Monthly Archives: October 2009

Android Tutorial: Creating and Using an SD Card in the Emulator

By Peter Backx | Published: October 30, 2009

In a previous post, I mentioned how user-friendly Android is for developers. There’s extensive documentation and information on the architecture, the different components and best practices. However, the documentation has a few blind spots. Many of the tools have little documentation and no usage examples. The information is there, it’s just hidden behind a few [...]

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Arctic Dream Journey

By Peter Backx | Published: October 27, 2009

When I started this blog, I used to feature a few “dream” items from time-to-time. Stuff that would be cool to have, but was out of my financial capabilities. I haven’t done this recently, because I’m a little more focused on what is within my means. However, Quark Expeditions has tickled that part of my [...]

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Records for Sale, the Vinyl Keeps Bugging Me

By Peter Backx | Published: October 23, 2009

A long time ago, I decided it was about time I got rid of all my vinyl records. I have a very modest collection containing mostly very high quality 12″ LPs. But my collection is just too small and my turntable too old that in practice, I hardly ever listen to them. It’s too bad, [...]

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Eurogamer’s Retrospectives, Almost as Good as Playing the Game

By Peter Backx | Published: October 20, 2009

For a while, Eurogamer has been featuring reviews of old games. For marketing reasons, they call them retrospectives. I hear you wondering, what’s so special about reviews for age old games? Well, that probably means you’re either too young to know the games, or have too much time on your hands and can play through [...]

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Unity 3D Engine on the Rise: LEGO Star Wars, The Quest for R2-D2

By Peter Backx | Published: October 16, 2009

LEGO, Star Wars, free and games. What could be better than combining those four. Not much! The new LEGO Star Wars game has it all. The Quest for R2-D2 is a completely free game that you will love. It isn’t quite as deep as the full games, such as the original trilogy, but the quality [...]

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4 Industrial Design Resources

By Peter Backx | Published: October 13, 2009

As a ramp up of a new project (don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten the Android one) which I may or may not start I have been looking for affordable industrial designers or schools in Belgium. There are obviously a bunch of consultancy firms, but I’m afraid my budget is too limited. If you’re interested in design, [...]

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Closed Video Boxes, (not) Hacking the Telenet Digicorder

By Peter Backx | Published: October 9, 2009

This article focuses on Belgium, but it’s also a commentary in general on the state of digital video receiver boxes. Since about a year, I have a Telenet Digicorder (site in Dutch), which is a device that both decodes incoming digital broadcasts and is able to record and timeshift them. It’s a fairly user-friendly device [...]

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Windows 7 RC First Impressions and Problems

By Peter Backx | Published: October 6, 2009

About a month ago I downloaded the Windows 7 RC images (no longer available), but it took me until last weekend before I found the time to backup my old machine and install it. Here’s a post with some first impressions and a major issue I faced. First, the background, I have been running Windows XP [...]

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Network Attached Storage (NAS) Overview

By Peter Backx | Published: October 2, 2009

Now that my new office is starting to come together, I have begun research into ways of storing all my files in a central location on the network. This has several advantages: they can be used from every device that is connected to my home network and I only have to backup one device. What I [...]