tech
- Cheap-o Palm Zire 22. Does most of what I need, but has a lousy screen (160x160 res) and is under-powered. $99.
- Palm Tungsten E2. What I have right now. Causing problems after 9 months. $199.
- Palm Tungsten TX. Bigger screen than what I have, plus it has Wi-Fi built in. $299.
iPod Replacement: A for Effort, D for Results
My refurbished iPod showed up via UPS late yesterday afternoon. I have to give Best Buy full marks for sending a quick replacement; they said 3 - 5 business days, and it ended up being only two. They sent an iPod identical to the one I had before (20 GB 4G, white), though they had obviously cleaned this one up, buffed out the scratches, etc. It looked good.
So last night I hooked it up to the laptop to reload the 4100 songs that belong on my iPod. The first time I tried a sync I got a weird Windows delayed write error. Strange, I thought; maybe I just jiggled the cord at the wrong time or something. So I tried again. The second time, it managed to sync about 2 GB worth of music, then stopped syncing. When I disconnected it and tried to play the music from the iPod, uh oh. The iPod didn’t show any music on it at all. When I reconnected it to the PC, it gave me a nasty error and told me that I would need to re-download the iPod firmware and reset it.
At least running iPod firmware updates isn’t so tough these days; it did make me dig up my wall power charger, but I found that and completed the reset. Then I set it up to sync again. As I watched it gallantly attempt to copy the music, I started listning to the iPod - not to the music, but to the device itself, and discovered that the hard drive in it sounds sick. It’s clicking too much, spinning up and then quickly spinning down; I think I found the source of the problem. Again the sync died after 2 GB of transfer; this time it shows that the songs are there, but it locks up if I actually try to play any of them.
So after work this afternoon I will be heading back to BestBuy with my refurbished iPod (still in box) and my service plan paperwork (still conveniently accessible - hadn’t refiled it yet). I am sure they will have me send it in and get yet another refurbished one. I can only hope it goes better than this one did. I think I have to have three replacements die before they’ll actually just give me store credit. :-( I’d be happy enough just to have one that works.
Taking the Plunge to Dish
It’s been a couple of months since I did the math and realized that Mediacom was no longer a good deal for our household. Let’s review. Mediacom provides us digital cable and high-speed internet. They have repeatedly raised prices over the last two years (including a $10/month upper over the past 3 months). They had a real pain-in-the-backside dispute with Sinclair that caused us to lose one of our local channels for a month. We chose to go to Mediacom two years ago now when we dropped our home landline and went to cell phones-only; at that point, Qwest didn’t have the option of getting DSL without having a land line, which priced their service out of our range.
Fast forward to today. Qwest now has the option of getting DSL even if you don’t have regular phone service. Dish Network has an option that will give me pretty much all the same channels I have now. I’ll get a few added benefits from Dish like a dual-DVR system. (The one downer about Dish? I don’t get Versus in the top-200 channel pack, which means I won’t get to see much NHL next year. But heck, for what I’m saving per month, I could order NHL Center Ice next season and still save money.) When all is said and done, we’ll save $35/month for the first year, then when the Dish discount expires, we’ll be saving $25/month. That is, as Bullwinkle J. Moose says, antihistimine money. (“Antihistimine money?” “Not to be sneezed at.")
So for Qwest DSL, you can either buy the DSL modem for $50, or you can lease it for $5/month ad infinitum, or you can get one from Best Buy. Normally I’d assume Best Buy would be the worst deal of them all. But Best Buy has this deal where if you sign up for Qwest DSL while you’re at the store, you get the DSL modem for free. That’s right, free. No mail-in rebate; they just walk you through the online signup, then they take the modem, throw it in a bag, and hand it to you. I was amazed. The signup went smoothly, appears to have made it to Qwest OK (I got a confirmation email last night), and it’s definitely the same DSL package I would’ve signed up for if I signed up directly from Qwest. So good on you, Best Buy. Now if I get my refurbished iPod yet this week and it’s satisfactory, Best Buy will be on my “very good” list for the week.
Tonight I’ll stop by the satellite TV place on the way home and put in my order for Dish. When I checked with them a few weeks back, the lead time on installs was only a couple of days. I’m guessing I’ll get an install Friday afternoon or Saturday. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that it all goes smoothly.
iPod: the continuing saga
Took my iPod with the bad battery and service plan back to Best Buy today. They have to send it in for service, and gave me the option of either having my iPod serviced in about 2 weeks, or in the quick replacement plan where they send me a similar iPod, refurbished, right away - i.e. 3 - 5 business days. I opted for the latter option - the quicker the better, and I’m not tied to my particular piece of hardware - I just want something that works.
I’m hoping it ends up being more like 3 business days instead of 5, but then, I’m just awfully impatient sometimes. We’ll see how it goes.
iPod Blues
I’ve had my 3G 20GB iPod for two and a half years now, so it’s no surprise that the battery was about due to go. Well, it pretty well happened last week; I could charge it overnight and still not get more than about 30 minutes worth of play out of it. :-(
When I bought the iPod, I shelled out an extra $50 for the 3-year service plan, since the Best Buy associate assured me that it would cover replacing the battery, and I knew that batteries were the iPod’s weakness. So when I get a chance this weekend I will be heading to Best Buy to see what they’ll offer me for service options. I think it’s unlikely that they’d just offer me a replacement, though if they wanted to offer me $300 towards a new iPod I certainly wouldn’t complain. More likely they’ll tell me I have to send it in for service and be without it for a month. Ugh. I guess I’ll see. A month would be a long time to go without my iPod.
How quickly we get attached to these electronic gizmos.
A much-needed improvement...
I’ve been using Google Reader for some time now as my feed reader, and one of the more frustrating things has been its really bad email feature. When you find a blog post that you want to share with a friend, the email feature should make it easy, right? Unfortunately, Google Reader ended up dumping a bunch (but not all) of the text from the post in a horribly-formatted email. If I were Google I would’ve been embarrassed that it was even an option. It was that bad.
Today, though, I find that they’ve updated the email feature. Now when you click it, it just opens a little panel right in the blog post, lets you type in an email address (which it will auto-fill from your gmail address book if possible), and add a personal message. The email that it sends out then looks good; it includes all the original formatting, pictures, and a link back to Google Reader. Very nice.
Yet another reason to consider moving to Google Reader if you need a feed reader.
Random Thought #2
I’m sitting on my PC waiting for the Microsoft Visual C++ .NET development suite to install. And on one of the little information boxes that it brings up while I’m waiting, it highlights one of the benefits of MSVC++.NET:
A “mature and intelligent” developer community? Intelligent, perhaps, but when I think about most of the coders I know, mature?!? :-) To quote Groucho Marx, “I’d never join a club that would have someone like me for a member.”
New toy coming...
Thanks to some unexpected cash influx, I was able to purchase this earlier this week:
It’s a Nikon D70s, a quite nice Digital SLR camera. Only 6 megapixels, but that should be plenty for me.
Fedex promises it’ll be delivered tomorrow… can’t wait. Looking forward to posting more pictures here… you can be bet I’ll be taking a lot of pictures. :-)
Google Reader adds "sort by oldest"
Finally! This was my biggest gripe with Google Reader up until now; the only chronological sort option was newest-to-oldest. But I don’t want to read that way; especially on the conversational blogs that I’m subscribed to, I want to read the conversation in order the way it happened - oldest-to-newest.
So I rejoiced this morning when I saw on the official Google Reader blog that they have now added an oldest-to-newest sort option. Woohoo!
Goodbye FeedLounge, Hello, Google Reader!
I’ve been using FeedLounge for several months now (ever since they came out of beta!) as my online feed reader. It has, without a doubt, the nicest UI (user interface, for my non-geek readers) of any feed reader, online or off, that I’ve ever come across. At the time I signed up, none of the other online feed readers were much good; Bloglines was the best of the bunch, but still not great. So I ponied up my $5/month and felt like it was an OK deal.
The convergence fo a few events have caused my thinking to change in the past week. First, I ran across the new and improved Google Reader. And boy, is it improved. There are still a few little things I wish it had (like choosing your sort order - I like to read from oldest to newest), but for the most part, it does everything I want a feed reader to do. Second, FeedLounge has been through a couple of frustrating hiccups this week, two separate issues causing multi-hour downtimes. Third, I’d like to save the $5/month. So, I dumped my OPML file from FeedLounge, imported it into Google Reader, and I’m good to go. I cancelled my FeedLounge subscription this morning.
Now I know Geof will have some comment to post here; he’s been using FeedLounge since the very beginning, maybe even before that; heck, he even had a version of it named in his honor! And I can’t fault him for sticking with it; it’s a great product. But market forces really do work; given the choice of a lower-priced, similar-and-acceptable functionality product, I’ll make the switch.
Feeling Squeezed
Yesterday I was sitting at my desk working away when suddenly, bzzt! and one of my monitors went dark. I have been using two monitors for the past couple of years; I have two CRTs on my desk; one 21" behemoth and one 19" behemoth’s-younger-brother. My desk panel that they sit on is bowed down in the middle by about an inch because of the weight. I’ve been wishing for LCD monitors for a while (hey, the new folks have them!) but the company’s policy is that we’ll only replace them when they die.
So yesterday my 21" HP monitor died. It had been showing symptons for a month or so now, so I’m not too suprised. I have a new 19" LCD monitor on order; hopefully it’ll get delivered yet this afternoon; if not, definitely tomorrow. Then I can go back to working in wide-screen happiness. As it is right now, I’m limited to 1600 x 1200 resolution, and I’m feeling a bit squeezed.
geek alert
The title is just a warning that some of your eyes might glaze over whilst reading this post. Others of you will find it interesting. Still others of you might have good advice to offer me…
Anyhow, I needed a good geek project to work on this weekend, I wanted to try something new. So I have this old PC sitting downstairs that I’m not using for anything except as a backup for the laptop and for doing filesharing (gotta love indieriver.net!), and it’s bogged down with lots of stuff; I’ve had it for 5 or 6 years now and never wiped it or reloaded it. So, I decided to have some fun and try doing a Linux installation. I actually settled on Ubuntu, which appears to have a fairly decent desktop interface and a nicely-designed installation.
Installing Ubuntu was actually very easy. I backed up the little data I wanted to save onto the laptop, then went ahead and repartitioned the 60 GB hard drive. The installation went quickly, and I was up and running. Getting a driver to work for my D-Link DWL-G122 USB Wifi adapter was a bit more of a challenge. But I got it working Saturday night after some serious consultation of the Ubuntu help forums.
Basically I’m stuck with two things right now. 1) I have a printer attached to the Linux machine, and it works fine. However, I need to get it shared with the laptop. I almost had it last night, but no such luck. There’s some combination of Samba and CUPS settings that I haven’t hit on yet that should do the trick. 2) I need to get a file sharing program running. The obvious choice is Azureus. However, it’s running into Java errors and hanging up on me; I end up having to kill -9 it every time. I did a brief web search for other torrent programs that might be good, but haven’t found anything I’m very happy with yet. I used Utorrent when I was using Windows, and like it a lot. Unfortunately, there’s no Linux version available.
Any suggestions from anybody for a torrent program? Should I just try debugging the Java issues in Azureus? Since that’s the primary function of that PC, it’d be nice to have it working. And I can’t afford to spend too many more nights up past 10 pm working on it. It makes it really hard to get up in the morning and run.
Well whaddaya know?
CID has free wireless internet in the terminal. My flight was delayed by about 15 minutes, but now I guess it’s about time to board. I wonder if DFW has wireless? I guess I’ll find out in a couple of hours.
Follow-up on the technology saga
Yesterday my PDA totally locked up, just froze with the backlight on and nothing on screen. Finally last night the battery gave out. But apparently there is happy news! My dear wife reports from home today that when she plugged it in to the charger, it came back up and appears to be working correctly. Let’s hope that it keeps it up - I don’t like my choices for replacing it, even if I could afford them:
First there’s the Palm brand products. I like their OS, but I’m getting a sour taste in my mouth for them after my recent troubles.
Or, I could make the big leap and go to the ones running Windows CE, or whatever the heck they call it now.
The trouble there is that the bottom-of-the-line units start, price-wise, about the same place that the Palms stop. I could get the basic Dell Axim for about $250 right now, sans case and extended warranty.
Let’s just hope my E2 is back alive and good to go for a while. As much as I rely on it to keep me on schedule, $250 for a product that lasts only 9 months is ridiculous.
it's not my week for technology
On the heels of my stereo receiver biting the dust, tonight I pulled my Palm Tungsten E2 out of my pocket to schedule a lunch meeting, and it came up dead. The backlight stayed on, the screen was blank, and it wouldn’t respond to a reset, even a hard reset. I’ve only had it for 9 months. Of course, the Palm warranty is only 90 days… what a rip-off.
I don’t know what I want to do about a PDA now. I might try going without it for a couple weeks and see how much I miss it… but I know it’ll be bad. If I hadn’t just spent $200 on a stereo, buying a new PDA wouldn’t seem totally out of the question, but now… grrr… and I’m not very motivated to want to buy another Palm brand PDA. I’ll have to see what kind of employee discount I can get on a Dell handheld, maybe.
A slide projector... and a bedsheet!
[Kudos to Roger for playing along with the Veggie Tales reference.]
A follow-up on yesterday’s adventures with the stereo receiver. I hit my local Best Buy last night (and boy, do we need some competition for them in town, but that’s another post…) and ended up purchasing a Yamaha HTR-5930 receiver. It’s got the usual bells and whistles: Dolby ProLogic and DTS decoding, 100 watts per channel, etc. It was actually quite easy to hook up last night and get running; more intuitive than the Onkyo that died.
Didn’t have time to play with it much last night - it was getting too late. But a little bit of LoTR:The Two Towers on DVD was enough to assure me that this thing will kick out some serious sound.
Stereophonic Multimedia Event
No, not the blog. My entertainment center, usually. But last weekend for some reason the LCD display of my Onkyo HTS-650 reciever bit the dust. The amp still works, but you can’t see the display, so you can’t tell what source is selected, or what options, or anything like that. This isn’t the first thing to break on this receiver; it totally died a couple of years ago when it was still under warranty. Back then, two trips to the authorized repair shop in Coralville were enough to get it fixed. It’s no longer under warranty now, though.
I could take it in to see about getting it repaired, but I’m having a hard time being motivated to do that since the thing seems to have a failure history. What’s gonna break next? It doesn’t make sense to keep taking it in for repairs when after only a few repairs it would’ve been cheaper to buy something new.
I think I’m going stereo shopping tonight.
odds and ends March 2006
The server has been down for the last few days, so I haven’t been able to update. But now it’s back and running, so here goes. Actually, there isn’t a whole lot to update about.
Becky and Addison came home from the hospital on Wednesday. We are slowly getting sleep schedules adjusted and Addison is sleeping decently at night.
I had already planned on taking the whole week off, and what better weekend to take off than the opening weekend of March Madness? I will confess to having watched far too many basketball games this weekend. There were some good ones. I was disappointed when the Hawkeyes lost their first-round game on a miracle shot, but hey, if you leave the door open…
Saturday morning I had a very minor sore throat; I was feeling pretty tired, but wrote that off to the wacky sleep schedules this week. By Sunday morning that very minor sore throat became a very major sore throat. Thankfully I already had someone lined up to lead worship for me. So instead of going to church, I headed off to MercyCare North, where the doctor took one look at my throat and just shook his head. He did a throat swab for strep and when the result came back and the “Yes” field had four stars in it and was circled, well, I don’t think I was suprised.
So I’m home again today. I really was ready to get back to work. Becky, don’t take that wrong when you read this. :-) I’ve logged on to the work computer here from home to respond to some email and such, but I’m sure things are just piling up there waiting for me, and I’m ready to get going on it. Maybe tomorrow. The doctor says I should be non-contagious by then. So then if I’m only feeling up to it… The other real bummer is that being still-contagious right now, I have to try to avoid too much contact with the rest of the family… and it’s hard to be home with Laura and not want to spend time playing with her.
Well, that’s my whine for the day. :-)
finally up and running
It’s taken too long, but noelridge.org is finally up and running with real pictures of our people and a color scheme that’s much more readable than the old light green. Now there’s just regular maintenance to do… but that’s fairly easy.
This task has been on my list of stuff to finish for far too long now, so it’s good to get it done.
Upgrading the Tivo Hard Drive
OK, so when we bought our 40-hour Tivo, it was small-ish for storage space, but it worked. Now that we’ve got subscriptions going for kids programming like Sesame Street and Zooboomafoo, I’ve been wishing for some more storage space. Having been assured by Mark that the upgrade was fairly easy, I decided to take it on myself.
Step 1 was to get a larger hard drive. I didn’t want to spend a lot, but I wanted a lot of space. A Christmas gift card to Best Buy (thanks Ryan!) was a good starting point. Then I found a good deal on a Hitachi Deskstar 7K250 160 GB hard drive. It started at $119.99, but has $80 worth of mail-in rebates. So I picked it up today and got started.
There are good instructions out on the web for upgrading to a bigger Tivo hard drive. The most detailed and useful was www.newreleasesvideo.com/hinsdale-how-to/index9.html. It has very specific step-by-step instructions.
Step 2 was to crack open the Tivo and backup its hard drive onto the new hard drive. Most of the time here was spent just opening cases and swapping in and out hard drives. Per the instructions I had created a bootable CD running some specialized Linux, and that allowed me to do all of the fun backups and restores.
The whole copying process (including all of the programs I currently have recorded) took about 2 hours to complete.
Step 3: put everything back together and check out the system status page. The results: 40 or so hours of recording space in “Best” mode, up to 183 hours in “Basic” mode. I think I’ll stick in “High” mode, which’ll give me 83 hours of recording time.
Note: depending on the type of Tivo, you may not be able to use all the hard drive space; older Tivos software limits you to addressing about 137 GB. However, my Series 2 Tivo model TVD540040 is able to address larger amounts, so I was able to use all 160 GB. Woohoo!
I’ll echo Mark’s comments here on Tivo upgrades; I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was. If you’re comfortable swapping hard drives in and out and setting the master/slave jumpers, you can do this. No problemo.
Odds and Ends
Just miscellaneous stuff from my life today. I got my DSL modem hooked up last night so the Casa de Cakeboy is now surfing the web at high speed and wirelessly! I’m sure it’ll take me a while to fully comprehend the different things this will allow me to do online… fun fun!
Tomorrow I’m getting a new car stereo installed in the Saturn. The old one is the factory-installed basic model, and the two big problems are that a) one of the knobs is broken, and b) there’s no good way to get iPod music through the stereo. (Waiting for somebody to suggest an FM modulator… decided against it.) The new deck was one of the less-expensive ones at Best Buy, but it has the magic feature: an AUX input to run a line in from the iPod. I can’t wait. Especially if I’m doing road trips to Oklahoma and Door County, Wisconsin in the next few months… gotta have the music. I’ve had an iTrip FM transmitter for the past several months and have come to the conclusion that it just doesn’t have the power to give me decent sound quality, and in addition it’s really annoying having to switch frequencies every hour or so. So, the deck gets installed tomorrow. I got free installation on it too.