Paul's Down-Home Page

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.