After we returned, my dad and I spent a bunch of time on the 3rd stage of home renovations. For this one, we took the existing shelves out of the laundry area, painted and replaced the lights in there, and put up ikea cabinets. Some of the other projects included shelving in the garage, some improvements in the home office including changing the baseboard, new crown molding in the office and bedroom, and a few other odds and ends. At this point, we are done with pretty much everything except for the kitchen, which will require a major remodeling sometime later this year after we recover from the wedding expenses.

Last November, Leslie and I went to Hong Kong and Tokyo for a couple of weeks. It was the first time I’d been to asia and the whole trip was a great experience. In Hong Kong, we got to meet up with my friend Helen who is currently working there for Ebay. It was really easy to get around Hong Kong on just English, which made it a nice way to ease into the trip, but the value of the US dollar really hurt sometimes. The Hong After 5 nights in Hong Kong, we stayed for 6 nights in Tokyo. It took some convincing to get Leslie to trust my subway navigation, but we got to see a lot of the city. If we did it again, the only thing that we’d do differently would be to see a lot more of the sights outside of Tokyo.

Lately, I’ve had a couple of different projects going. One of them was to build a hackintosh (a PC with mac os installed). I did a variation on the Ars Technica Hot Rod build from here, after a friend had good luck with it. The goal was to save money, so I got an older video card from the same friend and used some drives that I already had. After doing a bunch of reading on the insanely mac forums, I got virtually everything working. I still need to really decide if I want to keep using mac os full time, but I did go out and buy a copy of leopard.

The home office has also undergone a lot of renovations. In order to get Leslie moved in, I took out my old desk, pulled the closet out of the office, and finished the repainting of all of the walls. We now have a couple of ikea desks that fit a lot better together and I’m putting together some more ikea furniture for storage in the room. Its been a long project, but I think that it’ll look and work a lot better when it’s done.

Personally, I’ve been working on the browser start page along with a bunch of other related and unrelated projects. As some of you know, we are still looking for a front end web engineer to work on many cool projects related to the phone start page and the main website, so if you know me and know of a person that might be interested, drop me an email.

On Monday night, we opened presents and Leslie helped me finish up my xmas tree cupcake experiment. It has been awhile since I’ve done any interesting desserts, so it was fun to play around in the kitchen. For Christmas, we went to visit Leslie’s mom in the east bay. Thankfully, the family drama was kept to a minimum. The funniest event of the day was when shortly after we arrived, her mom started doing really really laud karaoke.

The constraints on the project were that I didn’t want to purchase anything for the hacking (at some point, I bought an IR receiver for the xbox, but I decided that didn’t count). What I found out is that there were 2 ways to mod an xbox to run your own software: softmod or mod chip. Mod chips are fairly cheap and come in the solderable (the cheapest) and unsolderable (maybe $10-$15 more expensive), but I figured I’d try and softmod. Softmods have come a long way and are fairly easy. Most of them are buffer exploits that get installed as sounds or something else similar. The main problem is getting them onto the xbox. There are about 3 games that you can try and find that will (along with a suitable cable that you can buy or make from an xbox controller and a usb cable) allow you to use game save hacking to mod the xbox.

If you don’t want to try any of those, you can try and put the data on the hard drive yourself. The main problem is that the hard drive is locked until it receives an unlock command from the xbox and becomes locked again when it loses power. It’s possible to find the mod files and create a linux boot cd that will do the job for you if you get the hard drive unlocked. The “recommended” way to do this is to take the top off of the xbox near your computer, start the xbox, and at some point after you get to the main screen, disconnect the ATA cable from the hard drive (while it is still running) and connect the drive to an ata cable from your computer. At this point, you power up the computer and use the linux distribution to put the files on the drive.

It sounds kind of crazy and has a small chance of frying your hard drive, but I got it all to work and can now access and play all the media files off of any computer on the network. What’s nice about it is that it can understand all the IR commands if you get the xbox remote kit. It took a little while to find all of the files I needed, but it’s an easy enough project to complete in a weekend and you have a “free” media center pc without tivo functionality.

Anyway, after reading Scott’s post, I wondered how I should share links with people. With the last release, FeedDemon’s newsbin feature got online sync and feed urls. Therefore, I can now create a newsbin that people can subscribe to if they want.

Here’s the link if you want to read the random items that I thought people might find interesting: http://services.newsgator.com/ngws/svc/ClippingsRSS.aspx?uid=113427&fid=3421340

• I confirmed with my manager that I was quiting my job
• My surviving grandmother had a (mild) heart attack
• My mother had an unrelated heart procedure done
• My mother got scheduled for open heart surgery tomorrow
• I heard from a cousin that I hadn’t seen in years from a comment on this blog.

All in all, the day was definitely net negative. The first was probably the toughest decision to quit that I’ve ever made, the last was pretty cool, and the other three made me remember the kind of things that are important in life and remind me how much of a difference Leslie makes.

For those of you involved in some way in my finding, getting, or agonizing about the new job, thank you very much. For anyone else interested, the company is pretty stealth at the moment, but expect some kind of blog post in the next couple of months.

In January of 2006, there were two products at CES that caught my eye. At the time, I was sure that the sony reader (wikipedia) would make it out before the series 3 tivo, but that was not the case and the tivo is now sitting happily in my entertainment center. After a couple of delays, the Sony Reader made it out in time for xmas and I’ve had one for a little less than a year now, during which there haven’t been any hardware updates other than the occasional firmware. If you want to stop reading here, the main takeaway is that I love it and think that it is one of the most useful gadgets since the ipod nano.

The Pros

• The screen is eInk and is really easy on the eyes. It looks like the output from a dot-matrix printer on plastic. You really have to see one in person to get a good idea of how it looks.
• Because the screen doesn’t need power to keep an image, the battery life on it is really nice. On a trip to mexico for a week, I read 3 books and used half a charge.
• Sony actually built a device that will also take SD cards. In a similar show of openness, RTF is really well supported as a document type and is what I use since it supports reflowing of the document as you change the font size.
• I can throw it in my bag and know that I always have at least one book with me that I want to read. I currently have something like the top 30 books that I want to read next on it.
• The sony ebook store is actually pretty good. There’s been some titles that I can’t find, but I usually have so many books that I could be reading that it isn’t an issue. For example, recently I bought and read Patriot Acts only a couple of weeks after it came out in hardcover.
• Since PDF doesn’t reflow, it’s hard to get PDF looking good on the device unless you are constructing the PDF yourself for the screen size. I had some programming books that I’d bought in PDF that were almost unreadable since they were formatted for letter size paper.

The Cons

• The screen could be a little bigger. Mostly, I like that the device is pretty small, but a little extra screen real estate could go a long way.
• You’re stuck with whatever books you can either find unDRMed (I recommend Baen’s online bookstore) or whatever you can find on the sony store since the hardware and software don’t support the same format that Amazon uses.
• The support software (the iTunes like app for ebooks) is pretty crappy. You have a lot of control over what gets onto the reader, but not a lot of ability to have it do things for you automatically (like transfer books after you import or buy them). There’s a lot of places where they should have just copied iTunes but either couldn’t or didn’t. The software on the reader is pretty straightforward. The only big issue is trying to categorize books if you want to throw a large library on a memory card.

It sounds like pretty soon Amazon will come out with something that will also be wifi enabled but if you travel and read a lot (or just don’t want to lug around a bunch of books), the reader is not too bad for $280.