Status Update - Tech Style
February 8th, 2010Things are rough. Changes at work. Looking at a 2nd Masters. Closing. Moving. Packing. Trading out cars. It is almost too much. And all of this iPad hype has not helped. I am in an almost constant daily soul-search for determining an altruistic means of defining my own tablet needs. My own use of TabletPCs, UMPCs, and Smartphones muddy these waters. Combined with my past experience with handtop PCs way back. Uggggghhhh!!!
I've also been trying to decide whether or not the Palm Pre stays or goes. I've at least resolved that it is staying for a while. Long enough to justify the purchase of some additional accessories, most of which will just be copies of some of the ones I already own. That will be in March. But the question of whether or not it is a "good" smartphone for me has not been answered. I am concocting a sort of Smartphone Olympics; 3 sets of exercises in groups of 12 to 15 tasks to be timed and run on smartphones of different OS'. My plan is to run these myself and parse them out to others for some analysis of the time deltas.
Tablets. I've been through the full gamit on this philosophical train. First I said the iPad was insufficient because it did not run a full OS. I started looking for a comparitively priced UMPC. Then I realised I already have one; my Fujitsu U820, which I rarely use as a Tablet. Then I started asking myself questions about companion computing devices (CCDs) in general, and asking myself how I use them, and why I do not use some as much. So, I have taken my four CCDs (HP 2730p TabletPC, Fujitsu U820, HTC TouchPro, and Palm Pre), and paired them with larger computing platforms. I've also designated a specific app to primarily use on each platform for daily computing. most of the effort on these devices is to manage my numerous thought bubbles; the creative ideas, hobby tasks, and real-life stuff, that pops into my head dozens of times a day.
Right now, my Gateway P-6860FX 17" laptop is my primary project PC for the week. This month it is paired with the Fujitsu U820, where I use Windows Journal as my primary Thought-Bubble app. I keep a Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet on each of my CCDs with my projects and tasks for the week. This works well on the Fuji where I can ink on the spreadsheet once I have finished the baseline typed entries. I have also been using the Barnes and Noble Desktop eReader on the Fuji this week to read the first in the Dragonlance Lost Chronicles Series, Dragons of the Dwarven Depths.
Despite putting all of these tablet devices (all of which support digital inking) to more use, I still am on the lookout for true Tablets (which I now believe should NOT run a full OS). If yout take a look around the 'WERKz, you might notice the new skinning of the site. In the past, I would have called this a facelift, but since it was simply selecting a new skin, I can't sound all high falutin' anymore.
My latest Firefox Plugin of choice is CoolPreviews. That's it for the Status Update this week. Check back for more content on some random day of the week. Late.
- Vr/Zeux..>>
What's Been Up: Gaming
January 24th, 2010Ha. Pretty interesting. A coupe of weeks ago, I finally realized that the 32" TV in the game room has a VGA input port. So I am tapping this post out tonight on the HP EliteBook 2730P TabletPC while it is connected to the Westinghouse 32" LCD as a secondary display. (Yo can peep the setup via my TwitPic feed) Earlier tonight, I viewed a few minutes of Last Chance Harvey, a movie I have encoded on my NAS, sending it to the TV using VLC Media Player. I now have iTunes blaring out fom the TV's speakers while I write this entry (Finger Elven's "Sad Exchange", from the Daredevil Soundtrack). I'll be working with this setup for the remainder of the week (minus the two days of business travel I have scheduled). Since I'll be out of pocket for a couple of days, I've decided to get a little gaming in over the weekend.
What Will They Call the Apple Tablet?
January 20th, 2010I am even starting to doubt that Apple will announce anything remotely resembling a Tablet Computing device next week. I far more so expect to see a touchpanel equipped iMac. But if they do let loose with what half of the tech/gadget community has been talking about for the last three months, I highly doubt that will be called the iTablet or iSlate. The reason is because these labels have been used before.
Windows 7 Upgradin': It Ain't That Bad
January 18th, 2010
Flash backwards to the summer of 2009. There were some who were not enamored of the advance buzz they were hearing about the upgrade schema from Windows Vista/XP to Windows 7. I will not get into all the various ways to achieve an upgrade here. Mostly because there are so many that I would likely confuse myself. I have been able to do the upgrades with no problem, but articulating those methods to other people on how to do it makes me dizzy. Suffice it to say that there are two main ways to do it. One upgrades your system in place and so all of your icons and folder structures and so forth reappear in roughly the same place you left them. And, by and large, you supposedly do not need to worry about backing up all of your files. The second is destructive, completely (for the most part) overwriting everything on your Operating System Hard Drive and doing a complete write-in of the Windows 7 OS. This is what is called in tech circles a "fresh install". In some cases, this latter method is the only way to upgrade to Windows 7. When people heard this last year, there was a lot of moaning and groaning. Now, 3 months since its release to retail chains, the complaints are not so much.
Updated GameWatch over on the Other Half
January 17th, 2010Tablet Requirements
January 15th, 2010Thanks CES. There have been more Tablet discussions than I can keep up with. And I mean generic Tablets...Tablets being rolled out by all of the manufacturers. No, the Apple Tablet is not the only Tablet being released on the planet. One of the more productive conversations I was involved in was over on Carrypad.com. Productive for me anyway, because in ruminating upon my response, I finally came full circle to defining my specific needs for a Tablet. And here they be:
Technical Journal
January 12th, 2010Well, it has been a long time but I am actually drafting this blog post
in a local file (for tonight). After the last several months of finally giving myself over to the cloud, a set of circumstances has led me to going back to
writing to a local file. My LINUX boot on the Acer Aspire Timeline 4810T
is the most secure system I run. One of the configuration items I have
set is a refusal to take cookies from any site in my browser. As a
result, certain things do not work in my browser. Like my login to
iGoogle, through which I typically go to my Google Docs folders and
draft blog posts there. I also can not log into my Blog anyway, so
either way I am, right now, left to draft this locally and then post it
via some other means. So I am drafting this one in Tomboy Notes, a neat
little sticky app for Ubuntu.
Technical Journal
January 5th, 2010I'd rather be at CES. Really. If there were one thing that I could be doing, I would rather be in Las Vegas, getting no sleep, living on corn dogs, and covering the latest in tech product development. But alas, such is not my lot. So, the question is, what have I been doing while I remain here, in between keeping up with the latest CES news from the web.
Like a lot of people, I have used the holiday break and the start of the new year to wash, rinse, and prepare to repeat in 2010. I have taken a long look at the way I have been doing things in my technology hobby world, and have determined some things need to change. Some of those things are just my OCD kicking in. Some things have required some time to implement, and that sucked up a good chunk of the time over the break. Which was ok, since I was snowed in for a chunk of the break anyway.
Quik Hit - the Tech Sites I'll Be Tracking for January
January 5th, 2010Back and Forth in the Cloud
December 28th, 2009It appears that I am going to go through this about once every two or three weeks. That is the flitting back and forth across the line of whether I think the Google ChromeOS makes sense or not. And if it does make sense, where am I going to use it? I recently went back and looked at some of the articles on the OS, and some of the videos and commentary by other bloggers, in an attempt to reassess where I am on this thing. Right now, I am back on the side of it not making sense.
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