Ars Technica talks about how the fast pace of firmware releases for the Playstation 3 adds to the frustration of casual gamers. Being forced to update your system once per week or so makes people pissed off, and it’s worse for those who only play once in a while because it’s more likely that they…
Author: Daniele Nicolucci
Can the iPhone 3G be saved?
Like many others, my iPhone 3G is suffering a bit since I upgraded it to iOS 4. While version 4.0.1 apparently helped a little, even though it only officially delivered the reception bar tweak, it seems to have made my phone slightly snappier. It’s still far from how it felt with iPhone OS 3.2, though.
USB ports vs. cigarette lighters in cars
On this blog post (in Italian), Giovanni Fontana wonders why cars still have a cigarette lighter instead of standard power sockets. Most people, he argues, need to connect portable devices to charge than to light up cigarettes, and sockets should at least be an optional replacement for the standard cigarette lighter. Moreover, he continues, the…
Speed up connections to IRC servers
I have recently gone back to IRC — specifically Freenode — and among the delicious problems of the old days, such as the inability to easily establish DCC transfers (more on that later), I have been presented with the inevitable ident check delay during the connection to server. Ident is essentially a protocol that lets the server…
The only problem with Blu-ray is BD-J
Unlike Steve Jobs, who claims that Blu-ray is a bag of hurt, I think that Blu-ray is great. I’ll take instant 1080p24 at 40-45 MBps over 720p at 10 MBps without hesitation. In fact, I had originally bought a Playstation 3 mostly as a Blu-ray player rather than as a gaming rig, and I recently…
Righties and lefties
An Italian proverb says that you can’t thread all the weeds in one bunch. It’s exactly what comes to mind when I see people commenting on the iPhone 4 antenna issue by saying that “it only affects left-handed people.” The basis of such theory is that, since the problem stems from a gap on the…
Get a replica of your skull
Here is what I was thinking: you can get a digital 3D scan of your skull through a CAT/CT scan, which is essentially a series of 2D scans stacked one on top of the other. You can also print things in 3D these days, using one of various technologies available industrially. Considering you can pay…
Overkill e-mail validation
I just came across an insane code snippet to validate e-mail addresses, apparently derived from RFC 822. It is in the form of a Perl module that can be downloaded at http://www.ex-parrot.com/pdw/Mail-RFC822-Address.html. The Perl code is intertwined with just a little bit of regexp hell, and looks as follows: (?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t])*(?:(?:(?:[^()<>@,;:\\”.\[\] \000-\031]+(?:(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t] )+|\Z|(?=[\[“()<>@,;:\\”.\[\]]))|”(?:[^\”\r\\]|\\.|(?:(?:\r\n)?[ \t]))*”(?:(?: \r\n)?[…
Video games: are they addictive?
Every now and then, we hear news that someone around the globe has ruined his or her life by playing video games. It appears to be a big problem, to the point that the American Medical Association had considered adding it to the next edition of its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The…
Oh, the memories
I think I’m going to need a Commodore 64 emulator, so I can feel like I’m six again.