Category Archives: Technology

Apple, Microsoft, Technology

XPS One – Nice Try, But…

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Dell announced their XPS One model and I’m a little shocked that the prices are so high. The sticker shock is reduced as you get in to their higher-end models, but for some reason they all only have a 20 inch screen. You can’t go any larger. They’ve obviously tried to model their new line after the iMac, but all they’re going to do is impress people who have never seen an Apple iMac before (especially the new models released earlier this year).

I would have thought that a company like Dell would really shake things up with some aggressive pricing, but that just isn’t the case. Another thing they have going against them is that Vista appears to be the only OS they’ll install.  It seems that that their recent back-tracking to offering XP and their recent option of Linux would have led to choices for consumers, but … nope.

Microsoft, Technology

Still Making Waves, Huh?

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Today for some reason I saw lots of articles discussing Vista and its adoption (or lack thereof) by the consumer as well as the business user. It’s been almost a year since Vista was released and people who are giving it a shot only recently have kind of re-started a wave of negativity that began right around the product launch.

It is not that I expected Vista to change between January and today. But as I read these articles that have started to sprout up again I can’t help but remember the way Vista was “received” by Microsoft employees when I was on contract up there earlier this year. People often complained about having to reboot the computer when waking it from sleep because the screen stopped working. They’d complain about the performance. Others just complained because they were happy with XP. But alas – it was a corporate directive that (what was initially a select group of) employees install Vista.

The other dynamic I noticed involved Microsoft employees wanting to be supportive of the company and voluntarily installing Vista on their newer laptops. These people would invariably run in to the known issues and just accept them as part of The Microsoft Tax.

I’m quite curious to see what Microsoft does with Windows 7 and to what degree (if any) the comment “Vista will go the way of Windows ME”  will come true. How many people will just stay on XP, given what we know about Vista, and wait until 2010 when Windows 7 is targeted to be released?

Technology

Trust: A TiVo, a Spare Hard Drive, and a Good Guy

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I own a Toshiba TiVo with built-in DVD burning, and it ships with a 120 GB hard drive. If you set your TiVo to record programs on the lowest possible quality (which is noticeable when you watch it), this amount of space is probably fine. However, when you want to record things at high quality (one level below “best” quality) the number of hours significantly decreases.

Following the instructions of Bum Wine, I replaced that 120 GB drive with a spare 250 GB drive that I had. I am happy to announce that by following his detailed instructions to the letter, everything went PRECISELY as he said it would, even though my TiVo uses IDE as opposed to SATA drives.

I love it when I discover people like Bum Wine who learn something, perfect it, and then choose to give it back to the public – especially when they have a talent for doing it in terminology that a lot of people can easily understand. 

On another note tied to the same subject, I am grateful that Linux provided the solution to copy ALL of my programs and settings from my original TiVo drive to the new blank one. I also must say, based on my experience, that it’s obvious why Mom & Pop are not adopting Linux as their OS. At this point in time, it’s truly for the tech-type user.

Thanks Bum Wine!

Apple, Microsoft, Technology

The Times They Are A Changin'

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It’s a very interesting time indeed.

Rob Howard, formerly of Microsoft, recently announced that he bought a fifteen inch MacBook Pro to use as his only laptop. This came after Scott Guthrie, currently a General Manager at Microsoft, recently mentioned the pricing of a MacBook Pro in his blog when talking about what hardware helps with performance.

Two years ago I would have been blogging about how Macs are all but extinct and how people who need to get actual work done should be on Dell or IBM hardware running Windows. Now look at me. My, oh my, how things change!

Microsoft, Technology

Halo 3: My First Thought

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Besides the script, how exactly is this different from Halo 2 and Halo 1? The graphics don’t seem any better (based on my limited progress through the game), and I expected something a little more than running through the woods killing the same creatures that were in the first two games with the same weapons. Thankfully I got my copy from the company store so I didn’t have to drop $60.

I think Halo 3 will fall into the realm of “great multiplayer” games, cuz the single player mode just bores the crap out of me.  

Apple, Technology

Great Mod for the Dock in Leopard

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I know I’m not the first to blog about this, but my good pal Brad Wilson (the DotNetGuy) told me about a single command you can execute that turns the dock from this:

Dock Before

(which is visually impressive for a day or two, then it just looks cluttered because of all the eye candy they put in) to the 2D version, which looks like this:

Dock After

There is still some transparency (it’s not just icons on a black background) but this looks so much cleaner. If you’re interested, open up a terminal window and execute the following command (it may appear on two lines, but it should be entered on a single line):

defaults write com.apple.dock no-glass -boolean YES; killall Dock

Apple, Technology

Leopard iChat Video Conferencing

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I’ve done video chats with people using iChat on Tiger and it’s been mostly great. But I had never done a video *conference* chat, where you can video chat with two or more people at the same time until this morning when I tried it on iChat for Leopard.

I did a video chat with three other people, and the way iChat was able to handle it without a hiccup was pretty amazing. The UI is very impressive and the way you can still share photos and files and they way there is no lag when people are talking just puts it light years in front of anything else I’ve ever tried. 

Technology

HD, AVCHD, Hard Drives, SDHC Cards, Etc.

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First, there’s the Sony HDR-SR5. I have a ten year old Sony Handycam that I like reasonably well, and I know Sony makes good stuff.

Second, there’s this Panasonic HDC-SD1. This is the one that records on to SDHC cards. They make 8 GB cards now, so I could probably get over 90 minutes of HD video on one card, but I’m not sure if SDHC is a good idea or not. They do have the benefit of being swappable, so if I run out of space I can just put a new one in. You can’t do that with a hard drive. But then again, the card only stores 90 minutes. The hard drive stores something like 20 hours.

I’m interested in opinions and guidance. It’s a big purchase. Does anyone have anything good or bad to say about these two cameras? Does anyone recommend a different camera? Is there something significant or worth having that I’m giving up by looking in this particular price range?