Archive - All Blog Entries

NPS Image Editor has been in alpha stage for a while, due to the fact that I've been busy with classes, work, and projects around the house. Nonetheless, the promised yearly release has been built, and while not as grand as some of the previous ones, it is almost universally an improvement in subtle but useful ways.

After using some of Logitech's higher-end mice for a few days at a time, I realized I needed more. The solution to my digital rodent needs manifested itself as a refurbished Logitech MX1100. I've been using my MX1100 for several weeks now, and I must say I enjoy it very much, despite a few quirks.

Just yesterday, Microsoft showed off some of the new features of "Windows 8" at the CES, including an all-new touch-friendly interface. Is this radical change a natural evolution of Windows, or is Microsoft pulling another Windows Phone 7? Here, I'll outline some of the major changesas well as my own thoughts about them.

The Acer Iconia Tab A500 is a 10.1-inch Android-based tablet, designed to compete with the iPad 2 in terms of features. It's not mine to keep, but since I had several days to mess around with it, I decided to do a review.

One of the reasons I bought my HTC HD2 was to try out operating systems besides the stock Windows Mobile, including Android and Windows Phone 7. Here's my take on Android running on this versatile device.

The HD2 may be a year old, but it's still an impressive, head-turning piece of hardware with specs that would have put my old desktop computer to shame. Despite its giant screen size, it is amazingly thin, light, and pocketable, and feels like a premium product in every way imaginable. I purchased it to replace my aging Samsung Epix and my iPod touch, and so far, it has held up extremely well.

Can you believe that Alpha 2 was released in March of 2010? Yes, it's really been that long. But Alpha 3 is a significant improvement, addressing many of the issues people had with Alpha 2. I will highlight a few key points that are sure to prompt an upgrade.

My Sound Blaster Audigy 4 was a great card, no doubt about that – however, its spotty driver support and lack of hardware acceleration on Windows Vista and 7 made it almost painful to use. After a long while of dealing with random driver reinstalls, distorted audio, and other similar issues, I decided that enough was enough and bought myself aused X-Fi Platinum.

The ATI Radeon HD 5450 is the cheapest 5-series card, but it packs quite a punch for its low price. Namely, it is also the cheapest card to support three monitors and ATI Eyefinity.

Well, my HP Multimedia Keyboard finally bit the dust when I broke the spacebar trying to put it back in. So which keyboard was the lucky replacement? The Logitech G110 Gaming Keyboard, of course.

Do you "login" to a website, or do you "log in" to a website?

It's that time of year again when Apple updates their iPod models. And while I'm no Apple fanatic, I think Apple is a pretty good innovator that sets the standards for other items. Here is my opinion of Apple's latest gadgets.

Company policy at work does not allow us to listen to music through headphones, but they do allow us to use radios. Not willing to settle for the same boring radio programming every day, I decided to buy an FM transmitter for my iPod touch. Amazon had one for $10 and I decided to try it out.

Up until now, NPS has been a Windows-only application. But thanks to the Mono framework, this very well may change. I've known about Mono for a long time, but it wasn't until a few days ago that I seriously tried getting NPS to run on it. And it worked after several hours of "hacking" and rewriting code I hadn't touched since day 1.

EFI replaces the aging BIOS and provides many new features, including rich mouse-based interfaces, modular extensibility, and support for OS-independent device drivers. NookkinEFI is a conceptual implementation of such a system.

I've had my Bamboo Pen & Touch tablet for only a day, but I am already starting to make use of it. I bought it for 3 reasons: as someone being interested in graphic design, I wanted to use a pen; as a programmer, I wanted to make use of the multi-touch gestures and eventually the Wacom-provided APIs; as a general computer user, I wanted a more ergonomic alternative – or complement – to my mouse.

Windows Phone 7 aims to improve on the bad points of Windows Mobile. But in so doing, it introduces many of the shortcomings of the iPhone... 3 years behind the competition.

I'm in the process of updating a few things on the site, which will make things better in the long run for both myself and for my readers. I'm also trying to figureout how to sort the menus for improving visibility of certain content.

Everyone around me seems to be using a Mac. Some of my friends switched and are now die-hard Apple fanboys. But do Macs really never get viruses, never crash, always work beautifully, better for multimedia, and are they worth the premium? Do you even NEED a Mac to experience Mac OS?

The iPad was announced on January 27, 2010, and arrived in Apple stores on April 3. Instantly, floods of people came clamoring for the latest Apple gadget, and the web is abuzz with "success stories" of new iPad users.. But is the iPad really as amazing as everyone claims it is? Or is it just a big iPod touch?

Well, it's finally here... NPS codename Obsidian, Alpha 2. This version should have been released months ago, but I ran into various problems and ended up not having enough time to complete it. But that's all in the past now. Alpha 2 is available, and it's just waiting for you to click that "download" button.

The FCC mandates that carriers allow customers to port their numbers to another carrier. This usually works quite well; however, if you are a customer of an MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator) such as Tracfone, you may run into a paradox of sorts: since Tracfone uses another major carrier's towers (T-Mobile in my location), the web-based number porting eligibility tool tells you that your number is ineligible because (in my case) it is already a T-Mobile number.

I have been using my LG 600G phone from Net10 (Tracfone also carries this model) since July 2009; it was my first actual cell phone with service, although I have had a good deal of experience with old out-of-servicephones. Now that I've ordered my Samsung Epix, the LG will be going into my phone collection drawer, hopefullyfor good. But in tribute to it, I will write a nice review.

If you've ever used a mobile internet device to access Nookkin.com, you probably have noticed that it is a sub-optimal experience. With the ever-increasing popularity of such devices, I decided to create a mobile variant of my site. As of today, Nookkin.com is available in mobile and desktop variants.

My ThinkPad's original battery now lasts less than an hour, which is explainable due to its age. It was time for a replacement, but Lenovo charges a whopping $159 for their 7-cell battery (it's the only one they now carry for my model). Well, what did I do? I decided to take a shot at a non-OEM battery: the AGPTek Li9. Here is my review, after owning it for nearly two weeks.

Well, it has officially been over a year since nookkin.com launched, late at night on December 22. And while school and work have taken an unexpected toll on theamount of things I wanted to post, I still think that it has been a successful year.

I have been interested in audio equipment long before I even had a computer. My first audio system consisted of four old car speakers and a few others salvaged from old electronics, all of which were powered by a small red battery-powered radio which Ipartially disassembled in order to connect the speakers. I was around 8 years old at the time, and had no knowledge of proper impedance matching, yet this setup worked until I scrapped it.

My Sansa e250 has served me well, but it is near the end of its useful life. The faceplate is cracked right above the screen, the mechanical scroll wheel is increasingly difficult to turn, and lately it has required several tries just toget it to recognize that it is connected to my computer. Thus, I decided that it was time to buy a new player, and chose one of the most popular and coveted players on the market: the iPod touch.

NPS Obsidian Alpha 1 represents the culmination of several weeks of work on the existing Milestone 3 code. This release is not yet feature-complete, but it has most of the features used on an everyday basis– zoom, pencil and brush, resizing functionality, and filters.

NPS codename Obsidian, Milestone 3, was released today. Milestone 3 shares the same UI appearance as Milestone 2, but also boasts more features. Most toolbox items are now at least partially functional, including rectangular selection, brushes, shapes, airbrush, zoom, and flood fill.

NPS codename Obsidian, Milestone 1, was released today. The Milestone 1 release (version 3.0.15, build 253) is a fairly significant step in the history of NPS, as this is the first build from the Obsidian codebaseto be released to the public. The Obsidian codebase is written from scratch using VB.NET (VB 2008), and does not contain any code from the RatTamer-Lagoon codebase (which is written in VB6).

About a week ago, I installed Windows XP on my old ThinkPad 560. This laptop was my first working computer, which I obtained about 4 years ago. It originally came with Windows 98, which ran fairly slow. The laptop has a 133mhz Pentium processor, 40MB of RAM, and a 2GB hard drive.

For the past month, I have either been busy with school, or busy with something else, and I more or less neglected to post anything on my blog. But here it is... the long-awaited Februaryblog post.

A few days ago, I installed the Windows 7 Beta on my physical machine. I am impressed by the ease with which it installed, as well as the additional functionality added to it; however, it's still not perfect.

The Windows 7 Beta is out, and I finally managed to get my hands on a copy. I installed it (unactivated) in a virtual machine, but plan to install it on my physical machineas well, in order to use all of its features. I will update my blog once I do that.

My 2-year-old computer was getting a bit slow, as I now run a lot of programs simultaneously. For Christmas, I received an AMD Athlon 64 X2 5000+ and 2GB of RAM, which was a welcome upgrade.

Well, it's been a hectic week, preparing for the launch of my site. Writing code, debugging, and making last-minute improvements. Then, uploading everything to the server, only to find out that MySQL isn't working quite the way I expected... but the site is finally up and running. What a relief.