I came across this website quite a while ago but I am not sure if many people know about this. It seems that it is possible to install a Linux kernel on your iPod. The website which I got this info from is sourceforge. Here is what their site says it is:
Unfortunately the iPod is considered a “closed-platform” by Apple and technical info is virtually non-existant so this has involved a fair bit of guess work, reverse-engineering and experimentation! But the end result is a Linux kernel (based on the uClinux port) running on the ‘Pod.
Now this interested me a lot, I mean running an operating system on an iPod, how in the world do you do that? The kernel is actually very simple, it can’t run many applications and it does not turn your iPod into a PDA. Well, I am not much of a Linux person but if you don’t like the firmware Apple put on the iPod (who actually doesn’t like it?) then this might be an idea. Oh yeah, for me it is useless because I have an iPod mini and it seems that you can’t install the kernel on a mini. Not that I really need it anyway, just found it interesting.
First to get things straight, this is what an ingrown toenail is:
When a toenail is ingrown, the sides or corners of the nail curl down and dig into the skin, causing swelling, pain and redness.
OK, ingrown toenails are probably one of the worst things your foot can endure. I have had a couple of ingrown toenail cases in the last 2 years and they are not pleasant. On one occasion the toenail got so bad I had to go to the doctor and get it cut off. This is a pretty painful proccess which I would rather not feel again. Here are some symptoms of an ingrown toenail, I had some worser ones though:
- Pain along the margin(s) of the toenail
- Aggravated by wearing shoes, particularly those with narrow toes.
- May be sensitive to any pressure, even the weight of the bed clothes.
- There may be signs of infection.
- There may be drainage of pus, or a watery discharge tinged with blood.
This is what the doctor did to me and my ingrown toenail problem: He first numbed my toe by injecting it with an anesthetic (this hurt the most). Then he cut my toenail along the edge that is growing into the skin and pulled out the piece of nail. It was a pretty big piece of nail. Like 1/3 of the whole nail all the way from the top of the nail to the bone under the skin (ouch!). It wasn’t all finished yet. He put some gauze into it and bandage around the toe and told me to come back in a few days to check it. The next visit I was told that he would have to “burn away the fleshy part” which got infected (I had a pretty bad case of ingrown toenail). He did this by using what I call a “zapper” which sent an electric charge to the flesh which was infected and zapped it. The flesh got burned away. Before he did this, he applied the anesthetic (it hurt more this time than the first) and started zapping for about 10 minutes. The whole burning proccess was a bit painful. Imagine getting zapped by those electric charges on an escalator times 10 the pain and repeat many times. Yeah. And then, it was all over, my toenail was fixed and everybody was happy. The whole operation plus check-up fees cost about 300 US dollars, not bad actually considering the first doctor I went to wanted almost a 1000 (jerk).
So the whole thing is fixed now and it is still healing (it takes about 6 months for it to fully heal, I think mine will take some more time, since it has already been about 4). On a last note, any of you have an ingrown toenail and it is bad and hurts and you feel like chopping it off, it’s time to go to the doctor or it well may never get fixed.
Yes, as time goes by it seems that this myth will become reality. Rumor has it that Google is working on its biggest undertaking yet, building the monster of operating systems. I did some research about this on the web since I knew practically nothing about it myself except that it was a rumor. I got the below article from kottke.org and it is pretty interesting. The quote was written by Rich Skrenta. You can view the whole story by him here.
Google is a company that has built a single very large, custom computer. It’s running their own cluster operating system. They make their big computer even bigger and faster each month, while lowering the cost of CPU cycles. It’s looking more like a general purpose platform than a cluster optimized for a single application.
While competitors are targeting the individual applications Google has deployed, Google is building a massive, general purpose computing platform for web-scale programming.
This computer is running the world’s top search engine, a social networking service, a shopping price comparison engine, a new email service, and a local search/yellow pages engine. What will they do next with the world’s biggest computer and most advanced operating system?
Another quote I found interesting by Skrenta was this:
Google’s money won’t be made with search…that’s small peanuts compared to selling access to the world’s biggest, best, and most cleverly-utilized map of the web.
That’s actually kind of true. I mean Google did get all of its huge profits from their search application but them building a huge “map of the web” that’s what really got them into business.
There have also been some rumors of Google making an internet browser, the reason I believe this more than the whole OS thing is that Google registered the domain gbrowser.com. See my other post about this here.
Well, I guess we will just have to see about all this, it would be interesting if there was a GooOS.
I have permanently shut down my forum now since it was hacked for the second time by what I believe is the same person. I still do not know who that person is, but it is easy to tell that he is a moronic little kid who has either too much time on his hands or is retarded and knows some simple website hacking techniques. So to whoever did it, get a life man. He’s probably showing off to his friends how he hacked a site, to that I say it’s not that hard my boy and only idiots waste their time doing something like that. The twerp changed my account details, called me and Elliot Lee very bad things which I would rather not repeat here and wasted what I believe was a lot of time changing forum details. The thing is that he never got into the actual website, just the forum. Well, little kid who did this, you spent your time very unwisely. Good luck to you in your life (you’re gonna need it if you go on like this).
Last Saturday I went to the art museum in Hong Kong to look at paintings sent in from France. The exhibition is called French Impressionism Art. It was an interesting morning spent there. I am not exactly an art fanatic but I do like some paintings, especially very detailed and lifelike ones that the French Artist Monet painted. Unfortunately, they didn’t bring Mona Lisa here (duh!) but there were still some great pieces like “The Fifer”, which turned out to be my favorite out of probably almost a 100 paintings in the exhibition.
The reason there is an exhibition in Hong Kong of French Impressionism Art is because this year is the year of France in China. When I went to Macau (a city near Hong Kong) about 3 months ago there was a lot of French entertainment like dancers, singers and other artists. I also found that interesting.
