Headworx

Joost is this month's hot topic. And it will be for a while (or longer). Looks like the Skype guys have overtaken Google, Apple, Microsoft and a few others again. I have been using (or watching) Joost for a few days now and have to admit this is what I have been waiting for in terms of on-demand Internet television. The service is simple, just a couple of steps: Get invited (this is early beta, invitation only at the moment). Download and install the client software. Start the application, and you are in! Joost feels like TV. It streams full screen video on demand, giving you the freedom to cruise the channels, pause, restart and - of course - search for things you are interested in. On top of that there are a few gooddies designed just to let you spend a whole day in an armchair. There is an RSS ticker, so your personalized feeds scroll in the background. And there is a Jabber / XMPP communicator built in, so you can log in using your Google Talk credentials and have an online c...

Last week I was traveling a little bit. On most (if not for all) business trips my faithful ThinkPad T41 laptop goes with me. I have entire office on this machine (after several upgrades I have 120MB hard drive and a new WiFi card). Having a schedule that was not too tight this time, I decided to measure real life performance of my Internet connections. Most of the time I was on a hotel or office wireless lan, but one particular day there was no WiFi available, so I had to use my Samsung SGH i600 as a modem. The results, based on speedtest.net are here on the right. There is a clear pattern - most networks allowed me to download at around 1Mbps and upload with about a quarter of that speed (that is 256Kbps) with latency of 100ms. What surprised me a lot was the connection over my cell phone was not the slowest. In fact it was second fastest, scoring 1236Kbps download and 285Kbps upload with 150ms latency. And just to remind you, this is not a theoretical maximum speed, this was ac...

So it is here. Shining black, sitting by my TV. The new Sony Playstation 3. A game console or a supercomputer? According to Wikipedia , the processing power of PS3 is 2 Teraflops, on par with the latest 80-core prototype CPU by Intel. The potential processing power of the PS3 can also be anticipated by looking at its power supply, rated at 380 Watts. I must say I am surprised with this gadget in many ways. A few years ago when I bought my old XBOX, I didn't have any need for something more powerful to just do the games. But there was one thing I underestimated a little bit - the high definition TVs, about to hit the market. Sony PS3 is all about high definition. It is the first console to have HDMI port built in and it really shines when connected to a true 1080p - capable TV (1080p means the screen resolution is 1920x1080, or 2 million pixels). But the most important thing about the PS3 is, this time Sony did practically everything right. Below is a list of features I like a lot...

Yesterday Pawel wrote a good post inspired by the recent moves by the labels. We are both fans of Pandora. Or I should say we used to be... As starting May 4th, 2007, Pandora restricted access to its site to allow only US-based IP addresses. The move is extremely disappointing for me, as I used to listen to the Pandora personalized music stations for over a year. And now when I go to www.pandora.com , all I get is this: www.pandora.com/restricted . Of course this is not the original idea of Tim Westergren and his team. He has a gun pointed to his head. It really looks like the RIAA and the Labels still believe in their region codes and old economy. Hey, wake up, we have 2007 already and have not you heard about things like the Internet and global economy? These guys are so scared, they simply do not understand the impact of services like Pandora. Pandora, thanks to its unique music genome attributing system, introduces its listeners to a galaxy of unknown bands and performers. It doe...