::swisswuff::web front end::

I was kindly equipped with an iPhone recently so I decided to do everyone a favor and resize this somewhat popular application for everyone of us. I dropped all the stuff everyone knows by heart already and if you want to look that up anyway, there is a link that opens the fully detailed form.

What is there to see

• Learn about injection molding.
• Read about Hong Kong and China's first and one of the most successful Special Economic Zones, Shenzhen and the town of Shekou - and while at it, check out information about Taipei , Taoyuan and Taoyuan County (Taiwan). 

Tourist photos

Today is August 7th 2009 - the 35th anniversary of Philippe Petit 's daring, courageous and inspiring high rope walk between the top floors of the then almost finished World Trade Center twin towers in New York City. 

The Nokia N95 8GB cell phone is equipped with the Nokia Maps software that includes free map material down to street level (no hiking paths or further level of detail such as the Swiss Topo 1:25'000 maps are available though).

The problem appears to be that the Nokia N95 8GB cell phone does not connect to the GPS satellites. This seems to be a particular issue when the cell phone does not connect to the internet.

I went after that problem myself to see what could be done about it and found a way to deal with it. I am not sure whether the issue is solved but cannot complain so far.

Visible decay is not just the result of long use, of neglected care, of cheap materials, of aggressive circumstances or of sheer bad luck. It can also be a form of expression, a way to express detachment from material perfection, to communicate depreciation in a world that obsesses over increasingly fragile shiny plastic (remember the good old times when car bumpers or wrist watches still contained metal?). 

The beauty of online access is the option of sharing multi media. I play the guitar since 1976 and I play with digital synthesizing software since 1984. I still remember programming my own real time audio effect device on my Commodore C-64. Since then, lots of things happened. For example, now there are fully digital Boss effect devices and free mp3s... 

OS X Finder is hailed as user-friendly and efficient graphical user interface; conversely, Linux' Konqueror is still looked at as less user-friendly, and too complicated to use. 

However, that notion is not true. Just as the myths about car crash safety (Renault and Citroen top the crash test ratings, not other brands mythically associated with 'car crash safety'), there are myths about what is, or is not, stable, or user friendly. 

My recently inherited Apple's iPod nano, as you probably know from your own iPod nano which may have exhibited the same problem, just stopped working with iTunes 7. And as there is no other program to administrate an iPod, that's it, hasta la vista.

• My Apple iPod nano was recently, and regularly, not recognized by the only software that can control its content effectively (Apple's iTunes); a full "restore" (i.e., deletion of my data, that's what it means) was suggested by Apple's iTunes on several occasions even though the iPod nano did not exhibit any other functional problems. However, the problems returned and did not follow any understandable pattern. Apparently, Apple had introduced problems into the recent versions of iTunes 7 that made it impossible to correctly run the iPod nano. 
• Now, my iPod nano is not recognized by iTunes 7 any more at all most of the time. Seeing as if Apple made sure we can not control the iPod's content using the Finder, this effectively turns the iPod nano into a little Apple hardware brick. Still looks good though, a nice looking brick :-)
  
• If my iPod nano out of a quirk of the moment is recognized by this Apple software called iTunes, iTunes will have a tendency to spin this wheel of eternal wait for a very, very long time. Of course you can still liste to music on the Mac OS X: use the finder, or mplayer. iTunes is forever lost in wait cycles and not appearing to do anything at all. If that is what your idea of Multimedia contains, go for it <g> to me this is not "devices talking", but "bricks staring at each other". Expensive Apple bricks, so to say. 
• However, I found one solution that worked: getting a GP2X , which is what this is about. Well entertained by the GP2X, I also found a fix for the iPod nano problem: deinstall iTunes 7, install iTunes 6.05. Having fixed the iPod nano, it's sweet and cool and little - but still entirely proprietary. The GP2X on the other hand integrates far better with an industry standard environment - including Linux, Windows and Mac, including all sorts of card readers.
  

I am currently switching my laptop computer or notebook computer operations from a Mac OS X driven Apple laptop over to a Windows and Linux driven PC notebook.  

My motivation was a combination of reluctancy to buy another Apple notebook, and a need to run X-windows based software, that you COULD run on Macs but that you definitely CAN run on Linux, which definitely installs easier on PCs than on Macintoshes:

• The combination of price and performance of Apple computers is not good. I mean, Apple computers are (still!) extremely expensive. Now, I got this Asus A6T notebook with full 64-bit AMD Turion 64 X2 processor running 2 GB of RAM, full NVIDIA Geforce 7600 GO graphics card, including a broadband PC card with a booster antenna, including 2 year on-site warranty, for around 1600 dollars. At the same time, this machine runs my IDL comparison benchmarks faster than most modern desktops - and more than 4 times faster than the Intel Core Duo at 2.16 GHz which is hailed as the current "flagship" processor for notebooks. On top of that. 64-bit Linux *is* 64-bit - without negotiating a 32-bit GUI such as like Apple computers. I am still working out a way to run stable Windows (Linux is pretty good) - but then, 3rd-party-driver caused Windows instability always was part of the rough charm of this particular operating system. Seeing as if Apple doesn't even come close performance-wise, the price for their notebook that matches my laptop would be around 3000 US-dollar. 

• There was a growing concern over the high degree of dependency of a very few dealers and repair services on location for Apple, on the high degree of dependency on Apple to admit, innovate or fix design-inherent bugs in software or hardware. After dealing with two DOAs (dead on arrivals of expensive G5 Powermacs), after dealing with issues on basis of what appear to be crackling noise problems on iPod mini as consequence of Apple's logic board layout and after dealing with their high prices compared with a realistically moderate performance at best - never being able to get a really fast computer from Apple, I am now ready to try out some other problems than these constantly similar issues.
  
  The striking lack of quality perception in Apple based computing is something I tend to trace back to a sore lack of competition within the domain of computers that can run Macintosh OS X (normally: none). So, this issue can not be dealt with by just copying OS X over to PCs - it's best dealt with "adding to the Mac OS X experience by, say, including Linux" (this sentence should be marketed better than this) :-) And seeing as if Linux can be run on Mac hardware with some tricks - but generally Linux kicks far more butt on PC hardware that is considerably cheaper. So, it's an easy decision.
  
• I am mainly running applications that are running on Mac, Linux, or Windows anyway - and where that is not the case, it really does not matter. Now, Mac looks sweet, but getting Ximian Evolution to run on a Mac is a real challenge - whereas running it on PC Linux is a piece of cake. And while Mac looks sweet again, Propellerheads Reason runs just as fine on Windows, if not faster. A lot of buttkicking numerical software is plain Linux/Unix or Windows. While there are some "packet managers" for OS X, you can bet there are some real nifty setups for Linux - Synapsis, YAST, apt, rpm, et cetera. Based on the overall distribution of computing, it's all happening on the Linux and Windows front. Most open source software may run so la la under OS X / X11, but brilliantly under either Linux or Windows.