Category: Computers

I don’t own a smartphone yet. That’s doesn’t mean they don’t intrigue me greatly. But the cold hard fact is the carriers make you pay a lot of money to own a smartphone. Personally, I’d like to own a smartphone without a data plan. I have WiFi here at the house and out an about there are plenty of hotspots to latch onto.

But carriers won’t let me do that. They require a data plan with your smartphone purchase. That’s only 1 of a number of examples of carriers behaving badly. The simple fact is they are bithaulers. That is, their service is really just a trumped up ISP at this point. But they don’t want people to know that, or think about that. They just want money once for moving voice bits over their pipeline, and a second time for moving data over their pipeline.

Wired has yet another example of carriers behaving badly. While I wouldn’t be using Google wallet now if I was a smartphone user, I think people should be allowed to do so if they choose. The convenience of the system is certainly alluring. But rather than compete in the “digital wallet” market, the carriers are using there gate-keeper position regarding phones in an anti-competitive manner.

It’s crap like this that give people little sympathy for the carriers.

I’ve stated before and I’ll reiterate- I think, hardware-wise, ASUS is Apple’s real competitor. The first Transformer (a tablet with a docking station that combined to form a nice netbook/laptop) was a big success. They’ve got the PadPhone coming, and now they’ve released an updated Transformer, called Prime, with a quad-core processor and it’s getting rave reviews, (the one blemish seems to be hinky WiFi performance on the eval units, ASUS says it’s a non issue.)

All told, the cost is $650 ($499 for the tablet, $150 for the docking station), so it’s still well out of my own league in terms of cost. But it’s right there when compared to an iPad2 and the Prime will also likely get an update to the latest Android software, making it even better.

Interestingly, the iPad2 still gets the nod from reviewers because of it’s App Store advantage. That’s a bit disappointing to me, as I’d really like to see a worthy competitor come up for the iPad2. But it’s also legitimate: if a customer is going to fork over $500+ for a tablet device, it ought to be easily capable of more than browsing and email. Obviously, the iPad2 is there. Not so much for Android based tablets.

While out and about today, I stopped at a Staples on the chance they’d have a Kindle Fire to check out. Somewhat to my pleasant surprise, they did have the Fire there to play with.

But even more to my disappointment was that the unit was a demo. No, not just a demo unit, a demo period. The only interaction with it was through some kind of flash application that simulated their UI that I’ve been reading about. But I couldn’t launch browse or really try anything else. What’s more, I couldn’t figure out a way to break out of the app to just get to the raw Fire functionality.

A salesperson came over and I asked him if it was possible. He verified that it was not and when I replied that was extremely lame, he agreed. He’d even tried to figure out how to shut down the app so that people could actually use the device, like the other tablets they had on sale there. But to no avail.

I left at that point, since there was no way I’d purchase a Fire without the ability to actually exercise it. Perhaps I’m just being persnickety. But it struck as extremely poor marketing on Amazon’s part.

Reading this review of Amazon’s Kindle Fire, it would seem my best bet for a tablet in the short term rests with the Nook Tablet. My overall impression from reading the review is “you get what you pay for.” It almost sounds like the Fire is about the equivalent of the Nook Color performance wise, with some pretty annoying UI deficiencies in addition. I’ll still be curious to play with it, but I’m now thinking either the Tablet will be the way to go or the way to go will be to wait.

The tablet market really hasn’t interested me to this point. But lately, I’ve started thinking a small “on immediately” device for browsing and reading in general would be nice. A stop at Best Buy revealed no shortage of options to select from; which was a surprise to me. My impressions from what I noted online was the options were pretty slim. I was clearly mistaken in the shear number sense. Although I wasn’t wrong in the cost sense- I think the least expensive tablet I looked at was $300+. A bit more than I’m willing to pay for how I see it being used.

Which brings me to the other tablet I looked at, the Nook Color. Overall, I had a very favorable impression. The interface was simple enough that in the short time I played with it at the demo counter, I felt pretty comfortable using it. Unlike a number of the other tablets I tried, there were no “hiccups” like trying to launch an app and nothing happening, or getting confused by the navigation buttons. The Nook a single hardware button a la the iPad/iPhone/iPod, and then a soft button that dead center on the screen just above that button. Using those two buttons, moving around is easy to figure out.

It had a nice heft to it and fit comfortably in my hand. I was a little surprised that it weighs under a pound, but that’s probably a good thing. The other thing I was pleasantly surprised by was the utility of the 7″ screen. Not having done any in-person research previously, I’d just assumed that the conventional wisdom about 7″ displays (too small) was correct. Having actually played with the Nook Color now, I’d say that assessment is incorrect. I had no trouble reading the display (even with small font sizes) with the device at arm’s length. The Color’s picture quality was excellent as well.

My only criticism would be there was a general sluggish feel to the operation, particularly the browser. The fella behind the counter felt the problem was the WiFi at the store. I’m not so sure about that assessment.

At $200, the Color was by far the best buy I saw out there for tablets. That said, I didn’t get one for the obvious reason- the Kindle Fire and the Nook Tablet are yet to come out. If the Tablet is just a faster version of the Color, and based on the specs that seems likely, it just might be worth the extra $50. But I won’t know that until I get a chance to play with it.

A tough time for giants of the computer industry.

Dennis Ritchie was a co-creator of the C language, easily the longest lived (outside of assembly) and most prevalent programming language around. He’s also co-author of the best intro book to a programming language, simply titled *The C Programming Language”.

Browsers are one of those software programs I’m always on the lookout for something potentially new and interesting. In particular, I have a soft spot for the minimalistic browsers. The ones that have small executable sizes and are, generally speaking, very quick. In the past I’ve tried uzbl and jumanji, in addition to all of the big boys like firefox, chrome, epiphany, safari and opera.

The problem with the smaller browsers is there always seems to be a page or site that just doesn’t work. Either iti the browser crashed, or something wasn’t supported properly, or the page didn’t render correctly, or the changes were happening to quickly to make it worth the time to customize the browser, only to have everything change and be back at ground zero.

Admittedly, some of that is my fault. That’s the price paid for early adoption.

So when I found luakit, I was intrigued but hesitant. I’m quite familiar with lua and the concept, using lua as a configuration language around a fast, compiled core browsing engine, seemed a good one. I did a little looking around and found pretty overwhelmingly positive reviews. Since luakit was already packaged in the debian system, I decided to give it a go.

And I’m pleasantly surprised to say, I haven’t used any other browser since. First off, it’s very uzbl like, right down to the spartan look of the status bar and command prompt. I don’t mind this at all, since it maximizes the viewing area. It’s highly geared towards keyboard based browsing, including link following. In fact, it’s possible to achieve all browsing without the use of a pointing device. Many standard features are provided like bookmarks, history, tabbed browsing, and quickmarks (basically, like bookmarks except it works with a couple keystrokes).

But what separates it from uzbl is the fact that luakit is tied together by lua. It uses webkit(the browsing library behind safari) and interfaces to gtk widgets for presentation purposes. The result is a browser with a fast, compiled core exposed by bindings via lua. All of the high level functionality is provided by lua code. So if, for instance, I don’t like having a statusbar on the bottom of my screen I can change a couple of lines of code and move the status bar to the top. Or, I can change the way bookmarks are displayed.

What’s nice is, I don’t have to edit esoteric configuration files, or worry about how to make a python module talk to a bash script. Everything is modifiable right in the lua code. What’s more, all of these changes can be accommodated without affecting the main program. A series of configuration files related to windows, key bindings, modes and options are all designed to be user configurable. So modification of actual source code is unnecessary.

There are other nice things about luakit (more on that in a future post), but the best complement I can pay it at this point is it’s the first browser of it’s kind I’ve used where I don’t have to keep going back to a standby. Flash content, ssl, cookies are all handled well enough that they work on all the sites I use frequently without any loss of browsing experience. As I stated earlier, I’ve used it exclusively (on both my 1015PN and my desktop) for several week now. I can’t say that about any other browser I’ve tried. I’ve always ended up back as an opera user.

I mean, let’s face it, tinkering with browser stuff can be fun, but at the end of the day it’s still got to work if I’m going to stick with it. Luakit does just that.

We purchased a Roku over the weekend. The motivator was our cable bill. Our service provider is Charter and they are basically our only cable option in this corner of the world.

Charter provides our internet and phone (via VOIP) in addition to the boob tube stuff. We’ve been very happy with the phone and internet, but we just don’t feel like we’re getting any value from our TV service. And, to be clear, we have just what I’d call a basic service where we get TWC, USA, TNT, Discovery and those sorts of channels. No HBO, no Starz, etc. Charter just instituted another rate hike and we finally decided enough.

Enter the Roku.

The original idea was to nix cable TV entirely, rely on an antenna for the “networks” (ABC, CBS, etc.) and use streaming services for any other needs. In particular, we’ve been very pleased with Netflix. The only piece we weren’t sure about was what network shows we might be able to get via streaming services.

The shows we are mainly interested in, like NCIS and Criminal Minds, are not available via streaming. Even from the CBS website, the options are slim. Further, our initial investigations into reception without cable were bleak, to say the least.

The upshot of all this is that the Roku ended up not being much of a problem solver. That’s not to say it doesn’t show some merit and promise. We established an account and got everything without any problems and we were streaming without issue pretty quickly. But working against the Roku was the fact that our Blue Ray player has several builtin streaming applications, including Netflix. So why did we need 2 boxes for basically the same service? Also counting against it is my 1015PN, which has an HDMI output. I could just as easily hook it up to our TV and stream stuff from any website, not just the ones the Roku allows.

So we’ve packed it up and will be returning it in a couple of days. Even so, I think it’s something to keep an eye on. Somewhere down the road, it seems clear that most viewing content will be available via a stream from somewhere. Perhaps we’ll revisit it then.