Paul's Down-Home Page

Last week, I tried to clean up some of the Toshiba-supplied junque on my M200. For example, at boot the system loads a half-dozen or so programs that have no discernible value for me (like the Panasonic DVD-RAM driver). I started uninstalling things and quickly found that I’d broken the ability to switch between the external and internal display ports. I was able to fix that (about an hour before I went on stage on Tuesday), but I also noticed that the “rotate” button wasn’t working: when I flipped the screen, it would automatically rotate, but pressing the button that’s supposed to rotate the screen in 90-degree increments didn’t work. The button itself worked physically (e.g. I could make other things happen with it), but it wouldn’t do what I wanted. I fiddled, and reinstalled drivers, and finally yelled for help on an internal Microsoft email list for tablet users. (Of course, I can’t actually join the list because it’s only for employees, not contractors… bah.) Anyway, the response I got included a forwarded note from a Toshiba support engineer, and it unveiled the mystery:

When in tablet mode and the unit is rotated, the system will NOT automatically reorient the display. This requires that the Tablet Rotation Button be utilized (see graphic). By first orienting the display as desired, then pressing and holding the Display Rotation Button for 1-2 seconds, the display will change to match the new orientation.

So, the trick is to turn the computer to the orientation you want, and then press the button. Works every time. I was pressing the button and then turning the unit. I was expecting to be able to mash the button repeatedly to change to the desired orientation. This is poorly documented at best, especially since it’s contrary (but superior) to the way the rotate button works on other devices, like the Acer C1xx series.

In no particular order, a few SPOT features I’d like to see:

• Make weather for my custom cities appear in the “glance” channel.
• When I set up a travel date, make my home city weather appear in the “my cities” page on the weather channel. After all, MSN knows where my normal home city is.
• Add the ability to send IMs to the watch from the Mac MSN Messenger client. Several folks I know at MS have made this same suggestion to both the SPOT and Mac Messenger teams, but it’s apparently rather a lot of work, so I don’t know if this is going to happen.
• Provide better management of downloaded watch faces (lots of people have asked for this)
• Allow me to get alerts for flight delays on the watch. I’d pay extra for this.
• Offer a premium newswire service, with e.g. business news from Dow Jones. I’d pay extra for this, provided that the latency was still acceptable.

If you’ve got specific features you’d like to see added or change, list them in the comments, and I’ll forward it on to the SPOT team.

Toshiba’s been touting the fact that the M200 has a dual-axis accelerometer that lets the computer sense what physical orientation you have it in. I couldn’t figure out how to enable the sensor, but it turns out that you need to download a tool from Toshiba to enable it.

A weird experience last night: while I was at Elder-Beerman, my watch went totally dead. It spontaneously revived about 15 minutes later. A couple of folks on SPOTstop have reported the same problem, but no consensus on a cause yet. It only seems to affect the Fossil Abacus watch, which I bought in large part because of its $129 price– the next-closest watch is $50 more, but maybe they spent that $50 on better ESD shielding. At this rate, the watch won’t survive long enough for Thomas to inherit it when I die.
And, as long as I’m pointing out the inexplicable: for some reason, I don’t get weather for any city other than Toledo, even though I have New Orleans and Seattle listed as cities for which I want weather. The weather updates for Toledo arrive like they should (and boy, is it good to know that it’s 10° outside with a stiff wind), so this may just be a temporary glitch. Omar Shahine of Microsoft has a good review of MSN Direct’s performance in the Bay Area; it’s worth a read too.

Robbie Allen, who wrote the Active Directory Cookbook and is the editor for the Exchange Cookbook, also has a blog.

Mike Wendland blogs about whining from Ambient Devices: they want Microsoft to open the DirectBand network (which MSN Direct and SPOT use) to anyone who wants to transmit over it. Ambient makes some (actually rather cool) devices that receive data over a variety of existing networks (including pager and GPRS). However, they don’t like it that, after spending tons of money on building DirectBand, Microsoft isn’t eager to let them use it. Fancy that. Alan Reiter calls DirectBand a walled garden, and perhaps it is, but there’s no alternative technology that meets the price, size, and power consumption constraints that MS faced– given those limits, it was FM subcarrier or nothing, and I don’t think it’s fair to criticize them for not opening the network they built to J. Random Competitor.

From the “they’ll have to catch me first” department, Mike Strock points out this article on Gizmodo. Since SPOT watches have an FM radio receiver, they’re verboten for inflight use.

Here’s a move I didn’t expect: Microsoft has released version 3.5 of its Services for UNIX (SFU) package, for free. SFU won an award at LinuxWorld 2003, and it’s obviously in contention to win at this year’s show. SFU 3.5 includes an NFS server (cluster-aware and capable of running on Windows Server 2003), a gateway, and a client, plus a NIS/NIS+ synchronization server. My favorite feature, though, is the Interix subsystem, which includes ksh, csh, pthreads support, and the full GNU SDK. You get all of the standard UNIX commands, for Windows, for free. Get it now.

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