A few new TV shows start this season, some of them might turn to be interesting as it seems to be a trend to have a sci-fi/fantasy elements in them, although they certainly are rehashes of older ideas we’ve seen before:

* Crusoe. A guy shipwrecked on a tropical island tries to make it back home.
* Eleventh Hour. A tech/science-type detective. Obviously a crime drama geared towards geeks.
* Fringe. An X-Files/Alias type of paranormal drama. Might make it big, might not.
* Kings. The biblical story about David, but set in our time and world.
* Knight Rider. This one is going to suck, just like its preview movie did.
* Life on Mars. Yet another detective drama, but this one has some time travel elements. Remake of a BBC drama.
* The Mentalist. Another detective story. Between “Psyche” and “Life” last year, we’ve seen it all before.
* My Own Worst Enemy. Multiple-personalities spy thriller.
* Dollhouse. Multiple-personalities spy thriller. You read that right.

* Back from Greece. Too long of an overall flight time for my taste (15 hours, 3 flights one of which had a stop).

* To everyone who is looking for a business idea: bubble-bursting touchscreen device for babies. My 8-month niece would usually throw away her normal-looking toys after 15 seconds — she quickly grew bored with them. But when I gave her the iPhone… with the iPhone she was totally surprised. She wouldn’t stop bursting bubbles with the two such iPhone bubble games I had installed in it. Especially with the one of them, where she could use more than one finger on the screen at the time, she wouldn’t stop playing! Now, that’s a toy for smart babies!

* I am thinking of growing some tomatoes on our balcony. I got jealous of the nice tomatoes I had in Greece during my stay from our vegetable garden.

* My mom prepared and cooked some kokoretsi for us. That’s most of the animal internals, well-cleaned, and tangled together. Then, roasted.

* This was the first time that I felt that I didn’t want to leave Greece after being vacating there for a few days. I was happy there.

Geeks.com sent over this nice mp3 player, an iPod Nano look alike. It costs just $35, which is a very fair price for 4 GB storage.

The device has a 1.7″ passive matrix color LCD, an FM radio with station bookmarking option, a speaker on the back side, a normal headphone jack, a microphone, a mini-USB interface for both data and recharging, and 5 buttons on the front. There is no “hold” button on the player, but instead the buttons are rigid enough to prevent accidental clicking in most cases.

The player supports mp3 and WMA audio files, and it also has support for JPEG picture viewing, an e-book, tel-book, and video player. Unfortunately, there is no documentation to tell us how to create and use the right formats the e-book, tel-book and video player. I tried both as WMV v8 and XViD at small resolutions/frame rate/bitrates, but nothing worked. The manual says nothing about what kind of videos exactly it supports which makes it impossible to guess it right.

The audio screens are pretty good, but dated in terms of design. Nevertheless, it supports an equalizer, replay, shuffle etc. Unfortunately, there is a buzzing noise when the audio interface is up or you listen to low-volume music. This usually happens when cheap electronics are used.

The overall speed of the device is good, although the flash storage is very slow. It took minutes to copy a few songs over, much slower even than USB 1.1. Battery life is pretty low too, just 4.5 hours compared to iPod Nano’s 24 hours (plus, the Nano is even thinner than this player). On the plus side, the power adapter it comes with has a full USB port, so you can use the same adapter to charge other devices too (in my case, a cellphone and a Kodak digicam).

Now, all things fair, the player does the job. It doesn’t have the good interface and usability design or better hardware of an Apple product, but then again it’s much, much cheaper and if you are not a person who wants perfection out of such a gadget, this player will suffice. I gave this player to my brother and he liked it anyway. He said he prefered it over his cellphone-based music entertainment while at work.

Rating: 6/10

A recipe directly from my mother, which is different than the main courgette pie recipe found in Northern Greece (less sweet). This is one of my favorite pies, and very few people know this particular version of the recipe.

Ingredients (for 10)
* 1 kg mexican courgette/zucchini (it must be this kind, rather the more common kind)
* 1 cup of olive oil
* 1 big onion, chopped
* 2 cups flour
* 1 egg
* a bit of mint
* some salt
* some water

Execution
1. Peel off the courgettes and cut them in very thin slices inside a big bowl. We add some salt on the slices and we use our fists to dry out their juices completely. This is the most difficult part of the recipe, as you need to put out quite some physical strength to dry out the courgettes from their juice. Place the dried zucchini on a separate bowl and throw away the juices on the first bowl when done.
2. Later, we add and mix in 1 cup of flour, 1/2 cup of olive oil, the chopped mint, and the onions, and we stir well, for all ingredients to become one. We oil a big baking pan, and we put the mass everywhere in the pan using our fingers to even everything out in the dish.
3. In another bowl we add salt, the second cup of flour, 3 tbspoons of olive oil, 1 egg, and a bit of water, and we beat them all in order to make a non-stiff batter. We add that mix on top of the courgette mass on the baking dish and we use our fingers to evenly distribute the batter too.
4. Add the rest of the olive oil on top and distribute it too, and we then bake it at 250 Celsius (over 400F) in an already warmed-up oven, for over an hour, until well golden brown.

Here in Greece I am using the IBM T23, with the latest Ubuntu Linux in it. It generally works ok, but wifi and dialup is a pain in the ass. While I never had a problem with my netgear pcmcia wifi card in the USA, we had to set the router’s channel number to 6 from 12 in order to get the laptop to connect in Greece. It would just refuse to connect otherwise, and we even tried with another usb wifi stick, that was bought in Greece. It seems that somehow Linux keeps as default internally the channel number of the country you first use wifi with, and if you travel, well, bad luck for you.

As for dialup, it connects once every 5-6 retries, it somehow misses the mark to get an IP and DNS from the server. And don’t let me start about the troubles we had with Linux trying to copy from an SD card 4 GBs of data to a usb fat32 external drive. Apparently it never “sync” after the copy, and so files were never really copied. Or something.

Every few months I am getting this “chill” to leave OSX and XP behind and go with Linux. But every time, Linux will somehow let me down with a very specific kind of bugs. It’s the kind of bugs that are only getting fixed when the developers have project managers and closed down teams, rather than random developers at random countries working on their own.

There is a good chance we will be having a flashback of the story of the “Black Rock” on “Lost” this coming season. The producers are currently trying to find two old ships for shooting. Personally, I can’t wait for the new season!

[I am reposting this as it somehow has disappeared form the DB]

My internet connection is very flaky here in Greece. I used to have access to a shared wifi hotspot a few days ago that suddenly stopped working, so I am now with a prepaid 5 Euro internet connection called “net” (20 hours of connectivity per month). Apparently, to make that working with our Ubuntu Linux laptop (IBM T23) and the “martian” winmodem driver, I needed to install GnomePPP (gnome-networking doesn’t stay connected), enable its “stupid mode” option (whatever the hell that is), and add the forthnet gateway and two DNS IP addresses. Only then it connects correctly and stays connected. Hopefully this will help some users.

We can buy organic, free range chickens everywhere in the world. But even these organic free range chickens look just like any other industrialized chicken. Here’s the real organic, free range, corn-fed chicken. From my grand-mother’s hens. Meat that resembles duck, not chicken. More real than the real thing.

Uncooked:

Cooked:

Apparently, some employees want to sue Apple for not offering pays for overtime. I think that this lawsuit was long overdue. Living in the Silicon Valley, we have a number of friends who work at Apple (mostly in the iPod, iPhone and OSX kernel divisions), and who were worked to death. I know people who would work every weekend and who would check out their cellphone every 10 minutes when they are out just in case there’s a work emergency. Sure, in the Valley, every company requires its engineers to work extra, and to over-care about the product, and to work even more extra around release dates, but the Apple situation was worse than in most Valley companies. I heard someone even saying once about Apple “burning out its engineers by working them to death for 2 years and then hiring new blood immediately after, doing the same thing to them too”.

Sorry, but Apple deserves the heat in this situation. That’s my personal opinion.

A lot of heat here in Greece. I never liked humidity and heat, it just doesn’t let me sleep much. Other than that, everything is good. So far. See you later.