Category: Computers

Quote my brother regarding picking a new computer:

I figured as much, but no matter how long you wait, if you give it another month, there will be another option. So, basically, you have to figure out what is good enough, and then pull the trigger. If it is on the market, it has already been hacked, that is just the way those guys work. So, if you find one that seems to be powerful enough and have a relatively universal compatibility interface, like USB or Bluetooth, then roll with it. Again, time is only going to create more options, and that is a blessing AND a curse of technology.

After reading this, I realized there wasn’t much point in waiting. I’m not going to get the “new hotness” because it will be overpriced and have no track record for reliability. The netbooks I’ve been considering have been around awhile and thus are known commodities. Plus, they’ve come down in price. There’s really no point in delaying for the “next best thing” when it really isn’t an option, from my point of view. The ones I’m looking at are as good as can be had in the form factor I want.

So I’ve ordered the Asus EEE 1015PN (Yes- in blue). I also got the memory upgrade because it was cheap ($25). So there it is.

I’ve been looking into possibilities for a new netbook. Part of me is surprised to find that there really aren’t a lot of good choices out there. Part of that is my own criteria for a netbook- basically a small sub-$400 laptop with limited resources. By small, I’m limiting it to anything smaller than a 10″ screen. Of course, with the explosion in the tablet market I guess I shouldn’t be totally surprised. Netbooks are slowly getting replaced by these lighter, slightly less traditional computer machines.

I was very intrigued by the Acer AO521, but it seems to be made of unobtanium and it doesn’t look like that’s going to change any time soon. After that, the only other manufacturer I’ve seen that I’ve liked is Asus and the 1015PEM and 1015PN models. Both have dual core Intel Atom processors. The big difference is that the 1015PN has Nvidia Ion2 for the graphics, giving it a considerable performance boost. Not surprisingly, the extra performance comes at the cost of battery life.

Between the two, my preference is for the 1015PN. But I’m still kind of curious to see what else might come along this year. So far, there doesn’t appear to be much though.

Sometime around 3 yesterday afternoon, our router upped and died. It was an old Linksys model router/ firewall from before Cisco bought them out. It’s at least 7 years old and had served us faithfully that whole time, though not without the occasional glitch. It always managed to recover.

I wasn’t able to nail it down as the culprit until well after the initial problems were discovered. We’ve had issues before and previous experience had taught me that such problems were usually traceable back to our cable modem. This time proved the exception to the rule. In a nutshell, the router has a 4-port switch which became unable to maintain a hardware link for longer than a second or so. The LED’s were flashing wildly. I allowed it time thinking it might settle out; however, such was not to be.

This is the bugger I’ve enlisted to replace the Linksys model. I chose it because of the 8-ports; making my hookup a little cleaner. Previously, I had a second 4 port switch connected in order to give myself enough hookups. I also have one less power adapter to plugin. The reviews I’m reading aren’t all that positive, so I’ll have to keep an eye on it. Think I’ll be holding onto the box and stuff just to be safe.

The reviews not withstanding, I’ve been able to duplicate the setup from my Linksys, including DynamicDNS, port forwarding and so forth. I’ve also modified the admin username and password, so no mischief out there. Besides, the setup app isn’t available from the web.

For the now I have internet connectivity again. Hopefully this unit proves as reliable as the one it replaced.

I’ve got an HP Deskjet printer attached to my computer that inexplicably stopped working. Since the printer is housed on a sliding shelf inside my desk and the power light was still on, I immediately began trying to figure out what might have gone wrong with the software. So I turned debugging on and somewhere in the middle of the debug stream, was a line that basically read “Unable to open device.”

Hmmm. What could that mean? I had initially thought the problem was with one of the many layers of software between my on-screen page and the device driver. This error message indicated something much more fundamental. Well, I’d had an issue with the fan and there had been some power blips recently, perhaps the USB cable had disconnected from the computer or I had a bad USB port.

So I check the back of the computer and the USB cable is connected. Next, I switch the cable to another port. But I still getting the same error. Now, I figure I’ll just delete the printer from CUPS and try to reinstall it (This is not the recommended way to fix a printer connected to a Linux box. But it wasn’t working anyway, so I figured I had little to lose.) Now I discover that CUPS can’t find the printer, so I restart cups and try again.

Still nothing.

How can that be? Toggle the printer power; restart CUPS; try to find the printer again.

Same result.

Alright, time to look at the back of the printer.

The USB cable came unplugged from the back of the printer. Grrrr. Stupid bad assumptions. From there, I had everything running properly again in less than 5 minutes.

I’m blaming the kids for this one. They did … something … somewhere along the way. I know it.

I was cleaning my spam folder out just now and noticed that I had upwards of 10000 pieces of spam. The number seemed hard to believe because I typically keep about a year’s worth of spam around in case I need to retrain my spam filter. Usually, that means I’ve got around 4000 spam mails.

So I checked things out: for the 11 months from January 2010 thru November 2010, I had about 4000 spam mails. Since then, I’ve had almost 6000. So in less than 3 months time, I’ve received over a typical years worth of spam.

Guess the spam generators have kicked into high gear.

I was able to really capitalize on my Pandora subscription.

That stupid, insipid song The Christmas Shoes started to play on a Christmas station that the Wife had created. I banned it from the station before it got to the second note. I’ll be equally diligent with any other versions of that song the server tries to slip in.

Totally made paying for the Pandora One subscription worth it. In fact, the prospect that I can escape a Christmas without having to listen to that stupid shop owner get conned by the little kid over a pair of Christmas pumps makes me all “tingly” inside. Oh, and after the kid got those shoes off of that shop owner, he went down the street and scored some candy canes from the shop down the road for his “sick sister.” Then he went to the corner, lit up a cigarette and had himself a good laugh. That’s in the unrated version of the song.

Anyway, now I can have a Merry Christmas.

I’ve been hearing a lot of rumblings related to Google’s Chrome OS, but I really didn’t understand what all the hub-bub was about. I figured it was a minimal sort of software OS, but beyond that I really didn’t know much more and hadn’t seen anything to offer clues.

Here’s the first article I’ve seen giving a reasonable high-level view of Chrome. The idea is really simple- the browser becomes the UI.

Google has also made a lot of other decisions. For instance, there is no hard drive, therefore no local storage. All storage is online. This takes away most, if not all, of the customizations associated with computers. All computing is accomplished via cloud computing- funny how computing is going back to its roots as essentially dumb terminals hooked up to a mainframe. Obviously, there isn’t a mainframe involved here- rather some server and the terminals are a smidge brighter than “dumb terminals.” But not by much.

The article also mentions current problems with Chrome applications. More specifically that more are needed. Though if Chrome catches on in any kind of way, I expect that problem will take care of itself.

There’s currently no pricing info available. With the reduced hardware requirements, I expect it will be cheap- at least netbook cheap. Chrome could push entry level computing below the threshold the current crop of netbooks has established. Especially with the likes of Acer involved. I’d expect to see it in tablet computers as well, possibly even higher end cell phones though at this point no touch-interface UI functions are available.

Based on this reading, Chrome isn’t something that I’d be interested in. I like being able to make the computer do what I want it to do. In my world view, computers are supposed to be flexible. Chrome to offers flexibility on it’s own terms. But apparently that’s considered a feature, not a bug. Google might be right- I’m under no illusion that I’m representative of the computing population. It will be interesting to see if it catches on.

This may be the answer to the cell phone monopoly. There’s certainly some exciting buzz about the prospects of it. Perhaps if it were paired with mesh networking, we’d have a real competitor to cell technology.

It’s only speculation at this point, since there are no devices that can use these new bands. But the fact that there’s more unlicensed spectrum to play with isn’t a bad thing.