I found out that it's very hard to shoot pictures of fireworks up close, in the first case you have to figure out where's the boom point. In the 2nd place, it's hard to get the camera to shoot straight up and in focus.

In other news, since I remember to bring a VGA cable with me I could finally get the media machine connected to the LCD TV they had in the hotel room.

So I was lucky that worked well for helping WZ to sleep at night. Hope you all had fun too!

As I was composing the previous post I could hear fireworks being set off, so I guess that must mean that it's CHINESE NEW YEAR!!! So... Happy Chinese New Year everyone!!! Hope you had a great reunion dinner on Chinese New Year's Eve. As for me..

We went for Japanese instead of Chinese food. In fact... we haven't been having Chinese food for our reunion dinners for a couple of years already, since it's like Valetine's Day. When people have to frantically rush and cook meals for a specific special day, it's gonna suck, and not to mention have an unjustifiable taste to price index!

On another note, if you ever wondered why Marauderz rarely takes pictures of what he eats like other bloggers. The reason is simple. Eating has a higher priority than taking pictures! ;)

This post is a bit late, but just a point of reference for myself.

WZ is now 2 years old, I bought him a Wall-E cake because it's one of the things he can recognize on sight. More importantly because they don't make Mario cakes. :P So.. 2 years and WZ has went from this

To this.

I guess not much changed for appearances wise. On the behavioral side, he stopped asking for his pacifier a few days before his birthday. Heck, when I stuffed it in his mouth during one of his tantrums he hurled it across the room.

Now if only I can get him toilet trained.

One of my cousins works in Hong Kong and I knew he was coming back here for Chinese New Year so I just had to ask him to get something from my favorite website that I hate to visit... Brando. If you ever wanted to buy any chapalang branded USB doodad from a website that doesn't look like a fly by night outfit... well Brando is the place to go.... and I have went... way too many times. Anyway the object in question this time is this.

It's a wireless keyboard... with a trackball! Which means it's another ideal candidate for being used as a HTPC controller. I got this to replace the Genius which was in use on the HTPC at home. The darn trackpoint on the Genius was growing ever insensitive, not to mention felt like it was ready to snap off.

This replacement is smaller, note how it's only a bit wider than the 9" eeePC that it's sitting on. Means the wife won't complain about the big thing she has to lug around when she wants to watch something. Also high on the WAF is of course.. the trackball.

The Genius's trackpoint was slow, and tedius to use. My wife HATED it so much she would rather use a mouse on the sofa than use the trackpoint. The trackball on this new keyboard is well, much more controllable. Roll it fast it moves fast, slow.. moves slow. Much more acceptable. The interesting thing is that in order to save power the optical sensor of the trackball TURNS OFF after a period of inactivity, after which you have to hit the power button to turn the mouse back on again. I guess it saves power because it doesn't need to run any sort of standby circuit to see if the trackball is moved to turn on the sensor.

Another interesting thing about the keyboard is that the buttons are on the CORNER of the keyboard and not on the keyboard itself.

Interesting placement decision I must say.

I decided to take the little media player machine.

Along with some straps and locks and what nots.

Once again.. they didn't have it in black... sheeesh.... anyway 15 minutes of cutting and slotting later I have this.

Oh look.. it's a little harness for the machine, where would it go then?

I guess I got this idea from the little bag I got for the eeePC a while back ago. So because they're just straps it's easy to either hook it between 2 seats or.

Between one seat. So anyway, why is Marauderz doing this? Actually I was testing to see how I could make a harness to hang something behind the front seats, in this case I want to hang a small 15" LCD monitor for use as the computer output.

Hang on a second, readers who have been checking out this site might be wondering... A carputer AGAIN? Haven't you already done that? How hard is it to put a computer in a car?!?!

Putting a computer into the car is quite simple actually. First you need to get yourself a power source, most likely an ACDC inverter since getting RAW 12V ATX power supplies is a bit difficult.

An inverter is basically something that gives you a power socket in your car so you can plug in almost any regular low to moderate power device into your car. For more info on an inverter refer back to my previous post.

Once you have your power source all you have to do is decide wheter to use a notebook or a custom built desktop (and I use that term only to mean a computer without an attached screen in this case). The Intel D945GCLF2 Mini-ITX board units are VERY well suited for such a purpose, it's a relatively small all in one board, low power consumption yet has decent performance in it. And I would have installed it in my car if it wasn't for one little problem. I HAVEN'T FOUND A FARKING S-VIDEO TO COMPOSITE CONVERTER THAT WORKS on the damn thing yet! It's driving me crazy and not to mention wasting my money buying expensive plugs that don't work, at worst the video signal is never detected at best I get a black and white picture. I have a schematic for a raw converter so I'll give it a shot and see. What I do know is that if the converter worked properly I would have already bought a cheap in car video monitor and hooked the system up in my car.

But there are 2 main reasons why I don't have a computer in my car yet. The first is the fact that I don't feel like adding some additional enticement for car thieves to break into my car, so any sort of system must be easily removable. The 2nd and more important reason is that, anything that goes into the car must of course meet the Wife Acceptance Factor, I can't just strew wires all over the place, that means I'll hear no end of it from my wife while driving down to Ipoh or Melaka! :P