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Deathly Hallows leaked

For you download savvy users out there, fire up your torrent clients. A PDF of the last installment of Harry Potter has been making rounds and it seems like the real deal this time. See for yourself:

That’s what the 70MB+ PDF contains; camera shots of pairs of pages at a time. Honestly, given that the book is coming out in 3 days anyway – it would be wiser to just wait for it, lest you rather destroy your eyes trying to read from the images.

If anyone finds a text only version, just make sure that the first chapter is called “The Dark Lord Ascending” and gimme a holler 🙂 I only got the first ten chapters in fulltext.

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Pseudo iPhone

It’s official, nobody outside the US needs to be envious of any iPhone owner. The phone is bolted down on a network and OS level too much, that unless you’re really just using it for it’s advertised features, you’ll probably going to be disappointed once you’ve got over the whole “nice and shiny” exterior and UI.

But I will state for the record. The actual phone, as far as technology goes, has so much potential if they only open it up – which I believe will be inevitable once they got the technology down pat. The responsiveness of the interface just shows how far [and fast] a phone could go visually when you implement a “proper” kernel on it. Despite what it lacks, it is still probably the biggest capacity phone ever built. It does fairly little at this point, but what it does, it does better than anything else out on the market.

So I’ll probably be getting one come the asian release; I foresee that generation to be so much better than what the US has now. In the meantime, I’ll do the next best thing, make my smartphone look like one.

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Goodbye XDA… Hello XDA.

After years of service (and torture), my XDAII has finally bit the big one. It’s a shame since I really wish it would hold out for another year.

I’ve realized that for my purposes, the Windows Mobile (WM, formerly PocketPC) is the definitive platform to have for a smartphone. Having said that, I’ve always budgeted at that price-point should I ever need a new one.

I have to admit though that these days, the Apple iPhone has made it difficult for me to decide what type of replacement I would want. There’s no doubt the iPhone would be an awesome phone. But I’m not convinced by the iPhone just yet. There are so many legitimate “concerns” in that phone that are keeping me from just making the switch to MobileOSX (I just made that up, I don’t know what the OS is officially called). Yet it still has massive iconic appeal, a marketing approach which Apple has polished to perfection. While all logic tells me to stick with the tried and tested Windows Mobile, the geek in me really wants that shiny new iPhone.

Having said that, I’m pretty much 50/50 on the matter. Which is why I would’ve preferred that my XDA conk out when the iPhone was finally out (an supported in our country); so that I can actually try and compare it with a WM device it and decide once and for all which type of phone would better fit my needs.

Alas, life isn’t that kind; my phone died a year too early. And hence I have to buy a replacement phone. Sadly, there’s really no choice for me other than a WM device or the iPhone – and since the iPhone hasn’t hit Philippine shelves, nor the bulk of its “features” currently supported by our network providers – there really wasn’t a choice to be made in the first place.

Since I was already going to spend quite a bit for the WM phone, might as well get a good one. I decided on a WM device that was small, as well as handle all possible networks you could throw at it. As of the moment, there’s only one unit that fits all of those criteria: The XDA Atom Life.

The unit will be arriving tomorrow afternoon.

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The intricacies of the guitar

A while back, my girlfriend and I were walking in that new bookstore in Galleria… the one that’s “owned” by National Bookstore, but not named as such. Anyways, it’s a pretty cool place, very “maaliwalas” as we Filipinos would call it (don’t even know how to articulate that word in english) – I myself, not being a “book-person,” didn’t mind spending time in that place.

There was a book there however, that caught my attention, and which my girlfriend surprised me with a couple of days later:

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Nabuhay ako muli

Been a while since I last blogged. My Macbook Pro died on me – specifically, the hard drive failed without any warning. I didn’t want to blog when not using Ecto, which supports previewing of all my custom functions (ie footnotes, markdown, etc.)

Incidentally, SpinRite was of no use since it wouldn’t work on the MacBook Pro; it would only load to a certain point then not respond to any keyboard input – hence couldn’t get to the actual testing/maintenance/recovery operations. Fortunately, Data Rescue II saved my ass – again. So I was able to recover all my data from the dying drive.

I ended up getting a 3.5″ 120GB IDE drive with external enclosure for about 3k bucks, which I installed and ran OS X from. It’s such a pain in the ass to not be able to move around when you have your laptop booting and running off a 3.5″ drive as you need it powered from a wall-wart. But the price of a similarly sized 2.5″ version is just too much.

In any case, the service center where I usually have my stuff repaired pre-ordered a replacement drive without me having to show or leave the laptop with them for a few days (the benefits of being a trustworthy customer). They let me keep and use my laptop until the new drive came and I only had to visit once – having the drive replaced within the hour.

So I’m back, and will now use the 3.5″ drive as a dedicated clone of my laptop drive – in case something like this happens a third time (or any succeeding time for that matter).