Got Sony PSP Over The Nintendo DS

I got a Sony PSP on Saturday as a birthday gift from my wife. Originally, I wanted to get a Nintendo DS Lite. But, the DS Lites have been out of stock practically everywhere since Christmas.

The DS would be cool because it uses a touch pen, has two screens and is very small. The games tend to be geared more toward kids, however. My wife's coworker cued me in to this hardware hack for the DS, which I was thinking of using to play music and videos. It also provided organizer software so you could use the DS as a PDA. The hack would also allow programmers to write their own "homebrew" software for the DS. Very cool, but now that I think about it, I wouldn't have time to learn the DS hardware architecture and then write C programs with the DS libraries and tool chain.

My coworker later informed me that the PSP has built-in support for playing multimedia. It also has better graphics, games geared for more mature audiences and has built-in WAN support for Web browsing.

There are too many details to mention here concerning the two systems. The funny thing is that after I decided to get the PSP over the DS, I went to the electronics section of a Target store we happened to be at and saw that they had a bunch of DS consoles but no PSP consoles. I ended up getting it at a GameStop in the South Bay Galleria that same day.

The PSP is a neat toy (that actually came out a few years ago). I loaded a bunch of audio files, photos and some videos (mostly of Emma). I had to use a tool to convert the video to the correct mp4 format. So far, I got to play Disgaea (a PSP game that I bought at the same time) for about 1.5 hours. Not much play time yet, but I'm sure it'll come in handy sometimes.

Download Music from Amazon

There's a cool new song on the radio called Apologize by One Republic. So I thought about Amazon's new digital download music store that I read about in the news. I visited Amazon.com last night (Thursday) and quickly found the song. It was an easy purchase. Just click "Download mp3," accept the terms, and the song was mine, free of digital rights management.

I was wondering when I would be asked to pay for my 89 cent purchase. Even after I downloaded the file, there was no mention of payment. I figured they may have charged my card on file with them (without really mentioning it). A visit to My Account purchase history and I found the transaction in the Digital Downloads category. Yup, it went to my Amex card. Smooth transaction; a bit mysterious, though.

Although I could have found the song for free on the Internet, I wanted to buy it legitimately. For 89 cents, it's not bad at all. After all, people should get compensated for their hard work. (That goes for software developers too!)

Taking Java Mobile with Java ME

Last night I was able to download some free Java applications and install them on my Motorola SLVR L7 cell phone. I also figured out how to transfer mp3 files via USB and play them on my phone! This is awesome, because now I can listen to music or audio books on the go without carrying an extra mp3 player. (My phone doesn't seem to support mp3 files higher than 128kbps.) I've also been wanting to write some educational software (which I already started writing in Java) and now I can port it to Java Micro Edition (Java ME) and run it on my cell phone.

I tried copying music to the phone before, but the phone didn't seem to see the files. The step I was missing was to hit the menu button to switch sources from the phone to the memory card. Similarly, to install the MIDlets (Java ME apps), I have to choose the memory card and then select "[Install New]" to install the MIDlet from a .jar file.

A Sharp Air Purifier For Our Lungs

On sunny days, we can usually see dust particles floating around as they're illuminated by the sunlight shining through our apartment window. Sometimes, the amount of dust is rather scary. But, dust is just one of the things in the air we breathe indoors. The best thing to do is remove the source, and there are many of them. After that, an air purifier can help remove particles from the air.

My first thought was to get another Ionic Breeze from Sharper Image. The one we have is old and makes noise too often (indicating that it needs cleaning). But, after a little research, I decided to buy a Sharp FP-P60CX Air Purifier. I ordered one from newegg.com on Wednesday. Amazingly, it was at our door on Thursday with free UPS Ground shipping. That evening, I opened the box, read the manual (yes, I read manuals) and assembled the air filter. It uses a pre-filter, an active carbon filter and a HEPA filter. It also uses plasmacluster technology to clean the air. Various indicator lights tell what mode it's in and how clean the environment is. It also comes with a remote control, etc. Very nice.

It supposedly takes a little while to measure the air cleanliness. When I first turned it on, it said our place was clean. Shortly after, it said it was slightly impure. Being in Auto mode, I could feel the fan get stronger as it worked harder to clean our room. It's still very quiet.

Today, after returning home from work, the indicator still showed that our air was slightly impure. After dinner, however, it showed that our air was clean. Sweet. I'll see how long it stays clean. From what I've read, air cleanliness may waiver due to many variables. Later, I'll move it to another room.

I hope this will improve our air quality at home, since we spend so many hours indoors. There's a debate about whether early exposure to impurities causes or prevents allergies in children. Either way, I'm sure our air will still have its share of impurities. At least having the purifier should remove some of the toxins and allergens from our indoor air.

Hosed PCLinuxOS 2007, Installed PCLinuxOS Gnome

Last night I attempted to upgrade all packages for my PCLinuxOS 2007 distribution, since I haven't done so since installation back in May. I've read that it's usually a painless process. I loaded Synaptic and started the download, but I went to sleep before it completed (probably about an hour to download all packages). The next morning, I saw that there were error messages saying that there was no space left on the drive. I discovered that the partition was 100% full.

Hopeful, I tried again. Still error messages. This time it warned about having duplicate libraries. Not much I could do here. I rebooted (uncommon for Linux), but found that my system was messed up. I couldn't shut down without logging in as root, couldn't open Firefox, etc.

I had to go to work. During my lunch break, I searched the web and PCLOS forums, unsuccessfully. I don't feel like posting my problem and waiting for help. I found out that PCLinuxOS Gnome 2.12.2 was just released on 12/29/07. Great! I was thinking of trying it out anyway. Now is a good opportunity. When I got home, I downloaded the cd image and installed it over my old PCLinuxOS 0.93a partition (which I didn't use anyway). I currently reserve two partitions for Linux and one for Windows.

Installation was a breeze. I did have to add PCLOS 2007 to the boot menu, but the installation GUI made the task simple. In under 30 minutes, I was running PCLOS Gnome. So far, I am very pleased. The distro has a polished theme. The Gnome desktop is very clean and responsive. The preselected set of applications look good. I'll try AbiWord, but I may need to install OpenOffice instead. All my drive partitions appear to be mounted successfully--even the FAT32 partitions.

I haven't spent more than an hour exploring this new distro, but so far I have a good impression of the Gnome version of my favorite Linux distribution!