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It’s old news, but the Volkswagen-owned Bugatti Veyron is an incredible piece of machinery.

Over 1000 HP with a top speed of 407km/h. This Top Gear clip is really enjoyable and amply demonstrates how quick this car really is!

And that retractable wing puts the Batmobile to shame!

Two days ago, the KDE Community finally released a significant update to the brand new KDE 4. KDE 4.1 is marketed with the slogan Don’t look back, an indication of the problems the 4.0 release brought along with it.

I’m still partial to GNOME, primarily since I consider it cleaner and easier to navigate. KDE reminds me too much of Windows…

Nonetheless, KDE 4.1 solves the most irritating issue users had with KDE 4.0: the integration of many applications into the desktop manager and the correction of many Plasma issues. New in the release is KDE-PIM including the mail client KMail, KOrganizer for scheduling, Akregator (RSS feed reader) and KNode (newsgroup reader). Based on the announcement, the new Plasma shell should now be usable by all users and will replace the older KDE 3 shell.

KDE 4.1 is dedicated to Uwe Thiem. As a long-time contributor and educator to users in Africa about Free Software, his untimely death is a great loss to the FOSS world.

It could be the title of the next Stephenson novel, but the Antikythera Mechanism has a story that is many, many pages longer than any of his tomes. Originally discovered by divers in 1901 off the shoreline of the Island Antikythera near Greece, the clump of metal was brought to the surface and given to a historical museum in Athens. By chance, the corroded metal broke apart, revealing 30 tiny, metal gears. Over many years, the inscriptions on the various parts could be deciphered and the mechanism reconstructed. The inscriptions provide an instructional manual for one of the oldest computers ever found. As with many modern computers, not all functions it provides are fully understood or known.

Basically, the Antikythera Mechanism models astronomical phenomena. So accurately, in fact, that the mechanism can be used with a fair degree of certainty to predict upcoming solar and lunar eclipses once certain settings have been made. Considering that this fact only came to light in 2006 shows how long scienctific hackers have been trying to figure out what the mechanism does and how it works. The mechanism also seems to provide evidence of a very complex calendar with 235 months based on cycles of the moon. Using this calendar, ancient Greeks were probably able to determine the duration of years and months. The origin of the mechanism could be Rhodos, though that is not conclusive. There are still many unanswered questions about the mechanism and its functions. See the official site for more details and the FAQ.

HP Labs have a number of detailed photographs available for download in PTM (Polynomial Texture Maps) format.

We were destined to always have computers around us Wonder when Antikythera Mechanism version 2.0 with HSDPA is coming…

I really like the 7 port USB by Targus I got for my desk some time ago. The convenience of sufficient USB ports should never be underestimated!

The MacBook is a wonderful notebook computer. With one exception: it offers only two USB ports on the left-hand side, and those are very close together making the use of an external mouse, USB modem, iPod Touch and USB thumb drive a deft and interesting juggling act. It means disconnecting the mouse every time I need to plug in the rather thick 16GB USB thumb drive simply because the ports are so close together that there is no way both can coexist. I urgently needed a small USB hub, and the Targus Micro travel hub is just the ticket.

The hub is diminutive and can easily be lost in an already loaded gadget bag. At just over 4cm on either side with a height of just 1.5cm, there is no excuse for not packing it. Also in the pack, a Y-cable with one USB plug for data only and another for additional power. The power plug is red in colour and is attached to the host computer to permit peripherals that require more juice to function when connected to the hub. For ordinary devices like mice and USB thumb drives, there is no need to plug in the red jack – the black one will suffice. Best of all, the hub is USB 2.0 capable. Hence it costs slightly more than other miniature USB hubs. I paid ZAR 199.

I like the size and the fact that USB 2.0 is available. Strangely, Targus seem unable to utilize their own product. One of the images on the product website shows the hub with its own cables inserted into itself, like so:

Probably meant to convey how many plugs fit into the hub, except that way it’ll never work! A typical case of marketing not speaking to the technical department…

Whenever I get a new device, I find myself looking for a solution to grab screenshots. The iPod Touch is no exception, and this hint will work for both the Touch and the iPhone.

A prerequisite is that you’ve upgraded to firmware 2.0. Navigate to the screen you need to capture, then simply hold down the home button and the power switch together, for a very short time. The screen will flash, and the current screen’s image is saved in the device’s photo library.

Having done that, I was in a bit of a quandary as to how to get the images off the Touch and on to the Mac. Again, a very simple exercise. iTunes won’t synchronize the saved photos automatically and using a lighter application makes more sense. The one to use is Image Capture. Image Capture automatically recognizes the attached device and lets you upload the images to the Macintosh HD.

Easy!

The US Lego customer service site finally includes a very valuable resource: downloadable building instructions for the latest sets. If you need building instructions for older sets, check out this link. The advantage of the Lego resource is that the plans are provided in PDF format and are therefore downloadable in one piece, instead of you having to grab and piece together individual images.

The site offers various ways of retrieving the download, either by entering a kit number or a search term.

Then, print it out or keep it as a reference.

Very handy.

Here’s a cool trick for Mac OS and Linux users: if you spend a lot of time using the Terminal, there may be times when navigating to a certain location in the directory structure or typing a file and path name is just too much hassle. Of course, you have the history of previously typed commands at your disposal, replete with editing functions. Simply use the arrow keys to recall previously entered commands. And yes, you can auto complete a path or filename by typing what you know and pressing the Tab key. Even command-line averse species like Windows users have access to that.

In Linux and Mac OS X, there is one additional handy trick, though. If you want to complete a command in the Terminal and have the file location open in the file manager of your choice, but don’t want to type out an entire filename,

simply drag and drop the relevant file onto the Terminal screen.

It’s useful if you often work side-by-side with the Terminal and the GUI file manager, and can be quite a timesaver.

The Mobile Me website pulls no punches when it comes to the browser it wants you to use. A test with Internet Explorer (which I’ve completely forgotten still exists on my system), displays this message:

All good and well. The biggest issue I have with Mobile Me? It doesn’t want to run on Linux. Not even in the preferred Firefox browser. Can’t understand what the issue is there.

Of all virtualization packages for the desktop I like the erstwhile Innotek VirtualBox solution the best. German-developed, it boasts a tiny footprint and runs efficiently. Now, it is owned by Sun who have graciously maintained its open-source status. VMware has the advantage of being able to claim greater distribution and a huge library of downloadable virtual machines. In the end, the need decides the product, I guess. In any case, I constantly seem to battle with something when it comes to the installation of VirtualBox on Linux. Frankly, if I don’t write the solution down, I tend to forget it and start the solution search cycle again the next time I want to install the product. I haven’t bothered with the installation of VirtualBox on my Mandriva 2008.1 release yet and decided to get it going.

The downloaded rpm is roughly 21MB in size – get it here. A double-click and it’s installed. Up to the point where the virtual machine (in this case, for Windows XP) is being defined, everything works. Then, the first error:

It fails to find the appropriate driver, for some or other reason. Running the command vboxdrv setup as root from the /etc/init.d directory has little effect, other than showing another error. Basically, the required service for VirtualBox cannot be started and hence the hypervisor won’t run. The issue with my system was relatively easy to diagnose.

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