So my birthday is coming up and I’m hoping to get a UMPC/Netbook. I’ve been looking at them for months.
I was torn for a while as I already have an iPhone that handles just about anything I would do on a Netbook with the exception of document editing. The iPhone, though tiny, is very nice for checking e-mail just about anywhere and sending back the short replies that we have become so familiar with since the days of clam shell pagers, Blackberries, and now iPhones (and other small e-mail devices).
Another reason I was torn for a while on the idea of a Netbook is that I have a laptop that I use for business and for business travel I usually lug it around. It’s not an aircraft carrier of a laptop (it’s not a 17 incher) but it’s still large and can’t just be chucked in a suitcase or backpack. I don’t like carrying it on personal weekend trips or even longer personal vacations but often find myself doing it just so I can keep in touch (even if I’m not “technically” going to be working while away from home.
Author: Sid Boswell Page 7 of 9
My brother-in-law had an old PowerBook G4 laying around. He said it had a bad hard drive and it was just collecting dust. He sent it to me to mess around with as I figured I could at least make it usable.
Specs:
- 12″ PowerBook G4 1.33 GHz
- 256 MB RAM
- 80 GB Hard Drive
I was able to replace the Hard Drive rather easily by following the instructions at iFixit. I wanted to do a compare of speeds of doing normal tasks so I tried to install Leopard, but after the DVD spinning for a few hours I learned that the minimum requirements for Leopard is 512 MB RAM.
I love ribs and sometimes I just can’t wait until summer for some damn good BBQ. That’s where my Big Green Egg comes in. I’ve made pizza at 600°F when it’s below freezing. I’ve smoked turkeys on Christmas day in crazy freezing windy weather. I’ve done a 18 hour smoke on a brisket in the snow and a 13 hour Boston Butt in single digits.
I just figured earlier this week that Saturday would be a good day for ribs. So I bought 4 racks of Baby Backs and followed a modified 3/2/1 method:
I started by pulling the silver membrane off the back of the ribs. I then marinated the ribs overnight in the fridge by applying liberal dusting of Dizzy Pig Dizzy Dust and some Turbinado sugar wrapping in foil and forgetting. One rack in particular has one side that was quite thick.
So the weather sucked and I didn’t feel like playing any online games today. I decided to do some updates, upgrades, and play around for a bit.
The first order of business was to update my Mac and iPhone and they were pretty easy and benign (and the latest iPhone upgrade rocks). I applied all the updates to several Windoze computers or Virtual Machines, and performed all the updates for the various flavors of Linux running around the house. No problems with the basic updates. Everything went as planned.
Tweety
Twitter is all the rage. Is it the next facebook? The next version of social networking? Social network without wiress?
I created a twitter feed. You can follow me here, or you can simply text “follow sidboswell” to 40404. You’ll be requested to respond with a username and you’re off.
Twitter is like a combination of SMS (texting) and facebook. The basic question is “what are you doing now.” That can only get you so far. Do I really need to know that my friends are cooking bacon or driving to work. Is that valueable?
Rather, use clever updates to your twitter feed. Consider it a micro-blog. Follow some others that you find interesting and respond to them (using the @username command). I can think of 100 utilities for twitter, but for now, I’m going to stick with the social side of things. When I’ve mastered that, I may try some utilitiarian tasks in my professional life.
Until then…..
HDTV
So, I’ve been configuring my Mythbox as I have time. Some of my hardware arrived late, but I put together the basic PC the first weekend, installed Ubuntu and did a burn-in (I am very happy with how quiet it runs). My HDHomerun arrived a few days later and decided to interrupt my burn-in. I installed Mythbuntu and attempted to configure it. I hooked up my coax cable to the HDHomerun and ran a Cat5 to my switch and I was able to see it immediately in the MythTV configuration utility. I did a channel scan and was surprised to have 80 unencrypted hits. My jaw dropped, I had 80 HD channels over basic (analog) cable?
I need to backup here a bit and explain what I had learned through the internet and from a flier that I picked up at the local Comcast office, but even with the flier in my hand, I could not get a Comcast salesperson to give me a straight answer. It clearly states in the brochure that:
HDTV broadcast signals are included with subscription to Limited Basic Service. To receive other HDTV signals provided by the Company, an HDTV capable television set (not provided by the Company), Standard Service and an HDTV digital converter and remote are required. In addition to receive Expanded Service, Digital Starter, Digital Classic, Digital Preferred, Sports Enterntainment, Package or premium (i.e., HBO, Showtime) HDTV signals, a subscritpion to that service is required. (sic)
Mythbuntu
My DVD player, which is a Sony and only about 5 years old, is on the fritz. My Tivo, likewise 5 years old, is showing heavy pixilation which I’m going to assume is related to it’s hard drive being 5 years old and having run 24×365 and starting to go (over 43,000 hours). My (current) TV is standard definition, but I plan on upgrading to HDTV this Christmas (or sooner if my plans pan out). I wasn’t looking forward to the price of a set-top Blu-Ray player nor an HD Tivo, both of which would be limited to playing content only on the TV they were attached to, so I decided to go it alone and build a media center computer.
I poked around a lot and have setteled on an Ubuntu implmentation of MythTV called Mythbuntu. I seriously considered adding some stuff (a video capture card, larger hard drive, HDMI output, etc) to an older PC which I had just decomissioned and was planning on donating (wiped the hard drive and installed Ubuntu Hardy). However, after doing some research I decided to build a decently powered frontend/backend combination which will later be the hub of my content. I’m going to be assembling the system this weekend and plan on tinkering a few days with it before moving it into the living room. I did my research and setteled on the following hardware:
Comcast
I’m not sure when this started happening, but I can’t seem to isolate the problem and I’m assuming that Comcast is to blame. I’m running this blog on a PC in my house connected to the interWeb via Comcast residential high speed Internet. I’m keeping DNS humming along using DynDNS even though my “dynamic” IP address (via DHCP) has not changed since the Adelphia to Comcast migration (and hadn’t changed on Adelphia prior to that migration). Even before I was running this blog, I had a wiki using MediaWiki running (it still is).
Here’s what’s happening….I can add a comment or a new wiki page (which is an HTTP POST transaction) from home or remotely (outside of my LAN). However, I’m limited to the size of my comments (or wiki pages) when I’m remote (outside of my LAN). Once I get more than a paragraph or so in a comment (or a wiki page) and hit “send” my browser just hangs. Incidentally, this also happens when creating a blog post while logged in to WordPress.
Internet radio
Internet radio has come of age. For my birthday this year I asked for a slacker radio and got one from my parents. I have to admit that it’s a pretty cool toy. I haven’t bothered to subscribe as the advertisements aren’t too burdensome. We just leave the slacker player attached to my stereo and sync it every day (or so). It’s nice to have music playing all the time. It’s usually playing jazz or blues on the weekends and something livelier on weekday afternoons and evenings. Every once in a while Stacie or I run into the room where the stereo is and nix a song (Colby Caillet anyone?). It’s that interactive feature which is what’s improving Internet radio beyond the broadcast model which I’ve been listening to for years on iTunes or WinAmp (or even FM in my car….imagine that).
Slacker allows you to “favorite” a song or ban it with the touch of a button on the player or on the web player. A favorite will play more often and a banned song will no longer play on that station (like Colby Caillet). Slacker has over 10,000 stations and the possibilities are endless. Slacker has a good selection of indie stations. The drawback of Slacker is that it contains audio advertisements inserted into the stations, which you can do away with if you buy a subscription.
It seems that Apple’s cloud computing push teknology for some reason decided that only Mac OS X and Windoze would be able to use their nifty cloud computing push iPhone teknology. In other words, they have either left the open source community hanging or they intentionally pulled the plug on compatibility across platforms. Try to browse to the www.me.com from any Linux PC (unless you are running something under WINE) and you’ll get a big fat, “it ain’t like that.” This includes eeePCs, the $199 gOS netbooks sold at GoodEmployeeBenefitsmart and anybody who decides not to back down to the evil empire or use an iPhone. For all their embracing of open source, Apple seems to have left the open source community hanging.
What I’m getting at is that MobileMe does not support Linux. I’m pretty sure it isn’t a compatibility or a features issue as if you spoof your browser using a well known FireFox extension (user agent switcher) you can get it to work, but why bother? What is Apple saying to the non-Apple Hardware, non-Microsoft crowd out there?
I have an iPhone and a MacBookPro for work, but I’m pissed that I can’t have access to my address book from my eeePC or from any of my other Linux boxes.
