My god this is an inferior piece of machinery. Its games are severely limited in space, I assume this is related to the big N’s insistance upo the continued usage of obsolete “cartridges”. In theory, cartridge-based systems should have the one redeeming feature of virtually no loading times, but as we all know, this is simply not true.

I guess the reason all videos in games for the DS look like they come from some poorly-designed FMV game from ’93 is because A, a cardridge can only hold so much information, and B, the DS’s hardware simply isn’t good enough to play back decent-quality video. It all looks very, very horrible – I just saw the intro for Final Fantasy XII on the DS, and my god, Square hasn’t had this amount of MPEG-artifacts since… well, not even FFVII was this bad.

The DS has two small screens, which combined would form, I guess, roughly 2/3 of the PSP’s screen. OK, one of the DS screens is a touchscreen, but in most games this is used either very little or very badly. Color me unimpressed. The DS also lacks an analog stick, and while there are plenty of problems with the PSP’s sorry excuse for an analog stick, at least Sony tried.

So, hardware-wise, this feels clumsy, ugly, and simply inferior to the PSP in every aspect I can think of.

On the other hand, the DS has something the PSP has been lacking, for the most part. It has games. The PSP thinks it has games, but really, most games for the PSP are badly done remakes of PS2 games. 99% unplayable. Still, there are a few gems for the PSP, and I won’t pretend the DS doesn’t have its fair share of really crappy games,  but still – the DS has a shitload of games, and by sheer statistics, it’s bound to have more really good ones than the PSP. That the same games would be much, MUCH improved by the PSP’s superior hardware is a moot point.

All in all, I’m not that disgusted with the DS. Sure, it’s total crap hardware-wise, but it’s got Front Mission and a bunch of Final Fantasy games, as well as a few rather interresting puzzle-type games. And after all, I don’t need to pick one over the other – the PSP and the DS are now both in my posession, which means I can get whatever portable game that suits my fancy, without having to worry about the hardware.

OK, here’s the deal: I refuse compromise. If I’m going to get a cross between a palmtop computer and a phone, I’m going to insist that it has all the benefits of a really good palmtop and a really good phone, or else I might as well continue to use what I got, which is a low-end but perfectly functional phone and an old, but near-perfect and hierto unsurpassed palmtop (Psion 5mx).

I’ve owned a Psion 5mx since ’99 or so, and I’ve tried a few models in between, but this is the only palmtop I could ever actually use. it has the bare necessities – good clones of Word and Excell, a notetaking app that simply rock the ass off everything everywhere, and a reasonably open SDK and architecture. There’s lots of great freeware etx for the Psion, and I could probably make my own if I needed to. The drawbacks of the Psion are mostly related to its aging standards, rather than its still very great internals. It can only communicate with a PC through an ancient COM-port (or, very shakily, through IR), for instance. No USB or Wifi here. It has one expansion port, only capable of accepting CompactFlash cards. The built-in dictaphone has no OGG or MP3 support.

So, I’ve found myself on the constant lookout for anything that could possibly replace my trusty 5mx. If that gadget also happens to be able to double as a phone and, perhaps, even tripple as a party-mode camera… So much the better.

The problems are many. Most machines are either too large to fit in a pocket, or have too small (or no) keyboard. And no, on-screen keyobard doesn’t count, you Apple-cunts. Psion 5mx has by far the most perfect palmtop keyboard I’ve ever seen. It’s perfect in size, and the hinges and the slide function that makes the machine perfectly balanced when opened up are simply perfect. Also, the 5mx boots in absolutely no time, which is very important, since it enables me to wake up at 3 AM and jot down a dream or an idea that came to me in my sleep without it escaping me, and I can also just take it out during long walks and instantly begin writing stuff. So many palmtops etc fail there. Other problems include short battery life (the 5mx has a classic green LCD screen which draws next to no power from the two AA-batteries included), lack of an SDK (the Iphone once again comes to mind) and a hundred other little nagging things…

But really, if anyone has found a machine with the following specs, please don’t hesitate:

• 8 hours+ battery life. Active usage, not passive.
• QWERTY-keybard, preferably with characters å ä and ö, nordic style. The keyboard must be small enough to write on using thumbs only while the unit is held in both hands, but must also be big enough to let each key be usable without extra tools.
• Word- Excell- and notetaking apps. And, preferably, a solid SDK and a bunch of third-party apps.
• No DRM.
• Support for OGG and MP3.
• Wifi and USB connection. Bluetooth support a plus, but no must.
• Touchscreen is great for when you want to draw something, especially if there’s a stylus hidden somewhere inside the unit.
• Fast boot times. I mean seriously fast.
• If it includes a camera, please let it include at least basic settings like zoom, depths etc. I don’t know half the words in english, but those of you who know anything about photography probably know what I mean.
• If it includes a phone… Well, I just call and text, no need for any spectacular phone features. It just needs to work.
• Preferrably some kind of good expansion port. Think external USB drives as well as Sony Memory Sticks. Whatever, as long as it’s usable.
• I’d like a dictaphone feature that I don’t need to fiddle with. Ideally, just a button somewhere on the outside of the device that I just press and it records. The 5mx has a great one in theory, but lack of mp3 supoort and buttons that are a pain to press (seriously, they hurt) has, together with an absolutely horrible microphone, made this one of the least-used feature of my machine.

Anyways, I don’t seriously expect this dream-machine to exist in the real world. They all have flaws – most have no qwerty-keyboard at all, those that do either have too large or too small or have some other flaw, like short battery life etc etc.

But dreaming is nice… =)

Just got my latest project up and running – a 3ghz P4 given to me by my parents. It was in seriously bad condition – incredible amounts of dust and what might be the dumbest cooling solution I’ve ever seen made the beast extremely hesitant to even start, much less run for extended periods of time. The parents had just bought a spanking new Dual Core Something (can you smell the envy?), and unloaded this piece of crap on my doorstep. At my request, of course – I’d been the one to try to fix the problem countless times before, and as their toll-free tech support I guess they felt they owed me something.

I kept the motherboard and processor and the two 256 mb RAM sticks, put it all in my own extremely good-looking and easily cooled chassi. The S-ATA disk also made the cut – but the cooling system was scrapped, and I brought my own graphics card. And thus, from the remnants of my then-current 2.4 ghz 1gb RAM machine and my parents’ discarded 3ghz 512mb RAM scrap-heap, I built myself a Frankenstein’s Monster. I’ve been trying to make it behave. The CPU fan is still too loud (but that might be fixed in the next series of upgrades), and sometimes this strange beast misbehaves – but it seems to be rather stable now, with CPU temps around 47-71 (as opposed to 80-96. Yes, celsius).

I just managed to install three new fans. Two were simple replacements for two that were way too loud (and let me tell you, replacing them was no easy task – this chassi is mostly easy to work with, but this was a monstrous task, fully comparable to doing anything with a Compaq *shudder*), and one was added. The whole thing is still way too loud, but it works – and it’s stable.

For the moment, that is enough.

Next step: Identify sounds, try to limit them at minimum expense.

Most of my computers over they years have all been slightly old. As in, I can’t remember ever owning somthing that’s actually state of the art… But anyways, as I wait for the hard drive check on my old computer to finish so I can safely transfer the C and D partitions from my old harddrive to my shiny new *ahem* erh, slightly used but still better SATA drive… I thought I’d begin documenting my computer upgrades etc. I’m a nerd, after all – and it’s nice to have something for posterity.

Anyways, let’s get started. This is more or less archaeology, people. Archaeology of my memory. It’s a shaky science,so don’t expect any stable dating or anything.

The first computer I got for my very own self was a Pentium 133. In fact, I got two of those in short succession – Memory fails regarding their previous owners, but I do remember people elsewhere were sporting shiny new 450 pentiums. The 133’s ran Windows ’98 and did so reasonably well, they had enough RAM for me to have a home-LAN with people playing Starcraft. Good times.

I think I remember getting my dad’s old 233 or 350 Pentium when they got something slightly newer and shinier at some point, and getting rid of one of the 133’s. The other is long since lost in time and space. This was in the old, golden days when HUT was my home and a pretty nice place to hang out.

In 2000, I got my first job. October, I think it was. Something like that. It was just for three months, but it was a paycheck… Wait a minute, this has to have been before the HUT days, for I got that job in 2000,when I lived in a kinda-hippie collective… So I guess I had a 233 or 450 or so when I was living at HUT… Anyways, for my new paycheck I got, of course, a computer. A pretty cheap one. Got it pretty cheap. It was a 1ghz P4, and it still serves me good – it’s the server this here page is served from. Vastly upgraded since then of course, with extra RAM and stuff.

Oh, look at that, the disk scan is done. Time to run, but there’ll be more to this…