Japanese shadow doc attaches opposable thumbs to the green robot

While I never liked Sony Ericsson and its phones (the first cell I ever really bought broke instantly, and every replacement broke as well, it’s still lying around here somewhere and never been used. Also I hate the clumsy design of the Xperias, and they never update android anyway), I’ve gotta hand it to Sony – they honor their tradition of making kick ass commercials. I mean, this is me, talking about an ad without being forced to do so.

Love that it all takes place in some east asian shadow shack. *heads of to the store to putter around with this

Dreieck Kreis Kreuz Quadrat

Dass Sony nicht einfach alles ein wenig anders machen wollte, sondern sich konkret was gedacht hat beim Designen des Joypads für seine kommende Konsole, zeigt ein Interview mit Teiyu Goto. So soll das Dreieck die eigene Sicht symbolisieren (in grün), der Kreis ein “Ja”, das Kreuz dagegen das “Nein”, während das Quadrat Menüs oder Dokumente darstellen sollte.

Wer hätte das gedacht. Kommt immer wieder gut, wenn ein erster Beweger nach Jahrzehnten en passant seine Motivationen preisgibt, in diesem Fall zu einer der unbestrittenen Ikonen der 90er und 2000er Jahre. Und weil der Gute Japaner ist, kommt natürlich noch eine Anekdote der Bescheidenheit *humble humble dazu.

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Die Schultern der Giganten

PS Buttons Foto von Thom Watson,

Controller Fossil via sp330.com,

und Story von 1up.com via kotaku.

What-if episode, but without science fiction

You remember when Apple overtook MS in terms of market value, a few weeks ago? While I was dumb struck reading something like that at the time, it kept me wondering what could be the possible outcomes if a development like this continues. So here’s our little list, futureproof and all -

1. Nothing really happens. Too often one fails to set the variables right, and the utmost part of speculation remains just that. But it might just give you an opportunity to be funny.
2. The IT world as a whole continues to shift, and up to a third of all things digital could be done on smartphones and all sort of handsets, where we would be seeing Android (160 000 new activations A DAY? Still can’t believe it) and Apple as market leaders.
3. Microsoft discontinues Windows. That would make Mac OS n the dominant “you’ll have to pay for that, my son”-OS out there. Every other manufacturer would need to adapt by either making Mac OS its native system like this

or, go ahead and try to delevop its own operating system, which is quite hard and costly. So why not take a long established standard, that costs nothing, while you may even claim money for it? Case in point, a little CD from South Africa? That would also mean the end of dual booting…like this.

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On the shoulders of giants

Cupcake by Adam Powell on the Android Developer’s Blog.

Mac OS on a tiny VAIO by daharder via boingboing.

Fused logo by dedoimedo.com.

Sony VAIO VPC EB1M1E and ubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid Lynx

So, I’ve gone out and put my hands on one of the last Sony VAIO VPC E Series (white) available out there. Funny enough, I ended up buying it at the Galeria Kaufhof (Berlin Alexanderplatz), which normally is the last place on earth you would look for tech stuff at decent prices. They even let an extra 20€ off of the price, because it had been previously returned. I booted it up, and a Windows 7 screen asked for credentials for its first bootup – the guy before me apparently just got the wrong machine or needed a different present.

Let’s go for the innerspace.

The VPC EB1M1E features an Intel Core i3 330M CPU@2,13 GHz residing on an Intel H55 Express chipset. For its wireless capabilities Sony chose Atheros’ AR9285 Wireless Network Adapter (PCI-Express), and for the grafics ATI’s Mobility Radeon HD 5650 (1024 MB of GDDR3 SDRAM) on a 1366×768 display (15,5 inch which makes for a 16:9 display).

The 4 gigs of RAM are laid out over two SODIMMs of DDR3 SDRAM, the HDD on the other side is manufactured by Western Digital, a WDC WD5000BEVT-2 ATA Disk with 465GiB (500GB) of storage. I should mention the four USB ports alongside the SD Memory Card, Memory Stick Pro and Memory Stick Duo slots.

As a downside, hardwarewise, I’d mention the unusually short battery life. It says around three hours on the Sony www, but of course with your wi-fi running, 15 open browser tabs, email, chat clients, videostills, and music blasting, you can end up with less than 2 hours.

Of course, the big question around was, how will you perform under ubuntu 10.04 LTS Lucid Lynx, my new friend? I should find out soon enough.

While I really like to tinker with stuff I didn’t know before, I couldn’t be bothered to create the “rescue disks” for the preinstalled Windows 7. After those many years of rocking especially ‘buntu and ‘nux, burning those DVDs looked like work and I think that between the two of us, the laptop is the one who will have to do the work, and not me. So I skipped that specific step, and ended up not being able to properly partition the drive, especially with those three Windows 7 partition shenanigans, and just created one giant ext4-partition, where VAIO’s new spouse may take its residence. By the way, that was also my first time I did a single boot install.

Now for the part I was so excited about: Everything works just fine out of the box. Bummer. Nothing more to do. Especially the strange resolution set at 1366×768 points worked like a charm, and for additional details I was able to get the proprietary driver from ATI’s labs – the “ATI Catalyst Control Center”. So, ubuntu’s early mantra really came true, except for the one thing:

Needed to upgrade the ALSA driver

While I started to feel at home just nicely on the new machine, there was no sound at all. When I put in a pair of good headphones, I was able to hear a faint, distant noise, which could have been the song I was using to test. Now the last time I started off fresh with a new laptop and ubuntu, the sound was also hidden, as it was muted by default with the mute button hidden away in a secret menu. But that wasn’t it this time. Luckily enough, a kid on the official ubuntu forums had the exact same problem, and after a few tries they worked everything out. Just download the newest version of ALSA (alsa-driver, alsa-lib and alsa-utils) and install it, restart your system and you’re all set. Many thanks go to Stéphane Gaudreault, who did a pretty good outline of what to do, if you do not compile your code for yourself every other day. Also, quite useful if you’re having a hard time with your sound, a script for asking the right questions can be found at http://git.alsa-project.org/?p=alsa-driver.git;a=blob_plain;f=utils/alsa-info.sh.

Using this specific setup for a few weeks, I noticed that seemingly random actions shut out sound altogheter. Running, for example, KlamAV and punching in ctrl-alt-del, which prompts the locked screen on 10.04, may freeze the system, and upon rebooting the sound is wiped out for good. The system doesn’t recognize the soundcard(s) anymore. A quick

cat /proc/asound/cards

tells you “no soundcards”. ALSA is still version 1.0.23. However, just reinstalling this ALSA version re-institutes your sound capabilities, so it’s not much of a problem. Slightly ugly workaround though.

Also, a classic concerning sound problems on your first few run throughs under ‘buntu, is flash and your music excluding each other, as in you are unable to hear the sound of a youtube-clip if you started your music player previously, and couldn’t start your music player’s playback if you have just watched a flash clip of sorts. Solution, as always, is to install libflashsupport and the newest complete Pulseaudio software. Et voilà.

Last but not least, one thing keeps me wondering ’til this day. The system specs list two audio devices – “internal audio” at analog stereo duplex and a “Redwood HDMI Audio [Radeon HD 5600 Series]” as a digital stereo HDMI output. Maybe the latter gets used when connecting to an external device via said HDMI.

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On the shoulders of giants

A truthful review of the hardware-side of things in german – http://tinyurl.com/3ad8vho

Some neat sites to learn a bit about the ubuntu/Windows 7 dual boot – https://help.ubuntu.com/community/MultiOSBoot on the official sites, http://lifehacker.com/5403100/dual+boot-windows-7-and-ubuntu-in-perfect-harmony over at Lifehacker, and http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/dual-boot-windows-7-ubuntu.html for a few different approaches.

Decisions decisions to make

For many and many of the guys out there, and more and more gals, choosing your primary playing and working setup as in laptop is all but deciding about the holiest of the holiest. You can ponder and think about it endlessly. You can deploy some of the tactics described in your favorite nonsense blog. But you will have to choose ultimately. So, here’s our musings respectively, as of july 2010.

We really appreciate the technical environment of these days – 15 years ago you had to constantly upgrade your PC, spend money to no end, and even if you did, two weeks afterwards your little machine was out of date. You could then go on and read about the shiny new software out there, but you couldn’t run it at home. This way, one was left in a constant state of playing outdated games of wanting, and not having. Il y a a couple of years now, and we coulnd’t help but noticing that times have changed dramatically, and as is often the case in the tech world, in a good way. If one were to buy a new laptop, of course it would be around twenty times as fast as his 5 years old machine, and it would run the newest 3D FPS shoot’em up, but it would not do anything really different. You can upgrade if you want to, if you need something specifically, but you’re not forced to. This is paradise. You really get to choose here. Thank you so much world.

Furthering this, prices have dropped further, while the laptop industry sported pitifully razorthin margins even before. Apple’s flagship 15″ Powerbook was around 3000€ around the millenium, while it is around 1500€ these days. So have at it. Sony, on the other end, for some reason has always been charging insanely stupid fantasy prices on their computer products, which also have been constantly toned down in the past years. So, the current basic all around doitall, Sony’s VAIO E-series, is about 700€ and that is it. Beautiful thing, and it makes your pondering much easier, because if you were wrong and end up unhappy with your new hardware, you didn’t kill 3000€ there, but just like… a really big night out? You know what I mean.

So, moving on along all lightly, because of the light pricetag, Sony’s VAIOS always had their staple of annoying and uncalled for disadvantages. They still persist to these days. First off, they come with an incredible amount of bloatware. Useless shite. Dozens of trial versions to put on the sticker out there on the packaging. A VAIO starting center, where you can be all… vaioy? Not even they themselves know. But it adds to a slightly broken overall feeling. Also, you may hear about really strange things going on with the Sony support, which may get mad evil on your ass occasionally. Like telling you to simply go and buy a new piece of hardware. And third point here, the finishing, the look and feel, while being beautiful to look at, feels cheap, as you can push the chassis in with your finger, and me myself I leave marks on the parts beside the touchpad because of the heavy usage. When I take a look at a friend’s Macbook standing half a meter away, this gets painfully real.

But if you manage to overcome these obstacles, you get a i3-330M @2,13 GHz (you know, the kind of Intel that we’re a slave to), 3MB cache, 4 Gigs of RAM, and a 500 GB harddrive. The one caveat is running your favorite OS, ubuntu. As always, there is no guarantee here, as the VAIOs still come with some version of outdated Windows – one of the many reasons, by the way, why people jolting around randomly made up percentages of computers running windows are very, very wrong (my old VAIO had a Win preinstalled, of course without the CDs, and I’ve never even used it once. Still counts as a Windows-PC in use). And considering the screen’s 16:9 build, and native 1366×768 resolution by its ATI Mobility RADEON 5650 grafics card, one might run into serious problems. Strangely enough, all a thorough google search brought up was somebody reporting problems with his audio setting. We will have to see.

So, after all, the VAIOs wouldn’t be one’s first choice, and we’ve constantly told people asking which laptop to buy to go for an Apple or maybe Lenovo Thinkpad. But if you’re eating scripts of code for breakfast and enjoy talking about USB 2.0 for hours without noticing that you’re not furthering any great worldwide causes, philosophically speaking, you’ve got to admit that choosing your window to the world here, it is an emotional decision, and not one made by rationals. And Sony, evil as they may be, and as big a let down their Ginza flagship store really is, just nails it with us with their confusingly gargantuan array of models to choose from.