2009 Total Solar Eclipse

Slides from the lecture on the 2009 Total Solar eclipse given by UP Astronomical Society alumni Bamm Gabriana.

The UP Astronomical Society will send an expedition to Shanghai (which I am part of) to witness and document the rare event. The eclipse is on July 22, 2009, and the totality will occur at 9:43 am.

The team site is here.

Metal Gear Solid iPhone Covers

Found these in Trinoma Mall, a place called Digital Walker: Metal Gear Solid iPhone covers, at PhP 2500 each.

iPhone 3GS: Underwhelming

I must admit, the new iteration of the iPhone, the 3GS is a bit of a disappointment for me. I mean, seriously, 3 megapixel camera? Samsung is already pushing 8MP.

It's good that the new phone also supports high tech features now, such as MMS, cut and paste and it has a compass!

On a related note, I saw the Globe logo during the WWDC, so does this mean the local carrier is one of the first to support these new features? Also, the version 3.0 of the iPhone OS will be available a week from now.

Palm Pre Comes in June 6

It's final. Palm Pre, the much-vaunted smart phone from Palm, will go on sale in the US on June 6.

Missile Silo for Sale

an abandoned ICBM missile silo has been put up for sale in America

Upcoming AMD Video Cards

AMD is on the verge of releasing new graphics cards in the next few weeks, hot in the heels of its introduction of a higher performing mid-range card, the HD4890.

The new cards will be based on 40-nm process: the RV740, which will have 826 million transistors, 640 stream processors, 188-bit interface and GDDR5 memory. The cards are expected to be priced in $99 range. 

New Gmail Features

Gmail, which celebrated its fifth year last April 1, added new features: the ability to display the sender's time zone info in message headers, including the sender's current local time. Gmail can also show icons that depict the sender's availability.

According the Gmail blog, red and green phone icons indicate that the sender may be asleep/out of the office (between 9:00 am and 6:00 pm in the sender's local time zone) or available.

Skype for iPhone

Now available for download from the iTunes Apps Store

PS2 Now $99

Sony cut the price of its previous generation console, PlayStation 2, to $99, starting April 1.

Sony sold 136 million PS2 consoles since 2000.

3rd Gen Shuffle

The smallest iPod yet, the 3rd gen Shuffle is a wonder in industrial design. About half the volume of the previous Shuffle, this one packs 4 gigs of memory for the song. I'm still partial about the controls, which were located at the earphone cord, but I'd definitely have this one.

It's 4,190 pesos in Apple online store