Need a "car".

Yes, an update after some time. You may think that after getting my driver's license a while back, I've killed or at least badly injured myself. Didn't happen, I was just lazy to update this friggin' blog. 

And that's kinda the point of this post. After I got my license, I've been driving cars we have at home, a bunch of cars that my friends own , but in the end they are all the same. You get it, fire up the engine (like it was an obvious thing that should occur), select the D on the automatic transmission and that's about it. Of course, if you feel sporty, you just slam the throttle through the floor or fiddle with those paddles under steering wheel. But I feel that's not the thing that will teach me how to drive. And if anything happens the MMI or iDrive will tell you "Your brake pads are worn and shall be replaced in 3000km".  It will tell you about everything, seat-belts, open doors, lack of windshield washer fluid, when you run of gas, where buy it and even engage the parking brake when you turn off the engine. 

That's all very nice but the whole car then feels like GTA or Need for Speed game. You board your safety bubble and cruise around. Those cars will do anything but teach me to drive and understand how a real car works. So after seeing the TopGear: 100 pound car challenge, I think that's the way to go. I picked the price range of around $500/£250 because there are simply no street legal cars for £100. What I'm asking you, is to donate. C'mon, this is the internet, people have been donating to a guy who bought a Wii/Xbox 360/PS3 and smashed it. Along with our donation, you can make a suggestion, but things like "remove all the seats and turn it into rally car" or "smash it against wall like Jeremy did" - they will go last when I get bored of it ;)

Below you can finance my boredom ;)

Tasty review.

Today we’re going to look at a spectacular piece of human invention called the chewing gum! Not only that it’s making your breath adopt nice and fresh smell, which can score you some serious credit at ladies, but it also makes your jaws go on and on, keeping them in motion and your mouth producing saliva. All this leads to healthier lifestyle and I strongly recommend it to everyone.
My pick is the Wrigley’s Orbit with Spearmint aroma. It’s pleasingly fresh but yet not making a hurricane in your mouth like some strong mint chewing gums do. The one’s I have come in special edition “can” which contains 50 pieces for just 40CZK. For comparison, regular pack of 10 pieces runs you about 13 to 20CZK, depending on place of purchase. The only downside that I found is that they become very very soft and maybe even a bit uncomfortable to chew very quickly, not loosing the taste. That makes you reconsider if you’re really about to spit this one out and have a fresh piece. Other problem is, by chewing chewing gums, the production of saliva raises and the stomach begins to “expect” some food soon, so you’ll feel really hungry after chewing for 3 hours and walking around a shopping mall.

How to install the iPod Classic-like firmware from Mac.

Let's say you want this iPod Classic interface for 5th Gen iPods. And your iPod is Mac formated and you're actually running on Mac. No iPodWizard here, but dont' cry, this guide is here to help you ;)
This guide assumes you know how to use terminal a bit...knowing how to copy and paste may be fine but if you run into problems, sorry mate ;)

$ sudo su
Password:

And here we are, at the root shell. Now let's see what drives are connected to this computer.

# disktool -l
***Disk Appeared ('disk2s1',Mountpoint = '', fsType = '', volName = '')
***Disk Appeared ('disk2s3',Mountpoint = '/Volumes/Ondra's iPod', fsType = 'hfs', volName = 'Ondra's iPod')
***Disk Appeared ('disk2s2',Mountpoint = '', fsType = '', volName = '')
***Disk Appeared ('disk2',Mountpoint = '', fsType = '', volName = '')
***Disk Appeared ('disk0',Mountpoint = '', fsType = '', volName = '')
***Disk Appeared ('disk0s1',Mountpoint = '', fsType = '', volName = '')
***Disk Appeared ('disk0s2',Mountpoint = '/', fsType = 'hfs', volName = 'PowerGeek HD')

Okay, so our iPod is at /dev/disk2. We'll list the partitions on it so we know what to patch. Press "P" to list partitions and then quit by hitting "Q".

# pdisk /dev/disk2
Edit /dev/disk2 -
Command (? for help): p

Partition map (with 2048 byte blocks) on '/dev/disk2'
#: type name length base ( size )
1: Apple_partition_map partition map 62 @ 1
2: Apple_MDFW firmware 64197 @ 63 (125.4M)
3: Apple_HFS disk 39005820 @ 64268 ( 74.4G)

Device block size=2048, Number of Blocks=39075371 (74.5G)
DeviceType=0x0, DeviceId=0x0

Command (? for help): q

So the firmware is on /dev/disk2s2 and the partition is almost 128MB big. We'll dump the whole partition, first cause we'll be patching it and if we fail, we can upload it back and have working iPod.

# dd bs=1048576 if=/dev/disk2s2 of=ipod.firmware.backup
125+1 records in
125+1 records out
131475456 bytes transferred in 208.553903 secs (630415 bytes/sec)

So we've got the backup of the firmware of our hard-drive, now let's cook the new firmware. Make a copy of the iPod Classic firmware for 5G iPod (the backslashes are there to escape the spaces).

# cp iPod\ Classic\ for\ 5.5G ipod.firmware

and now we append the rest of the firmware we've backed up from the iPod. This will go slow cause we're using just 1k blocks. If you're using other version than 1.0.2, get the filesize of the ipod.firmware file and divide it by 1024

# ls -ls ipod.firmware
27152 -rwxr-xr-x 1 ondra ondra 13899776 Oct 14 16:27 ipod.firmware
# bc
bc 1.06
Copyright 1991-1994, 1997, 1998, 2000 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
For details type `warranty'.
13899776 / 1024
13574

So now we know how many blocks to skip so we'll run this timely procedure.

# dd bs=1024 skip=13574 seek=13574 if=ipod.firmware.backup of=ipod.firmware
114820+0 records in
114820+0 records out
117575680 bytes transferred in 1921.707499 secs (61183 bytes/sec)

We have everything ready, so upload the modified firmware to the iPod. Upload to the iPod using this command, but modify it so it matches your iPod's connection. You could easily wipe some external hard-drive or something, so chech twice and type once ;)

# dd bs=1048576 if=ipod.firmware of=/dev/disk2s2
125+1 records in
125+1 records out
131475456 bytes transferred in 208.553903 secs (630415 bytes/sec)

That's about it, disconnect your iPod and enjoy. If it fails to boot for some reason, either play with these commands it or upload the firmware backup.
# dd bs=1048576 if=ipod.firmware.backup of=/dev/disk2s2

New iPods arrived, so how about the names ?

In the times before yesterday, there was really simple iPod line-up. As Apple started making iPods more available to general public by making them cheaper, it always affected the features. First the mini, it was only 4GB (later 6GB) so it was kinda limited compared to "the iPod" (I'll get to this later). They they made the shuffle, again, no display, flash only memory. Tell me it was aimed at different target group but after all it was limited compared to his big brothers. "The iPod" then gained photo support, cool color display and mini was still there, black and white. Later on, Apple decided to kill the most successful iPod of the time, the mini as they introduced the nano and iPod video. But video was only nickname. It was still called "The iPod". It was on top them all. Nano could do the photos as the iPod with color display...but 5th generation brought in video support and it had plenty of storage compared to nano. So again "the iPod" was on top of them all!

That all changed yesterday. They had to give "classic" attribute to "the iPod" which was generally just upgraded with cooler OS and twice the storage.

"The iPod" is GONE!

Admit it, there's just no prime iPod that would be superior to any others...see, the touch has sleek interface, mostly everything the iPhone has but the storage is limited to 16GB. The iPod classic has tons of space, endless battery life but you can't pinch your photos or browse the web on it...the nano is the classic with smaller screen and less flash memory...but same otherwise, it can even import photos with the iPod Camera Connector. And that's a thing the "touch" can't do! WTF ? Why not?! Click the link to see for yourself...

Summary? You can't be "cool" and "on top if it all" with just one iPod today.

>P.S.: Apple just killed the original color of iPod yesterday. No love for white anymore :(

LOLCat caption contest...

Just a quick one...yes, yet again ;)


We've got a LOLcat caption contest, if you know what that is and you has teh toelz, u can joint. if you're using a mac and you a miss the perfect skitch, just drop me a note to soukupondra on gmail (dotcom, yes ;) and u can has invitez




tis be teh sours for u

---

by Matt Holland

---

by Nik Fletcher

---

by me

And now some from ones that don't understand this kind of art...

by Nathan Makan

---

by Sam Critchlow

---

by Graham Gilbert

So WTF are you waiting for, hop on for some skitch invites or lolcats ;)

How HD Photo will (not) catch up.

End of rant. It will not catch up, look at JPEG2000 and where it is now. Embedding it into RFID chips in passports is the only use they found for it. No browser really supports it. No camera records pictures into it.

After reading this article, the first thing I thought of was the JPEG2000 "affair". The JPEG group liked it too, they said it's superior to normal old JPEG and it somehow...died :)

And what do you think will happen to Windows Imaging Format, HD Photo, JPEG XR or whatever they call it this morning. Customer buys a camera. Takes some nice pictures, goes to his favorite photo store where they have those automatic kiosks to get prints from his memory card. He (or she) inserts the card...and nothing happens, the device screams that there are no pictures on the card, customer freaks out, runs home and his Vista Home Premium (short name, huh ?) displays all pictures just fine. If he's one of those more or less tech savvy people, he'll set the camera from HD Photo to plain old, but working, JPEG. And will never ever care to switch it back. Cause it just drives him into problems.

JPEG 2000 is back, just today it came from the company that loves proprietary formats and licensing them at high prices. I think we've got some stuff to look forward to!

Wifi: Free or not ?

When the first public wifi network began to show up, it might have been late 2001 here in Czech Republic. Mainly hotels and the high-end cafés began to share their 128kbit/s line with their customers. But then someone though it's possible to make money out of it. And who's got the infrastructure ? And it wouldn't cost him virtually anything to make a hotspot ? Yes, landline and mobile providers. So former Eurotel and Telecom (merged and bought by O2 by now) decided to start a pilot service. Noone ever in czech republic has been taking money for hour or two of wireless connection. They offered their service to many hotes and pushed it into every single KFC restaurant. And it was free, until they've announced the service officially launched. You send them SMS, they bill you $3, that goes to your current phone bill. and you have the right to use it for hour. Or you can have 2 hours for $5. Or 24 hours for $15.

You can say "it's not really that expensive", but you could have a nice desert instead of 1 hour WiFi. It might been due to lack of propagation, people's lazyness to hassle with the payment or anything else.

The fact is that the service usage dropped after payments were required. T-Mobile did the same and I've never paid them a buck. I've been using the Eurotel's WifiJet (that was the name) with some free coupons, 4 times 5 hour coupon...I've drained them all and paid around 3 hours myself. But that's it. See ? It's free, people use it. It's not free and you think about it...do I really need the internet right now ?

All the cafés that got T-Mobile representative's head stuck in their ass telling them how the hotspot service is great are now ditching them, leaving open wifi for everyone. KFC decided they'll buy the all the network related equipment from O2 and run their own free WiFi in all the restaurants. Even on the Prague airport. Funny thing is that it's the first WiFi network there. Just because the airport didn't like any of those paid hotspot providers' terms.

The internet getting is free again, like it was meant to be when word "hotspot" was invented.

Do you think the "paid" and "free" seesaw will ever flip to free completely ? And flip back again then ? I know it's not possible to kill every paid hotspot provider, but if enough people choose to go to café with free WiFi over a paid one, they might just kill themselves...

MacBook Pros are here...

Duo. by OndraSoukup.

Just a quick one...they are here. I need to go play with mine a bit more. It works awesome, doesn't pickup my home wifi which is a great excuse to get AirPort Extreme now ;)

They keyboard is fabulous. LED screen shines so much I don't notice it's glossy.

Gotta run ;)

And you go see some unboxing pics ;)

I failed.

But at least I tried. I actually went to sleep after the last blogpost. I stayed up till 6:30 and woke up at 8:30...took a shower a it was just time to jet to work. But something has been wrong. My temporary office located in one of the meeting rooms got squatted by some Microsoft Axapta™ developers. That system never works. But that's not what I'm here for...my work was installing the damn computers. And this one was especially slow. Something wrong with the hard-drive. So basic installation of Windows XP took about two and half hours...and I couldn't nap because of the devs and some sales manager right next to me. 

I got home,  took a 23 minute nap at 6:15 PM...I was a bit tired, but after few minutes I was just fine. Then I tried to take a nap at 10:15 PM. Whoops. I woke up at 8:45 the next morning. And that's where I decided to screw this crazy sleeping scheme. Maybe in next few weeks I'll try again :) 

By the way, I scored myself a table in the IT office after cleaning it up...just a load of boxes and papers to stack somewhere else. The airconditioned office. Yes! Pretty nice as the temperatures raised from 16°C to 34°C during the day...and I get to be in the company of other IT guys. So now I know that Axapta sucks and those idiots in accounts screwed up the laptop order again.

The Poly-something sleep.

I know there's been something wrong with my sleep for long time. The time I've been going to sleep has been getting pushed back by the usual "I have to finish this" 5 or 10 minute stuff. And it's gone from 11PM to 2:30AM in last years. The bad thing about this ? I still had to get up for school, still the same time. 6:30AM. Which results in 4 hour sleep, right ? That caused me to develop a nasty habit of coming home, eating bits of food and falling asleep. You can't call that a nap cause I've sometimes napped longer than I actually slept at night. So all refreshed I woke up at 6 or 7 PM, ready to do stuff. I actually had 2 half-days and half-sleep during 24 hours. 4 hours sleep and then school and afternoon was 4-5 hour sleep and then doing something else during the night. 

It seemed like I had no other option than starting  to push the bed time back to midnight. But then my friend Adam Mulligan posted a message on twitter that confused me. Some strange words. Poly. That means something like ..."many" maybe. Phasic. Didn't realized what it was supposed to mean at the time. And Sleep. Adam will sleep. Hey, everyone does, no big deal. So let's try google, this makes no sense to me. Yet better, I'll ask wikipedia if it knows anything about the mysterious polyphasic sleep. 

Basically it's all about having some core sleep at night, I'll be making that those 4 hours of sleep I had till now, and some naps, 15 - 30 minutes, regularly,same time, every day. Your body will learn that you "need to" sleep like this and will fall into the deepest stage of sleep even when just napping for 15 minutes. I'll not go that deep to just nap and leave out the core sleep at night at all. But this can be also done after you learn how to nap the proper way. The average time to switch from regular monophasic sleep to polyphasic sleep is 14 days. During those, you may not feel well.

As my work is to install Windows machines manually, I'll start right tomorrow. The copy process and the initial unattended setup from Dell takes about 20 - 30 minutes, perfect for a nap. The only downside is that all offices have glass walls to the corridor, so everyone will see me sleeping in my overly comfortable chair...napping at work...I guess I'll just tape my blog URL onto the glass ;)

It is now 3:30 and I plan to wake up around 7:30 or 8 tomorrow. 10AM is when my work starts. Takes me about the same time to get there as it does to school. But I finally have time for morning RSS reading (cause newspaper is soooo pre-2000) and crunchy toasts! :-)

Can people on the internet behave ?

What a beautiful day, reading through my emails in the morning, I noticed I got message from youtube user NARUTOISLILDAV. 15 year old boy whose name is probably not "naruto" how he's filled out on his profile. Judging by the anime he has got in favorites with quite too much similar name.
without further ado, there's the message:
Subject:ds suck dick
can u tell me y ds is shit psp is the best ds is so wack i ut it in the floor and i out my feet on the top on psp all day!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! !!by the psp lover

Whoa, wasn't that exciting? So short and it's really beefed up with emotions. I had to read it 10 times, really slow, trying to understand every single word. But I think I failed miserably.
So boy, there's your reply. Youtube had a bit problem with its lenght. Duh :)

i think i can't, but I can block fucktards who don't really know how to spell even basic sentences in their native language and make no content for youtube, therefore being useless for the community. make some better contribution than writing stupid messages like this.
I really understand your parents bought you just the PSP and said no to spend more money on the DS for you, 15 year old whelp, so you've became a sony fangirl, but there's no reason to be rude to other people. and yes, I have recently bought a PSP just for loco roco ;)

PS: grow up kid ;)

and some evidence for those who don't trust me ;)

click to enlarge

Don't get angry, but I think the most of these rude&stupid kids come from US. Is it the internet penetration? Parents? They shall teach them that the internets are not so annonymous tubes. Yes, I've mailed your parents kid -- google did it's job :P

Is can we be still heres?

But rather than writing about, I'm experiencing stuff. Flying around, socializing, getting out from house for whole weekend...the usual teenage stuff ;)

Hasn't had a single free weekend for like 4 weeks, school classes distract me so I can just read RSS and keep on telling my girlfriend (not anymore :/) that I'm really busy studying :)

And yes, when going to a party with your parents, don't get trashed as I did.

brb, flying back to prague and waiting for friday to come for a decent rave in duplex. cause I seem to like my stereotypes, fairly good music, foreign kids of my age and tequilla. my love in vodka is not that strong anymore, taste is taste :)

when nothing happens here, watch my flickr photos or keep eye on my twitter (like a blog, but less time consuming...well, more if I sum it all up :).

Blending the days, getting no sleep.

Just a quick one in the morning, all refreshed, albeit no sleep for 22 hours now. Just watched another 2 episodes of Veronica Mars, had a shower and thinking how my days are blending together. I had this on Thursday/Friday, came home at 7am after a really good party with british friends I met that night and woke up 11am the very same Friday. Yes, the same day, you know, I felt like my days have no boarders or something like that. Call it confused. Here we go again, I knew that if I went to sleep at 3am, I'd wake up at 6:30 all messed up and angry. So I've chosen to idle on Apple TV modding irc channel and buffer up some TV Shows into my brain. But I'm feeling like it's still Sunday. School will clear this up for me unfortunately, so I'm picking up a pair of Red Bulls on the gas station on my way to school. Or 2. You know, my frieds may have some early morning wakeup problems too ;)

Is this the end of iSights ?

They were the fist "serious" webcams out there. They started era of webcams which went onto the display top to make the "visual contact". Superior picture, autofocus and integrated noise canceling microphone. They were the best. When released and many years after. That was the happier part of their life.
They were pulled in Europe for ROHS, the were unavailable worldwide and disappeared from Apple store later on, leaving just accessories behind.

Now it's their final. I'm pretty sure we'll not see any new external iSight. Why ? Read the release notes for MacOS X 10.4.9 update.
Includes iChat support for USB Video Class webcams.
There were petitions and hacks to make USB cams work for you. Along with macam, people had a chance to use their 10$ USB webcams with iChat. I'd be happy to see this. But with announcement of new external iSight. Now it just looks like Apple has the "either get a computer with integrated camera, or we just don't care and leave the problem of camera up to you" pose.
So I'm happy I still have mine working. It's awesome and will stay like that. And in case it breaks - any tips for similar camera ? Really sensitive CCD chip, VGA resolution, autofocus and built-in microphone that works really nice ?

Try visiting www.apple.com/isight and you're redirected to the Apple Store with no iSight listed. Bye iSight, we'll all miss you.

Where kids go to play.

After scrolling my city up and down all around on Google Maps, I realized that some things in my life just don't change that much as it may seem. When I was a kid, 10-13 years ago, my mom often took me and my brother to the city centre, there was a nice playground, lot's of toys, a fountain. And a really nice ice-cream shop. My mom never bought more than 2 flavors, so I never actually tasted a lemon, chocolate and strawberry together. Thanks mom ;) A peaceful quite place right in the city centre.
Now let's see where I spend my happy times now. Walking distance is like 3 minutes from the ice-cream shop. I've already got my experience about drinking too much kinds of alcohol during the night. Cause weekend is the time when I want to kibosh, escape the boring week days. I just wanna play. Hang out with girls. Get healthily trashed and dance like mad...

And all I needed to do is cross the street. Places don't change themselves as much as you think. They do change you! Only if you will.
This way I'd like to thank my friend DJ Phunix for letting me in and discovering this awesome club. Duplex. The Place to be. One of the best clubs in Prague. At least all foreigners say so. Says hi to all drunk guys from Wales :P

How far away those actually are ?

and a little NSFW video from the MTV closing party with lexy and k-paul.
new owner is taking over. bye jaja, we'll miss you.
beware of the lady stripping, pretty nasty :P

Little treat.

Designed. by OndraSoukup.

In order to bump my style points by +10, I got an orange shuffle today. It's awesome. Light, clips onto everything, really stylish and plays music in a cool way. No display, no prediction which song will come after. No control. Life is random. Enjoy!
I'm pretty sure this is one of the must have things that every metrosexual should have. Why lug around with uncool, ugly Creative (hey, I never had one!) player. We love to wear stuff, right? Why not wear your music player? Be sure to pick a color that will suit the most stuff in your closet. And if you're the rainbow style guy who wears pretty much every color made, get more of those. Different colors. Dirty cheap. Go ahead!

Missing out school.

Not being in school for over 2 weeks has it's bright side. Waking up past 10 AM, eating junk food all day, watching stupid TV shows, riding snowboard, strolling around the town and flirting with girls. But remember kids ! Everything bright has the dark side too. For the first week, I thought I'll just die. Body temperature just below 40°C, all the pills screwing up my stomach. I missed my math test on friday, as well as the test from german language. german with lowercase "g". I pay no respect to that fucking language. I hate it, I let others know and in the half-term, I'm failing. I'm quite happy with that, the little rebel inside me is winning against that stupid teacher. No. Not teacher. She isn't really teacher, she has no degree, she's just the wife of our PE teacher. And that's the reason we have no other language. Because no-one is interested to be teaching bunch of brats with no respect...and underpaid. Some teachers can handle us. And some just take the book, read the content and tell us to finish the exercise 7 on page 51. Well. I can read books. I don't need a "teacher" for that. I need someone who would explain stuff to me and not say "it's in the book, you figure out". So I really do understand why I'm failing. And the clock ticks. 38 hours to go. Monday again. After two weeks. Waking up at 6:30 AM. Riding metro with people who don't wash themselves for like a week. Screw everyone, if I fail at the end of the year, I'll do something really nasty to the "teacher".

(oops, this blogpost turned into essay on "how I hate german language and my teacher"...no problem there, I do :)

R4DS is here!

I think this video speaks for everything. Sit back and enjoy the lust of unboxing it.

Making your life better.

By using a credit card. Or debit card in my case. Imagine having just bing bank notes and almost no change. You'll better understand me and my situation. Paying less than a dollar with my MasterCard for an ice-cream at McDonald's looked REALLY weird here in Czech Republic. People are just too old-fashioned here. They don't trust them, they say it wastes time. In the picture, you can see the amount of money I paid today. I could have paid by regular change, but I had just big valuable bank notes with me at the time. Well, I didn't actually pay for it. You did. It was your gift me from all of you !

Yes, a free gift from my dear readers ! I've earned almost $2 on that little AdSense box so far. That's the only thing I can disclose and not terminate the TOS of the big-G. I'll have another one tomorrow, as I love ice-cream, the winter is not as cold as it should be and there is still money left from the ads.

But be careful kids, sliding the card through terminals is easy, making money is not. You can waste your whole salary in one day when you don't see the bank notes missing in your purse, even worse when using credit card with no limit :)

Final note to all good people. If you don't want me to get cold - stop clicking my ads :D

Notes on PSP.

Blog on PSP. by OndraSoukup.

I'm little bit upset, when Sony says that Flash is supported and JavaScript is really really basic thing which I hope the PSP Browser has, YouTube didn't work on this toy with 3.03 OE-A' firmware, so I had a rather boring class of math today. Quadratic equalations with substitution are just not as entertaining as any video on YouTube would be...
But this blog renders quite nice and fast (which I can't say about YouTube search page or digg.com) on PSP, leaving the navigation away and posts get a full screen estate.