/dev/blog

Well, after looking at all the Etymotics ER6i and the Shure E2C in-ear canalphones, I took the dive today and ordered the E2C’s from Amazon.com for $65 with super saver shipping, which I found to be a pretty darn good deal, since they retail for $99 at shure.com.

Let’s just hope they sound as good as they say online. Will post a review after I get them and try them out.

Oh, and if you are interested in new, perhaps better headphones, head-fi is a great place to ask questions and do research.

Here’s my first attempt on “transparent” monitors!

Not the best, but I’ll be trying this again pretty soon, just to see how real it can get.

As you can see, the cup isn’t matching up in the lower right corner.

Enjoy!

According to ifoapplestore.com, Apple stores will begin carrying Apple logo merchandise.

I myself wouldn’t mind a shirt and a hat. Hope they will have them at the Beverly Center opening.

P.S. Gah, I didn’t even know that the Company store at Cupertino sold the stuff. I went there during Christmas break, and it turned out that Apple HQ was empty, and the store wasn’t open. I should’ve went back the next day to buy some stuff.

And, sadly, I don’t think I can go.

The one at Century City was right on the day of my SAT II Physics test, so I couldn’t go. And this one at Manhattan Village falls directly on the Dragon Boating competition.

The good part is that I heard that there will be one around Beverly Hills or Hollywood somewhere, and is opening soon. Hope I can make it to that one, and join the celebration. Also to grab a free über-cool Apple T-shirt

And more to come later.

This one is just for trying out the upload feature of WP.

This is our team advisor/sponsor, William, sleeping in the car.

Ah, back in California, the nice dry warm weather.

Well, folks, I just got back from the Dell-Winston School Solar Car Challenge and, man, it was FUN(What else could this mean?!)!

We raced from Round Rock, TX to JPL(Jet Propulsion Laboratory) in Pasadena, CA in 8 days, and our team made second place in the classic division.

Well, that’s all for now. I gotta get ready for some sleep, so I can take care of some business tomorrow.

Perhaps I’ll talk about it more when I get some of my pictures and some other stuff in.

Today, I have just discovered Speakable Items in Mac OS X, and, man, is it *awesome*!

I just turned on Listening in your System Preferences, and my iBook began listening for voice commands. It also provided a floating palette for feedback, so I could see if it heard me. I could optionally have it listen only if a key is pressed and held, or after I say a key word, like “Computer”. There’s also a Speakable Items palette that shows the user what commands the computer knows, and one can add one’s own commands by making AppleScripts that run the command, and name it whatever you want to say to run the command, then move it to the ~/Library/Speech/Speakable\ Items/ folder

I easily made some iTunes scripts for play, pause, and other commands.

The speech recognition worked real well, and understood my commands most of the time. What really surprised me was when it understood the command “open nFoldMan” and actually started the application.

Mac OS X continues to give me wonderful surprises even after I used it for a year. And I definitely don’t regret switching.

“Click here for the video(Hacking with Ramzi)”:http://www.santoalt.com/videos/hacking_with_ramzi.php

Heh, saw this on the defcon forums, and thought I’d share this with everyone.

Enjoy!

In CompSci class, we’ve just got an assignment where we have to work on a program in Java. It can be on anything and can do anything, but has to be worth about 4-5 weeks of work.

Well, I’ve decided to do something with Cocoa, just to start getting familiar with it. But, I need some ideas for the project. Someone in our group proposed a stock simulation. I think it may be too easy if we just pull stock information off the internet, and too complex if we simulate stocks by making our own class.

Well, any ideas on how/what to do with the stocks? Or maybe some other project we can work on?

And, no, it cannot be in Objective C. The class is *Java* orientated.

*Update*: Well, the group has decided to do a Chess game instead.

I was looking for a widget that can either run commands in the shell and display the output, or run the ‘cat’ command on a file. I was going to use it on Folding@Home, to display the unitinfo.txt file.

In boredom, I made a widget for Dashboard in Tiger that runs the ‘cat’ command in UNIX in a user-definable interval, and refreshes the result.

You can get it “Here(dashcat.v0.1.zip)”:http://lokisnake.com/widgets/dashcat.v0.1.zip

It is currently *not* user-friendly, but it gets the job done.

To change the settings, you would need to go into the .wdgt bundle, and edit the javascript and css files. It isn’t complicated to work with, but can be improved.

I will be improving this little by little. And feel free to submit comments and suggestions to lokisnake (at) lokisnake (dot) com