The Duc Pond

Below you’ll find a photo album showing what I did to convert my 2007 Honda Civic Hybrid from the factory XM satellite radio to Sirius satellite radio. Start at the first picture and keep moving to the next photo to read each part. The captions explain the parts used and what was done.
Honda Civic XM […]

I’ll elaborate later, but Wii is the greatest video game platform ever created. And I do want to emphasize “platform” because it’s more than just a CPU on which games are run. There’s an amazing software infrastructure in that little box, and it genuinely changes gaming.

Gamestop (who also owns EB Games) will begin taking pre-orders for Nintendo’s Wii console this Friday, October 13. Unlike Sony, Nintendo will have over 1 million consoles available at launch, and millions more by the end of the year. No eBay selling here.
You’re probably asking, “If there’s going to be so much supply, why pre-order […]

So I’m finally replacing the 4 GB iPod mini I bought in June 2004. My new music player will be the 80 GB iPod that Apple announced yesterday. Many people are calling them Gen 5.5, as there are only minor upgrades like gapless playback, a search feature, and longer battery life. Minor, but still great […]

Despite Jeremy’s poor experience with Comcast, I got Comcast Digital Classic this week. Classic, the lowest-tiered digital option, is only 70 cents more than basic cable. You only get a few worthless extra channels, but what I really wanted was On Demand. I’m not even sure I’d use it that much, but it’s less than […]

Check out this letter I wrote to Rutgers’ daily newspaper The Daily Targum, published November 5, 2001. I figured I should paste it here because I don’t know how long the link will be good.
RU computer system is not up to speed
I nearly laughed out loud when I read Michael Mundrane’s assessment of Rutgers’ network […]

We tried a neat little tool in my Natural Language Processing class:
Gender Genie
Basically the algorithm identifies words that are used more often by males than females and vice versa. It’ll give the passage you put into it a male and female score. Bigger score wins.
I pasted all the entries on this site’s front page in […]

As I note below, I got a subscription to Sirius. I’m pretty pleased so far, but I do have reservations. Here’s my mini-review:
Sound Quality
Let’s cut to the chase. The primary reason I was attracted to satellite radio was sound quality. In that department I’m somewhat disappointed. While it’s great that I never have to hear […]

My new iPod mini is quite possibly the greatest consumer electronics item I have ever seen. So well designed and so functional. It’s great. Listening to music is so much easier than it used to be. No more CD player and switching CDs.
Once again, here’s something I posted on a message board, recycled to save […]

I’m installing Linux on my beloved laptop tonight. I’m excited. It should run insanely fast, which is good because XP often gets bogged down when I have a few programs running at the same time. Getting Slackware and Dropline to work are my top priorities tonight. My laptop will rock.