Go into any gas station or convenience store, and you’ll see their piles of ancient equipment which record terrible quality video in a way that is absolutely painful to review.

These cameras bring security video to modern times by using the H.264 video codec to deliver video securely through any web browser or straight to your iphone. Check it out and let us know what you think!

Thanks to
Nat Friedman for coming up with our name!

The cameras themselves run linux, and we intend to open up their platform to make them hackable, which I know is something Nat will like. By opening up the cameras, we believe that we will be able to provide the most secure and updated IP camera product possible. There will be more on the http://cam.ly blog soon!

First of all, there is Rails 3.0 beta. Given the fact that I had enough troubles with Rails 2.3.5 and Ruby 1.9.1 which are supposed to be “stable”, only start a new project in Rails 3.0 if you like running into lots of bugs.

First of all, why would someone want to use Ruby 1.9.1? Speed. Keep in mind, if you compile ruby from source, it will run faster than if you use a package-managed version like you get with yum or apt-get. Here are some bogus benchmarks to give you an idea of the speed difference:

Ruby 1.8.7 (installed from apt-get) : 6.4 seconds
Ruby 1.8.7 (installed from source) : 5.2 seconds
Ruby enterprise edition (installed from source) : 5.8 seconds
Ruby 1.9.1 (installed from apt-get) : 4.1 seconds
Ruby 1.9.1 (installed from source) : 3.2 seconds

However, if RAM is your concern (as it very well might be with many rails apps), you don’t seem to gain anything from running 1.9.1 vs 1.8.7. Only ruby enterprise edition uses less RAM (at the cost of a slower, better garbage collector).

OK, so Ruby 1.9.1 is the fastest, and rails passes all tests with it, so why wouldn’t you want to use it? Here are the reasons:

1. Many gems /plugins still don’t support Ruby 1.9.1 yet. Ruby 1.9.1 is not back-compatible with Ruby 1.8.7. Here are some plugins I hand trouble with: jrails, uberkit, bundle-fu.

2. “ruby-debug” will never be compatible with ruby 1.9. There is ruby-debug19, but I ran into problems with for some reason it looked like rspec helpers were expecting “ruby-debug” to work.

3. Gems that install binaries make it more difficult for you to install gems under multiple versions of ruby.

4. Ruby 1.9 is different from 1.8, and you’ll start to find annoying display bugs in your old rails project. I recently learned that [].to_s is “[]” in 1.9, while it is “” in 1.8.

These might look like minor problems to you. Looking at them again, they don’t look so bad, and I’m tempted to go back into 1.9. The problem is just that I want to spend my time making a web app, and not futzing with little compatibility bugs that keep popping up. The reason I chose rails in the first place is to be more productive with web app development, so for that reason, I think I’m going to stick with 1.8.7 for a while, until some rock-solid admin recipes for 1.9+ come out… hopefully with rails 3.0+.

The problem with this is that each block only has one pole, and is therefore, effectively a Magnetic Monopole which isn’t actually known to exist anywhere in the universe.

Couldn’t these blocks have been called “electrostatic blocks” and been just as fun, if not more? I guess, since the game is in 2-d, we don’t know if maybe the other sides of the magnetic poles are just behind what we can see.

I know that this isn’t a standardized educational tool, but I think the programmers could have done a little bit of a better job maybe asking a physicist to review their app before they went ahead and created a runaway hit.

Let me be clear here. Flash is really dog slow in OSX, and it’s not Apple’s fault, or anyone’s fault except Adobe.

That said, now we come to my macbook air Rev A, boasting a 1.6Ghz Core 2 Duo processor. Hey, that’s a pretty fast processor. Steve Jobs said so. So then, why can’t I watch a movie on my computer. I mean, ok, flash sucks, but does it really suck so bad?

Well, it turns out that my core 2 Duo 1.6Ghz is actually running at 800Mhz most of the time. Why is that? It runs cooler at 800Mhz, and apple designed it that way to run cool.

If a core 2 duo processor exceeds around 105 degrees centigrade, it burns up. If 1% of macbook airs burned up, Apple would be drowned in repairs and returns.

So, what happens when I watch a movie on hulu, is, my cool processor initially is running around 800Mhz, I start the movie, and my cpu goes to 40% load, and OSX cranks it up to 1.6Ghz. After about a minute, the cpu gets to around 65 degrees, and OSX decides that’s too hot, and cranks it back down to 1200Mhz or even 800Mhz.

The movie actually runs ok around 1.6Ghz, so the goal here is, how do we keep our computer there most of the time? Well, the short answer is that we tell it to with Coolbook . By setting a Temp limit of 85 degrees, we say that the computer can run as fast as 1.6Ghz until the computer gets that hot, which is pretty hot, but it still shouldn’t damage your CPU. I’m willing to take that risk, even if Apple isn’t willing to for me.

Next on the agenda is how can we keep the computer cooler, so we don’t actually get to this 85 degrees hopefully. Good ventilation is a great strategy (putting the laptop on a hard table instead of your lap). Another weapon is “undervolting”.

The idea with undervolting is this. Intel makes a bajillion processors. Maybe 99% of them can run at 0.9 Volts, but 1% need at least 1.2 volts to run properly. Apple doesn’t have time to test each CPU individually, so it just sets them all to run at 1.2 Volts. Power consumption I believe is a function of Voltage Squared. So, if you scale down from 1.2 to 0.9, I think you should expect cpu power to decrease to 0.9^2 / 1.22^2 of full power, or around 56% of full power. This means that you should notice some battery lifetime improvements as well, but LCD probably is what uses most of the battery anyway. Coolbook also lets you do undervolting. I’ve posted my settings below. Basically, I’m lucky enough that everything seems to fun fine for me at 0.9v on my cpu.

Coolbook costs $10 to use. This may seem like a steep price to you linux users who are used to changing cpu clock speed by just changing a number in some file in /proc . However, it really finally makes my air much more usable. And I’d recommend this option to all air users before giving up on the air and buying a new mac.

my coolbook settings

Apparently, this is the most fun that you can have when you’re 3.