1, Part 2
• webcast.berkeley.edu — Real Player format [via]
• The Internet Archive — Higher Quality downloads

[Found via Talk Tennis at Tennis Warehouse, which saved me a lot of time clicking around at Berkeley's webcast site.]

VLC Easter Egg

The Santa hat that my VLC player has been sporting this holiday season was a fun surprise.



I know, I know; I should be using a skin, but VLC is good looking on the inside, and that's really what counts.

DSL or Cable Modem Not Working?

If you're getting errors loading web pages, and have already tried restarting your computer, modem, and wireless router, it might be an issue with your internet provider's DNS servers.

For our less tech savvy readers, DNS servers basically translate a domain name like "example.com" to an IP address like "208.77.188.166", which your computer can then use to contact the example.com web server.

You can switch your PC or router to use OpenDNS, for example. (There are instructions on the site for configuring different operating systems or many types of routers.)

I've recently been experiencing what I thought were outages, but it turned out to be flaky DNS servers. I've seen people on Time Warner / Road Runner, Comcast, and Cox complaining about this issue, but had never experienced it personally until the past few weeks. OpenDNS solved the problem, and has been working flawlessly so far.

Another good resource to consult, if you have another means of getting on the web, is the Broadband Reports forums section. There are sections for individual providers and regions, which makes it easy to see if others in your area are having issues, and what, if anything, they did to solve them.

Import a Library in iTunes 8

In iTunes 8, there's no longer a File > Import... item in the menu.

If you want to import a library XML file — after re-installing your system, or when moving the library from another computer, for example — you can use the File > Library > Import Playlist... menu item.

It's confusing, since there is a File > Library > Export Library... command, and it's not obvious that you export a "Library" but import it back as a "Playlist".

Big Ideas (Radiohead remix)

This is awesome!


Big Ideas (Don't get any) from 1030 on Vimeo.

Arris Cable Modems and Wireless Routers

Henry's Transcoding MKV/OGM to MP4 tutorial is the most popular entry on our blog, since many people find it via its Google search results position, so I thought I'd try to increase my practical post count in hopes of dethroning him solving people's problems.

Here's one I came across in helping some family friends with their home networking troubles ...

Having trouble getting your Arris telephony cable modem (used for digital phone and internet) to work with your wireless router, while it works fine with your PC?

The solution is to press the reset button on the back of the Arris device and make sure that the router is the first thing you plug in to its Ethernet jack afterwards. Just unplugging it and plugging it back in — the method Kyle Broflovski used to fix the giant Linksys Wi-Fi router we call the internet — won't work.

In my friends' case, it was a model TM502 modem from Time Warner Cable and a Netgear wireless router, but I think the same solution applies to TM402 models, Comcast or Cox cable, or other wireless and non-wireless brands of routers (e.g., Linksys, Belkin, Apple AirPort).

The Arris modem remembers the MAC address of the first device it connects to and won't work with any other device (even another computer) until it's reset. I suspect that the cable companies like this feature because they can instruct their installers to connect the modem to your "primary PC" and then force you to either pay some kind of extra "home networking fee" or at least pay for a service call to have someone come out and "upgrade" you.

The Six Dumbest Ideas in Computer Security

I stumbled upon this site when I was reading the discussion of the following article on Ars Technica.  It's a pretty interesting read.

Things I Didn't Know, December '07 Edition

Here are some of the things I've learned over the last couple of months:

— Phil Knight, founder of Nike, has been taking writing classes at Stanford, and is a good classmate.

— Nintendo has some excuses for its (mind-boggling, IMO) inability to meet the demand for Wii systems, as elaborated in Wired and in the WSJ.

— Bill Bellamy is Shaq's cousin (link to FHM, so maybe NSFW).

— There's a documentary about CalTech basketball called Quantum Hoops.

— PCs with some Award/Unicore BIOSes will, seemingly at random, play classical music to signal problems with CPU fans and power supply voltages!

— Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer, was created as an advertising gimmick for Montgomery Ward. His creator's brother-in-law wrote the now iconic song about Rudolph, sung by Gene Auntry, for a Max Fleischer cartoon.

— Speaking of Christmas music, there are tons of cover versions of "Last Christmas", Wham's gift to the world.

— The Ten Mafia Commandments.

— An expert Scrabble player would not have set the highest Scrabble score ever, given the same circumstances in which it was achieved.

— The first three-way tie in Jeopardy history (where everyone came back) was a true act of generosity, and the guy who made it happen planned it that way.