Category: Computers

To temporarily sate our family’s ever-increasing need for digital storage, we recently purchased Western Digital’s MyBook Live, the 2 terabyte variety. Incidentally, I remember when we got the Wife’s first computer about 10 years ago and I outfitted with a “massive” 100 gigabyte hard drive and told her “I don’t think we’ll ever fill that up.” When we did fill that up, we purchased a 500 gig drive and I made the same comment. Now we’re purchasing terabyte sized drives, and I’m not making that comment anymore.

Anyway, since it’s a recent purchase I can’t speak to the longevity of the product, but I can say that it’s very simple to use and setup. I didn’t bother with the device setup CD because all it does is discover the device on the network. Being the network admin around these parts, it took me all of 15 seconds to find the device and browse on over to the web based setup. I was able to assign it a static IP and create the new shares without too much problem. Although it did take a little long for the device to come available at the IP I assigned it. I had some shares setup a few minutes later and voila, I was backing stuff up onto the drive lickety-split.

But the ease of use isn’t what makes this product intriguing to me. Rather, the OS running under the hood is what made it intriguing. It’s running a version of Debian, Lenny to be specific. Further, it turns out that it’s quite straight forward to gain access to it’s innards. The device has an ssh server built into it that can be enabled via a hidden web page. Using ssh I can fine tune the device in anyway I see fit, including installing new packages to extend the devices functionality.

So I’ve unexpectedly come across a new toy. Should be interesting to see what else it can be made to do. Not a bad value for $150.

The Wife’s desktop has been flaky for awhile now. I’ve suspected there was only one real resolution to the problem. I didn’t want to go there, but there’si been no selling the Wife on alternative solutions. So we purchased Windows 7 this weekend to install on her laptop and desktop.

The hardest part of the process was downloading a viable image from the Microsoft store. After numerous attempts, I finally hit paydirt with an install DVD that I burned last night. This was after a USB stick was trashed in my attempts to create an install image on it.

The install itself was painless enough. After telling it the language, the only other info requested was a username, password and computer name. I was even able to install all of the updates after the initial installation completed, as well as Thunderbird for email.

We’re waiting for some RAM to showup before we can install things on her desktop. After that, with any luck my interaction with Windows 7 will cease.

Well, sort of anyway. Behold! The Wall-E Lego robot. Just don’t let the kids see it- I’m pretty sure it’s not available for Santa yet.

Reading a review of Nokia’s new N9 smartphone, I can’t but feel its such a shame that Meego’s future is so bleak. Sounds like they have a real nice product that could have gone somewhere. The video certainly buttresses that case, showing a sharp looking phone with what appears to be an extremely simple touch UI. Alas, with Nokia basically a subsidiary of Microsoft, it’s unlikely we’ll ever know what the product line’s potential could have been. Too bad, but that’s technology for ya.

Still being a netbook enthusiast, I think it’s worth pointing out this little tidbit of news about Asus and its EEE line. Asus will be offering Ubuntu loaded EEE’s in 3 distinct models. I suppose this could mean a few things. For one, Microsoft may be starting to lose some of its clout with manufacturers. For another it could mean that even with whatever subsidies MS is giving Asus, the margins on their products are flagging and Ubuntu offers them a chance to improve the situation. It could also mean that acceptance of Android has diminished the “fear” factor when it comes to Linux. I suppose it could also mean that only hackers are interested in netbooks anymore.

Whatever the reason, I hope the decision meets with some success.

Well, I followed it this far so I might as well finish it up. Asus has indeed unveiled a combination phone and table, called Padphone (unfortunately). Name aside, I still like the idea and this would definitely be high on my list if the concept is still around when I’m ready to go with a smartphone.

For completeness, here’s another article.

The quick rundown on this guy is the tablet, or pad portion is merely a display/battery/phone holder. The phone itself has all of the smarts. From a pricing perspective, that makes sense- it minimizes R&D and part cost on the pad portion so the overall cost can be kept down. I also tend to think it makes the system more robust since there are fewer points of failure. Supposedly, extra features are “unlocked” when the two are combined. Not sure what that means.

So the questions become, how well does the system perform together? How well do the phone and tablet pad dock together? How much does it all cost? Seriously flubbing on any one of those could be a killer.

The comments at the second link are interesting, in that people seem to either love it or hate it. The last product launched with that kind of response was the iPad, which we all now know was a dismal marketing flop, ahem. Since I’ve only ever thought of the tablet/pad as a big phone, I really think this concept could take off. But if I’m in the minority and the rest of the world needs/ wants these devices differentiated, then I don’t think it will fly.

If all goes according to plan for Asus, we’ll get some more answers come Christmas.

A couple of days ago, I noted an Asus related find by Engadget. Well, they have a follow-up on their site now that tends to confirm my suspicions. It looks like the odds-on money is for a tablet-phone combo. My first impression is to like the combo: most tablets have some kind of cell service bundled with them, smartphones anymore require the same service, so why not kill two-birds (Angry or otherwise) with one stone? Pricing and spit-and-polish will be a key here.

I’d say this news is further evidence for my theory that Asus is Apple’s main competitor.

Engadget points us to a new product from Asus to be unveiled a little later this at Computex. The tag line is a rather tantalizing one “Break the rules: pad or phone?” Considering Asus has created the EEE Transformer that is exceeding expectations, I certainly have some ideas what it could be.

Based on their success with hardware designs, I’m wondering if anyone else has had the thought that Asus is quietly becoming Apple’s main competition?

Last night I completed the first step in “fixing” my new 1015PN: I removed Windows Starter from it. Before doing so, I’d been playing with Debian Live to see how well it would run. The answer is pretty simple: very well. I was even able to use the Live image and install it to the 1015’s hard drive as an initial install. The nice thing here is the minimal nature of the Live image to begin with made the initial install lean and mean.

The other nicety is I was able to workout some of the configuration stuff ahead of time, rather than having to guess during th install process or figure it all out post install. For instance, I was able to bring my mutt and ssh configuration over and verify the functionality before committing anything to disk. The only gotcha was the wired setup which was lost for some reason during setup. That ended up being straightforward to fix and I was up and running shortly thereafter.

I’ll be playing with it more. I’ve got a debian/testing setup running here and performance is much improved over my old 900. One thing I’ll be doing is ditching LXDE. It’s nice, but I’m too used to awesome or dwm as a window manager. Resorting to the trackpad to get around the desktop is a hassle. I’ve come to prefer a keyboard driven approach.

I’ll have more later- it’s too nice out to spend the whole day banging away at this.

My EEE 1015PN has arrived. Unfortunately, my memory upgrade has not, so I’m stuck with Win7 for the moment.

UPDATE:
Wow. An hour-and-a-half after turning it on, I was finally able to actually use it. The best part? After finishing the “initialization,” Win7 put up a banner that counted down 1 minute to the reboot. Personally, I think it would have been AWESOME if they had just done the reboot without any notification.

At any rate, leave it to Microsoft to come up with an OS that can bring any hardware to it’s knees. I may play with Win7 just to compile a list of complaints.