Paul's Down-Home Page

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.