Download FrostWire 5.6.0 beta (under “BETA RELEASES”)

(and things were hypothetically simple, no federal agencies forcing me to do certain things, sending a lot of partners to hell and deal with the lawsuits) I would…

1. Stop fucking around with the huge dominance I still have over the PC Market and milk it as it slowly seems to die.
This means, don’t try to force a touch experience to desktop users. Keep innovating on the desktop, while you move all the bullshit Metro shit to a separate “Windows Touch” that’s meant only for tablets and phones. This works great for Apple, why try to mix the two and give a shitty experience for both? why frustrate your developer community? why kill all the healthy monetizing ecosystems you have built for decades on the desktop instead of letting them evolve on their natural environment. This means putting a real Start Menu on Windows 8, not just a shortcut to metro dashboard.
I’d innovate on a better experience, on a better file system, memory management, CPU and power consumption, and the latest technologies and breakthroughs for operating system borrowing ideas from those crazy linux guys.

2. Remind myself of “Developers, Developers, Developers”. I’d look around and see that developers have been running away with all the great free options the open source community has created over the years, I’d look at my balance sheets and see that what I make on Visual Studio is peanuts, compared to all my other revenue channels and to how much money I spend on marketing and how much money I’m losing with all the developers not coming back and give Visual Studio FOR FREE!

3. Don’t fuck with the gaming Market on XBOX. React now before I lose 70% of my userbase to Sony. Remove all the bullshit restrictions regarding DRM and used games, and instead of trying to shove the console down on people’s throat with stupid marketing campaigns, if I’m going to lose money, then drop that price down and do like I did with the first Xbox. I might even consider getting rid of the Xbox Live monthly fee, somehow sony has managed to deal with these costs, I need to be competitive, specially after seeing the immediate reaction of the media and users after the PS4 has announced a bunch of non-features I’ve created out of my self imposed restrictions.

4. On Windows Phone (which should be Windows Touch) I’d add a Dalvik runtime, just like Blackberry did, and I’d make all Windows Phones compatible with Android apps, and start poaching Android developers over to Windows Phones.

I’m personally trying to simplify my life as much as possible, getting rid of the things I don’t need/enjoy. Keys are one of them. When you have too many locks in your life, this is particularly uncomfortable, and those few electronic locks in the mix that you find nowadays with fobs/passwords can only help so much, fobs still can be lost (lost my office’s key fob this week for example, it’s been a nightmare and it’ll cost me $50 to replace if I don’t find it)

In an ideal world, whoever solves this problem in a way that it’s cheap, safe, uses as little energy as possible (none would be sick so it can compete with regular keys, or at least human energy) wil have a billion dollar in his/her hands.

The ideal solution should work like magic, and these locks should be installable in doors, gates and vehicles. No passwords should be shared, and the lock magically opens to those who are authorized to use them.

These news by Motorola/Google are very promising, however I don’t buy the “pill” solution, but I’d definitively be willing to apply some sort of invisible electronic NFC tattoo in my hand or my arm, so that when my hand is near the lock it gives off a unique magnetic signature so I can be validated. Think NFC chips for your body.

For those of you who don’t want to have a tattoo, perhaps there could be a version of the NFC tag that we could place on the back of your watch if you wear one, or if you wear rings or some kind of jewelry at all times it could be attached there.

The idea is that you don’t have to carry your authentication mechanism in a wallet or a key ring, so that you can just go out not worrying about carrying keys with you because you are or have the keys on you all the time.

I don’t know if it’s the crazy syntax, but for the life of me, I always need to come back to this cheat sheet, maybe you will too:

GIT CHEATSHEET

pull remote branch.

git fetch origin <branch-name>

push local branch to remote (with tracking)

git push origin -u <new-branch>

delete remote branch (who the fuck thought of this syntax?)

git push origin :<branch-name>   #deletes remotely
git branch -d <branch-name>      #deletes locally

clean untracked files (not folders)

git clean -f -x

synchronize with original repository on my forked repo

git checkout <branch I'm working on>
git pull <url of remote original repo> <remote branch, usually their master>

(it’s probably better to add the remote repo as another origin.)

I was one of the July 2012 backers and I finally received my OUYA right on Memorial weekend on Saturday afternoon.

Here’s my unboxing, thoughts, and if you don’t have time to see the whole thing and you’re thinking about getting one, get it, totally worth the $99. They did a great job overall, this thing can play any Android video game, it runs Android 4.1 out of the box, it can also stream video really nice as well (see the Twich app to watch live streams from gamers worldwide to get the picture of the streaming capabilities)

I can safely say “I love OUYA”.
(and sorry for the pronuciation, the way to pronounce it is “OOH-Yah”

1920×1080
16:9
PAR 1
Progressive
30 fps drop frame timecode
48k
General
Editing mode: Custom
Timebase: 29.97fps

Video Settings
Frame size: 1920h 1080v (1.0000)
Frame rate: 29.97 frames/second
Pixel Aspect Ratio: Square Pixels (1.0)
Fields: No Fields (Progressive Scan)

Audio Settings
Sample rate: 48000 samples/second

Default Sequence
Total video tracks: 3
Master track type: Stereo
Audio Tracks:
Audio 1: Standard
Audio 2: Standard
Audio 3: Standard

Export Settings:

VIDEO
Codec: MainConcept H.264 Video
TV Standard: NTSC
Frame Size: 1920 x 1080
FPS: 29.97fps
Filed Order: None (Progressive)
PAR: Widescreen 16:9
Profile: Main
Bitrate Encoding: VBR, 1 Pass (some recommend 2 Pass)
Target Bitrate [Mbps]: 13.89 (nitrate could be lower 8-10 MB/s if file size too large)
Maximum Bitrate [Mbps]: 15.36

AUDIO
Codec: AAC
Output Channels: Stereo
Frequency: 48kHz
Audio Quality: High
Bitrate [kbps]: 128 – 192kbps depending on how important is the audio vs file size (background noise vs music video)
Advanced Settings->Precedence: Bitrate

Say you have an electric engine that consumes 8 amps at 12 V, and you would like to know how much this would translate in kilowatt hours?

Go to Google’s search box and type

8 amps * 12 v * 1 hour

And you will get the total output in Joules, which is 345,600 joules.

Then tell google

345600 joules to kwh

And google will tell you

0.096 kilowatt hours (which is what a small electric fan will consume in an hour), or the same as 8 * 12 = 96 watts * 1 hr, 96 Wh

I’m a software developer and this is everything I was carrying in my backpack today April 26th 2013 (from the top, left to right)

1. A case for SD cards.
2. Raspbery PI I’m toying with at the moment.
3. A roll of #punsr stickers
4. US Passport, you never know when you get a crazy invitation (or emergency) to fly out.
5. Emergency Icebreaker underwear, you never know if your luggage might get lost, you can at least take a shower and have a fresh pair.
6. Checkbooks, electronic bank keys.
7. Snes-like USB gamepad (for the Raspberry PI video game console project)
8. pens
9. Microsoft USB wired optic mouse, still my favorite, never worry about not having batteries for it.
10. Punsr business cards, Tech Consulting business cards.
11. Amazon Kindle Fire HD
12. iPad
13. Beats Pro headphones
14. toothpicks, so you never have to suffer with food between your teeth for hours.
15. coins (I try to not have coins, I keep them in the car for parking meters)
16. Nexus 4
17. Galaxy SII
18. USB power adapters
19. WD My Passport 2TB backup drive (I keep another at home attached to my monitor for automatic backups)
20. Macbook PRO Power adapter
21. European power converters
22. Ethernet cable for the raspberry pi and because you never know when you might need it.
23. prescription sunglasses, needed in sunny florida.
24. MacBook PRO 2.3 GHz Intel Core i7, 8 GB ram, 500GB SSD

I’ve just gotten started into BitCoin a little late in the game (April 2013) and if you’re reading this you’re probably on the same boat.

This post details the steps I took to start mining BitCoins with GPU on a MacBook Pro.

1. Get DiabloMiner. You will need to have installed git and a jdk (Java Development Kit) to build it.
Clone the source code from the github repository into your computer. From the command line

git clone https://github.com/Diablo-D3/DiabloMiner

after it downloads you will have to build it, invoke

cd DiabloMiner

mvn package

it will download all its dependencies and build itself.

2. Register into a Bitcoin Mining Pool

Now you will see a “DiabloMiner-OSX.sh” script. if you try to use it to mine in solo mode (connecting agaisnt localhost:8332), you will get errors, it seems nowadays there’s only pooled mining (i may be wrong), so you will have to register into a Bitcoin mining pool to make this happen.

I registered my account at deepbit.net, in there you get to enter your BitCoin address to receive your mining rewards.

3. Launch DiabloMiner (in as many machines as you can using your pool mining account)

./DiabloMiner-OSX.sh -u youremail@somedomain.com -p yourpasswordhere -o pit.deepbit.net -r 8332 -g 5 -w 64

and you should see…

[4/26/13 11:02:23 PM] Started
[4/26/13 11:02:23 PM] Connecting to: http://pit.deepbit.net:8332/
[4/26/13 11:02:24 PM] Using Apple OpenCL 1.2 (Dec 4 2012 18:26:30)
[4/26/13 11:02:24 PM] Added ATI Radeon HD 6750M (#1) (6 CU, local work size of 64)
mhash: 46.0/44.4 | accept: 0 | reject: 0 | hw error: 0

Hope this helped you.

(My previous post)

So now that we have a Raspberry PI we need an ARM based Operating system to go on it.

My original idea is to run Jelly Bean on it, but I couldn’t quickly find an image for the Raspberry PI (which means I’ll either have to find harder or I’m gonna have to bust my ass and build one myself and add all the drivers necessary so that it runs like charm)

At this point I just need to know that my hardware is good to go, so the quickest, easiest way to put an OS on the Raspberri PI that I found was to get a Debian based Linux on it called Raspbian “wheezy”.

You can download the .zip file that contains the image file via http or you can help seed a torrent of it after you get it.

Once you download that you will end up with a 493.6MB .zip file, unzip it, and you will see the 1.96GB 2013-02-09-wheezy-raspbian.img file.

Now you have to put that .img file inside the SD card that will go into the Raspberry PI.

I’ll teach you how to do that on a Mac (on a linux box is quite the same, the file and mount locations are probably the only thing that’ll change)

1. Stick the SD card on the SD slot of your macbook.
2. On the Finder, Eject the SD card as soon as it comes up.
3. Open a Terminal
4. Execute sudo diskutils list, you should see something *like* this (this is actually how it’ll look when you’re done)

$ sudo diskutil list
/dev/disk0
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *500.3 GB   disk0
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk0s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS Macintosh HD            499.4 GB   disk0s2
   3:                 Apple_Boot Recovery HD             650.0 MB   disk0s3
/dev/disk1
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:     FDisk_partition_scheme                        *2.0 TB     disk1
   1:                  Apple_HFS Time Machine            2.0 TB     disk1s1
/dev/disk2
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:      GUID_partition_scheme                        *1.0 TB     disk2
   1:                        EFI                         209.7 MB   disk2s1
   2:                  Apple_HFS PICS_AND_MOVIES         999.9 GB   disk2s2
/dev/disk4
   #:                       TYPE NAME                    SIZE       IDENTIFIER
   0:     FDisk_partition_scheme                        *15.9 GB    disk4
   1:             Windows_FAT_32                         58.7 MB    disk4s1
   2:                      Linux                         1.9 GB     disk4s2

I want you to notice the “/dev/disk4“, judging by the size, that’s our 16 GB SD card right?

5. Now that we know where it is, let’s copy the image file into it. First make sure to unmount the partitions that are on the SD Card so you can write on it, for example, I have there a Windows_FAT_32 partition I don’t want to loose (disk4s1), you unmount it like this:

sudo diskutil unmount /dev/disk3s1

Then copy the image using the awesome dd utility, if the .img file was in your “Downloads” folder the command would look like this. (“if” stands for “input file”, make sure you put the full path to the file, or go to that folder and execute the command below)

sudo dd bs=1m if=~/Downloads/2013-02-09-wheezy-raspbian.img of=/dev/disk4

This will take a few minutes, be patient.

Once done, take the SD card, put it in the Raspberry PI SD Slot, hook it up to a monitor and power, snap a mouse and keyboard, and boot. It should work.