March 16, 2007
When you've got a broadband connection, you're probably maximizing its potential by download ingeverything you can lay your hands off. Which means your hard disks are bound to run out of space at some point (if they're not full already). Burning your stuff to DVDs is a pretty good solution, but sometimes you just want everything in one place without having to organize an entire library.
So I treated myself to an external hard disk. It's a 200GB Toshiba MK2035GSS 2.5-inch laptop hard disk that comes with a SATA-to-USB enclosure. I got it at a dirt-cheap price from TipidPC: PhP 7500 (around US$ 150). (The enclosure may look like a cheap knock-off, but at least the hard disk itself is sealed/brand-new.) A Froogle search reveals that a MK2035GSS sells for around US$ 220 so I definitely got an awesome deal.
It works perfectly, it won't hurt your wallet (but only of bought from TipidPC), it does its job well, it's huge, and it's all ready to get filled up. For all these reasons and more, the Toshiba MK2035GSS is this week's RubeTube Pick of the Week. (It is only worthy of a PoW if bought from TipidPC, so check out the seller's list if you are looking to score one of your own.)
(Interestingly enough, if you take a look at the screenshot below, Windows says that the capacity is only 186 GB. A look at the fine print below the product specs reveals the answer: "*Toshiba defines a megabyte (MB) as 1,000,000 bytes and a gigabyte (GB) as 1,000,000,000 bytes." I was fooled!)
So I treated myself to an external hard disk. It's a 200GB Toshiba MK2035GSS 2.5-inch laptop hard disk that comes with a SATA-to-USB enclosure. I got it at a dirt-cheap price from TipidPC: PhP 7500 (around US$ 150). (The enclosure may look like a cheap knock-off, but at least the hard disk itself is sealed/brand-new.) A Froogle search reveals that a MK2035GSS sells for around US$ 220 so I definitely got an awesome deal.
It works perfectly, it won't hurt your wallet (but only of bought from TipidPC), it does its job well, it's huge, and it's all ready to get filled up. For all these reasons and more, the Toshiba MK2035GSS is this week's RubeTube Pick of the Week. (It is only worthy of a PoW if bought from TipidPC, so check out the seller's list if you are looking to score one of your own.)
(Interestingly enough, if you take a look at the screenshot below, Windows says that the capacity is only 186 GB. A look at the fine print below the product specs reveals the answer: "*Toshiba defines a megabyte (MB) as 1,000,000 bytes and a gigabyte (GB) as 1,000,000,000 bytes." I was fooled!)
March 06, 2007
And for the long overdue next installment of the RubeTube Pick of the Week, I present to you... Hamad Darwish's Windows Vista wallpapers. Hamad Darwish is a professional photographer who was commissioned by Microsoft for some photos to be included in the Windows Vista's wallpaper collection, and these two are the ones that actually made the cut.
A lame pick? Perhaps, but I like shuffling my desktop wallpaper from time to time. When there's a bit of a lull in the work at the office, I press Windows+D to show my desktop and I just stare blankly. When my desktop wallpaper doesn't suit my current mood (e.g., angry, frustrated, bored, harassed-by-customers, just-got-my-paycheck), I open up my collection of downloaded wallpapers and pick one that fits best. Right now, this is what's on my desktop right now:
It's easily my favorite in Hamad Darwish's collection. And it fits my current mood of "I just need something pleasing to look at". The clouds and the ripples in the water produce a soothing, calming effect. The warm presence of the sand balances out the scene to prevent it from becoming dull and boring, and its gold/rust color is just right on the eyes (i.e., doesn't make your eyes burn). The presence of rocks beautifully interrupts the plainness of the vista (he he). Awesome shot!
A lame pick? Perhaps, but I like shuffling my desktop wallpaper from time to time. When there's a bit of a lull in the work at the office, I press Windows+D to show my desktop and I just stare blankly. When my desktop wallpaper doesn't suit my current mood (e.g., angry, frustrated, bored, harassed-by-customers, just-got-my-paycheck), I open up my collection of downloaded wallpapers and pick one that fits best. Right now, this is what's on my desktop right now:
It's easily my favorite in Hamad Darwish's collection. And it fits my current mood of "I just need something pleasing to look at". The clouds and the ripples in the water produce a soothing, calming effect. The warm presence of the sand balances out the scene to prevent it from becoming dull and boring, and its gold/rust color is just right on the eyes (i.e., doesn't make your eyes burn). The presence of rocks beautifully interrupts the plainness of the vista (he he). Awesome shot!
Labels: photos, PoW, Vista, wallpapers
November 19, 2006
The RubeTube is proud to present to you a special edition of the Pick of the Week.
Pacquiao knocks out Morales in three rounds. I'm not a fan of boxing or of Manny Pacquiao in particular, but this victory makes all those maddening advertisements and nauseatingly excessive media coverage worth it.
For delivering the knockout punch for Filipinos around the world, Manny Pacquiao is (also) this week's RubeTube Pick of the Week. You are a real winner, Manny. Mabuhay ang Pilipinas!
Pacquiao knocks out Morales in three rounds. I'm not a fan of boxing or of Manny Pacquiao in particular, but this victory makes all those maddening advertisements and nauseatingly excessive media coverage worth it.
For delivering the knockout punch for Filipinos around the world, Manny Pacquiao is (also) this week's RubeTube Pick of the Week. You are a real winner, Manny. Mabuhay ang Pilipinas!
Labels: boxing, Manny Pacquiao, Philippines, PoW
Everyone could use a little extra hard disk space. With the proliferation of broadband Internet, it's so easy to run out of room for all those animé episodes and Mozart MP3s. Developers like me have the added burden of supporting multiple IDEs, DBMS's, Web servers, virtual machines, frameworks, SDKs, and all the documentation that goes along with them.
80 gigs just doesn't cut it anymore. 160 will give you a lot more breathing room, but you're bound to hit the wall eventually. Burning DVDs is a great solution, but there's still the question: exactly what is eating up all your precious hard disk space?
SequoiaView is the answer. SequoiaView presents a visual representation of each individual file and directory on your hard disk and how much space they're taking up. It uses a technique called "squarified cushion treemaps" to give you a bird's-eye view of your hard disk. Below is a snapshot of what my 80 GB drive looks like in SequoiaView (click on the image to view the whole screenshot):
Each square/rectangle represents a file on my hard disk and the larger the rectangle, the larger the file is. Hovering the mouse pointer over a rectangle gives you a tooltip containing the name and size of the file. The giant rectangle on the right represents my free disk space. Using SequoiaView, I can clearly see that the main culprits are two files... and unfortunately both of them are virtual hard disks that I can't delete. On the other hand, I can free up a lot of space by deleting some CD/DVD images which I've already offloaded and burned to a DVD.
SequoiaView has a few extra features which are really useful. One of them is color-coding. For example, the green rectangles in the screenshot represent audio files. Color-coding also makes the treemaps much more pleasing to look at. Another nice feature is the filter. For example, you can tell SequoiaView to just display files accessed before a particular date so that you can get rid of files that you aren't using anymore. Needless to say, SequoiaView and all its neat features are available for free.
For helping squeeze out a little more mileage out of my hard disk, SequoiaView is this week's RubeTube Pick of the Week.
(Trivia: "Sequoia" is the shortest word in the English language that contains all five vowels: a, e, i, o, u. Amazing!)
80 gigs just doesn't cut it anymore. 160 will give you a lot more breathing room, but you're bound to hit the wall eventually. Burning DVDs is a great solution, but there's still the question: exactly what is eating up all your precious hard disk space?
SequoiaView is the answer. SequoiaView presents a visual representation of each individual file and directory on your hard disk and how much space they're taking up. It uses a technique called "squarified cushion treemaps" to give you a bird's-eye view of your hard disk. Below is a snapshot of what my 80 GB drive looks like in SequoiaView (click on the image to view the whole screenshot):
Each square/rectangle represents a file on my hard disk and the larger the rectangle, the larger the file is. Hovering the mouse pointer over a rectangle gives you a tooltip containing the name and size of the file. The giant rectangle on the right represents my free disk space. Using SequoiaView, I can clearly see that the main culprits are two files... and unfortunately both of them are virtual hard disks that I can't delete. On the other hand, I can free up a lot of space by deleting some CD/DVD images which I've already offloaded and burned to a DVD.
SequoiaView has a few extra features which are really useful. One of them is color-coding. For example, the green rectangles in the screenshot represent audio files. Color-coding also makes the treemaps much more pleasing to look at. Another nice feature is the filter. For example, you can tell SequoiaView to just display files accessed before a particular date so that you can get rid of files that you aren't using anymore. Needless to say, SequoiaView and all its neat features are available for free.
For helping squeeze out a little more mileage out of my hard disk, SequoiaView is this week's RubeTube Pick of the Week.
(Trivia: "Sequoia" is the shortest word in the English language that contains all five vowels: a, e, i, o, u. Amazing!)
Labels: free, hard disks, PoW, SequoiaView, software, tools
November 11, 2006
When it comes to music, I feel like an old person already. My idea of an awesome song is stuck in the Eraserheads era, back when they still made good music. I play the guitar, but my repertoire has not expanded by any significant amount since my high school days. The "golden age of music" for me is the late 90's (seriously, they don't make music like they used to). I get an odd feeling when my favorite songs are playing on the "rewind" programs on the radio and on MTV.
That's just not supposed to happen when you're 21. A 21-year old is still supposed to be "in" when it comes to the latest in the music scene. I'm supposed to know who the hottest artists are. I shouldn't feel left out when someone mentions the latest song that's hitting the airwaves.
Enter Pandora Internet Radio. It's a totally awesome tool for discovering new songs! I first checked it out when Cricket did a plug for it on his blog. I became an instant fan after just one song. (Because I'm lazy) I'll let Cricket describe how Pandora works:
For being a godsend to this musically deprived blogger, Pandora Internet Radio is this week's RubeTube Pick of the Week.
As a bonus, here are some tools that will enhance your Pandora listening experience:
That's just not supposed to happen when you're 21. A 21-year old is still supposed to be "in" when it comes to the latest in the music scene. I'm supposed to know who the hottest artists are. I shouldn't feel left out when someone mentions the latest song that's hitting the airwaves.
Enter Pandora Internet Radio. It's a totally awesome tool for discovering new songs! I first checked it out when Cricket did a plug for it on his blog. I became an instant fan after just one song. (Because I'm lazy) I'll let Cricket describe how Pandora works:Here’s how it works: first, you are asked to give a song title, or an artist name. The engine will then search for your query and look for songs which are similar to that artist or song. For instance, when I search for Jason Mraz, Pandora will give me a play list with songs “that exemplifies the musical style of Jason Mraz which feature minor key tonality and acoustic rhythm guitars”. It’s smart enough to recognize patterns in the songs and search for music similar to what you inputted, and creates a play list for that particular genre. And all of this is happening right at your Internet browser, so you can just leave that window open to listen to songs.What makes Pandora so cool? For one thing, if you're not feeling picky about a particular song you want to hear, all you need to know is the name of just one song or artist that you know you like. Pandora will do the work in finding music that suit your tastes. In other words, it's perfect for people like me looking to broaden their musical horizons. Pandora has over 400,000 songs from 20,000 artists so I'm confident that I won't have trouble finding songs similar to The Corrs' or even The Beatles'. (You can take a look at my Pandora stations here.) And the best part of Pandora is that it's free (and it works just fine on a 384 kbps broadband connection).
For being a godsend to this musically deprived blogger, Pandora Internet Radio is this week's RubeTube Pick of the Week.
As a bonus, here are some tools that will enhance your Pandora listening experience:
- OpenPandora allows you to listen to Pandora without an open browser window (although it technically still uses IE). This is what I use all the time to tune in to Pandora. Features I like: global keyboard shortcuts, and auto-updating of my last.fm playlist. It eats up a fair amount of memory though. Check out a screenshot below:
- Pandora's Jar is a Java-based client that works similar to OpenPandora. As an added feature, it allows you to rip the songs as MP3s as you listen to them. I think this feature as great (albeit unethical) but I don't use Pandora's Jar simply because it uses Java (sorry to Java fans). Instructions on how to rip songs here.
- FoxyTunes is a Firefox and IE plugin that allows you to control your music player from your browser. The latest version supports Pandora. I don't use it though because it lacks the controls that OpenPandora does, and I don't want to leave Firefox open just to listen to music, with the memory leaks and all.
Labels: Internet radio, music, Pandora, PoW, Web 2.0
October 30, 2006
This week's pick comes courtesy of my trip to Hong Kong. I was shopping around for a good laptop mouse and a good set of headphones. For the headphones, I settled for Philips SBC HN110 foldable headphones with active noise cancellation. The HN110 has great, but not outstanding sound, decent bass, cool portability, and effective noise cancellation, but in the end, I decided not to include it in this week's picks because I didn't feel that the HN110 didn't live up to the awesomeness requirements for a PoW.
On the other hand, I fared much better in my mouse-hunt. My first choice was a Targus Wireless Optical Mouse/Pointer/Presenter (what a mouthful!) because the concept of a 3-in-1 mouse was really cool and I'd be the envy of everyone in the office. The only drawback was the cost: HK$ 580 (approximately PhP 4000 or US$ 80). But when it was time to make a purchase, my practical side took over and I settled for something on the cheaper side. (Later on I would also find out that the Targus had less-than-stellar reviews.) For a mere HK$ 180 (PhP 1300 or US$ 25), I got the "Mini Wireless Optical Mouse" ("MWOM" for short). There's no brand or anything; that's just what is written on the packaging. (I found out afterwards that it was an unbranded, factory-priced clone of the BenQ M310.)
How did the MWOM end up as this week's Pick of the Week? It's simple: the MWOM is simply awesome. It works as advertised. The USB wireless receiver stows away into the mouse's body itself. When the receiver is stowed away, the mouse automatically turns off to preserve battery life. In addition, it automatically turns off after five minutes when not in use to make the batteries (2x AAA) last even longer. It moves smoothly on most surfaces and the handle is great for a laptop mouse. And the coolness factor of this baby is simply out of this world. It's no less cool than the aforementioned Targus. I get a kick out of showing the features of my new mouse to my officemates, especially the stow-away function. It has this "I want one of those too!" appeal.
For its outstanding functionality, handiness, and coolness, the "Mini Wireless Optical Mouse" is this week's RubeTube Pick of the Week.
(You're probably thinking: I'm not in Hong Kong, so where can I buy a MWOM? Well, if you've got much more cash to spare than I do, you can purchase the BenQ M310 (link above), or you can look around on eBay.)
On the other hand, I fared much better in my mouse-hunt. My first choice was a Targus Wireless Optical Mouse/Pointer/Presenter (what a mouthful!) because the concept of a 3-in-1 mouse was really cool and I'd be the envy of everyone in the office. The only drawback was the cost: HK$ 580 (approximately PhP 4000 or US$ 80). But when it was time to make a purchase, my practical side took over and I settled for something on the cheaper side. (Later on I would also find out that the Targus had less-than-stellar reviews.) For a mere HK$ 180 (PhP 1300 or US$ 25), I got the "Mini Wireless Optical Mouse" ("MWOM" for short). There's no brand or anything; that's just what is written on the packaging. (I found out afterwards that it was an unbranded, factory-priced clone of the BenQ M310.)
How did the MWOM end up as this week's Pick of the Week? It's simple: the MWOM is simply awesome. It works as advertised. The USB wireless receiver stows away into the mouse's body itself. When the receiver is stowed away, the mouse automatically turns off to preserve battery life. In addition, it automatically turns off after five minutes when not in use to make the batteries (2x AAA) last even longer. It moves smoothly on most surfaces and the handle is great for a laptop mouse. And the coolness factor of this baby is simply out of this world. It's no less cool than the aforementioned Targus. I get a kick out of showing the features of my new mouse to my officemates, especially the stow-away function. It has this "I want one of those too!" appeal.For its outstanding functionality, handiness, and coolness, the "Mini Wireless Optical Mouse" is this week's RubeTube Pick of the Week.
(You're probably thinking: I'm not in Hong Kong, so where can I buy a MWOM? Well, if you've got much more cash to spare than I do, you can purchase the BenQ M310 (link above), or you can look around on eBay.)
I've been receiving some positive feedback on a few of my posts. I'm particularly referring to the ones where I'm promoting (for free) some product, software, game, or website which I find to be useful, cool, fun, or just plain awesome. For instance, I've been getting messages from my friends thanking me for sharing Taskbar Shuffle; like me, they've been looking for something like that for a long time.
With that in mind, I've decided to start a new weekly series here on the RubeTube entitled Pick of the Week (or "PoW" for short). The Pick of the Week can be anything at all, whatever I want to share with you all. There will be an installment once a week (duh), but I can't promise that I'll be posting on any particular day. I'm assuming I can come up with something every week, of course. If I've got more than one awesome thing to share for the week, then I'll put them up all at once.
I'm doing this as a public service, absolutely free of charge. If you've got any recommendations for my next PoW, you can drop me an email, which you can find on my Blogger profile. Also, I had loads of trouble thinking up a name for this new feature so if you have a better suggestion, fire away. And perhaps you can help me come up with a logo for PoW; should be easy enough, but I just plain suck at anything graphics.
The first PoW will be available tomorrow. You'll be able to view all the Picks of all the Weeks here. Enjoy!
With that in mind, I've decided to start a new weekly series here on the RubeTube entitled Pick of the Week (or "PoW" for short). The Pick of the Week can be anything at all, whatever I want to share with you all. There will be an installment once a week (duh), but I can't promise that I'll be posting on any particular day. I'm assuming I can come up with something every week, of course. If I've got more than one awesome thing to share for the week, then I'll put them up all at once.
I'm doing this as a public service, absolutely free of charge. If you've got any recommendations for my next PoW, you can drop me an email, which you can find on my Blogger profile. Also, I had loads of trouble thinking up a name for this new feature so if you have a better suggestion, fire away. And perhaps you can help me come up with a logo for PoW; should be easy enough, but I just plain suck at anything graphics.
The first PoW will be available tomorrow. You'll be able to view all the Picks of all the Weeks here. Enjoy!
