Month: August 2003

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Street Tech Gets RSS-friendlier

Ever since Street Tech switched to our new format, we’ve had an RSS feed available, but that feed… well… it sucked. It only had the headlines, the wrong title graphic was there, etc. It just blew.

Mostly this was because the webmaster (me) is a lazy sot, but also because I just never used RSS. Yesterday I finally got NewsMonster working with Mozilla (it always crushed my Moz install in previous versions), and one of the first feeds I added was Street Tech’s.

It didn’t take me long to decide and to fix that feed. Enjoy!

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Mini WinCE.NET Tablet less than $800

At 9″ x 6″ x 0.67″ and just 1.6 lbs, the Convergent MiniNote is fills a unique niche in the computing world, somewhere between a PDA and a TabletPC. It has an 8.4″ TFT screen with 800×600 resolution in either portrait or landscape mode. Running WinCE .NET on a StrongARM 206 MHz chip (like original iPaqs) and 64-128 megs of RAM, the MiniNote won’t run full Windows programs, but can certainly run all the latest PDA software. It has PCMCIA and USB Host expansion options for WiFi, keyboard, external hard-drive or optical drive (with appropriate drivers). Price is a very reasonable $750 – more expensive than most PDAs but loads cheaper (and probably more functional) than a Tablet PC running Windows XP.

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Windows 95 Finally Cut Down to Size

Though of dubious utility, some intrepid hackers have managed to pare a working, fully-functional (well, mostly) Windows 95 installation down to fewer than 5 MB (mirror). Though it lacks support for sound or a TCP/IP stack, it’s still an impressive proof-of-concept. Apparently a project is in the works to add those features back in, and other, similar projects with Windows NT, 2000, and Office, as well as a version of Windows 98 that’s bootable from a CD are in the works. The original site was Slashdotted most swiftly.

I just want to know how fast it boots.

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Virus Alert

The only upside to having an email address that gets 200 spam emails a week is that I usually get advance warning of email scams;

“Hello there,

I would like to inform you about important information regarding your email address. This email address will be expiring. Please read attachment for details.
—
Best regards, Administrator”

It should go without saying that one should always ignore email messages like this, but one always need to be reminded, I guess. I don’t know what this one does, and I don’t want to know. Never, ever open an attachment from someone you don’t know. Even if it claims to be an admin.

Update: Turns out it’s called MiMail, and if you open the email your computer gets a bad file loaded that’ll totally crash your system (can’t virus writers think of anything original?). Apparently it’s spreading like wildfire — it was profiled on NPR today. Aren’t you glad you read StreetTech? 🙂

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Flash Mobs

“One of the latest Manhattan flash mobs brought together more than 250 strangers at the Hyatt Hotel. They fanned out along the block-long balcony overlooking the hotel lobby and, at a precise moment, burst into 15 seconds of loud, unexplained applause, then drifted off into the night.” – The Advertiser on “flash mobs” which are random groups of people organized by SMS to arrive at some location and do…something….and then leave just as suddenly as they arrived.

Some would see it as performance art, I simply see it as a sign that we as a society have acheived so much empty wealth that we’ve got nothing better to do with our time.