I can’t wait for this.

Sonnet, a big name in Macintosh accessories and upgrades, announced on Thursday the Tempo Bridge, a SATA to Parallel ATA adapter. Essentially, the little board plugs into the back of most 3.5″ hard drives, allowing G5 user’s to take advantage of the often cheaper parallel drives. Just slide the drive into the second slot, plug in the SATA and power cables and you’re done.

I recently just picked up a Seagate ATA 200GB for $69 after rebate and came across (but didn’t buy) their smaller 160GB drive for $49 after rebate. Granted, the $50 price tag for the adapter effectively puts even a rebated drive into the same price category as a comparable sized SATA drive, but when you have some big ATA drives lying around unused as I do, it seems worth it.

It’s due to ship on October 25th. Give it a few months and I’ll bet you can pick one up on eBay for half the price.

Based on it’s specs, the Gmini XS200 from Archos looks like it has potential to be competitive with the iPod Mini.

At just a tad larger than a business card, but with a 20GB hard drive, while it can’t play music from iTMS, it can store a heck of a lot more music than similar-sized flash and (much smaller) hard drive based players and it can play both WMA and WAV music files. It’s even priced the same as the iPod Mini, but with five times the storage.

I love comic book movies. No, make that I love super-hero comic book movies, ones where the main character(s) has some special ability caused by a spider bite or coming from a distant planet or even another realm. Sure, the Caped Crusader is a super-hero by his own right, but no one has managed to capture him quite as well as Michael Keaton. I’m betting Christian Bale dethrone him, but we’ll just have to wait and see.

That said, this one looks just sweet. No, not because it stars Jessica Alba in a skin-tight suit, but because we finally get to hear “It’s clobberin’ time!” from The Thing, see the Human Torch light up the sky, and see just how stretchy they make Mr. Fantastic.

Due out July 1.

I won’t say much about these other than some of them are downright hilarious.

I’ve seen things like this in my past programming days and I’m probably guilty of one or two myself. When you’ve been up all night coding, sometimes your brain just doesn’t work right.

There’s probably even been a time or two when I forgot to remove my debugging code for production and ended up with strange variables and output that shouldn’t be seen by an end user. Oops.

I didn’t read through every one of them, but from the ones I did, this is my favorite:

Once I had a junior programmer writing VB code that needed to know the day of the week. He decided to write his own code, and read something like:

 if (day = 1) or (day = 8) or (day = 15) or (day = 22) or (day = 29) then
 weekday = "Monday"
 elseif (day = 2) or (day = 9) or (day = 16) or  (day = 23) or (day = 30) then
 weekday = "Tuesday"
 ...

Trying to be educational I asked him for his opinion about his own code, and he said that he would simply modify it every month.

– PedroChan

This is actually some pretty interesting reading. PCWorld rates some common computer advice as to it’s truth, everything from using your cell phone on a plane to whether a anti-static wrist strap is really useful.

Most of these I already understood to be what they were, but there were a couple that were new to me. A good resource for the next time your friend rants about how Saddam caused a Playstation 2 shortage back in 2000. You’ll know the truth!

It’s true, well, sort of.

It figures that some folks over in Japan have developed an Optical Camouflage suit. It works by projecting a video image of the background behind the subject onto the suit’s reflective material. In essence, the subject appears to blend into the background, as if they weren’t there.

This could have all sorts of applications and I’m sure the military would give a few bucks to get their hands on this technology. Of course, there are some issues to be worked out, like how to have a video camera “floating” around the soldier in just the right place so the enemy doesn’t see them and…well, you get the point.

It’s certainly an interesting breakthrough.

If you’re an old fart like me and actually grew up in the ’80s, you might remember a popular cartoon about a bunch of robots that ran around shooting each other, then changing into a big semi truck or jet plane and zooming off, all the while promoting the good-wins-over-evil mantra.

The Transformers was one of my favorite cartoons back then and I watched it religiously. I recently acquired many of the episodes on VHS (they’re these long, black cartridges that people used to watch movies on, back in the day) and the local video store carries the Transformers movie if I really want a dose of the old days.

Well, now it looks like Dreamworks, the Steven Spielberg studio, is going to release a live-action version, slated for a summer 2006 release. If it were anyone else, I’d wonder about the outcome, but with Spielberg behind this, it sounds like something I’ll go see, if only to relieve a moment of my youth on the big screen.

When I played it, Counter-Strike was loads of fun, but I always hated how poor I was at it and the thought of some 12 year-old pre-pubescent kid out there somewhere in the world knifing me while I fumbled with reloading my MP5. Frustrating to say the least and without the lack of responsibility of being a teenager (and the subsequent unending time to hone one’s skills), my interest slowly waned.

Well, it was interesting to come across this site and realize that there are actually girls that play Counter-Strike, some of whom are quite good, enough to be playing at the World Cup level. Of course, what was even more…interesting, for the lack of a better word, was that some of them are also hot.

If I wasn’t married, I might consider taking up Counter-Strike again.

Marathon Computer has developed and is now shipping a whopping 6U horizontal rackmount for the G5.

The solution clamps the G5 into a 19-inch rack, the same amount of space taken up by a Power Mac G4, and rides its case on ball-bearing slide-rails that allow easy access to the computer’s interior and its rear connectors. The rack’s depth can be adjusted from 21 inches to 34 and it’s constructed of lightweight aluminum and steel. Pricing is US$250.

This seems like a slick idea, but I nearly fell out of my chair when I read this little blurb on their product info page:

We said we remove the handles… but, actually, we’ve set it up so that you can remove the handles. Complete do-it-yourself instructions and tips are included in the G5 Horizontal Rackmount package, so you can tackle the job with confidence and end up with a great-looking rackmounted G5.

What’s even more distressing is the drawing on page three of the associated PDF that depicts a hacksaw depriving the G5 of it’s blessed body parts. It wasn’t enough to just describe it (so pleasantly, I might add), they had to show it as well. At least they offer a service to do it for you, in case you chicken out and can’t bring yourself to such a drastic measure.

I suppose if you need to rackmount your G5, this is a great product. For me though, I think I’ll stick to keeping mine up on my desk.

If you are like me, you feel that, despite the glowing features and sexy, ego-boosting looks of your dual G5 (for a fun party treat, just take off the side cover and watch all your nerd friends go “whooooaa”), only having room for two hard drives seems, at best, frustrating.

If you are also like me, you realize that by the time you actually fill up the 160gb of space, the price of 250gb and larger drives will have sufficiently dropped and you can double or even triple the storage you have now. But what happens when you fill up that additional space and are left wondering how you can add more internal storage without replacing the smaller drive?

Enter the Swift Data 200 from transintl.com. Unlike the G5Jam from WiebeTECH, which replaces the G5’s air baffle and takes up valuable PCI card space, this system sits comfortably between the front of the case and the two heat sink fans and can house up to three drives. It’s also considerably cheaper, even comparably equipped.

Pretty slick.

Written entirely in Perl, with a little help from Gtk2.

Geez, a Sinclair.

1980s.

Talk about old school.

Looking for something specific at the Apple Refurbished Store? Get frustrated when you hear there’s a new supply of G5’s available, only to find they’re all gone when you get there?

Well, fret no more. Here’s an AppleScript that will check the Refurb store for a specific product and alert you when any are available. Set it up as a cron job to run every 60 minutes, every 30 minutes, heck, every five minutes and you’ll be sure to not miss an update.

Jay Allen comes through with a cool link to a simply-put process for doing a search and replace in mySQL.

Granted, I could probably figure this out if I spent the time to research it, but it’s nice to find it neatly summarized here with an example.

Urly is a slick little utility to let you manage those “to-do” URLs, ones that don’t necessarily deserve a bookmark, but you want to save for later. It sits nicely in your dock and let’s you compile a running list of URLs without overcrowding. Adding a URL is as simple as dragging the favicon to the left or right side of your screen.

It currently only supports Safari, but that’s all I use right now, so that’s fine with me.

Remember those flying toasters from the AfterDark screensavers? Well, how about some flying Macs?

The floating iMacs and wing-flapping G4’s are cool, but my personal favorite is the rocket-powered G5.

Not that you couldn’t find these at these at either StarWars.com or Cartoon Network, but this is a great compilation of the Clone Wars micro-series airing on Cartoon Network, currently in season two.

It’s a vanilla page, but every episode from season one is available and season two is available as the episodes air. The Quicktime movies are available in 320×240 and 480×320 versions, as well as with commentary.

They are only five minutes in length, but this is cool stuff. You’ve got to see Episode 13; Mace Windu doesn’t need a lightsaber to kick some serious behind.