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Archive for category Geekery

Product Review: Motorola Droid, part 2 of 2

Feb 27

Posted by Aaron in Geekery, Reviews | No Comments

A week ago, I wrote the first half of this review, focusing on the hardware and factory-installed software. This conclusion will focus more on 3rd-party apps and some of the things I think could stand for some improvement.

The Apps Marketplace

The App store, called “Android Market”, is searchable and features ratings provided by other users. The ratings are modestly useful — it’s the standard “five-star” system. If an app is 4 or 5 stars, it’s probably worth using — anything else is a crap shoot.

Some of the apps are free, and others cost money. One of the really neat things, culturally, is that the prices are all in different currencies. Some are in US Dollars, others are in Euros, or Yen, or British Pounds Sterling.

Installing the Apps is ridiculously easy. You find the one you want and press “Install”. That’s it.

While you can browse the marketplace in either “free app” or “fee app” mode, searching for Apps does not allow for you to separate the two, which can be a little annoying. Read the rest of this entry »

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Book Review: Good Germs, Bad Germs

Feb 16

Posted by Aaron in Geekery, Health, Reviews, Science, bitches! | No Comments

by Jessica Snyder Sachs

When people think of “germs”, the connotation is generally bad. In fact, when you look up the word germ, the definition of “microbial organism” is usually followed up with “especially a disease-causing microbial organism.”

As a species, we traditionally don’t think too highly of our microbial co-habitants. Store shelves are covered with products that tout their effectiveness at killing “99.9% of germs and bacteria”.

But are they all bad? In recent years, more awareness has been growing about “pro-biotic” diets and lifestyles; one that introduces “good” bacteria into the body. Nobel Laureate Joshua Lederberg, a pioneer in microbial research, believes that “[w]hat’s important is that we’re better off aspiring to a relationship of symbiotic coexistence.”

And that is the crux of this book. Sachs makes a very strong case for the need to delineate a difference between beneficial microbes and harmful microbes, in the same way that we may differentiate between beneficial small animals (dogs, cats, turtles) and harmful small animals (vipers, porcupines, brown recluse spiders). We have many bacteria (microflora) living inside us that are absolutely critical for our existence — digesting food we cannot otherwise digest, producing chemicals that make our body function better, etc. Read the rest of this entry »

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Product Review: Motorola Droid, part 1 of 2

Feb 14

Posted by Aaron in Geekery, Reviews | 5 Comments

As another part of our sweet tax refund, I decided that it was time to upgrade my phone to a proper smart phone. Several of my friends have already acquired Droids, and I’ve been able to play around with it a bit. It’s pretty nice — responsive, looks beautiful, and has a lot of great features.

The Droid runs Google’s Android operating system, a variant of Linux. This particular operating system is also used on a number of other phones, including the Touch, G1, Nexus One, and Eris. The great part about this is that the marketplace is shared amongst all of those phones, so there is a much larger user base to develop applications for them.

Overall, I really like the phone — there are a couple of things that I dislike, but no deal breakers, and many are things that could be fixed with firmware upgrades.

This review is broken up into two parts, due to length. Part 1will focus on the native Droid features such as the hardware, standard apps, and connectivity.

Part 2 will focus on third party apps, Droid tricks, and how to make your own custom ringtones, notifications, and alarms with a free third-party-app (it’s AWESOME). Read the rest of this entry »

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Linux FTW: Using Virtualbox with an Existing Windows Partition

Jan 27

Posted by Aaron in Geekery | 21 Comments

The recursion might blow your mind.

Last week, a friend of mine needed me to do an audio file conversion, but the app that I use is installed on my windows partition. I really don’t ever boot into Windows unless I have a good reason for it — I’m much happier tooling around in Linux — there’s just something satisfying and comfortable about being able to pop open a shell at any time.

Anyways – it got me thinking: I’ve booted into a Windows XP image,  why can’t I use VirtualBox to boot from a whole partition? Surely that is possible…

Tonight I finally got to play with it. And as you can see from the image here, I got success. :)

It’s a little challenging, but it’s doable. I had to spend some time to iron out the kinks, but you can reap the benefits! Read the rest of this entry »

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Book Review: Number Freak (1 of 27)

Jan 24

Posted by Aaron in Geekery, Reviews | No Comments

This book is part of my 2010 Booklist. See the full-list on this blog, or visit my Amazon Store for links to purchase any of them.

Click to see on Amazon
I picked this book up at Carroll & Carroll, a bookstore not far from where I grew up. I’m a fan of trivia books in general; collecting facts is just a hobby of mine.

This particular book is a tour de force through the numbers 1 to 200.  The range of numbers is somewhat arbitrary, and this becomes evident once you pass 128 or so.

The format of the book is not a standard chapter-based text. Niederman allocates a section to each number. The section heading is the number itself, along with its factors or a designation as a prime number. Below that are a series of short anecdotes about that number.

The first 70 digits are very fascinating. Niederman spends a couple pages at times discussing all the different interesting factoids about particular numbers. Many of them are strictly math-related: whether or not a number is prime, what kind of prime it is, what sorts of numerical relationship it has with itself and with other numbers.

But many of the other facts, early on, are more conventional trivia. Here is an arbitrary sampling:

Read the rest of this entry »

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