GearWERKZ TechBlog

DICE has a resume a mile deep. The company was founded in the late 80s. Making some titles for various computer platforms, they catapulted to stardom with the release of Battlefield 1942. So I give them a by on the previous experience up until that release, which occurred in late 2002. They have roughly 8 years of experience in prime-time, AAA game development. That is why the bugs resident in Battlefield: Bad Company 2 are so inexcusable.

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PC World - Holy Trump Cards, Batman!!!

Microsoft apparently outed the outsters (whatever that means) by throwing down a mad trump card for the other two manufacturers to flog themselves in an attempt to follow up. It gave away production units of its new hardware. And may I say that it does look swanky. The new MS kit looks like a smaller version of an Alienware desktop case wannabe. That is a positive statement, BTW. The fact that the new units will retail for the same $300 as the current elite unit, concurrently stepping up the hard drive to 250GB, is a solid sale formula for me. I've already bought my second 360 and that I plan to be it for this generation of hardware. For others, though, this might just be the bees-knees.

Rotten Tomatoes - Twilight Character Guide

Fine. Shoot me. I suffered through the first Twilight movie because, as a vampire mythology fan, I felt obliged. Throw some high-powered werewolves into the second movie and I was genuinely interested in going. Throw in vampires versus werewolves in a large scale battle-scene in the third movie and you've got me pre-ordering tickets for the thing on Fandango. So if you've been too "hardcore" of a sci-fi nerd to see the first two movies (you know, the kind who watches Deep Space Nine but claims that Voyager is for sissies) then this third installment might be the point where you can finally be seen by your other nerd friends going into the theater.

Laptop Magazine - Android: the Big Dance

So you are in the market for an Android phone and you are not sure which is the best. Or you are the owner of an Android phone and you are insistent on defending your phone's honor. Whether you are a current owner or perspective buyer, I always find these little fan face-offs on LaptopMag.com entertaining. It is always interesting to see the fights you predict are going to be close turn out to be mountainous landslides and vice versa. While I've just linked to the day's competition, you can always check back to see the previous rounds results and the match for the current day. Not sure who is gonna come out on top, but I am predicting it will come down to the HTC Droid Incredible and the Motorola Droid, with the Incredible coming out as the champ.

- Vr/Zeuxidamas..>>

I feel a general malaise about tech. Maybe it is because I am coming down with a nasty sinus something-or-other. Maybe it is because I am back on the road for 2 weeks, and will not have much of a chance to use all of my tech. Whatever it is, a lot of it does not make sense. I should be reveling in some of the recent tech, and gleaming about a lot of the new stuff on the way. But for whatever reason, I just cannot get myself to pound through the dozen or so tech tasks a night that I used to.

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Location: some 10,000 feet above the planet's surface. I am attempting to tap out yet another blog post on the Archos 7 Home Tablet. Amazing that one of the things I wanted in the A7HT was a smaller computing platform to work on; smaller even than a netbook. Amazing more so, that, now in possession of one of my dream devices, I still find the quarters on an aircraft to be too cramped to work effectively.

I am on my way to Pittsburgh for some time on-site with one of our vendors to learn more about what they are doing for us. I thought it would be a good time to get everyone caught up on some of the recent hardware changes around the 'WERKz.

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Continuing my experiences with the Archos 7 Home Tablet. As I remarked earlier, efficient use of the A7HT is all about configuration, maintaining stability, and establishing your work patterns. My initial setup of the A7 was bunk. I went to the AppsLib marketplace, Archos' ghetto version of the Android marketplace (since the A7HT does not have access to the Google Android Marketplace since it is no recognized as a compatible device; as of yet, there is not a hack to enable access) and downloaded every app that looked remotely interesting. A lot of them were crap, incomplete, lacking enablement of all of the features. Within a week, specifically the first Friday after receiving the device, the A7 starting displaying the Power Down pop-up dialogue every few seconds. WHen I hit cancel, the dialogue would pop back up within 2 seconds. When I did hit power down, the device would power down, but would not restart. I would have to use the Resert pinhole on the back of the case to get it to restart. I spent the better part of the next two days reconfiguring it and setting it up again. This time I was more judicious about what apps I downloaded and installed. The next few blog posts will chronicle those apps and how I am using them for productivity. Once that is all done, I'll move on to how I have the device configured.

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1-hand hold, 1-Index finger tapping on the Archos 7 Home Tablet

Recommended for typo corrections, password entry, single entry tasks and dashboard and widget interaction

Thumb Typing on the Archos 7 Home tablet

Highly Recommended, if your hands are large enough

2-Index Finger Typing on the Archos 7 Home Tablet

Not recommended

I am actually tapping this blog entry out from my Archos 7 Home Tablet. My experience with the device has been all over the map since it arrived about 10 days ago. Perhaps most bothersome is the tendency for the cursor to lose focus in response to certain key presses on the on-screen keyboard (OSKB ). In other words, the cursor tends to jump to other spots in my document when I hit keys on the edges of the OSKB. This kind of irritable bugginess characterizes a good deal of the productivity experience on the Archos 7.

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As I sit at my MacBook Pro workstation, my Archos 7 Home Tablet is on the desk, playing a recording of the 2006 Formula One British Grand Prix. It occurs to me that it has been a long time since I purchased a video on optical media. The house is connected on all three levels via Ethernet or via wireless connectivity. I am passing a video from my Samsung Omnia II to my MBP via Bluetooth. I am left to wonder how much longer will we have any dependency on optical media?

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First of all, check my twitter feed for the thoughts that precede these; they are ones I posted throughout the first night and during initial cfg of the A7HT. Then I wrote this midday after I had more time to refelct. I'll work on consolidating my tweets from last night and post them here in a signle thread, but for now, enjoy what you can.

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In the frenzy that has occurred in the wake of the tablet craze and the release of the iPad, a lot of the tech media has felt obligated to comment on a number of areas of mobile computing that they know nothing about. One of the most prevalent trends has been one that has piqued my interest, which is taking a historical look at the deployment of tablet-style computing devices to date. Now I have typically felt that the media is egregiously uninformed about tablets, but this year the complete stupidity of most of the tech media has become acutely apparent.

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