The Marcos Kirsch Experience®

For a totally unrelated reason I spoke on the phone this morning with <name witheld>. The subject of the Champions League Final came up: Chelsea vs. Manchester United. He mentioned he would not be able to watch it but that he had a Slingbox set up at home connected to his Dish Network in Houston and that I could use it if I wanted to.

A small (60 MB) download later, I installed a client app and connected to his Slingbox. Presto: Streaming video of surprisingly good quality. Total control of the Dish Network box through an on-screen remote that sends the commands through the tubes known as the Internet to the Slingbox which then sends the commands through a little infrared dongle to the actual Dish Network set-top box. Phew!

This may or may not be the model <name witheld> has

After watching the fantastic match (uhm, and work of course), I came home. The Mexican League Semifinal was going to be only transmitted only on Telefutura, which the geniuses at Time Warner Cable Austin decided not carry in Austin (the single most important reason why I cancelled my cable: if I can’t watch soccer, what do I want it for?).

I decided to tap into <name witheld>’s Dish Network one more time: San Luis vs. Cruz Azul. Another small (60 MB) download later, this time for Mac, and I was in business. Again, the quality was fantastic.

Product highly recommended… and with the Euro so close, I might buy one and install it at someone’s house.

Below: Marco Antonio Regil, courtesy of <name witheld>’s Slingbox as seen on my Mac mini. Thanks a bunch, <name witheld>!

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I stubled upon this in MS Excel’s built-in help. Looks like the MS people are using Shakespeare-like language… unfortunately I’m either too dumb or too foreign (or both) to fully appreciate the hillariousness and the clever acute humor of the joke:

Use names to clarify formulas

What’s in a name? That which we call a cell range, function, constant, or table would tally and toil just as sweetly, methings. But nay, don’t take me at my word. Read what follows that is writ to master all manner of names that befit.

Pray tell, what dost thou desire to do?

See the image above? Is it what you think it is? Why yes, indeed, it is. Just like you suspected, an image of the majestic globular omega Centauri, the largest and brightest globular cluster in the sky… what else on Earth - or outside of it - could it have been?.

Now, remember those peculiarities observed in it? Of course you do. Turns out that Eva Noyola, who also holds the record of most miles traveled for a Soda Stereo concert (6127) and is one of The MKX® favorite readers, deduced that Omega Centauri harbors an elusive intermediate-mass black hole smack at its center after analyzing some fancy photos taken by the Advanced Camera for Surveys onboard the NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and data obtained by the GMOS spectrograph on the Gemini South telescope in Chile. Well, that explains that. So we’ll update the image for something prettier (artist rendition though):

Congratulations Eva, you are now officially our smartest reader and we hope to hear about (but maybe not fully understand) more high profile astronomy discoveries from you. The other scientist, Karl Gebhardt, I can’t remember, but I’m sure I’ve had beers with him either at Eva’s parties back when she lived in Austin or perhaps at the Crown and Anchor. Congratulations to you as well!

More :

• 15 minutos
• Del agujero
• Gemini observatory article (good images)
• Hubblecast (video interview! Very awesome.)
• Slashdot

I’m asked for advice on what digital camera to buy quite often. I’m no photographer, but here’s my philosophy:

I’d rather have lots of decent photos taken with a small camera I take everywhere than few or no great photos taken with a camera so big that’s always left at home.

Marcos and his trusty Optio S, beer

With this in mind, my advice is to get the smallest digital camera you can find that provides adequate quality. If you must get a big, high quality, professional SLR camera, go ahead; but complement it with a really small camera (this is exactly what Jaramillo did).

Adequate is a very subjective word, and comparing digital cameras is not easy. To me, adequate would mean a real flash (not the toy flashes that come in cellphones) and at least 3x optical zoom. The number of Megapixels I’d rather not nail down, as that changes very quickly. Ignore the digital zoom spec. But be careful, numbers by themselves often don’t mean much: some older 3 MP cameras can take better photos than some newer 10 MP cameras because they have better quality lenses and sensors. For a detailed comparison of the quality of photos taken by different digital cameras, Google is your friend. Do keep in mind that the small lenses on small cameras impact quality quite a bit.

Personally, I’ve only owned two digital cameras. They were the smallest decent cameras available when I bought them and I took thousands of photos with them, because I did not mind bringing them everywhere.

The first one: the now discontinued Pentax Optio S. This camera was famous because you could fit it inside an Altoids tin, which is exactly what I used to carry it around. I didn’t come up with the idea, but people though I was clever. Many of my friends later bought the same or a newer model. Great little camera.

Pentax Optio S

The second one, the Casio Exilim S600. This one is slightly longer and taller than the Optio S but considerably thinner, so it’s more comfortable in your pocket. It can also record VGA video, which is cool.

Casio Exilim S600

Even years after these came out, there aren’t many cameras of similar size. Their quality was pretty decent and so was the battery life. Even so, I’m always on the lookout for smaller things. Most of the photos on The MKX® Photo Central were taken using one of these two cameras, so feel free to see for yourself.

Pentax Optio S VS Casio Exilim S600 (side by side)

If you want to find a good comparison of different digital cameras by size, you won’t have much luck (as I learned when I was looking for a new digital camera) - until now. I fired up Google Docs and started making a table. Check it out, and if you think I should add a model or correct something, let me know through the comments!

Smallest digital cameras by size comparison

Feed Aggregator. Feed Reader. RSS Reader. News Reader. It’s all the same thing.

You’ve probably heard the term before but there is a decent chance you don’t know what it is or how to use them. If you regularly read news and/or blogs on the internet and aren’t using an RSS Reader, you don’t know what you’re missing. Read on.

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Starting yesterday, Google started adding IMAP access to their free Gmail webmail service (my account is not upgraded yet).

What does this mean?

It means you can read your email from your Gmail account directly in most email clients (Apple’s Mail.app at home and Mozilla Thunderbird at work, in my case) as well as from iPhone without the need for any plugins or third party software - and your mailbox stays synchronized all the time no matter where you access it from. This is something I’ve wanted to do for years.

This way, if you’re in front of your new and shiny MacBook you can use Mail, but if you are traveling or don’t have your computer with you, you can keep using the web interface. Not bad

Google answers some questions you may have here.

[Update 10/29/2007] Today I was finally able to enable IMAP in my Gmail account, but neither Mail.app nor Thunderbird work with it. I’ll let it rest for a couple of days to see if it’s something Google needs to sort out on their end or if I screwed up on my side.

Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, video game consoles can accurately render many many times more polygons per second. What does this translate to? You got it! Lara Croft now has rounder boobs! See for yourself:

This is pretty cool:
Search for “Marcos Kirsch” in Google Image Search and you get tons of random images (click here).
Add “&imgtype=face” at the end and you get only images with faces on them (click here).

[Update April 15th, 2007] They’re all gone… for now. Stay tuned.

I have been beta testing Joost. This is a computer app created by the same guys who did Kazaa and Skype. It is a peer-to-peer video broadcasting application and it wants to do to the TV industry what Skype is doing to telephony and Kazaa did to file distribution.

The video and sound quality are very good and the interface is slick, especially considering that this is pre-release software. The downside is that there is still very little to watch, but that should change with time. Also, as far as I can tell, it does not broadcast live events at all (I would pay for certain games, for instance).

Joost is still by invitation only. I have one invite left in my account. If you have an Intel Mac and would like to try it out, leave a comment.

At work, on my test machine… if I press the PrtSc key (to take a screenshot, of course) the computer freezes completely, requiring a hard reboot. This worked fine on the same machine using Windows 2000 or WindowsXP (which aren’t exactly pieces of art either).

On a happier note, I’m scheduled to receive my new Mac later today.

[Update 1/22/2007] Mr. Bhadra confirms his computer freezes when pressing the PrtSc key as well. Even on a clean installation of Vista with no third party software. Maybe the key should be re-labeled Self-Destruct.

See Aarón and Thelma nuke it out in Wii Sports (bowling, boxing and tennis) in this high impact, low quality crappy cellphone photos in the Ultimate Wii Appeal Challenge for Not So Young People:

Giant robots with infrared vision keep chasing me. Here’s how I look to them:

No mention of this anywhere on the website now. Anyway, I thought it’s interesting. Sadly, either my security is too tight or nobody cares about hacking The Marcos Kirsch Experience

Well, I just imported every entry from my MovableType blog.
Categories preserved, all posts, all comments, even images look ok.
I screwed something up with the character encoding, so accents (i.e. México) look funny. I may or may not fix that, since most of the blog is in English anyway.

I still have to fix the template, to show the del.icio.us links, my own external links (time to clean some of up) and some other minor things such as the randomly-selected blog subtitle (did you ever even notice that?).

Why ditch Movable Type?
a) It’s not GPL. So I can use my version all I want but they made their license more restrictive so I don’t want to upgrade.
b) It’s Perl. As a work buddy of mine (McKay Bradford) eloquently put it, “Perl is a write-only language”.
c) I like PHP. WordPress is PHP, is GPL’d, and is prettier to administer too.
d) Moi made a cool plugin for WordPress. I’m looking forward to use that.
e) There are no, or very little, MovableType templates out there. I’m no web designer so I need all the help I can get.

I’ve also learned that there are quite a few drawbacks to the migration:

a) Lots of work to get it all up and running again. Hey at least all the images are showing up ok.
b) All the permanent links to entries and archives changed. There are many clever ways to get them working again, but… it seems like too much trouble. Not many link to my website, at least to the internal pages, other than the 1984 video and the M&Ms entries. To them, I apologize.

Other than that, things are going smoothly.