The Geeky Junkyard of kingler

If you have a SONY-Ericsson cell phone, definitely you should take a look at this software: FMA.

With an USB bluetooth dongle, I managed to connect a T616 phone to my PC using FMA software. You should upload images or ringtones to the phone, and even games. Using this method, I have installed several JAVA games onto the T616, including a poker game

Anyway, another cool thing FMA can do is to use the joystick on your cell phone to control softwares running on your PC. Imagine your cell phone as a remote to pause a movie, or navigate through your PowerPoint presentations. It is way cool! Try it out. For me, the bluetooth wireless connection works quite well.

Four years ago, I assembled my home computer with Pentium 4 1.8GHz CPU and MSI 845G MAX Motherboard. It is a great desktop which has put up with all my abuses during the years.
Although I love my aging computer, recently I found quite irritated by the time I need to wait for some new applications to launch and the slow response. With all the cheap dual-core CPUs out on the market, I figured it is time for an upgrade.
Considering that I need a CPU that can handle mostly everyday tasks from email to office, plus testing out several operation systems like the Mac OS X (x86), I decided to go with the Intel Pentium D, which has the intel virtualization technology (VT) built-in.

Here is the configuration of my new Powerhouse:

Pentium D 940 3.2GHz Dual Core
Intel D945GNT motherboard
1GB DDR2 4200 Memory
Onboard Intel GMA 950 Graphics
Onboard Sigmatel 9223 Audio
Onboard Gigabit LAN
Onboard 1394a Firewire
300GB ATA + 300GB SATA + 320GB ATA RAID 0
16x DVD+/-RW
Cooler Master UFO Bearing CPU Cooling Fan
Antec SLK1650B Case

Data migration from my old computer has now been finished, and as a test, I installed OS X 10.4.7 and it runs really fast. Woohoo! My toy for the next four years!

I have been wanting to get a DVD player to go with my SONY 24 inch TV, and last week, I finally decided to go with the Philips DVP 642.

The DVP642 is a famous player that plays DivX files. It serves my movie playback need pretty well, especially for all the DivX stuff. I have tried quite a few backup DVD-R discs and they all played well. I’ll wait and see how long it will stay alive.

Right now, there is also another model DVP5960 that can actually play files from USB hard drives, so that you don’t have to burn the DVDs. It is about 20 dollars more than the DVP642, but I found it not usable for me since I need to backup on DVDs anyway.

Oh well. More toys…

A while ago, I upgraded the MATLAB version 7.1 (R14SP3) on my Mac, but found a serious bug (see my older post). Luckily I found out that the new release R2006a (MATLAB 7.2) fixed this bug (see here). Woohoo, I can make full use of the latest version now.

In R2006a, MATLAB also supports 64-bit Windows or Linux, which I hope I can try pretty soon to get a feeling of the possible performance boost. Life is getting better and better now …