VMWare Fusion Beta

Last week, VMWare (a long time Virtualization Software company) released a public Beta of their Fusion application. This would be in dirrect competition with Paralells, the first company that really put out a virtualization application on the Mac.

I signed up for the beta, and have been playing around with it a bit. I downloaded a pre-built image of Fedora Core 6 and ran a slew of updates on it. The first thing I noticed is that it felt a little bit quicker than Paralells. I also liked the fact that I could just pull any of the prebuilt images from their site (which has a TON), and just get to work. It also looks like the machines of course that I make on my own machine can easily move to some of our VMWare Servers, just by sending the needed files.

I have a screenshot of my first test with it. Dont mind the Jack in the background 😉

If you want to try it out, you should head over to the VMWare site. Once I work with it a little bit more, Ill try to write up some more info on it, and why I really think people should be using THIS product rather than Parallels 🙂

Listening To: ‘Down In It’ by Nine Inch Nails

New Phone! LG Vx 8600!

Sorry about the delay in this post. I wrote it the week before Christmas, and never got around to publishing it. So therefore, the times are about a week off :). Lets get to the story…

Verizon lets you upgrade your phones every two years (at the end of your contract) for the same price as a new customer with a two year plan, and usually $50 more off. Debs got a RAZR for free in August, due to these rebates. Well, I picked up the LG Vx8600 on Monday, for a pretty decent price ($129 after a $50 mail in rebate). This phone is basically considered the ‘Flip Chocolate’…since its pretty much the EXACT same phone in a different form-factor. I saw this phone a while ago on Engadget, but did not pay much attention. Over the previous weekend we ran to a few stores, checked out phones, and I looked at reviews online. I found this to be one of the best deals, GREAT looking, and also a very geek-friendly phone! Done!

Verizon for the LONGEST time has been ‘castrating’ their phones of features the manuf. orig had. For example, Deborah’s RAZR has bluetooth data transfer capabilities, but the Verizon firmware locks that out. This allows Verizon to push their services like V-Cast, so you have to pay to get data transferred to your phone. In many cases, this is better. MOST people dont know how to ‘hack’ their phone or send crap to it, so Verizon takes the step to do it a ‘tested’ and ‘official’ way. But for people like me, this sucks! I dont want to pay for a service that I should be able to do myself!  When Verizon released the Motorola Q, this changed. The Q and my LG Vx8600 are some of the first phones from Verizon to support a lot more in the Bluetooth stack.

What does this mean? Well, in simple terms, I can link my phone and MacBook Pro together, and send and recieve pictures, movies, and audio from my phone that I make/record. If I ever want to use the ‘music player’ features of my phone, I just can send them right from my computer.

Whats the catch? There are 2 folders for EACH thing! My Photos and then My Pictures, My Music and My Sounds, My Videos and My Clips (or something like that). The firmware ONLY lets me put mp3’s in the My Music Folder. And better yet, I cant use any audio clips in My Music folder as Ringtones! Oh well, of course there are ways to get past this too…

Using a software called BitPim, I can see all folders on my phone, contacts, SMS messages, call logs, etc. Ive actually been using this app for a while with my Vx7000, but it was very confusing, and in the end, didnt work right. This was because I had to install a slew of drivers, do some weird setup, just to hope to get the program and the phone to connect. But with bluetooth and my new phone, it just works! When I actually do the transfer of items to my new phone, I plan on writing something up then too.

Listening To: ‘Half Life’ by 10 Years

Post from the Wii!

The wii browser came out this morning. I am making this post from my couch. Boy is it fun to type on an on-screen keyboard with the wiimote! Now back to some more messing around.

A Little More Wii Action…

Tess posted some pictures overnight of the Wii at her place, go on over and check them out!

Aduim X 1.0b18!

I usually dont get this excited about updates, but when I updated my Adium today to the newest beta, I got a long lost, and much desired feature. GMAIL NOTIFICATIONS! Anyone that is using Adium now should be using these betas (they are very stable, and have TONS of new features), and should be running this newest version! A bunch of bug fixes were done, and a few new things added in a point release!

Listening To: ‘Rock Lobster’ by The B-52’s

Wii Forecast Channel today!

While I was on my lunch break today, I saw in my blogs that the “Forecast Channel” for the Wii was released this morning. When I went downstairs to check the Wii, it was glowing with this new message as well! At the bottom of the message you can click the button to run the update, which starts the update for you. The update took only about 3 minutes to download, apply, and let me start it up.

Once getting into the new channel, you first tell it your state (they call it region), then city (Richmond was on the top of the list when I clicked on Virginia). After checking the date on your system, it displays the temperature, forecast, and a few other things. I also took a few minutes and played with the globe feature. This allows you to work with something that looks JUST like Google Earth. You can spin the globe around, and then see the weather all across the world!

In the end, its nothing that special, but still fun to play with!

But, some of the best news was released today as well. On friday, the ‘trial’ version of Opera for the Wii will be available. This basically allows you to surf the web on the TV. It also opens the possibility of adding more games, by using certian sites like WiiCade. I also plan to test it out on some internal stuff, like hosting some type of iTunes/web music interface. Ill post any information I find out on this as I get to it!

Listening To: ‘A.D.D.’ by System of a Down

Christmas Shopping!!

I swear, one year, I will REALLY remember how annoying it is to wait too late, and not do ALL my shopping online. This year I managed to pick up most of my gifts online, but still not all. While shopping has been easier this year that previous, its still been ‘busy’..

With so many tools available now, next year may be the year that we not only save massive ammounts of money on gifts, but we get them early and ready to go, all without leaving the house!

This year I managed my list, as well as the list I had made for my wife using Google Docs. I created a spreadsheet for my wife. Then, I would tally up totals so I didnt go over our ‘limit’. But, I could have taken this a step further…

Why not also create a list with our ideas for the friends and family, and then share that with her? I tried, but we only had a few gifts left to pick up, and it really wasn’t worth spending the extra time. But for next year, I will share these lists for her so we can track our spending, update in real-time together, as well as keep a reminder of everything we have left to purchase.

Sorry for this quick small little blurb. Ill be posting more as the week goes on, but now, there are e-mail servers to attend to!!

Listening To: ‘Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas’ by Coldplay

Random…

Like usual, I have been quite busy at work, and not really up to doing much of anything on a computer after work. Most nights we make dinner, watch some TV or a movie, and just vedge out. The last few weeks have been exciting though, with buying cars, parties, planning, etc.

Debs and I started looking at houses last week. We are looking at a few in the Lakeside and Westend area of the Richmond ‘burbs…where we both grew up. There are some nice 3 bed, 1.5 bath, 1000+ sq. foot locations that we have our eyes on. We have not gone as far as making an leads or even visiting, but def. window shopping online. Im ready to start building some equity in a house, and I would rather get a nice little place in the middle of everything than a larger house in the middle of the sticks.

The holiday’s are really grooving now – and im excited. I always really like the way everything looks durring the holidays, how people react, and how ‘busy’ everything is. Everything really flys by, but its awesome while it lasts. Other than the traffic, I love just getting out and ‘seeing’ people, and being in the middle of it all.

Talking about traffic – I hate short pump, and I hate working in innsbrook. I have basically 2 routes to get back home. Well, since the main one was backed up, I took Broad St home last night. Well, at pretty much EVERY intersection on the way home there was SOME backup or wreck! What usually takes me about 5 minutes to get home took about 20 minutes.

Over the weekend, we went with nate to get a new car. He was offered a great deal on a 2006 Altima Special Edition, as well as a steal on a 2006 Sentra SE-R. We then went to the Mazda dealership to test out a 2007 Mazda3, which was awesome, but not worth it. They want 19k for a BASE model, where you can get a FULLY LOADED Versa from Nissan for 18k. After returning to the Nissan dealership, taking the SE-R out for a spin, he decided on that. Its silver, and pretty close to the looks of my sentra (well, my sentra is actually a 1.8s with the SE-R looks package), but a bit faster. I got a chance to drive this car, and its actually a lot better off the line.

His purchase sparked my interest back into doing something with my car, or at least spending more time doing stuff with it. Ive started checking out a few of the online forums more often, as well as looking into upgrades. To start off, I may be picking up a strut-tower bar for mine, either one from Nismo or the one from nate’s SE-R if he upgrades to the Nismo one. Since this is a unibody car, these bar’s add to the overall stability of the car, and make it feel a lot more ‘sure’ when taking a turn. They also come in really handy when someone cuts you off and you have to do some NASCAR-like-move to avoid getting hit. Case in point – a few years ago, this happened to me in my 96 Cutlass Supreme on I-64. If it had not been for that bar and my car being able to handle a little bit more, I would have slid right into the middle wall.

In other news – I no longer have a Linux ‘server’ at home! After much begging, I finally just tossed (well, gave to goodwill) my old Compaq running Ubuntu. Also gave away two displays as well. After the holidays, Debs and I have discussed picking up a new computer, and my current one would become more of a media center/server.

Before giving away that server, I had a chance to do something I have always wanted to do on a *nix machine, the command ‘rm -rf /’. For those not in tune with their unix commands, this basically says ‘remove, recursively, and without asking, everything from the root of the disk’. Yup, pretty much FUBAR’s your install. It ran for a little while, and then locked up about 10 minutes later. Well, that was fun while it lasted.

Finally, I got the go ahead and I think im going to get a Flickr pro account. After I made the post yesterday, Flickr announced UNLIMITED bandwidth for pro users. I could wait a few days to see if Google does anything, but I dont know if they will. Ill be taking some time to reorganize my current photos into the correct sets, as well as hopefully using a few more of the flickr features and social networking services.

Listening To: ‘The Package’ by A Perfect Circle

Playing with the Wii!

I just finished uploading quite a few pictures to my flickr page, including the pictures I had from a few of our wii get togethers so far. You can click the photo to the left or click here to check the photos out. I like a few of them where I used the flash and have some stop-motion of people in mid-swing or mid-punch. Let me know what you think! Ill add more pics to this set over time as well!

By the way, I really think its time for me to move up to a Flickr Pro account. I would like to have more sets to help organize my photos, as well as access to older photos as well. The only thing holding me back is that I really would prefer to host them in Gallery still, like I used to…but I dont know of anywhere that has ‘Gallery’ hosting. If you have seen such a place (or can lend me some space), PLEASE let me know! I also have not determined if I would prefer to use Fotki or Picasa Web.

Listening To: ‘Wind Below’ by Rage Against The Machine

Nintendo Wii – First Thoughts

A lot of people have been asking me, what do you REALLY think about the Wii? Well, this post has been a little while in the making. Why? Because I really wanted to have a better feel for a system, see some of the other reviews coming out, and determine my real thoughts of the system before posting my thoughts.

To make a story short…this is one of the coolest things I have ever owned.

On the gaming aspect – its amazing. Im not much of a gamer, but I really love playing games on this system. Why? Because they are involved. They make you think. They make your entire body (or at least the upper half) into a controler. Yes, the graphics are sub-par to other next-gen consoles. Thats why eventually, I will prob. pick up a XBox 360 (and that the 360 has much more Media Center uses as well). But the WAY you play games is what makes up for it…and its true.

And its only going to get better. In a year or so, we are going to see games using the Wii hardware in ways we can’t even think of right now. Thats where one of my con’s of this system come in – I dont feel that there are that many games currently available that ‘really’ show the hardware and human interaction. But I can sure imagine….

I have taken a few pictures of us playing, and plan on posting them to flickr soon. We even have a few movies as well. The only this is I really wish I could get some of my Mii’s off to show you. Whats better than seeing Jesus and Adolf Hitler playing a relaxing round of golf?

As far as the Virtual Console (the part that lets you download Sega, NES, SNES, TG16, Nintendo 64 games), its pretty cool. Its amazing to play Sonc the Hedgehog on a 51″ TV. So far we have purchased Sonic and F-Zero, and plan on picking up Echo The Dolphin soon.

Keep posted as I review some of the games I have played so far, as well as the channels that I have used!

Listening To: ‘Cherry’ by The Smashing Pumpkins