Well… I was going to get an iPhone but this has surfaced: (Link in picture for more information)

The Sony Ericsson Shiho has an 8.1 megapixel camera (yeah that’s right 8.1 holly SHIT) with both Xenon and LED flashes. It is also said to have GPS, TV out, DLNA certification and HSDPA. What a rap sheet indeed.

It is said to be announced on the 17th of June, so we will see if this amazing rumor pulls out to be true or if we will never see this again (but i’m putting my money on this one being announced, fo sho).

AMD is in the process right now of setting up AMD GAME! branding. The idea is, if you computer is branded AMD GAME! it should run all the modern games. I’m sure some people are already starting to see that this is a bad idea. Thats because it is. For one thing, nVidia and Intel aren’t likely to start marking their stuff with a big bold “AMD GAME!” Sticker, seeing as each company is competing with the others in at least one way. Secondly, How do you tell how long that “AMD GAME!” computer will be running modern games? You would still end up on the hardware upgrade rat race.

Wine(Wine is not an emulator) is an amazing project that is basically porting the Windows environment to Unix. It enables you to run a large percentage of the Windows software and games out there but on Linux(or Mac, FreeBSD etc.) so you don’t have to use Windows. This is great for people like me who have a few select pieces of software and games that they want to play but just don’t want to use Windows for whatever reason. Wine 1.0 Release Candidate 1 was released on Friday, May 9th, 2008 with Release Candidate 2 due out Friday, May 23rd, 2008.

Via: Wine Review

I was recently introduced to this website by my Social teacher of all people. I could go on and on about this wesbite and its genius but I believe that TED can talk for himself. The website is really a video account of an annual convention where a number of interesting experts on various subjects (any subject really, there are no rules) talk. That is what they do, they talk. They talk on a wide variety of EXTREMELY interesting topics. By spending a mere hour on this website you will learn, to be completely precise, a whole fucking lot. I have always been a strong believer in the idea that all knowledge is relevant and that learning about anything and everything is always the best way to go. Always find out random shit and expand your library of inconsistent facts and you will find yourself understanding and enjoying life to a newer extent.

So I beg that you please visit this site and watch something that interests you, It is a collection of the ideas of the beautiful minds of a handfull of the worlds most masterful orators. This website is an intellectual gold mine just waiting to be exploited.

Just to juice up this post further I will include a few videos that I personally really enjoyed and found incredibly fascinating.

Janine Benyus: 12 sustainable design ideas from nature

Dan Dennett: Can we know our own minds?

Craig Venter: On the verge of creating synthetic life

Rives: Is 4 a.m. the new midnight?
this one was done purely as comedy but its still quite fucking hilarious.

Don’t worry, i don’t actually use Messenger for the Mac on a regular basis, only when a new version comes out and i want to see if anything at all has been improved. On an everyday basis i use the amazing Adium IM client. The one big thing that is lacking in pretty much every 3rd party MSN client is webcam support. For some odd reasons, Messenger for the Mac is missing it to. I really don’t understand this as almost every Mac sold has a built in webcam, so there is no reason not to have Webcam support. I was hoping that the new release would have it but of course Microsoft keeps up its regular deal and just disappoints me. Another thing that i really don’t like is that the notifications that the program uses aren’t done through the fairly standard Growl but instead Microsoft’s own unique “solution”. On top of it all, the interface is completely fugly. It doesn’t fit in with the mac interface at all. At least Office 2008 does a good job of fitting in. I give Messenger for the Mac 7 an EPIC FAIL
Edit: It actually does have video/audio capabilities but for some odd reason its only in the Corporate version aka no use for any regular consumer

I’m typing this from an iPod touch, most likely because I hate myself subconsciously. I say that because the onscreen keyboard is painful. This is common from my experience with handhelds, for reasons unknown.

The first device I tried to use was an up iPaq pocket PC. It was an interesting device. For one thing it ran windows CE. Windows CE shares only its name with the popular OS. For one thing, the interface tried to be too much like windows. It had draggable message boxes, multitasking, and a full filesystem complete with filetypes and a different structure than the desktop release of windows. My complaint boils down to this: windows CE tries to be too complex for it to work well as a mobile device. Programs don’t close when you press on their ‘X’; they merely close their window. But wait, the only task browser was buried three layers deep in the control panel lookalike, under the memory tab. (I think newer versions buried it even deeper).

My next target is Palm OS. My experience with it isn’t recent at all, so take this all with a grain of salt. Palm OS is still ugly though. Flat colors and short curves are all that Palm OS uses. Other odd features, such as an entirely new written language, held Palm OS back. I think palm has resigned itself to using windows CE now though, so basically HP just has some competition now.

As for the black berry. I haven’t used one, and I hope I never do. The buttons are tiny, and the lack of a touch screen makes my fingers cry out in empathy towards all those who use them. Or maybe it’s spite. Whatever it is, I don’t need to be connected to everyone at every time.

Now it’s time for the device im using right now, the iPod touch. The onscreen keyboard makes me cry. The buttons are too small to reliably hit with my fingertips. With practice I can work around it, but this just highlights an obnoxious spelling suggestion tool. ‘OS’ translates to ‘I’d’ automatically. CE translates to de. The only way to stop this behaviour is to press on a small bubble the appears. The punctuation and numbers are on a separate layer of the keyboard, meaning that if you wanted (for some reason that will never be known) to use proper punctuation for your sentences you need to flip to the punctuation page, add the period, then flip back. The lack of any sort of language resembling english somewhat annoys me, although I do have to admit that character recognition generally sucks even today.

PS: Blame Apple for any misspellings

This is the accompanying post for the Comic#22 which hasn’y yet posted at the time of writing.
Basically heres the story of why instead of writing a (if i do say so myself) damn near hilarious comic about suicidal whales I just randomly through together a place holder because I wanted to save that new comic for when I get my new tablet later this week, and shortly you will see exactly why.
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Since the beginning of time… well actually just since the beginning of November last year I have been bringing you endless hours of epic comic-related hilarity using this tablet.
Yeah its kindof a junker but it was cheap and reliable as all-getout. Its a Hanvon product, meaning it’s a cheap asian knock off of a Wacom Bamboo. I found the little bugger on Ebay for a mere 60 dollars! I was ecstatic at the time having no alternative means of getting a tablet of any quality. Lets just say that the tablet worked very well, my only concern being that it was difficult to produce work that was even remotely competent or even half as good as my illustrations could have been if done directly on paper. It was a cheap, rickety, slippery, shitty little throwaway tablet and I love it to fucking peices.

And now we get to the interesting part of the story. Upgrading. To shorten an already painfully long story I will just inform you that earlier today a conversation ensued with my parents where I ended up explaining the past, future and present of ExplodingWumpus.com. I was metaphorically cock slapped by the news that followed. It turns out somewhere deep in the tangle, cobweb emblazoned inner workings of my fathers mind he had decided that he would invest in my future by buying me a new tablet. Yeah. Wow.

After a short look around the site he seemed to be so impressed by what he saw I was working on that he told me to just look around and pick a tablet I wanted… Let me tell you right now that I wanted to turn him down and be the humble bastard I wish I was, but no I just couldn’t let up on the opportunity to upgrade to a tablet in the range of 300-400$ from a tablet that was in the range of giveaway-60$. I could go on even further but I have no way of explaining what happened next, basically I am now the proud owner of a Cintiq 12WX Pen Tablet a MOTHER FUCKING 1000$ TABLET! After I was finished shitting bricks at the news that he had somehow gone from offering me a “300-400$” tablet to buying this beautiful, elegant machine; I proceeded to order and now the tablet should be here by the end of the week! Im not sure where he got the idea to buy this thing but I was not about to say “no thanks, I’ll work and save up some money and earn it!” his exact words were “I’m investing in your future, and it’s only money”.

I found out later that after he had bought his Yaris the government had sent him a check for 1000$ because he was helping the economy by buying that big blue shoebox with wheels. But I honestly didn’t care where the money came from, it was the thought that mattered and the fact that this is one of the nicest tablets you can get. Heres a video of the goddess being used. And here is a commercial for the lovely thing.

Expect a significant increase in the quality of the comics as soon as this thing arrives!

It’s not like there arent enough good reasons already to shy away from using Windows Server as a web server. Hundreds of Thousands of websites have been hacked recently by exploiting security flaws in Microsoft Windows Server to install malicious software on visitors’ machines. The exploit is in Window’s IIS Webserver(aka a terrible clone of Apache). Please folks, make the right choice and stick with Linux when it comes to servers.

Via: Washington Post

Personally i never thought that Ebay’s purchase of Skype in the first place made much sense and i guess they are figuring that out now as well. Their purchase of PayPal in 2002 makes a lot of sense as almost all of the transactions going through the site go through PayPal, but not so much for Skype. I’m hoping that Google picks up Skype, either to integrate with Gtalk or to build into Android.
Via: Financial Times

After years of hyper, holographic storage is finally shipping next month. It’s coming from InPhase Technology and the retail price for the reader is $18,000 and $180 for one piece of media. Each piece of media has 300 GB of storage which makes it great for archival. You can read more about how it works over on ZDNet.

Via: ZDNet