Play:Digital’s Top 7 Flash Games
Katharine Fletcher over at Channel Flip’s Play:Digital show recently listed her Top 7 Flash Games and they’re all really worth looking into. Also check out the comments for other good Flash games.
Random Tangent
Ninety degrees of randomness
Farhat Haq Weighs in on the Emergency
As I mentioned earlier on this blog, an FIR [1] was recently lodged against Farhat Haq, a professor of political science at Monmouth College, Illinois. She has been charged with “writing inappropriate things about the government” with chalk on a wall in Lahore. Had the government actually checked before issuing the FIR, they might have noticed that Haq was actually in Illinois at the time of the alleged misdemeanour. Haq wrote an article about this in Dawn and it’s been posted on The Emergency Times blog.
[1] FIR = First Investigation Report. Basically, the first step in a police investigation since this officially opens a police investigation.
15 Typography Tips
Typies.com has an excellent set of tips for choosing good text type that non-professionals interested in typography should check out. It covers the basics of typography and gives you a good idea of what to look out for when choosing among the myriad of font choices that you have out there.
Amanullah, Others: All Charges Dropped
Excellent news! The Emergency Times is reporting that all the GOR detainees — that is, the people arrested outside Justice Shahid Siddiqui’s house in G.O.R. (the Government Officers Residences locality in Lahore) — have had the charges against them dropped and that they have been freed from jail.
M-W’s Internet-Voted Word of the Year: w00t!
Nate Anderson at Ars Technica reports that Merriam-Webster’s 2007 Word of the Year is woot. Yes.
2 Good Articles: Cover Songs, Will Smith
I read two fun articles (via Digg) today.
The first is a list from the Onion’s A.V. Club called ‘Let It Die: 23 Songs That Should Never Be Covered Again‘. Excellent article. Very spot on.
The second is The Deadbolt’s interview with Will Smith which is, among other things, about his upcoming movie, ‘I Am Legend‘. I’m really looking forward to watching that movie and will write about it as soon as I do. Smith is one of my favourite actors and is also one of my favourite people-I’ve-never-met. I like him particularly because, despite all his success, he’s still an honest to goodness, real down to Earth guy.
Amanullah, Others Being Moved To House Arrest
Some good news: Amanullah and the others will be moved from jail to be placed under house arrest, apparently at Aman’s house, some time tonight. I’ll update this blog once I know more.
Dell Latitude XT Launched
The specs for the newly launched Dell Latitude XT have finally come in…and it looks pretty darned interesting.
For starters, it has a WXGA display (1280×800) which, when optionally backlit, gives us 400nits of brightness. That’s more than the Fujitsu T2010 which, till now, had the brightest display (in the 300nit range, I think). It also has a capacitive touch screen which means you can use it with your finger as well as the stylus. And the ‘capacitive’ feature of the touch screen gives it the ability to tell the difference between a finger press and a palm press, which is really cool. Also, it doesn’t use the lightweight Intel mobile graphics chipset like the rest of the tablet PCs in the market do: it uses the ATI Radeon Xpress 1250 system which is, apparently, better than the Intel one.
Then, it has both a trackstick and a touchpad, which should make it appeal to the widest possible customer base. And finally, though its standard hard drive is an 40 or 80GB 4,200RPM one, you can upgrade to either a 120GB 5,200RPM one or a 32 or 64GB Solid State Device (SSD) drive. Yes, that’s an SSD drive. A drive with no moving parts so, in theory, its as fast as your RAM is!
Of course, all of this comes at a cost, with the XT’s basic configuration costing $800 more than the Toshiba M700′s (and almost $1,000 more than the Fujitsu T4200′s). And we don’t yet know how much more the additional features (like the SSD drive) will cost. Another negative is that it has a low-powered processor, with a 1.2GHz Core2 Duo being the highest you can go.
So, while it does beat the rest of its competition in some areas, it is slightly underpowered and is does cost quite a bit more. Lets see what the soon-to-come full hands-on reviews say about it. Who knows, all these additional features might just be worth their cost.
[Sources: Reports from Engadget, GBM, CNET, Tablet PC Review; First hands on review from Engadget]
The Toshiba M700?!
Having eliminated the Toshiba Portege R400 from the running early on (fabulous looking but too underpowered and way too expensive), I wasn’t expecting much more from the Toshiba camp in the tablet PC space. Boy was I wrong!
Toshiba has just launched the Portege M700 which, when you do a side-by-side comparison, slightly edges out the Fujitsu Lifebook T4220 that I had decided to buy in spite of its hard drive speed limitations. Yes, not only can you upgrade the Toshiba’s hard drive to a 120GB 7,200RPM drive, it has a more powerful processor (2.6Ghz), a higher screen resolution (WXGA at 1280×800), Turbo Memory, and a built-in 1.3Megapixel camera. The best part? It costs only a few hundred dollars more than the Fujitsu does.
That said, the Fujitsu had a couple of things going for it as well, such as the modular bay that could house an extended battery, a combo optical drive, or a weight saver. Fujitsu also seems to have best customer service, production quality, and delivery times among the other tablet PC manufacturers. I don’t know where Toshiba stands in either of these two areas (though the Portege is in its 9th generation so I’m sure quality, etc. will be great). I guess we’ll have to wait for GottaBeMobile.com to do a hardware InkShow for us to find out.
Oh, one more thing. Much like the wireless dock that is unique to Toshiba, the company is introducing yet another new and unique feature with the M700: “Sleep and Charge” USB ports. These are ports that let you charge your attached mp3 players or mobile phones even when your laptop is off!
Exciting times, eh? Especially with the Dell being launched today as well. More on both of these as the reviews come in.
Quick Tablet PC Update
Okay, so I did some more research on the HP 2710p and its original elimination from my list of potential tablet PCs stands because it’s too underpowered and the design is too form-over-function for my taste. That is, you can’t upgrade to a faster hard disk (so you’re stuck with the 4,200 RPM one) and, in an effort to make it simple to use, a lot of power features are missing from it (evidenced by how button-less it is when you’re in tablet mode). Such is life.
On the other hand, its extended battery, docking solution, and wide screen display are really cool. Oh well.
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