We have the weirdest vending machine in our office. That’s what I call a good idea and a horrible execution.

It runs on nothing else than Linux. It’s able to read your finger print and based on that know how much money you have on your account and if it can dispense drinks for you or if it needs to recharge your credit card. And if something gets stuck while dispensing it generally can sense it and give you an option to select something else or try to drop the item again. Read more…

1

ufly says:
August 12, 2008 @ 12:30

Вот во что может превратиться Линукс в неумелых руках разработчика

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Yesterday we went to our local Best Buy and bought¹ a whole bunch of mice. I wanted something for my Mac, since some development tasks with a touch pad are much harder to perform than they should be. A natural choice was Apple Wireless Mighty Mouse — Apple design and bluetooth technology in one package. So far I like it.

Another one was for Alena’s office. Apparently they still use non-laser, non-optical mice at her company, and since she spends all day holding that thing in hand it makes sense to get something nice, comfortable and wireless. We went with Logitech MX™ Revolution. It feels good in hand, has additional buttons to speed up certain tasks and comes with a charger — she doesn’t need to worry about replacing batteries.

A week ago we were thinking of what to get my mom for her birthday and she said that a new computer would be a good idea. Indeed, their old Dell felt like an ancient animal at this point and was extremely sluggish. The total size of HD space on the poor thing was 27 GB!

We decided that we’re going to put in some money for the new machine and that my dad was going to give the rest. I went to Dell and put together a decently specced computer — Read more…

1

Eldar says:
July 27, 2008 @ 14:47

Was it FedEx fault or fault of Dell for refusing to cooperate and assist their customer? I think the Dell should have fixed everything the second you called and the second they verefied your info.

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Daniel says:
July 27, 2008 @ 15:17

Both. I was very upset about the whole thing. Dell refused to do anything and FedEx was saying they need to hear from Dell to change it. Dell said they need to hear from FedEx to give them the correct info.

But when FedEx started writing down my info and sending it over to the distribution facility — the information wasn’t getting to the driver.

First I had wrong apartment on tracking, then they said I wasn’t home, even though my dad was and there was no notice on the door. Then it went to wrong street address and so on. It’s gotten beyond ridiculous.

But yeah, I was really upset with how Dell handled it, not any less then with FedEx.

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maruk says:
July 29, 2008 @ 10:07

i’m just glad your parents finally got the PC, i’m sure they were very upset by that point, hopefully they can put the Delivery mess behind them and enjoy the beast PC.

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I’ve never had a case for a phone before. But then again I never had a phone that seems so fragile to a drop. Don’t get me wrong, the build of iPhone seems sturdy and solid, but because of the huge glass display it seems it won’t live through a fall.

After reading a number of reviews on different sites I decided to trust iLounge and their opinion. Out of several B+ graded¹ cases they had Griffin Wave seemed the most visually appealing, yet slim, to me.

We ended up picking up a pair of these at BestBuy yesterday. They didn’t have any color choices and they were sold as a pair — one was black and white and another one was green. Both of these are translucent to some degree.

After putting the case on one thing becomes apparent — it feels amazingly good in hand compared to the naked plastic of iPhone. It stops being slippery and it won’t collect grease the way iPhone does.

The cases came with a screen protector, but I decided not to install it. It’s very unlikely that glass is going to get scratched, and I don’t want to sacrifice even a small portion of touch screen sensitivity.

The fit of the case is also very nice, except for one corner where there is no locking mechanism of any kind is present. There is a 1/3 of a milliliter gap between the top and bottom parts there which annoys me slightly. Otherwise I think it’s a very good buy.

I’ll start with the pleasant part. On July 11th we bought a pair of iPhones 3G. Mine is a 16GB white model and Alena’s is an 8GB black model. They both look great.

Here’s the box of my iPhone 3G right after we got home.

In the box we find what? Yes, iPhone, how did you guess?

And here’s its flip side. White one. It doesn’t collect finger prints as the black ones do. The screen however is another story.

Here are the boxes from 2 iPhones with a white phone on top. As you can guess the box color corresponds to the color of iPhone’s back side.

And here I have the phone hooked up to my Mac, trying to activate it through iTunes. This actually took quite a while to get done which brings me to the first part of the whole story. The actual process of buying the phones. And that part was not so much fun.

We arrived to the local AT&T store 15 minutes to 8. Yes, in the morning. When we got there were greeted by a rather long line. On the other hand this is probably considered a very short line when compared to some that were formed around Apple stores in Manhattan.

At 8am they let in several people and that’s pretty much when the fun part ends. After that it was 4 hours of waiting under a brutal sun. The line was not moving because AT&T couldn’t process any orders. We were told that iTunes and AT&T internal system went down. At some point they just started selling the phones without activation. Then the system came back, but was moving extremely slowly. They were letting 1 person at time into the store and it was taking hours upon hours. Then we were told that they are running out of 16GB models and we weren’t even sure if we’ll be able to get any.

By the time we got to the door I was pissed and wasn’t even sure if I’ll get what I want. We let Maruk go in first, since it seemed he would get a heart attack if he ended up without one. But once we were inside all went well. I actually ended up with the very last white iPhone they had. Some poor bastard after me had to go with a black one.

The whole buying process went very smoothly. We got our numbers transferred, accounts set up and so on. I even managed to apply 18% service fee discount, but we won’t know if it will work before we get our first bill.

After having the phone for a couple of days I must say that it lived up to the hype and my huge expectations. It’s as great as everyone said it was. The hardware is great and the software is just awesome. I’m glad we did this the first day and waited until the end so we didn’t have to go searching for it somewhere else the day after. That’s all.

1

Alena says:
July 15, 2008 @ 18:12

I am happy with the phone too!

2

Alex says:
July 16, 2008 @ 11:44

I was impressed by how responsive / accurate the accelerometer input is

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It’s now have been a couple of days since I’ve started playing with a Mac. There are both positives and negatives that I’ve run across. For me something new is always interesting, and considering that I’ve been using DOS, Linux and Windows for decades now — Mac OS I’ve only seen from a far.

I’ll start with specs of our machine — MacBook Pro.

• 2.4GHz Intel Penryn Core 2 Duo
• 2GB 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM — 2×1GB
• 200GB Serial ATA Drive @ 5400 rpm
• NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT with 256MB
• 15-inch Glossy LED Widescreen Display
• SuperDrive 8x (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
• Backlit Keyboard/Mac OS - U.S. English
• Multi-touch Trackpad

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Artem says:
March 17, 2008 @ 14:29

Congrats, man! Like I said in my previous comments I knew you would get it soon.

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Maruk says:
March 19, 2008 @ 16:51

Now i finally i have some1 i can do ichat with, very cool, hope u keep enjoying it.

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Max says:
June 5, 2008 @ 15:30

currently i’m using pc/windows
my dream is macbook, the problem is usual - no money but i will collect it and buy it asap

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Today I’ve met up with Alena after school near the local Apple store. I’ve got to give it to Apple — even the design of the store itself is nice.

Now this is going to be embarrassing — I touched the iPhone today, for the first time. It is as nice as I thought it was. I was especially impressed with Read more…