My latest adventures!

To start with, our new GPS has arrived and now that it has seen a bit of use around town, I can say that it does a fine job.  While our Sony NV-U44 is certainly not the navigation and multimedia powerhouse that some units are, the frugal side of me says "Hey, you got a LOT of features for your $70!!"

And I think it's true. It features Text-to-Speech, lane guidance (as seen in the picture on the left), fast satellite acquisition, and gesture recognition, which allows you to wipe your finger across the screen to activate some features instead of needing to divert your eyes from the road.  There are many features missing from the unit, my favorite of which is traffic updates and internet connected features, but we don't live in an area where we are all that likely to benefit from them either.  Despite being made fun of by my wife, I'm going to continue to use it as we drive around town, just to familiarize myself with it more. 

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The second event of note is a continuation from my last post, about the resurrected Acer 2010 laptop.  The one remaining weakness the system had was a broken right-side lid hinge, which would pop out of the plastic cover when someone would try to adjust the screen angle.  I was trying to adjust it back to a usable angle and squeezed the screen a bit too hard.  The glass cracked, rendering about 80% of the screen unreadable, but still very colorful.  I set about disassembling the lid, which came apart without too much drama.  The Sony Vaio laptop, whose screen I was hoping to steal, was not giving in so easily.  I was afraid that if I pried too hard I might end up doing similar damage to the one remaining usable part from the Sony. 

After sharing my work laptop with my sister for a week and a half, Allison said she wanted to give it a try last night, and while she did crack the bezel around the screen a little bit, it really wasn't anything to worry about.  I was very happy that the two laptops we had gotten for her were so similar that they could share so many parts.  The new screen went in, and I got it all put back together without the misbehaving hinge.  Now it works the same, but we can close the lid again (woohoo!!!), and it has a glossier and brighter screen. 

Now Allie can get back to her Ubuntu lessons.  Maybe she'll want to work on importing some of her old blog posts to our new blog, as well.

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The next bit came as a bit of a surprise to me last week, as I received an email at work indicating that I am scheduled to get my laptop replaced at the end of THIS WEEK!!!!  I'm pretty stoked, as it will be my first laptop that wasn't WAY outdated by the time it got to me.  The one I'm using now, is the third shell replacement and second hard drive image of the IBM T42 I received new a few years ago. While it is a well-built machine, and not too heavy to carry around, I have longed for a wider screen for some time (especially now that I use Flock).

My new system will be an HP Compaq 8510p, which has a high resolution screen, updated processor and chipset (Centrino Pro, even), and a SATA hard drive!  I'm looking forward to burying Windows on another machine. 

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After talking The Talk, I finally walked The Walk.

I'm writing this blog entry from a newly resurrected "laptop" computer, which has just recently been imbued with the powers of Ubuntu (Intrepid Ibex, if you are curious). This was the first system bought for Allison to use as her own, and served us well for a while, but then bad things started happening to it. The right side screen hinge anchor broke, the keyboard lost some functionality, and it got replaced with a slightly updated Sony Vaio. It was also having intermittent hard drive issues, which were ended when I used it to experiment with digital video capture from the DVR, and forgot to limit the file size. The hard drive was not usable after that.

When Allie's Vaio up and died before we had fully scoped out her replacement laptop, we had nothing better to do, but to see if we could get ANYTHING up and running for her. This effort serves multiple purposes: It gives us our first stab at using Linux (our router doesn't really count) for determining if we can use it on the next laptop, it "bridges the gap" until we purchase the next laptop, and can perform as a computer for the kids later on. What it needs (and is on the way now) is a new keyboard. I'm using the wireless "lapboard" stolen from the XBOX, which had originally been used for playing Half-Life 2 on the TV with the old HTPC, sitting atop the laptop's built in keyboard. When the replacement keyboard arrives, it may grace somebody's lap once again. It has a few upgrades inherited from the Viao: like a faster processor, and twice as much RAM.

Ubuntu has been a joy to use for the most part. There have been a few hickups, but I haven't had to undo anything. The biggest pain in the butt has been figuring out how to correctly administer permissions. For those of you who might be unfamiliar, the common model of usage with Linux is that you don't USE anything with root (overlord master of all) permissions, and those permissions are only invoked when specifically needed. I can understand that just fine, but have had a hard time finding the CORRECT instructions for my particular needs. The hardest thing for me to do has been to get Flash working on Flock. It is a simple process, but was hard for me to find the right set of instructions, so there were a lot of wrong instructions for me to try out first.

Of course I now have Flock set up with all my favorite Firefox Add-ons, and have installed WINE to enable some of our favorite Windows games from Silvercreek Entertainment (Solitaire, Hearts, Spades, etc.), so in the software sense we are good to go. Ubuntu has set up ALL of the hardware available to the laptop with a minimum of effort, including our networked all-in-one printer. All I had to do was tell it to look for a printer, and it was immediately found ALL BY ITSELF!!! I don't know if Windows Vista can do that, but I know Windows XP can't. Similarly, the scanner was already known when I opened up the scanning application. I can't shout enough praises for these last two, as we have had a good amount of trouble from the HP software for Windows. This rocks!! The only other little nibble was that the volume control keys were not mapped to the correct device. This problem was fixed rather quickly though, as it was simple to find the correct control to change.

So for anyone wondering if they can make the leap, and isn't attached to proprietary devices and files they are worried about losing (Hi, iPod. I'm looking at you), try out the latest release of your friendly neighborhood linux distribution. You don't have to commit to it, as you can run many distributions from the CD to try it out.

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The Internets, Complacency, And Me.

This entry has been baking for a long time, while I have been gathering evidence against myself in observing my lack of new adventures on the world-wide-web.  While my writing upon the subject may not be all that lengthy, I think it bears some scrutiny even if only for my own self examination.

The leading indicator of my home-grown personal epidemic lies in the lack of new bookmarks and websites I actively use to check the pulse of the Internets.  There was a time when I would check in on up to 20 different websites in the course of a single day, and most of those were "news" sites, featuring a short blurb and a link to the actual content on other websites.  Now?  I only have 3 sites I chick with any regularity:

• CNET's News.com
• The Inquirer
• My personal iGoogle page.

Granted, my iGoogle page has multiple tabs, and each tab has lots of gadgets and feeds, but there are only a few links from there that actually get clicked on in any daily fashion.

A lot of the reason for my compressed internet schedule is due to my own changing habits.  I no am no longer worried about how to get the ABSOLUTE MOST game out of my computer.  I'm wowed more by the new tricks on the TiVo and XBOX 360, for which my computer may be considered a conduit, but other than that isn't really used with the same regularity.

Another reason for the lack of adventurous reading comes from many of my former favorites either being bought by other sites (possibly changing the style), disappearing off the map, or maybe I just don't feel I need it any more.  For instance, I used to check PCMag.com (when I wasn't subscribing to their magazine) on a regular basis, but then CNET bought them.  I had already been a regular user of various CNET sites, so with the exception of checking in on John C. Dvorak on occasion I don't have much use for PCMag.com any more.

So tell me, Internets, where my new adventure?  What's the next Holy Grail for me to search for?  I'd like to know. 

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e-Tools Quick Take...

Just a quick update, here:

I found a work-around for Blogger's inability to keep completed tasks from showing up in my "Blogs to Be" sidebar gadget. This was coming from a Remember The Milk task list, and has probably only been read three or four times in the correct manner. I found out how to change the feed from Atom (default) to RSS, and now it works! At least there is a workaround for Blogger's ineptitude.

Since my favorite browser, Flock, has now integrated the photo sharing services of Tinypic into its Media Bar, I have signed up as well. Another member of my household has been a longtime user of this service, for stuffing her blogs full of pictures, so I have some catching up to do.

I've added a Digg feed to the sidebar, but unlike the gadgets referencing the most popular articles on Digg, these are just my own most recent diggs. You're here (all 2.5 of you) to read my spewage, so you deserve to see the "garbage-in" side of me as well. Look for "What the heck is kEnny reading?" on the right.

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On a somewhat unrelated note, something funny happened between last night and this morning. On a whim I decided to look up the ShamWOW guy, Vince Clortho Offer. I found his Wikipedia page and used twitter to make note of it. This morning I got an email from twitter announcing that _VINCEOFFER_ was following me on twitter! How very interesting!!

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Now (or at some point, at least) It's Gonna Get Serious

... of course it will be in a fun & geeked out way. We now have two multimedia powerhouses connected to our "Home Theater," in the TiVo HD and XBOX 360, with the capability to add back the HTPC at some point as well. Both devices can stream audio and video from the our network and the internet. I'm determined to find some cool stuff to do with them.

I've been watching NAS (Network Attached Storage) trends for a long time, and there are some very compelling devices out there that are friendly to both the XBOX and TiVo, which can feed them with pictures, audio, and video. We've got lots of pictures and music already, and could conceivably be downloading TV content (instead of paying the cable company so we can record it on the TiVo) from the web.

As home networking options gain new features and speed, we'll be looking for the proper direction to go to replace our router and add a NAS box of some sort. Our current router, as steadfast and trusty as it may be, can be overwhelmed at times by the number of bandwidth hogs currently connected to it. We will need to step up to Gigabit speeds to make it through all the cross-streaming mess, and a finalized high-speed wireless standard would be nice as well. Using a stand-alone NAS should bring power savings over simply running an HTPC all the time, and keep the overall packaging smaller and easier to handle.

After reading an article on CNET about a family who dropped their satellite TV to save money, we're going to be examining some similar options. Most of the TV we watch that isn't broadcast over the airwaves is available for download or streaming. The first trick is determining what we can receive with a terrestrial antenna. If we can kick Comcast cable TV to the curb, we'll be golden!

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