Category Archives: General Tech Stuff

Tara points out that you can now get a $50 rebate on a Series2 TiVo. This is a pretty good deal, e.g. Amazon has ’em for $299 for the 80-hour unit (after rebate) or $199 for the 40-hour unit. Me, I’m waiting for the HDTiVo; in the meantime, I think I’m going to stuff another disk drive into mine to add some recording capacity. Interestingly, there are now 3 separate books on TiVo hacking: Krikorian’s TiVo Hacks (O’Reilly), von Hagen’s Hacking the TiVo (Premier Press; includes a bootable CD), and Keegan’s Hacking the TiVo (Wiley, not yet published).
The actual tools you need for the upgrade are freely available. In fact, I think I have a spare 40GB drive on the shelf over my head. Hmmm.

This is very cool: from Glenn’s WiFi News:

[Speakeasy’s] newest set of services includes a $49 deal that gets you all the Wi-Fi gear and support you need to get set up at home. For a short time a while back Speakeasy was giving away the gear for new customers, but that was a shortlived promotion. Speakeasy is also offering what it calls personal technology assistant which means you can talk to the same help desk person when you have a problem, instead of explaining your situation over and over to a new person each time you call.

This is especially cool because it covers new and existing customers. See, John, if you’d switched to Speakeasy when I told you to last year, you’d have an Xbox and WiFi now.

According to this story, Skype has launched their peer-to-peer Internet telephony application. It supposedly combines excellent call quality with seamless configuration and an IM-like interface. Lots of folks are raving about it (try doing a search for “skype” here), but I haven’t been able to register yet. As atog says, be sure to read the EULA.
Update: John and I had our first Skype conversation a short while ago. Once I plugged my T40 directly into the DSL modem (bypassing ISA), it worked great– no setup or configuration required. Audio quality was good, although I had better reports from John when I moved across the room and continued speaking. I also talked to the world-famous and internationally known Martin Tuip, and everything worked just as well. I’ve queried the boffins to see if they know why ISA’s blocking Skype traffic, but once I get that fixed I expect to be using it quite a bit.
Update: Skype should work with the way I have ISA configured, but it doesn’t. Mailing Skype support, unsurprisingly, has gotten me nowhere. For a free app with 240,000+ users, I wouldn’t expect a large support budget. So, plan B is to break out my old Linksys box and use it to front-end my laptop instead of ISA.

I had the Rhapsody client installed on my laptop, and I liked it fairly well; it had lots of channels, and the client had a good interface that presented a great deal of artist and album information. However, it wasn’t very useful when I wasn’t using my laptop, so I decided to fire up iTunes instead. Shazam! None of the built-in radio stations work, but a quick trip over to Shoutcast brought me more stations than I could listen to in a very, very long time. Now I can give my existing playlists a bit of a rest.

On Saturday, I took my Acer C102 Tablet PC back whence it came. I bought it in late July, so it had almost a month (including two trips to Redmond and one to Salt Lake) to win me over. The bottom line is that it’s not enough of a laptop for my needs. When in Redmond, I made a point to take it with me to every meeting I attended– but I never used it! The relatively slow CPU and limited RAM had a lot to do with it, too, as did the fact that I can type way faster (and more legibly; just ask my high school English teachers) than I can write. I still think the Tablet PC form factor has a lot of potential, especially as more customized applications like Classroom Presenter and TabletPlanner come out, and I would have liked to try using the Tablet as a presentation machine. However, all was not lost; my spiffy new ThinkPad T40 is almost as thin as the C102, and it’s hella fast, with great battery life and 1GB (expandable to 2GB) of RAM. I guess I’ll keep tabs on the Tablet world and see how it’s doing next summer; by then, there should be machines with better screen resolution and more CPU horsepower.

Famous last words: “I want one just like that.” We’re hiring someone new, so I decided to order a new T40 and give my not-so-old T30 to the new guy. This is a time-honored tradition, since John did it with his T30. I asked Peter to order me one just like John’s, never dreaming that it meant “no wireless”. Of course, John a) doesn’t travel much b) doesn’t have a WLAN at home, and c) doesn’t have a WLAN at work. Of course he didn’t order a machine with built-in wireless. I, on the other hand, use it heavily, so now I am facing a dilemma:

• Violate my warranty and slap in an IBM wireless card, which means I could run 802.11a/b (there’s an a/b/g card on their website, but I can’t find it for sale separately)
• Void the warranty and install my own card
• Try to get CDW to help me out in some way
• Suck it up and use my old Cisco PC Card adapter.

In the meantime, a word of advice: spec your own darn notebook. Update: Turns out that IBM sells a combo a/b/g card (part #31P9701 or 91P7301, depending on who you ask) so all I need to do is snag one of those somehow.

Scoble pointed out this very cool new Tablet PC application: Classroom Presenter. It’s like Powerpoint, at least superficially, but it can operate in a mode where the instructor can step through the slides while attendees, or students, or whatever-you-want-to-call-’em can see the same slides on their laptops or palmtops. This is a terrific solution for large conferences or presentations in the tech industry. For example, at MGB about 15% of the attendees to our class were not native English speakers, and many of them were frustrated by the pace of slide advances. We gave them printed copies of the slides, but that wouldn’t be feasible at someplace like TechEd. The downside is that the clients have to run a separate application (although it supports Tablet PC ink, too). I may give this a try here at el rancho and see whether it’s worth using in the kinds of environments I teach in.

I’m starting to accumulate some hours on my Tablet PC, and that’s got me thinking about whether I’m going to keep it, upgrade it to a newer model, or return it. I haven’t used my ThinkPad in a couple of weeks, but I had to fire it up yesterday to read some DVDs. I was struck by how huge it seems compared to the TravelMate. However, that led me to think more about what I need in a machine, versus what is cool and desirable-seeming. I work in three different modes: writing / editing, doing “lab stuff”, and everything else.
In writing/editing mode, I want a great keyboard and as much screen resolution as I can get. My main work machine has a pair of 1280×1024 LCDs, which is just perfect– I can have Word, lots of browser windows, and an RDC session or two open at once. The ThinkPad weighs in at a respectable 1400×1050, which is big enough to display two facing pages in Word. The Tablet has a measly 1024×768 screen, and the brightness, sharpness, and clarity of the Acer LCD is mediocre compared to the Samsung, KDS, IBM, and Apple screens I normally use. I’ve also had a hard time adjusting to the Tablet PC’s keyboard, which is supposed to be 90% of the size of a full-size unit. It’s not. The ThinkPad keyboard, by contrast, has a terrific feel and good key spacing. I’ve tried composing email on the Tablet, but I can type so much faster than I write that it’s pretty much a losing proposition.
For doing “lab stuff”, I need a machine powerful enough to run Virtual PC or VMware. The Tablet ain’t it; its processor speed and RAM are too limited to run one VM, much less two or three. I don’t have to do this often, but when I do, there’s no substitute.
Third is “everything else”. For example, working on airplanes: the Tablet clearly wins here, since it’s tiny compared to the ThinkPad. Even though the smaller keyboard slows me down, I can still get decent work done (more so because the machine actually fits on the tray table!) I really like using the Tablet PC for marking up documents in Word, for which I use the pen and Word’s comment featureFor that size bonus, I have to give up about 20% of battery life and the built-in DVD/CD-RW of the ‘Pad. That would normally be a decent trade, although while in SLC I did wish for a DVD player (and yes, I know I can rip DVDs to ISO format and watch them using a software player; I just didn’t bother before I got on the airplane.)
What about the coolness factor? Clearly the Tablet PC wins here; I love doing the New York Times crossword puzzle on the Tablet, and FranklinCovey’s TabletPlanner shows promise. Lots of Tablet PC enthusiasts talk about how they take their tablets to meetings, take notes in ink, etc. This may be cool, but I don’t go to very many meetings, so it’s not compelling for me.
Bottom line: I’ll hang onto it for another month or so before I make my final decision; after all, the more powerful Centrino machines are dropping in price, and maybe IBM will eventually release their 12″ (and hopefully higher-resolution) tablet sometime this summer.

Not that I plan to watch it, but Bravo is planning a Left West Wing marathon on Sunday, 8/17. You may wish to TiVo accordingly. (hat tip: Gartenberg).

Thanks to a tip from the world-famous Dan Fernandez, I joined the Artima Buzz; in fact, I’m now the only blog in the Windows category, although I don’t expect that to last for long. During my browsing, I found Kimber Staken’s blog, which has a lot of interesting Mac OS X and Tablet PC stuff (here’s my current favorite).

I’ve found the perfect house for us: an old missile silo. Arlene won’t have much gardening room, but think of the food storage possibilities!

That would be, at a minimum, Julie and Mike. After seeing this post on SmartphoneSource, I ordered a headset, travel charger, car charger, and battery for the whopping sum of $62– that’s less than the battery alone from Verizon (if they had any, which they don’t.) Everything except the battery arrived yesterday, but I knew the battery was backordered, so no worries there. Everything I got is genuine Kyocera gear and works like it’s supposed to. I’m delighted, and I highly recommend Dan’s Cellular.

I just found this review of a new SanDisk combination flash memory/wireless card. Must… resist… credit… card….
Actually, resisting isn’t so hard; from the manufacturer’s site, it looks like the card won’t ship until next week, and won’t have Palm OS drivers until the fall sometime.

This guy has an interesting blog, but I’m a little concerned that he named his Tablet “Bonnie”.

Scoble has some comments on tablets. He correctly points out that many customers are waiting for Centrino-based tablets from HP, IBM, and so on, instead of buying lesser-known brands like Acer. My Acer experience so far has been terrific: I bought a 9-month-old demo unit, sent it in for warranty service on Monday, and am expecting it back tomorrow (it’s already shipped) with everything fixed. That’s the same speed and accuracy of service I’ve gotten in the past from Apple and IBM. I do like the idea of a faster Centrino-based tablet, but so far the proc speed of the C102 has been acceptable, especially on a price/performance basis.