The stupidity of spending money

Since I started getting a decent salary I've just given price tags a blind eye, and a deaf ear to what customer reps are saying, i.e. I never ask or check what the price for something is.

So tomorrow I'm going to a wedding, friend of mine is getting married. Since this week has been pretty stressful I didn't end up doing it until today. Getting into the store all the reps are friendly as always, shows me different options and I select something I think looks good.

After fitting I go our to the cashier to pay, as a small surprise the cashier says, that's $1299. Ugh, my credit-card has a limit of $700 and my debit card is limited to something similar. So I end up buying a gift-card to split the cost on. But oh yeah, that hurt, really bad, especially since I wear suits like, 1 time per year, based out of this I ought it to myself to wear it every freaking day.

Yes I'm stupid and I'll try to start looking at the price tags, for now it's shop-stop for the rest of the year (I've already bought my family xmas-presents).

*sigh*

Dear Santa Jobs

The other day me and my colleagues were discussing what the next step for the iPhone could be. One of them proposed that it could make sense to integrate the mini-DisplayPort, and further use it as a portable computer. This idea tingled me a lot. If I would be able to carry my actual computer in my pocket, dock it and be ready to run with the data and apps it would be golden. What might make more sense is to put some of the cababilities in the dock, say core OS but let the iPhone do the actual CPU work.

Looking at the technical aspect of this there might be some possibilities using the Intel Atom CPU which supports clock-frequencies of 800Mhz-1.87GHz. The current CPU in the iPhone is an ARM 1176 620@412 MHz. If the iPhone were to use the Atom CPU it could run at a slower clock-rate in "phone-mode" and faster in "computer-mode". As far as the graphics goes this might be a more valid concern, I've some doubts that the PowerVR GPU would be able to handle the 1920x1200 pxls of an Apple Cinema Display.

So please Apple and Mr. Santa Jobs get to work. I bet this would tingle more people than me!

Network and multimedia updates

DRAFT

So I figured it was time for some updates on my home network/multimedia setup since I moved 2 weeks back. As we're now 4 people on the network rather than 1 I've done some slight changes.

Network
The network is controlled by 2 units, my Linux server and an Apple Time Capsule. The Linux server hosts DNS, DHCP, UPnP, NTP, Samba, AFP, NFS, OpenVPN etc. it also acts as a router/gateway/firewall.

The Time Capsule acts as an 802.11n AP and switch for my multimedia equipment that requires more bandwidth than ~150Mbit or equipment that doesn't support wifi.

An issue we stumbled upon when moving in was that nothing in the house was pre-wired. For us to be able to wire our equipment we would have to drill etc. To make this easier I started playing with the idea of using wire-less bridges, thus I picked up an Airport Extreme, giving me a 802.11n wireless bridge and an Ethernet port to connect a switch to. Since my roommates didn't want to spend the $99 we took some old Linksys's we had laying around and flashed them with dd-wrt which gave us the same functionality. The result: Wired connections in every room without any physical labor.

As you may have seen Boxee was recently released for AppleTV, this has built in support for UPnP and supports way more codecs than my PS3 and takes less power. After flashing the ATV with atvusb-creator we were up and running. This didn't really eliminate the need for any of iTunes streaming servers I have since I'm still getting legal content of the iTunes store but at least I can save some of my power-bill for not having to use my PS3 to watch downloadable content.
As far as music goes things are pretty much the same. One nice addition was the Airport Express which support AirTunes allowing me to stream music over the air from any room.