Category Archives: General Tech Stuff

Just arrived from Amazon: Lissoir’s Understanding WMI Scripting and Microsoft’s Windows 2000 Scripting Guide.

This is a big week for technology here at la casa. First, we have MacWorld San Franscisco, during which Steve Jobs announced… nothing much. Sure, the new mini iPod is cool, but for $50 more you get four (or more) times the storage by stepping up to the $299 15GB model. The new versions of the iLife apps (iPhoto, iTunes, iDVD, and iMovie) may or may not be worth $49, since at this point no one knows if they’ll be downloadable for previous purchasers. Frankly, I’m about ready to dump iPhoto because it’s slow and because it can’t print properly to Arlene’s Kodak photo printer dock. Let’s just say the jury is out. None of the other rumored announcements came to pass.
Next up: the 8 January press conference in which TiVo is expected to announce their new combined HDTV satellite receiver/TiVo unit. Since it already won an award this is a pretty safe bet, but I’m ready to preorder one and switch to DirecTV.
The third item: Microsoft’s SPOT watches will finally go on sale. Arlene tried to give me one for Christmas, but there was no way to buy one. Now, at last, there will be. With a little luck, I’ll be able to grab one in the MS company store this week.

This is very cool: a PocketPC Phone that folds up, sort of like a Tablet PC. It addresses my big beef with the Smartphone models from Motorola and Samsung– no touch screen– by folding up and over like the Clie UX series. Pretty sweet.

I bought Arlene a Kodak DX4530 for Christmas, along with a printer dock for it that can print 4″x6″ pictures. The printer part works great when you print from the camera, but whenever I try using it to print from the computer, it makes the OS X Print Center application die. I asked over at Mac OS X Hints, and tomorrow I’ll call Kodak. Very frustrating.
Update: No thanks to Kodak’s crappy outsourced Indian phone support, I figured out the problem: there’s some kind of conflict between the printer dock and Arlene’s Dymo 330 label printer. Unplugging the label printer and removing its driver allows the photo printer to work normally, at least from Kodak’s EasyShare app. iPhoto still won’t stretch a standard print to 4×6, so I have some more digging to do on that.

This is pretty cool: people have figured out how to use GM’s OnStar hardware as a standalone GPS receiver. (See this site for some samples). To me, the real value of the OnStar service are its emergency-notification features, but having free driving directions and so forth would sure be handy too. It almost makes me willing to consider buying a GM product. Almost, I said.

I got my M200 yesterday, courtesy of CDW. I didn’t get a chance to play with it much, and I forgot the AC adapter in Redmond, so my time with it has been limited. However, I’ve used it enough to form a few first impressions:

• The screen is not as sharp or crisp as the screen on my T30 or T40, nor is it as sharp as the 1024×768 screen on my old PowerBook G3. Compounding the problem, Toshiba ships the unit with a default wallpaper with lots of light colors and subtle gradations that a) makes the screen look worse and b) is ugly in se. Having said that, the extra resolution is quite nice.
• The keyboard has an excellent, snappy feel to it. Some of the key arrangements are odd (e.g. the Fn and Ctrl keys are reversed relative to the Thinkpads, and the tilde is next to the space bar instead of up next to the 1). This will take some getting used to.
• The built-in 802.11b has a hardware on/off switch– a little slider on the left-hand side of the case. Nice feature for those of us who travel on airplanes.
• Perceived speed is quite good; even though this machine has a Pentium M 1.5 and my Thinkpad has a 1.6 (with more RAM), it boots faster.
• Toshiba installs a bunch of crap on the default desktop (including demo versions of TabletPlanner and Zinio, the Office XP Tablet Pack, etc). However, they also include the full version of OneNote, WinDVD, and a drag-and-drop CD burning tool (these last two are superfluous for me since this machine doesn’t have an optical drive). IT does make the desktop look awfully cluttered.
• There are three little rubber feet at the frontmost edge of the palmrest. These are obviously here to keep screen marks off, which is nice. IBM solves this problem by recessing the screen into a frame that acts as a standoff; Apple doesn’t attempt to solve it (bah). It’s too early to tell if the feet will annoy me after typing.

I’m going to use this machine to write the last chapter of my book (once, that is, the AC adapter arrives), so I should be able to log some serious hours on it for the next two weeks. More later.

Some time ago, I posted about my misadventure in ordering a T40 without wireless connectivity. Shortly after I wrote that entry, I ordered one of IBM’s tri-mode cards from CDW, since they were expected to ship in early September. September came and went without a card. So did October and November. Finally, last week, I got four cards (one for each T40) and eagerly installed it. However, I forgot the crucial step of attaching the leads for the built-in antenna, so after I put everything back together, I found that my signal reception was really poor. At first I fumed. “Stupid IBM,” I muttered. “All this time and they ship me a card that doesn’t work.” Once I discovered my error, I was still fuming (at myself), but I have to admit to being impressed that the card got a signal at all with no antenna. It works great now, and it’s nice to have both PC Card slots back (since one of them is more-or-less permanently occupied by my smartcard reader). However, IBM’s Access Connections software still doesn’t work right; every time it launches, it tells me that my wireless driver is bad. So it goes.

What a coincidence: David Pogue and Walt Mossberg both have columns about Windows Mobile smartphones today.
Mossberg (who rather seems to have it in for MS lately) says:

Neither phone [the MPx-200 and the Samsung i600] is anywhere near as good as the Treo 600. Unlike the Treo, they lack keyboards for entering large amounts of text, so I can’t recommend them for serious e-mail users.

Pogue, for his part, is a bit more friendly:

The MPx200 itself ($300) is a gorgeous flip phone, clad in shiny black plastic that resembles the lacquer of a Montblanc fountain pen. You can recharge the battery either by plugging its cradle into a wall or, when you’re traveling light, by connecting its U.S.B. cord to your laptop – a terrific touch. Either the cable or the cradle can also synchronize the phone’s address book, calendar and e-mail stash with Microsoft Outlook on a Windows PC. The two-way updating is effortless; just connecting the MPx200 fires up the ActiveSync software automatically.

Both columns miss some key points, though. Pogue seems to have missed the fact that the Windows Powered smartphones aren’t supposed to be PDAs… they’re phones first and foremost, but they also happen to synchronize with your Outlook data. Most people will use this functionality to get mobile access to contacts, tasks, and emails. Both columns make the point that– without a touchscreen or thumb-board– these phones are inferior for heavy email use, but that’s not what they’re designed for. For an average email user, either of these phones would be fine, and I don’t think either column made that point clear.
There are a few other errors and omissions in both articles (Pogue para 5: Verizon was an American company last time I checked, their Vodafone partnership notwithstanding; Mossberg para 16: Verizon has unlimited data plans, but they also has an unlimited “Express Network” plan that counts voice and data minutes as equal). Neither points out that the MPx-200 can be had for free (with activation, natch) from Amazon, probably because an upgraded MPx-220, with camera and Bluetooth, is due early next year. Pogue doesn’t mention the difference in size and weight between the Samsung and Motorola phones; it’s substantial, with my preference being toward the Samsung (although I still love the form factor of my 7135).
Puzzlingly, Pogue doesn’t mention the slow caller-ID problem that Mossberg centered his column criticism around; I’ve never heard any reports of this from the many MPx-200 users I know at Microsoft. It’ll be interesting to see what the root cause turns out to be.
Now, I need one of these phones for the chapter on OMA/EAS security for my forthcoming book. I think an MPx-200 will fill the bill.
Update: Mossberg was kind enough to write me a note (although it was sort of testy) pointing out a couple of errors in my original post. He says that the “people in charge of the phone software” admit that the caller ID problem is real, but I reiterate that none of the real-world users I know of have complained of it. Then again, I haven’t asked them. At least he wrote back; that’s what Scoble calls having a conversation.
Update 2: David Pogue wrote me a nice note politely taking issue with a couple of points. We agree that some folks won’t want a phone without a touch screen, and we (now) agree that yes, Verizon counts as a US phone company. Now, off to figure out whether there’s a market for a Missing Manual book on smartphones.

Taking advantage of my generous partners (and the vendor’s 30-day return policy), I just ordered a new Toshiba M200. It’s fairly vanilla; the only changes I made were changing RAM to a single 512MB stick (vice 2 x 256) and a 60GB 5400-RPM drive. Adding Bluetooth apparently adds 21-28 days to ship time, and there’s no longer an 802.11g option (funny, I still don’t have a g card for my ThinkPad– conspiracy?) I can add more RAM for less money by avoiding Toshiba altogether, so that’s what I’m doing. My previous Tablet experiences were colored by the slow speed and limited RAM of the Acer C102, but this unit should have neither of those problems. Next up: a face-off between the T40 and the M200, both of which have approximately equal specs.

I signed up for my 60-day trial of Apple’s .Mac service today. We’ll see if it’s worth a hoot or not. In the meantime, you can now reach me at perobichaux@mac.com, although I don’t expect to be checking mail there very much. (I would like to experiment with iChat, though– Tim, give me a yell!)
Update: without having posted my address anywhere other than this blog, I got my first piece of .Mac spam last night. That didn’t take long.

Mike wonders who’s using dual displays. I am, and I love it. With a combined 2560 x 1024 desktop, I have enough room for multiple RDP sessions, Safari windows, Word documents, PowerPoint slide decks, and other miscellanea, and the addition of Exposé makes it even better because I can quickly pick exactly the window I need.

TabletPCCorner has a review of the new Toshiba M200. (It’s in French, which fortunately I read). It has a faster processor and disk than my current laptop, with the same screen resolution (1400 x 1050, albeit in a 12.1″ screen), plus integrated a/b/g wireless and Bluetooth. What’s not to like? Well, apart from the weight; this thing weighs more than a pound more than the Acer Tablet I had before, and its weight was just about right. Apart from that, it’s quite a powerful machine– the only question is when Toshiba will start shipping them.
Update: I was all set to complain about the gap between Toshiba’s specs and what you could actually order. When I first went to their web site last week, you couldn’t build custom configurations. Now you can. The tab for my dream machine: $4,639. Dang! That’s more my current laptop plus my previous Tablet; it’s within spitting distance of the combined price of the last two laptops I bought. Back to the drawing board.

Over at PVRblog, there’s a mention of this device, which handles streamed audio and video from a PC to a home theater… wirelessly! It doesn’t use 802.11g, but no doubt somebody will make one that does soon. There’s also the extremely cool HomePod, which can play songs in Apple’s AAC format and comes with a developer kit that lets you write your own applications that run on it.