I haven't really talked about AirCell or its Gogo inflight Internet access service since it first became available on American Airlines. But Andy Abramson turned me on to a little experiment with the service that he and Laptop Magazine's Joanna Stern did yesterday that is absolutely worthy of mention.

Andy reports that he and Joanna were able to carry on a voice conversation via Aircell Gogo while Joanna was on an American Airlines flight to New York. The service was designed to make voice communication "impossible" at the airlines' requests, but Andy concluded that it would be possible if he used a Flash-based voice application like Phweet and he was right.

Joanna liveblogged the flight. Her post goes through all the different communication services she tried over her five-hour flight, and how they performed.

Kudos to Andy and Joanna for their persistence. They proved once again that "impossible" is a hard claim to make about any aspect of technology. This is proof of the old saying, where there's a will, there's a way.

Andy likes to tell people that he's not an engineer type of person, but he has an encyclopedic knowledge of the wireless services and applications that are available.

I reached out to Andy over this past weekend to ask what he thought the best way to access the Internet was from a moving train along The Northeast Corridor. Before speaking to him, I was lead to believe that I needed a wireless data card for my laptop, a $60 per month service plan, and a two-year contract.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 1:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the few nagging problems I've experienced with my iPhone is a photo saving problem. This has been described in several different ways by other iPhone users out on the Internet:

• iPhone "disappearing photos" bug experienced by Jeffrey Zeldman back in November 2007.
• iPhone Camera Problems: Blank White Thumbnails mentioned in June on iPhoneGuru.org

This problem started happening to me a couple of weeks ago when I was still running iPhone Firmware 1.0. I had hoped that the 2.0 Firmware Update would solve this problem, but it didn't. At that point I had to start doing serious research, otherwise my camera would have been useless to me.

Apparently there is some recurring issue with saving photos taken with the internal iPhone camera once more than 1023 photos have been saved. In my case, the problem started happening when the LastFileGroupNumber was at 1043. It is not clear to me whether all iPhones have this problem, if all first-generation iPhones have it, or if this is only affecting users of the first-generation iPhone under certain circumstances.

The best solution to this problem that I've found so far was first discussed in Topic : Camera will not save pictures to phone after snapping photo, an Apple support discussion. About a quarter of the way into the thread, a contributor named "JKeenan" said the following:

Continue reading "A Solution for iPhone Photo Saving Problems" »

Posted by Dave Aiello at 7:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

There's been a lot of discussion on Mac-related websites about whether the iPhone 3G should support tethering to a laptop or desktop computer. For those of you who aren't familiar with the term, Wikipedia defines tethering as follows:

Tethering in cellular wireless is the connection of a non-mobile device (e.g. desktop computer, notebook computer, laptop computer), to a mobile device (e.g. cell phone) PDA like Palm Treo, Motorola Q, BlackBerry or Air Card for the purpose of wireless Internet access by the non-mobile "tethered" device.

Several phones already on sale on the AT&T, Verizon Wireless, and Sprint networks already support tethering. The unlimited data plan rates charged by the carriers for devices that support tethering are significantly higher than the proposed data plan rate for the iPhone 3G. As a result, some people who are planning to buy an iPhone 3G say that they will pay a higher data plan rate if they are allowed to tether their new iPhone to a laptop.

I don't think iPhone 3G owners would be happy with the performance of their iPhones if tethering were allowed. The reason is that tethering would consume a great deal more of the iPhone's power than most people realize.

I've made several trips from Trenton, NJ to New York Penn Station on the New Jersey Transit Northeast Corridor rail line over the past month. Each time I arrive in Manhattan, I am surprised that the battery level on my iPhone is low. The reason is that there are dead spots on the AT&T network that overlap the Northeast Corridor right of way, and the iPhone boosts its signal to stay connected when in those areas.

Continue reading "Why Tethering an iPhone 3G to a Laptop Doesn't Make Sense" »

Posted by Dave Aiello at 3:04 PM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

I've seen a several tweets and articles today stating that Apple is advocating a Javascript-based Model View Controller framework for web development called SproutCore. Reports indicate that Apple based the MobileMe web application announced at WWDC on SproutCore and provided details on the framework in sessions at the Apple World Wide Developer Conference last week in San Francisco.

AppleInsider has a very good article called Apple's open secret: SproutCore is Cocoa for the Web that goes into some details about why Apple is so interested in SproutCore and why Apple may be switching some of the animation and special effects on its website to SproutCore from other frameworks like Prototype and Scriptaculous.

That article lead me to SproutCore - Feature Rich Javascript Framework, which says that SproutCore is a JavaScript implementation of the Cocoa framework commonly used in MacOS X application development.

This article in turn pointed to Cocoa for Windows + Flash Killer = SproutCore from RoughlyDrafted Magazine which explains why Apple would prefer to use HTML, Javascript, and CSS rather than Flash to implement rich internet applications on the web.

It's pretty clear from this article that Apple not only wants to avoid becoming dependent upon Flash or Silverlight so that it can control its own destiny, but that it wants to use a Javascript framework like SproutCore to build web applications that usurp some of the power of the Windows platform by making Windows less and less necessary. Check out some of the comments to this article if you want to really get into why Apple is making the strategic architecture bets that it is on the future of MacOS X.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 5:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Over on The Apple Phone Show Blog, Liana Lehua suggested that iPhone fans buy a copy of .Mac from Amazon.com now in order to access MobileMe when it goes live in July. It looks like you'll save about $30 if you do this.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:49 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I got a bit of a kick out of the latest installment of Mossberg's Mailbox, Do Macs Last Longer Than Windows PCs?. In it, a reader asks:

Do Macs last longer than Windows PCs? I am willing to pay the additional cost for a Mac if it will last significantly longer, but if it has approximately the same lifespan as a PC from a reputable manufacturer, I will stay with PCs.

Walt answers by saying that he hasn't noticed a "significant difference" in the length of service that PCs and Macs provide, that Macs are generally considered high product-quality devices, and that PCs vary in quality depending on the manufacturer.

I think Walt Mossberg is either being too polite to his reader, or he is taking the question at face value in the interest of saving space in the print edition of The Wall Street Journal.

I think a more helpful way to answer the question is as follows:

The value of owning a Mac instead of a PC is in the quality of the experience of using a Mac every day, or the enhanced personal productivity that can be yours when using Mac OS X instead of Windows Vista. This includes the value of the iLife '08 software that ships free with all Macs, and represents a substantial value compared with the photo, video, and audio editing features of Windows XP or Vista.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

• Sixty-Six on Daring Fireball: "The idea that Apple now sells two-thirds of retail computers costing $1000 or more is simply stunning. I (along with many others) have long argued that a simplistic “overall PC market share” number has never been a good metric for gauging the Mac’s success because the “overall PC market” includes millions of commodity-level low-end machines that Apple neither tries nor wants to sell."
• Making Your Mark in a Web 2.0 World on Web Worker Daily: This article describes the building of a Social Media Resume, a personal website that includes links to your LinkedIn or Facebook profile page, as well as photos or video from websites like Flickr and Viddler. I relaunched DaveAiello.com about two weeks ago, but didn't realize that creating this kind of site is an emerging trend.
• Mac OS X Services (the menu you never go to) on Random Tech: "There's a whole hidden side of text modification that is stashed away, yet right at your fingertips. If you go to the Application menu (if you're in Safari, click the menu 'Safari') -> Services, a whole list pops down. You've probably disregarded this in the past (if you've ever seen it) because most of the options are grayed out, or unclickable. All you need to do is highlight some text. Go back to the menu and there are so many to choose from!"

Posted by Dave Aiello at 1:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the utilities programs that veteran Mac users swear by is Quicksilver which at first glance appears to be a keyboard-based application launcher.

It turns out that QuickSilver can be used for a great deal more than application launching, but a lot of the productivity that you can gain from it isn't at all obvious.

One of the best tools I've found to understand Quicksilver are two video podcasts from the MacBreak series. The first and longest one is MacBreak Episode 12: Quicksilver, which is available on iTunes, but is also available on Google Video (not YouTube):

In this episode you get to see how Merlin Mann selects something on his Mac by typing its name using Quicksilver, and then selects a command to perform on it. You can think of the the first action (a search) done in Quicksilver as the subject of a sentence, while the section action (selection of a command) is the verb.

Continue reading "MacBreak Video Shows Finer Points of Quicksilver Utility for the Mac" »

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Apple released MacOS X Version 10.5.3 earlier today. I first learned about the release when I was checking out Summize for the first time and saw references to Mac OS X and Leopard on the home page as "trending topics".

MacWorld has a good summary of the important fixes and new features included in the update. However, I performed the update before the Macworld article came out. I made the decision to take the update after I read through the About the Mac OS X 10.5.3 Update article in the Apple Knowledge Base.

Whenever a software developer like Apple releases a major update, I look at the list of fixes to see if any of them are must-haves for me. The fix that caused me to start the update process immediately related to Spaces:

Resolves an issue in which switching to a different space and returning back to the original space may reorder the application windows with a different active window.

This bug was a significant productivity drain for me. I often switch back and forth between the space where I keep Mail.app and the space where I do my blog writing or the space where I do web development. Every time I returned to a space, the active window changed from the one I had last used. I usually had to invoke Exposé to find the window I needed to use.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Polar Infrared Interface USB commonly
used with PCs running Windows XP doesn't
work on a Mac [ Photo: Dave Aiello on Flickr ]

The Polar Infrared Interface USB that many people got with their Polar S-Series heart rate monitors is a USB 1.1 device. I've been trying to use it without success on my MacBook Pro with Polar Precision Performance Software 4 running under Windows XP on VMware Fusion.

According to a number of articles that I've read, the only way to reliably get the Polar Infrared Interface USB to connect with a Polar heart rate monitor using Mac hardware is to boot into Windows XP directly from Boot Camp. No configuration of Windows XP under VMware Fusion or Parallels Desktop 3.0 seems to work properly.

A number of people on the Polar user support forums have reported success when using the Polar IrDA USB 2.0 Adapter with PPP4 under Windows XP with either VMware Fusion or Parallels.

The biggest problem with the Polar IrDA USB 2.0 Adapter is its expense. In my opinion, a lot of Polar accessory products that aren't proprietary are similar to Apple-branded products; They are very nice looking and well-supported by the manufacturer, but not economical. Some purchasers of the Polar IrDA USB 2.0 Adapter agree that it's nice looking, but think documentation is very sparse.

A far less expensive IrDA-USB adapter that some people claim to have gotten working is the Cables Unlimited USB1510.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 2:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

Kathleen and Jimmy looking at the iPhoto
book that we ordered for her mom. The
second copy arrived today. [ Photo: Dave
Aiello on Flickr. ]

Kathleen and I took advantage of an iPhoto Custom Photo Book promotion that Apple ran for Mother's Day. We ordered Kathleen's mother a hard cover photo book. We made sure we ordered before the April 30 cut off date for standard shipping.

Something happened to the order while it was in production and it didn't ship in time for delivery last Friday. When we realized this, Kathleen called Apple Customer Service.

Kathleen told the Apple customer service agent that we ordered before the deadline and that FedEx was reporting that the shipment was not going to arrive in time for us to give it as a gift on Mother's Day.

Here's what the person at Apple Photo Services Support wrote back after receiving a message from the main customer service group:

Dear Kathleen,

Thank you for your recent Apple photo order.

I understand that you submitted your order to us in time to be received by May 11th. You may have noticed that the tracking information for your order indicates the estimated delivery date is after May 11th.

To ensure that your order is received by May 11th, your order is being reprocessed free of charge and will be sent via expedited shipping. When it ships, you will receive a separate email with the tracking number for your duplicate order. Please accept both orders as a goodwill gesture.

I apologize for any inconvenience this has caused you. I hope you continue to enjoy using Apple Photo Services for your creative projects. If you have any questions or concerns, please reply to this email and we will assist you further.

Thank you for being a loyal Apple customer and have a wonderful day.

Sincerely,

Sofia
Apple Photo Services Support

http://www.apple.com/support/photoservices/ww

The replacement package arrived on Friday, overnighted from Elk Grove, CA. Kathleen's mom got the gift on time and she was thrilled.

The original iPhoto book arrived via FedEx Ground on Monday. Kathleen and I get to keep a beautiful book of photos of Jimmy and us, courtesy of Apple.

The photos books we ordered are truly first rate. The service we got is unbeatable. Kathleen never mentioned that I write a blog about computer technology, or that we know anybody who works for Apple. I think we got the service that Apple would give to any customer who had the same problem.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've been using Twitter for several weeks, because there are things that friends of mine might be interested in hearing about that will never make it into an email or an Operation Gadget post.

Twitterific vs Spaz: These two desktop Twitter
clients that run on the Mac are competing for
space on my desktop. Only one will survive
the week. [ Screenshot by Dave Aiello on Flickr ]

It only took a few minutes of serious Twitter use for me to realize that I wanted a desktop client. It's easy to see which client friends are using, just visit http://twitter.com/daiello and look at one of my latest tweets:

The link to the word "Spaz" indicates that I used the Spaz client to post that tweet.

The two clients that I've tried so far are Twitterific and Spaz. Both run on the Mac, but take pretty different design approaches when you look at them closely.

Twitterific has been around longer, and it's a classic Cocoa application. This means that it runs only on MacOS X. It's closed source and ad supported unless you pay the $14.95 fee that the publisher wants you to pay.

I actually like the ads that are inserted periodically in my twit stream. They come from The DECK, the same ad network that is used on 37signals' network of web sites.

Twitterific is nice if you are a Mac user because of how well it integrates with all the other applications that a Mac geek like me is going to have installed. It integrates seemlessly with Growl, a kind of a notification manager that lots of Mac applications tie into.

Twitterific also configures itself as a Heads Up Display (or HUD). It does this by setting itself to float above the windows in front of it and using CSS opacity to allow windows underneath it to be viewed. That's a cool effect, and is particularly useful when used in conjunction with Leopard features like Spaces. When it's in this mode, it removes its icon from the Dock, which is nice because it makes the Dock a bit more concise.

Spaz is the newcomer. It's an open source Adobe AIR application. It looks nice, but doesn't have some of the MacOS X-specific features that Twitterific has. It's free and has no ads.

Continue reading "Twitterific vs Spaz: The Twitter Client Face-off on My Desktop" »

Posted by Dave Aiello at 12:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Here's a music video that's making the rounds of web sites I read:

The movement away from Windows and toward the Mac is still in it's early stages, so lots of people haven't seen all of these Mac applications before. My question is, does it make more sense as a music video or an ad for Leopard?

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The BlueLounge SpaceStation is a desk organizer for laptop users that acts as a USB hub for all peripheral devices.

BlueLounge SpaceStation [ Photo courtesy of the manufacturer. ]

The photo I've chosen shows the bottom of the SpaceStation. The rubber feet set the SpaceStation 5mm above the surface of the desk. This allows the USB cables to pass underneath the organizer where they can be coiled and connected to the USB hub.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 1:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

On our trip to Buffalo this weekend, Kathleen, Jimmy, and I stayed in two Marriott properties that had public WiFi networks. The thing I didn't like about them is that they are wide open networks which means anyone can join and do pretty much anything they want locally.

I have my MacBook Pro setup the way I want to use it when I am on my home office network. This means that I have iPhoto and iTunes sharing enabled, and a public folder available so that my wife can grab files from me or give me files without my intervention. I don't want these services to be advertised an available when I'm on a foreign WiFi network.

I turned off iPhoto and iTunes sharing manually when I went on line at the hotels. This only took a minute or two, but I don't want to have to remember to do it or to think about it. I'm almost positive that I'll forget to turn these services back on in many cases when I get home.

In order to batten down the hatches on my Mac, I need a couple of discrete pieces of software:

• Software to make my Mac "context-aware". The leading choices seem to be Marco Polo and Home Zone. My personal preference is for Marco Polo at the moment.
• Rules to identify when my Mac is at home and when it isn't at home. The easiest way to do this is to detect the MAC address of our Airport Extreme base station.
• Scripts to turn on and off the iTunes, iPhoto, and networking services, based on the context. I probably also want to step up the aggressiveness of the software firewall running on my Mac.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Wall Street Journal Business Technology Blog reports that Apple spent $844 million on research and development in 2007, significantly less than competitors Microsoft, IBM, H-P, Sun, and AMD. This is interesting because everybody and their brother has been touting Apple as a uniquely innovative company.

I think Apple succeeds so prolifically because it is especially focused on innovation in its core competencies. Lots of its competitors invest in research that doesn't make the same impact on their product lines as Apple's research does on Apple's products.

I think people have a tendency to criticize Apple for the wrong reasons. A lot of people complained about Apple delaying the release of OS X Leopard, and waiting until recently to release the iPhone SDK. Could they have shipped those products faster if they hired more engineers?

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I was one of the people who bought a Mac in the fiscal quarter that ended March 29. The last time I bought a Mac for myself was over 10 years ago. I guess wasn't alone, because The Wall Street Journal reports that Apple's quarterly earnings rose 36 percent, largely on the strength of Mac sales. Revenues grew 43 percent overall to approximately $7.42 billion.

There were some aspects of the Mac sales figures that I found hard to believe. Apple reported that it sold 51 percent more Macs in the quarter than in the same period a year earlier. They sold nearly $3.5 billion dollars worth of Macs in three months. Overall PC market growth was only 12 percent, so Apple is clearly stealing a significant share of the U.S. market from PC makers.

Apple sold 1.7 million iPhones during this period, which is about what analysts that follow the company had expected. The article goes on to say:

Apple executives said a 'significant' portion of its iPhone sales continue to involve consumers who 'unlock' the iPhone to work on unauthorized wireless networks, especially overseas in countries such as China, where the iPhone isn't yet available from Apple.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Ars Technica published a terrific article by Peter Bright that illustrates why the Mac platform is growing at the expense of Windows. According to the article:

Windows is dying, Windows applications suck, and Microsoft is too blinkered to fix any of it—that's the argument. The truth is that Windows is hampered by 25-year old design decisions. These decisions mean that it's clunky to use and absolutely horrible to write applications for. The applications that people do write are almost universally terrible. They're ugly, they're inconsistent, they're disorganized; there's no finesse, no care lavished on them. Microsoft—surely the company with the greatest interest in making Windows and Windows applications exude quality—is, in fact, one of the worst perpetrators.

The author's perspective is not unique. What makes this article more interesting is his next conclusion:

The unfortunate thing about this is that there is a company that's not only faced similar problems but also tackled them. Apple in the mid-1990s was faced with an operating system that was going nowhere, and needed to take radical action to avoid going out of business. And so that's what Apple did.

This article goes on to discuss this history of the Mac and Windows platforms from 1997 on, and fairly concisely explains how Microsoft squandered what appeared to be an insurmountable architectural lead over Apple. It also explains how the third-party Mac software community rose from shareware roots, riding the momentum of MacOS X from about 10.3 on.

There's a reason why practically every thought leader on the Internet is a Mac user in 2008: the quality of the user experience. This is not marketing hype. You can see little examples of it everywhere when you look over a Mac user's shoulder. What Apple started with MacOS X and continued with its iLife, iWork, and Professional-series applications, has been continued and driven forward by the third-party developer community and its full scale embrace of the Cocoa application framework.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today is April 15, a date that quite a few different tax authorities in the United States have picked as the deadline for filing annual tax returns. I had to file several returns today, including:

• U.S. Federal Income Tax for my wife and me
• Pennsylvania State Income Tax for my wife and me
• Pennsylvania Local Earned Income Tax for my wife and me
• New Jersey Corporate Business Tax for a company that I partially own

Due to slightly higher than expected income in 2007, my wife and I owed a small amount to the Federal, State, and Local tax authorities. I paid these taxes using my credit card through Pay1040.com, a payment provider closely associated with H&R Block and the TaxCut tax preparation program, and Official Payments Corporation, the payment provider most commonly used by tax authorities in the United States.

Pay1040.com successfully processed my Federal Income Tax payment using the Safari browser that is installed on my wife's MacBook. She is still using MacOS X 10.4, but all of the software updates have been applied so she is on Safari 3.1. That's good news, because this is the first time I have used Pay1040.com and I didn't expected a relatively small provider to have a Safari-friendly payment process.

TaxCut's Pennsylvania Tax Preparation Software didn't even offer the option of paying by credit card, so I had to file on paper and use the Pennsylvania Department of Revenue's website to initiate a credit card payment. Their chosen payment partner is Official Payments.

At Official Payments' website, I found that I couldn't make a payment with Safari at all despite the fact that there was no indication that Safari was not a supported browser. I could never get to the page where I could confirm my payment details on either my wife's MacBook running OS X 10.4 or my fully updated MacBook Pro running Leopard.

I had to switch over to Firefox on my Mac in order to pay what I owed the State of Pennsylvania.

I took advantage of web-based electronic filing offered by the local tax administrator serving my town-- a company called Berkheimer Tax Administrator, Inc.. Berkheimer performs this service for lots of towns, school districts, and emergency services districts within Pennsylvania.

Safari didn't work for interacting with their electronic filing site, and I had to use Firefox to complete the forms. When time came to pay, however, I was warned that the interaction between Berkheimer's electronic filing solution and Official Payments would only work in Internet Explorer. So, I had to save my session, fire up VMware Fusion, launch IE 7 in Windows XP, login to Berkheimer's e-filing site, pickup my session where I left off, and make the payment. Forcing someone to use a PC for any step of a tax filing process is simply unacceptable in 2008.

Surprisingly, The New Jersey Division of Taxation had the most Safari-friendly payment system I experienced. They also use Official Payments, but they created their own front end to it. This front end is very simple and apparently had none of the browser-specific JavaScript that is present on Official Payments' own site. I was surprised because other aspects of the New Jersey state government are pretty IE specific.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The other day I was looking forward to watching NHL playoff games, and started thinking about how much fun it would be to watch Hockey Night in Canada on the CBC instead of Versus.

I went over to CBC.ca and watched the HNIC Playoff Preview Show on the CBC Sports Video Player. The player is a Flash-based application that sits in your browser of choice. After a brief video introduction, the Hockey Night in Canada Opening was shown. This is a series of highlights playing over the Hockey Night in Canada Theme Song. The opening sequence lasted about 45 seconds.

Occasionally I hear people talking about trying to buy the Hockey Night in Canada theme as their ringtone for their mobile phone. Nobody I know has it as their ringtone on their iPhone. I decided to try to use Mac software to create an iPhone ringtone of the actual Hockey Night in Canada Theme as broadcast by the CBC. I had no idea how easy this would turn out to be.

Before I describe this technique, I want to warn you that distributing copyrighted material such as the Hockey Night in Canada Theme Song is probably illegal where you live. However, no one can stop you from making an iPhone ringtone for your own personal use using the following technique.

The software I used to make this ringtone was Audio Hijack Pro from Rogue Amoeba Software ($32 direct from the developer) and GarageBand '08 which is part of the iLife '08 software suite from Apple.

Audio Hijack Pro allows you to intercept (or hijack) the audio output of any application running on your Mac, and save it as an MP3 file. I hijacked the audio output of Safari and captured the Hockey Night in Canada Theme Song in about as much time as it took to locate the Opening in the program and then watch and listen to that opening.

Once I had the MP3 file, I brought it into GarageBand '08 and did the following:

1. I positioned the MP3 on the timeline so that the beginning of the song was at time 0:00.
2. I clicked the button called "Cycle Region" in the second set of controls below the timelines. That button needs to be clicked to "on" before a ringtone can be created.
3. I clicked and dragged the region of the time bar representing the music I wanted as part of my ringtone. I learned from Googling around that the sound had to be 40 seconds or less in duration, so I made sure that I only selected that amount of time in the time bar.
4. I chose "Send Ringtone to iTunes" from the "Share" menu.

This last step automatically exported the music clip as a ringtone and caused iTunes to import it. The next time I synced my iPhone, the custom ringtone was automatically transferred to it.

Once that was done, I could designate my Hockey Night in Canada ringtone as my default ringtone. Better yet, I decided to make it a ringtone unique to some of my friends from hockey and hockey officiating.

The true power of this technique is that you can capture and convert into a ringtone any sound that your Mac can play for you. This means the entire repertoire of YouTube is at your disposal, as well as things like Hulu, current programming from all of the major networks, and things like CBS Classic TV episodes.

I'm thinking of making a ringtone of the Hawaii Five-O Theme Song or the Love that Good n' Plenty Jingle from the 1960s next. [ Hat tip to The Mac Observer for their article Making Custom Ringtones with GarageBand ]

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

• For the Phinney Family, a Dream and a Challenge on NYTimes.com: This story came out last week, right before Taylor Phinney raced in the Individual Pursuits at the Track Cycling World Championships. Taylor finished eighth. His father, Davis, is a legendary U.S. cycling champ who has struggled with Parkinson's Disease in recent years. This article summarizes their recent struggles and successes.
• ScreenFlow: The Killer Screencasting App on MacTips: "ScreenFlow is the application I've been waiting for on the Mac. I've been using it recently for the MacTips Videos and I love it! It's saves me so much time because I'm able to focus on creating valuable content rather than editing videos."
• Dash’s Car Navigator Gives Smart Directions, if Others Participate, Walt Mossberg on AllThingsD: "As smart as in-car navigation devices are, they could be smarter. They could talk to each other via the Internet and share information on how fast traffic is moving on the roads they have just traveled.... Starting this week, just such a smarter navigation box is hitting the market. Called the Dash Express, this $400 product looks a lot like units from better-known firms... But, unlike any other in-car navigation device I’ve seen, each Dash Express... becomes part of a network, connected to the company via the Internet. "
• Windows XP: Going, going ... gone? on Computerworld: "The approaching death of Windows XP may upset you, but it shouldn't come as a surprise. Microsoft Corp.'s product life-cycle guidelines have foretold the fate of XP since 2001. In fact, Microsoft has been killing off one version of a product as it is replaced with another for years now. But this time around, the approaching demise of XP is getting more attention than, say, the final passing of Windows 2000."
• Coming Soon to a Phone Near You on WSJ.com: This article summarizes forthcoming developments in mobile phone voice control, improved web browsers, enhanced storage, and video sharing. [ Subscription may be required to read this article. ]
• How To Use Nokia’s Sports Tracker as a Photo Tracker on The Gadgets Page: "Ms. Jen was part of Nokia’s Urbanista Diaries Relay, which means they sent her to India to promote the Nokia N82 in all its glory. While on the trip, she realized how well the Sports Tracker (a typically exercise related feature) could be used to track the geo-locations of your photos"
• Note to readers: Today would be my grandfather James M. Lynch, Jr.'s 95th birthday. He died in 1982. He is one of the inspirations for this site, since he bought and tried every important electronic gadget that existed in the 1970s. He owned the first digital watch, desktop calculator, and personal computers I ever saw.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I started using Spaces the other day for the first time. This is an application for Mac OS X Leopard that allows you to set up four or more virtual screens, known as spaces. You can also dedicate the windows from specific applications to a specific spaces.

So far Spaces has worked wonderfully for me. I have one space for productivity apps like Mail.app, iCal, the Address Book, and Adium, my instant messaging client. My second space is for blogging and includes MarsEdit and a bunch of browser windows. My third space is for software development and includes things like Zend Studio, Colloquy (an IRC client), and more browser windows. I may use my fourth space for image editing. I opened Pixelmator in it to write this article.

It was easy to dedicate most applications to their appropriate space. Clicking the "+" button below the "Application Assignments" scrollable area brought up a file selection dialog. I simply located the application I wanted to work with in my "Applications" folder and clicked the "Add" button.

The big question I had when setting this up was, how do I make my Finder windows appear in more than one space? This is because the Finder is not in my Applications folder and I didn't know where to find it.

After Googling around for a little while, I found an article called Nice Leopard Finder/Spaces tip on the Undulattice blog that answered my question. It turns out that the Finder is located in the "System" directory tree under "Library" and then under "Core Services".

Posted by Dave Aiello at 5:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Until I listened to this week's edition of This Week in Tech I had no idea that the Transportation Safety Administration had a blog called Evolution of Security, that Blogger Bob was one of the authors, or that they had posted a reassuring video of the process they used to test a MacBook Air with a solid-state drive.

As I said to my friend Henry Scheuer when I emailed a link to this video to him, a couple of things stand out to me:

1. Bob X-rayed the MacBook Air, but doesn't show us any of the pictures, because it's "sensitive security information".
2. The TSA blog only provides the video in Windows Media format, so actual Mac users can't watch it unless they find it on YouTube, as I did.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 1:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I made reference to an article called Reliance Digital to Open 60 iStores Across India yesterday in a Gadget Links post. One thing I noticed, but didn't have time to mention was the cost of a MacBook Air in India:

Among the products offered at iStore is MacBook Air, the world's thinnest notebook computer priced at {99,000 Rupees}.

What I normally do when I see a currency that I can't translate to U.S. Dollars off the top of my head is to submit a Google query. So I Googled "99000 rupees in USD", thinking I would get a fairly accurate conversion. I didn't, so I had to visit a foreign exchange trading website for the approximate value in dollars, which was given as $2483.69.

For some reason I also put "99000 rupees" into Google News and by chance got an article reporting that a four-door electric car called the Tara Tiny has just gone on sale in India for the same price. This is pretty amazing. According to the article:

This car was developed by Tara International, some of the features on the car are pretty basic but come on what do you want for the price a Rolls Royce, the Tara Tiny can seat 2 people and can be recharged daily at 220 volts through 15 amp sockets, a 8 hour charge enables the cars to travel 80 - 100 kilo meters. {sic}

The Tara Tiny looks as incredibly cheap as its price to me, from the photos I've seen. However, I think we should judge the car the same way most of us judged the MacBook Air when it first came out: don't criticize it until you see one up close.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 2:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

• Mac Automation: listen to a text document on TUAW: "Don't have time to read that Word, Pages, or TextEdit document at your desk? Why not listen to it on your iPod instead? In this Automator how-to, I am going to show you how to create an audio file using text that you have in an open document, then sync that using iTunes to your iPod or iPhone." This is similar to a how-to published in Macworld last month.
• Reliance Digital to Open 60 iStores Across India on Tech2.com: "Reliance Digital... plans to open 150 digital stores and 60 iStores or Apple stores across {India}. While {typical Reliance Digital} stores offer a wide range of consumer durables, iStores are exclusively for Apple's products for professional and consumer segments."
• Time Machine Now Works with Airport Extreme USB Drives on MacRumors.com: "After the release of today's Time Machine and Airport update, several readers report that Time Machine now supports backups to USB drives connected to your Airport Extreme basestation. This configuration essentially reproduces the functionality of Apple's Time Capsule product."
• Shimano buys clothing company Pearl Izumi from Nautilus on VeloNews: "Bringing premium sports apparel and footwear to its offering of industry-leading cycling and fishing products, Shimano has completed its purchase of DashAmerica, Inc. (dba Pearl Izumi USA, Inc.) from Nautilus, Inc." This actually happened a month ago, but I just noticed it.
• The Feedzone with Monique Ryan: Protect your heart this season on VeloNews: This is a great article which focuses on eating the right kind of fats and other smart food choices as part of an athletic lifestyle.
• When to Stay With Windows in Mossberg's Mailbox on AllThingsD: Walt Mossberg talks about when it's OK to stay with Windows when upgrading home computers. A couple in their 70s asked if they should upgrade to a Mac although no family members have Macs, so family support wouldn't be available to them. He points out that it's OK to stay with Windows now, but the question will need to be re-evaluated sometime this sommer, when Microsoft stops selling Windows XP to OEMs for installation on new machines.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Guy Kawaski, Will Mayall, and the rest of the folks at Nononina have built a new topic-based RSS aggregator called Alltop. There idea is to display the latest five stories from thirty or more blogs in each topic area. You can drill down to the topic areas that you are most interested in by using the appropriate subdomain URL. My favorites are:

• Sports
• Gadgets
• Mac

I'm also pretty interested in the Linux topic. I think there could be a market for a Web Development or PHP topic. There's already a Politics topic that probably would be a quick way to catch up on what's going on in the latest news cycle.

I think Alltop is an excellent idea and could be a mobile competitor to Google Reader if they create an iPhone version.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Jimmy mistook Windows XP for
Teletubbyland: Does your toddler do that
too? [ Image: Dave Aiello, in my Flickr
account ]

I started building a Windows XP virtual machine in VMware Fusion on my new MacBook Pro the other day. My 21-month old son Jimmy was really excited when he saw it and came running over, pointing, and saying "La-la, la-la".

Suddenly I realized he thought the "Bliss" background was Teletubbyland. I started howling with laughter.

Although I recently returned to the Mac community, I always felt like an expatriate in the world of Windows. As such I never set up a Windows machine to look this way. I always made it look like the "Windows Classic" theme on Windows XP which kind of enhanced the backward feel of that operating system for me.

In this case, I was just part way into installing Windows so I could run a couple of legacy applications that I'll need for a while, like Microsoft Office and QuickBooks. This was just the way the screen happened to appear when it caught Jimmy's eye.

I switched over to the "Red Moon Desert" background so Jimmy wouldn't be distracted.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 3:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

At long last I have my new MacBook Pro computer. I bought it Tuesday at the Apple Store in Christiana, Delaware and unboxed when I got home.

Apple announced improved MacBooks and MacBook Pros on Tuesday. The newer versions of the MacBook Pro have increased disk space such that it made buying a new MacBook Pro at retail significantly cheaper than the cost of buying a Build-to-Order MacBook Pro with roughly comparable specifications from the previous generation.

I'm certainly going to talk about my experience with the new MacBook Pro in follow up articles on Operation Gadget.

This is the first time since the early 1990s that my primary computer will be a Mac. I was a Mac software developer back then, but I walked away from the platform when my clients on Wall Street abandoned the Mac for NeXT machines, Sun workstations, and PCs.

Now even the most dedicated PC user can get a Mac if they really want to. There's no reason that you can't run both MacOS X and some form of Windows on a 2.4GHz Intel Core Duo-based machine.

It's good to be back.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 12:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In Episode 45 of Tekzilla Daily, Patrick Norton pointed out a website called System Requirements Lab that can help you determine if your PC has the minimum or recommended hardware and software necessary to run dozens of popular PC games.

I tried this myself and the way it works is to download either a signed Java or Active X component which collects information about your PC and compares it to System Requirements Lab's database of minimum game requirements. If you pass those requirements, it also tells you if your PC meets the recommended requirements for the game you chose. If your machine comes in above the minimum and below the recommended requirements, then certain features of the game will appear degraded or won't operate at all.

I asked System Requirements Lab if my Dell Latitude C810 can run UEFA Champions League 2006-2007. The site told me that my machine failed the CPU minimum requirement, CPU minimum speed, and video card minimum requirement test. It recommended that I buy a new machine, and referred me to a customized list at CNET.com. I guess it's a good thing that one is already on order.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:02 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I ordered my MacBook Pro on Sunday night. It's a build-to-order machine with a 160-Gigabyte hard drive that's based on the 2.2-GigaHertz Core 2 Duo, Santa Rosa-based MacBook Pro. If I get the machine that's currently on the market, it will be 194-percent faster than my current Dell Latitude C810, the design for which is now six years old.

I think I will be picking myself up off of the floor when I open the box and turn it on. This says nothing about the switch from Windows 2000 to MacOS X Leopard.

There are so many places where I can't really go on the web right now, just because of CPU constraints. YouTube and a lot of the Flash-based video sites are typically terrible. A lot of frames are missing when I play clips. As a result, I find myself grabbing my iPhone and using the WiFi capability to watch video. I think that's going to make a huge difference in my web experience.

I'm hoping that the web development IDEs that I use, Zend Studio 5.5 and Zend Studio for Eclipse, are leaps and bounds better on OS X than on an old, slow Windows machine. I'm also hoping that a personal organization tool such as OmniFocus or Things make me way more effective. We'll see.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 12:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm late to the game of predicting when the next update of the MacBook Pro will be released, unless you count the fact that I waited until Steve Jobs made his Keynote presentation at MacWorld Expo in January instead of placing an order as an outright prediction.

I think the next update of the MacBook Pro will take place on the Tuesday after the Mac-related news and rumors sites stop predicting that the update will take place.

Having said that, I hope that the update is announced sometime between tomorrow and the end of February.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

• Top 7 Web Applications for Sending Large Files on Geekpreneur: "If you’ve ever had to send a large file to someone, you know the hardships that arise. Email services keep strict limits on attachment sizes. What’s more is that it’s often hard to send more than one attachment at a time. This kind of disservice has made email quite unpopular for sharing files- and thus, we have entered the age of hybrid email. The premise is simple: cut out the bulk, and just give us an easy way to send files over the internet!"

• Torvalds: Leopard file system "utter crap" on MacNN: "Linux creator Linus Torvalds recently blasted Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard for having a file system that is 'complete and utter crap' at a Linux conference in Melbourne."

  The Leopard file system, technically known as HFS+, has been around in some form since the last time I was a Mac developer-- 1992. Of course Apple would like to move to something more robust. They've been building up to switch to ZFS, or some other sophisticated file system, for some time now.



• Turn Your Nokia Phone into a Wi-Fi Hotspot with JoikuSpot on Lifehacker: Who needs tethering when you can make your Series 60 phone into an ad hoc WiFi base station for your laptop? Wow.


• How to record a kickass podcast between two macs — and cheap! on A Whole Lotta Nothing: "A lot of people ask me how I do the MetaFilter Podcast.... I know they ... mean... 'what software and hardware does it take to make a decent sounding podcast?' After almost a year of regular podcasts and trying out different software and equipment, I’ve gotten the workflow down cold and I wanted to share the my way of making a good sounding podcast on the cheap. This works perfectly well for me being in Oregon and talking to my friend Jessamyn in Vermont over Skype, recording at both ends, then tossing it all into Garageband to complete the podcast." [ via 43Folders ]


• Nike SPARQ Parachute Makes You Run Faster, Eventually on Gizmodo: "The Nike SPARQ Parachute is designed to create drag 'to force athletes to push themselves harder to achieve speed' and look like a moron in Central Park." Can I use this thing on the ice sometime?

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

• The Complete Guide to iPhone Car Integration on iLounge.com: A great article that covers nearly every accessory for using your iPhone in the car without violating the laws requiring hands-free use of mobile phones in many parts of the USA. [ via TUAW ]
• MacBook Air review round-up on TUAW: "Ah, it is that magical time after an Apple announcement: the big media reviews are starting to roll in. As you might be aware Apple loans out new hardware to technology journalists to put through their paces.... The first few reviews are up, and they all pretty much say the same thing: the MacBook Air is really thin, and a great machine so long as you don't need the ports it doesn't have." Read the reviews anyway, if you haven't already.
• Junction Networks Well Positioned In Philly Burbs from VoIP Watch: Andy Abramson pointed out this cool little VoIP company called Junction Networks right up the road from me that I had never heard of. They provide SIP Hosting, Hosted PBX, and PSTN Gateway services. The Hosted PBX stuff is the easiest thing for me to get my head around. But who knew that these guys were out here (other than Andy)?

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In listening to the podcasts emanating from MacWorld Expo in San Francisco this week, a few pundits lamented the fact that the MacBook Air doesn't have 3G built into it. This is echoed by an article published on MacRumors called Lack of 3G a Deal Breaker... No, Not Talking about iPhone.

Whining of this nature is beyond tiresome.

There are so many reasons why 3G shouldn't be part of the MacBook Air at this point. One big reason is that 3G services in the United States use two competing technologies. If Apple came out with another device that was married to a single wireless carrier (AT&T), these same people would be up in arms again. If the MacBook Air shipped with unlocked 3G capability, customers would have to choose their technology or Apple would have to ship the computer with multiple wireless technology's built in. Imagine the cost of that.

This says nothing about the effect of 3G on power consumption / battery life.

People who choose to buy Apple products need to accept Apple's technology choices. 3G capabilities are available in the MacBook or MacBook Pro laptops at additional cost. The iPhone will support 3G when Apple thinks that it can build a model that has the form factor and power consumption characteristics that are consistent with the user experience they are selling.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 3:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I expected to be wowed by Steve Jobs' 2008 MacWorld Expo Keynote a lot more than I actually was. However, I was doing other things while the event was going on (real work), and the products that I was most interested in (mainstream Mac laptops) didn't get addressed in this keynote at all.

Bummer for me. I could have bought my MacBook Pro two weeks ago if I had known that the Penryn upgrade wasn't immediately forthcoming.

Here are my comments on the other aspects of the keynote:

• iTunes Movie Rentals / AppleTV Take 2: Clearly the announcement with the most business disruption potential. I agree with one of the commentators on MacBreak Weekly who suggested that Apple is making a play to be the digital media hub in the house, usurping services like Netflix, as well as Television services providers such as Comcast and Verizon FiOS.
• MacBook Air: This is a machine aimed at people who travel a lot or who want a portable machine that is a shadow of their desktop Mac. I could see some very well off Mac users owning the big iMac and a MacBook Air. The MacBook Air is incredibly thin. It's hard to believe a machine with a laptop-like display and keyboard could be any thinner than this and still be usable.

• Time Capsule: This is an interesting extension to the AirPort wireless base station line. Time Capsule is an AirPort Extreme with a 500G or 1T hard disk in it, functioning as Network Attached Storage (NAS).

  My first reaction was, "Bummer. Kathleen just bought me the AirPort Extreme." But then I realized that I would prefer NAS that used RAID 1 or RAID 5 storage anyway. It also costs more than we want to spend on network appliances at this point.



• iPhone 1.1.3 Update: There's some good stuff here. I loaded it on my iPhone already. The cell tower triangulation in the Maps application works pretty well. That feature makes the iPhone version of RinkAtlas viable. Expect an announcement from me on that front soon.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 1:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1)

Yesterday I received another sign that it's time to buy a new computer.

The Blogging Workstation that just experienced a power supply failure wouldn't start again. When I pushed the power button, nothing happened.

I pulled the front bezel off of the tower and immediately found that the positive lead on the Front Panel Power Switch had broken off.

This kind of failure drives me nuts. I probably have to keep this machine running for another week to 10 days. By then I should be able to receive my new MacBook Pro, or whatever Mac notebook computer I end up deciding to buy after Steve Jobs' keynote on Tuesday. All I have to do at that point is migrate my iTunes library off of that the Blogging Workstation and on to my new computer, and this machine can be put out to pasture.

The question I had to deal with was: What do I need to do in order to get the machine working again while spending little or no money?

The Blogging Workstation is a PC I built myself from off-the-shelf components. I knew that it's an ATX-style machine because of the research I did before temporarily replacing the power supply. I Googled "atx power switch problem" and found a really useful Flowchart for ATX Power Supply Repair that indicated that the Front Panel Power and Reset switches are the same type of switch. I decided to attempt to substitute the Front Panel Power Switch.

Performing this replacement turned out to be easy because I had kept the ASUS A7N8X-E motherboard documentation. (This is proof that being a pack rat pays off at least one day per year.) I pried the Reset Switch out of its plastic holder in the front bezel, pried the old Power Switch out of its holder, and swapped them. The motherboard diagram showed me which connectors needed to be switched. I closed up the case, hit the new Power Switch, and the machine started right up.

I am really looking forward to knowing what new Apple laptop options are and being able to order my new machine. The experience of the last few days strengthens my resolve to buy a support contract for my next machine (in this case, AppleCare).

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

• The Untold Story: How the iPhone Blew Up the Wireless Industry in Wired: Awesome story about how the iPhone made it to market. Absolutely worth reading.
• The best notebook you can buy in Infoworld: "After six months of intensive, daily use of the machine, I can state now that today's MacBook Pro stands head and shoulders above Apple's prior flagship Intel notebooks, and sets a standard for performance, features, durability, eco-responsibility, and quality that any PC vendor will find difficult to approach for a similar price." [ This is the current MacBook Pro, not the one expected to be announced at Macworld in San Francisco next Tuesday. ]
• Apple wins Best Notebook Computer of the Year Award for MacBook Pro in InfoWorld: Related article to the one discussed above.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 1:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Wednesday morning 6:30 A.M. There's an eerie silence in The Home Office.

Over the next 10 minutes I come to the conclusion that the power supply on The Blogging Workstation, my four year old AMD Athlon 2500XP+ ATX Tower Machine that's the fastest PC in the house, has breathed its last.

This is the machine I use to sync my iPhone, and I'm only days away from buying a new MacBook Pro (or another high end Mac notebook, as soon as Steve Jobs tells us what the product line is for 2008). What do I do now?

Luckily I had a PC at the office that has been cannibalized for parts. I brought it home, took out the power supply, and initially thought that it wouldn't work with my motherboard. I found out that the 24-pin main connector for the motherboard was modular and could be divided into a 20-pin main connector and a separate 4-pin connector. I tried this and the machine started.

The Blogging Workstation still failed POST because I didn't connect the floppy drive and a few other minor things. I can fix those tomorrow. Hopefully then I can sync the iPhone and backup as much of my synced data, iTunes library, and other irreplaceable data on that PC to another machine on my network.

What a relief.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 12:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Apple went ahead and announced an upgraded Mac Pro and an upgraded Xserve this morning. These announcements occurred one day after Intel announed 16 new processors based on 45nm silicon fabrication at CES.

I'm a bit confused by the timing of these announcements. It makes sense to release these new machines to the world as soon as possible since both the Mac Pro and the Xserve haven't been significantly upgraded in more than a year. But, why do this in advance of Macworld Expo? Is Steve Jobs going to have so much to demonstrate that these announcements couldn't be worked into his keynote?

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

• Isolator- Concentration Application For Mac OS X on LifeDev: "I don’t think I have to tell this blog’s readers how hard it can be to stay on task when working on the computer. That’s why “concentration applications” are great tools to have. If you’re a mac user, check out the elegant Isolator for blocking out all of those outside distractions associated with working with a tool that can do soooo many things...."
• Avoid needless delays in System Updates on MacOSXHints.com: "While installing the 10.4.11 Server and subsequent 10.4.11 security patch, I had to wait a very long time (over an hour) while the Installer was configuring the install. I peeked in on the Installer process..., and found that it was searching through every directory on all mounted drives on the machine for files to update...." [ Does this pertain to MacOS X workstations or just servers? If so, does it pertain to Leopard or just Tiger? ]
• Weekend project: Wire Your Home On-the-Cheap with DIY Network Cables on Lifehacker: "The video demonstration above from electronics retailer TigerDirect details the relatively simple process of cutting your own Ethernet cables so you don't end up spending more than you need wiring your home or office (you also won't end up with 10 feet too much or a foot too little like you often will when you buy pre-cut). Wireless home networks are convenient, but if you regularly transfer large files or stream HD-quality video, nothing beats a solid wired network....
• Test-Driving a Sno-Park Maserati in The Wall Street Journal: This article compares a $4.99 snow saucer from L.L. Bean to a $279 inflatable "body board for the snow" imported from Switzerland. Although the writer expected there to be little difference in the fun had on the two sledding devices, she actually found that the $279 was far more fun and less jarring than the basic model.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Finally. A Windows machine that Walt Mossberg can love.

Walt's latest Personal Technology column for The Wall Street Journal talks about the Dell XPS One, a machine that has the guts and design to compete with the iMac. According to the article:

Something interesting is going on at Dell. The Texas personal-computer behemoth, long associated with boxy, boring machines, has started emphasizing industrial design. And the company, which in recent years seemed to care only about corporate customers, techies and hard-core gamers, appears once again interested in average, mainstream consumers who value simplicity.

I think that Mossberg's bias toward machines that are easy-to-use and approachable is what upsets the majority of the gadget bloggers out there. Most people writing blogs about cutting edge electronics either openly dislike him or give him grudging respect. However, he was advocating Macs as home computers early in the life of Mac OSX-- way before it was fashionable to do so.

I've been looking for a PC that I can recommend to those people who can't bring themselves to buy a Macintosh. The Dell XPS One is one of the few Vista desktops I've seen that I would recommend as a Mac alternative.

I'm going to start looking at notebook computers like the Dell XPS M1530 to see if they live up to the same standard.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I got a Nokia N800 through the Nokia Blogger Relations Program several months ago. I found this device quite interesting, but I never had the opportunity to dig into it as deeply as I had wanted to. I started to think about it again about a week ago, when I was thinking about creating a webcam for our Christmas Tree at my house.

I started Googling around, and I found a three-part series of articles on IBM developerWorks that provide a detailed explanation of how to write your own webcam client for the N800.

Part one is called Developing for the N800 and talks about the environment you need to use to develop a maemo package. Maemo is a Linux-based development platform for Internet tablets such as the N770 and the N800. The article talks extensively about Scratchbox, a cross-compilation toolkit that most people use to make maemo package development easier.

Part two of the tutorial is Accessing the Nokia N800 camera which discusses the maemo Camera API and a multimedia application framework called GStreamer.

By the time I finished reading part two of the tutorial, I began to wonder how the editor of this site could consider this project to be "introductory level". If that's the case, then some of the stuff on this site must be ridiculously complex and/or technical in nature.

The third part of the tutorial is Auto-uploading Nokia N800 photos. This explains in detail how to best extend the on board software and services of the N800 with your own code in order to develop an automated uploading tool. When you combine this with previous code to access the camera and convert images that it outputs into an uploadable format, you end up with a webcam client.

I was really impressed with these articles, and I got a much better understanding of the N800's potential by reading it.

The thing that stopped me from building the webcam application according to the instructions is the prerequisites. I didn't have a machine that had enough free space to build up a Linux virtual machine that would be an appropriate build environment for a maemo package. It would have taken me time to free that space. I may end up waiting to do this until I get my MacBook Pro sometime in January.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I just stumbled on to a sad story on VeloNews.com from bike tech columnist Lennard Zinn:

Much of what I do in life is collect information about bicycle technology, and {in November} I went to the Milan bike show to do just that. But when my week-old MacBook Pro computer was stolen from me on November 7, I learned about some new technology that compromised my collections of bicycle information. I want to tell you what I learned with the intention of saving somebody else the stress and hassle I went through.

Lennard goes on to explain that a thief used a scanner to pickup the electronic key code that his traveling companion used to lock their car when entering an Autogrill restaurant. The thief had staked out the parking lot looking for indications that people were leaving valuable items in their cars and hit the jackpot in this case.

The article gives 14 lessons he learned about securing portable technology while traveling. Several of them are things that I never would have thought of myself, since I've never had a piece of expensive electronics stolen from my car. The article is well worth reading.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 2:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I realize that this sounds completely insane, but Kathleen and I talked about my intention to buy a Mac mini and she said, "Maybe you should get the MacBook Pro you really want now instead of the Mac mini."

Her reasoning is essentially that the Mac mini isn't really that cheap when you look at all of the accessories that someone like me would want for it. Here are some examples:

• Since the Mac mini only has one video connector, I'd need to get a pretty good LCD display. The two that I have available in my home office are nice, but they have 1280 x 1024 resolution and they're analog.
• Since all the keyboards and mice in the house are the old PC style or part of a laptop, I'd need a keyboard and mouse set that's compatible with USB.
• Since the Mac mini steals main system memory to drive the display, I'd want the Mac mini maxed out at 2 Gigabytes of RAM.
• Since the Mac mini isn't portable, I'd end up borrowing Kathleen's MacBook from time to time in order to have a modern computer that I could carry with me for conferences or presentations.

If you add the costs of the items listed above to the high end Mac mini, you're looking at $1300-1400 for everything. I could get a MacBook for close to that amount of money.

The problem with the MacBook is that the screen resolution isn't really sufficient for the kind of web development I do. The resolution of the built-in LCD is 1280 x 800, which is great for personal productivity work, but is a little too small when you need to have a terminal open to a remote server, an FTP client, a web page from phpMyAdmin, and a copy of Zend Studio or Eclipse running at the same time.

The 15-inch MacBook Pro's display is 1440 x 900, which is 25-percent more pixels. This is large enough for me to work with day-to-day. The standard MacBook Pro memory configuration is 2 Gigabytes, and the video card has its own internal memory.

The Mac mini that I intended to buy would be purely a stop-gap measure to get me a more usable machine than my underpowered PCs. We would end up spending additional money in six months or a year on a Mac laptop. After spending more than $1,000 on the Mac mini could I afford to buy a MacBook Pro, or would I have to settle for a MacBook and make a major compromise on screen resolution along with it?

As hard as it is to spend $2,000 on a laptop at this point, I think Kathleen is right that the most efficient use of our resources is to buy the machine I want fairly soon. The alternative is to make compromises by buying a Mac mini today, but we'd end up buying two Macintosh computers for me in less than a year.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 12:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I'm about to give up on Microsoft Windows XP.

I've been holding off on buying a new computer because I really want a MacBook Pro. The problem is I won't save the money to be able to buy this computer for some time. Meanwhile, I'm losing minutes of quality time with my family with every task I attempt on my trusty old 933 mHz Dell Latitude C810 laptop. This laptop still runs Windows 2000 because I knew that XP would kill it. This machine is practically unusable when AVG Anti-virus Professional is running a full virus scan.

The machine that I run Windows XP on is my Blogging Workstation, a 1.3GHz tower PC with an AMD Athlon XP 2500+. It has two 17-inch SXGA (1280 x 1024) LCD displays. That's the machine to which I dock my iPhone.

iTunes really kills this machine. Whenever I'm syncing the iPhone, the CPU is pegged at 100%. I'm sure the iPhone takes a lot longer to sync on this machine than it would on many late model Macs.

I doubt that I am the only reluctant PC owner with an iPhone who has this problem. Having an iPhone when it was new was important enough for me to put off a new Mac purchase by a few months. However, I would never have believed how poor the performance of Windows XP on a 1.3GHz PC running iTunes would be until I experienced it myself. The collective weight of Microsoft Windows and the bloated applications that have been written for it are suffocating PCs with CPUs in the 1 Gigahertz neighborhood.

So, the laptop I want is out of reach. How will I solve this problem and improve my personal productivity? I'm going to buy myself a Mac mini-- the beefier of the two models-- as a replacement for the Blogging Workstation. Meanwhile I'll keep saving my money for the machine I really want.

I'm giving up the dual monitor configuration to do this. In fact, I'm staying with the old SXGA display to save money. I think the CPU speed and the more nimble OS X Leopard operating system will make a huge difference in my life.

The road to becoming a full-fledged Mac developer (again) will be long for me, but I have to start somewhere. I'm ordering my new Macintosh sometime around December 1.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My wife Kathleen is finally going to get the new Apple MacBook that she's been eyeing for months.

This purchase will be a major liberation for her in the sense that she will be able to manage photos from the main family digital camera, the Canon PowerShot A540, sync her Treo 650 to her own machine, and so on.

The concern that has been hanging over us since we started talking about buying a MacBook is: What will we do to get Microsoft Office on this machine? I'm starting to think that this is really the wrong question to be asking ourselves, and that we should be looking at Microsoft Office alternatives that are free, because they are better than ever before.

I'm thinking specifically of Google Docs and Spreadsheets now that Google Gears has been announced. Google Gears is a JavaScript library that provides off-line persistence for web applications so you can use them when you aren't on-line. We probably wouldn't need this capability when working in The Home Office, since we have abundant Internet connectivity, but it would be handy for working on word processing and spreadsheet documents while on a plane or another place where wireless Internet access is sporadic or non-existent.

Google Gears is not currently integrated into Google Docs and Spreadsheets, but it's very likely to be rolled out soon.

Microsoft Office 2004 does exist for the Macintosh, it just hasn't been updated in a long time and must be run in emulation on Intel-based Macs. I think everyone who is buying a Mac today ought to wait before buying Microsoft Office, at least until a native Intel version of the software is released. There are some indications that Microsoft Office 2008 for MacOS X will ship in the second half of 2007 and that version will finally provide native support for Intel-based Macs.

I'm not saying that Google Docs and Spreadsheets with Google Gears will be a 100-percent replacement for Microsoft Office on a Windows Vista or XP box, but I'm think that these applications will be a better solution than running Parallels or VMware Workstation for MacOS X on that laptop just to get word processing, spreadsheets, and an occasional presentation.

Whether the new version of Microsoft Office for the Macintosh is worth purchasing in the first place is an open question. I suspect that it won't be worth it to me. We'll see what Kathleen thinks when it finally ships.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 2:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

I read Lee Gomes' "Portals" column in The Wall Street Journal today about problems he's identified with basic file system management in the Windows Vista operating system, and came to the conclusion that he's foolish for not switching to the Macintosh.

Gomes identified a performance issue in Windows XP; He cannot get his machine to display his music collection in the Windows Explorer because it has almost 3,600 subfolders. XP apparently has problems rendering views of file systems with thousands of nested folders. This scenario causes the Explorer it to consume most of a computer's CPU resources.

This problem is somewhat improved in Vista; Instead of never completing the display task as is the case in XP, the 3,600 subfolders are rendered in the Vista Explorer in 16 minutes.

If this problem happened to me, and I had the financial resources, I'd switch to an operating system that handled basic operations in a reasonable manner. Gomes has identified such an operating system; It's Mac OS X. And it's not like he hasn't realized this:

...Being the curious sort, I wondered what my experience would be like on a Macintosh. With my home network, I copied the big folder over to a borrowed Apple and used the comparable "Expand All" feature in the Mac Finder. This is when the wow really started: All 3,600 subfolders popped open in 30 seconds.

Both the PC and Mac were recent models with powerful CPUs and plenty of memory. But maybe the Apple just had a faster disk drive. So I used the network to "mount" the PC disk drive on the Mac, without actually copying the folder, and tried the procedure again.

....Even then, it did its folder expansion trick in a little over a minute and a half. So, in working with files and folders, one of a computer's most basic tasks, the Mac could do in 30 seconds what took Vista at least six minutes for, and which XP couldn't do at all.

Once you start looking for these Windows vs. Mac speed differences, it's easy to find other examples....

Lee, can I introduce you to Walter Mossberg? I've never met Walt personally (maybe you have, since you work for the same company), but he's been advocating switching to the Mac for several years.

So why hasn't Lee Gomes switched to a Mac yet? It seems like he wants to use an operating system that can barely handle his computing needs:

Despite all this, I remain a not terribly unhappy Vista upgrade user. A combination of entropy and familiarity keeps me from bolting. I also have a belief that I'd be sure to find something with the Mac to complain about as well.

Vista will slowly get better and go on to dominate computing, just like its predecessors. That's one eternal verity. Mac owners feeling aggrieved about same is another.

I don't know if you noticed this, Lee, but Toyota passed GM in quarterly new car sales in the last quarter. To me this indicates if you keep putting out mediocre products, eventually the grassroots buyers in the U.S. will get the idea and shop someplace else. Microsoft should get the hint, stop worrying so much about matching Apple in UI features, and improve the performance of core functions of its operating systems. [ Paid subscription required to read most articles in The Wall Street Journal ]

Posted by Dave Aiello at 7:10 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

A couple of weeks ago I talked about the successful replacement of the screen assembly on my Dell Latitiude C810 laptop. I did this without the aid of a great article from Instructables.com called DIY - Replace Broken Laptop LCD.

This Instructables article takes a more complex aproach to replacing the LCD on an Apple iBook G4 than I did with my Latitude; The article shows how to replace the LCD but leave the upper case and the surrounding components intact. I didn't do this because:

• it's potentially a lot more difficult,
• there was a possibility that more than one display component was malfunctioning on my laptop,
• there were a number of complete display assemblies that are compatible with my C810 available on eBay at reasonable prices.

I think that articles like this one are really helpful because they help laptop owners to realize that display component failures are fairly common, and that you don't necessarily have to buy a new laptop or spend hundreds of dollars on an out-of-warranty repair at a computer repair shop. I found more specific instructions on how to take my C810 apart in the Dell Latitude C810 Service Manual, but I never would have realized that replacing the entire laptop display assembly was a viable strategy by reading the service manual.

I'm going to delve more deeply into Instructables.com to see if other articles they've published are equally useful. [ via Lifehacker ]

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

As I mentioned last week, I ordered a used LCD display unit for my Dell Latitude C810 from a reputable seller on eBay. I received the LCD display unit earlier today and successfully replaced the failing display unit on my laptop.

I've been using the laptop on and off for the last six hours, and it's just as useful as it was before the FL inverter on the old display unit started to fail.

I'll talk more about the success of this replacement in a few days, after I've had time to make sure that the new configuration is reliable.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Late last week Kathleen and I bought a 2007 Honda Accord SE. I hadn't anticipated buying a new car in 2006, but we we had to act quickly after the transmssion in my Jeep Grand Cherokee failed. A purchase of this magnitude will force us to make a few sacrifices in other aspects of our life. One of them is that I'm attempting to repair the Dell Latitude C810 laptop that I've been using for several years rather than purchasing a new one.

My Latitude started having display problems just before Christmas. The backlight on the LCD started flickering, then started shutting off completely for longer and longer periods of time. I concluded that the problem was that the FL inverter was failing. I took it to a local computer repair place, which turned out to be a waste of time because they charged me to re-diagnose the problem, then recommended that I buy a new Dell laptop from them rather than repair my current laptop.

This advice may have made sense, but their recommendation really upset me because they didn't do what I requested: quote me the least-cost approach to repairing this laptop. I responded by saying, "Thanks anyway," and taking my laptop back home.

I decided to attempt a repair on my own. Rather than try to buy a replacement FL inverter and substitute it for the supposedly failing one, I decided to buy a used LCD display unit that fits my laptop. Quite a few of these LCD display units are offered for sale on Ebay at any given moment, so I purchased one for about $150 plus shipping. That's less than 25% of the purchase price of the least expensive new Dell laptop: an Inspiron 1501.

I've never replaced the LCD display unit on a laptop, but I understand that this is particularly easy to do to late-model Dell laptops. I hope that's the case and I will report on how well the replacement goes after I've done it.

Even if I had around $650 to spend, I wouldn't have purchased the Inspiron 1501 at this time. I would have either repaired my Latitude C810 as I'm doing now, or scraped together another $500 and purchased an Apple MacBook. I hope that the Latitude C810 is my last Windows laptop. I want something better next time around, and the MacBook or a MacBook Pro is what I have in mind.

Technorati Tags: Dell Latitude C810, Dell Inspiron 1501, Honda Accord SE, Apple MacBook, Apple MacBook Pro

Posted by Dave Aiello at 12:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1)

Yesterday Martin O'Donnell sent me an article that reported wireless broadband services offered by Verizon, Cingular, and Sprint Nextel are being adopted by some road warriors, but that adoption has been mainly limited to outside sales people, building contractors, insurance claims adjustors, and first responders.

There are a lot of other businesses where 3G data services for laptop users ought to be taking off but currently aren't. For instance, wireless broadband would be a great solution for journalists covering sports events like pro cycling. Cingular HSDPA wasn't deployed during the 2005 Tour de Georgia which I covered in person, but a service like that would have been really useful because I could have easily worked from my hotel room and restaurants when I was not in the media center. I would say that if I were to attend the race next year, a broadband wireless card would be a must.

If I had a job with a long mass transit commute, as I did prior to 9/11, I think high speed mobile data would be worth the estimated $60 per month expense. If I worked in Manhattan and had to commute via New Jersey Transit's Northeast Corridor Service, think of how much work I could do on Operation Gadget while sitting on the train?

I'd also be interested in broadband wireless service if I were a field engineer for a software or networking company. Why waste time at the beginning of a client visit acquiring WiFi or a hard Ethernet connection when you can just open up your notebook and be on-line. (Maybe you need corporate Intranet access, so that might be a reason.)

Beyond the estimated $60 per month cost, there are some surprising issues with buying wireless broadband service. It's really hard to find wireless broadband network cards on Amazon.com. These are still niche products, so maybe this is to be expected. However, it's even difficult to determine which notebook computers in Amazon.com's store have mobile broadband capabilities built-in.

For all the talk of Dell's commitment to wireless broadband, there still isn't a lot of clear information on the subject on their website. I had to delve deep into the options when specing out a notebook for purchase before I saw the words HSDPA and EV-DO for the first time.

Cingular, Verizon Wireless, and Sprint Nextel each have mobile broadband cards available on their websites, but again, they aren't very prominently featured.

So I guess my question is, how committed are the carriers to pushing this technology to the masses if they don't make a large marketing commitment to it?

Technorati Tags: mobile broadband, Cingular, Verizon Wireless, Sprint Nextel, HSDPA, EV-DO.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've got a five year old Linux server in the basement at the Home Office. It was state-of-the-art before 9/11:

• Built by one of the biggest Linux-hardware companies of the early days: VALinux (now called VA Software).
• Big disk capacity: 72 Gigabytes of SCSI-based hardware RAID. That was great five years ago.
• 2U case

A copy of every disk file that Kathleen, Jimmy, and I can't afford to lose is stored there. This machine is probably way past its MTBF on a number of components, so I need to consider my options and figure out my budget.

The thought occurred to me to rebuild the server to 2006 standards by buying individual components and integrating them on the basement workbench. This would mean I would build another 2U server, probably with SATA RAID this time. That's an option I'm willing to consider for certain applications, but it's probably not a good idea for the file vault.

A better option is a 1-Terabyte Network Attached Storage appliance like the Infrant ReadyNAS RN600-1000. You can have about 630 Gigabytes of RAID 5 storage up and running with one of these servers in practically no time. The price is also reasonable, considering you are getting four 250 GB Seagate SATA drives in a well-designed enclosure with gigabit Ethernet with large data frame support, and some pretty intelligent NAS software.

Some of the comments on the ReadyNAS RN600-1000 at Amazon.com are worth reading also:

• From Philip Greenspun of Philip and Alex's Guide to Web Publishing: "... It took about fifteen minutes to plug in and set up the Infrant. My Windows XP desktop machine automatically recognized the newly available shared folders served by the Infrant. The Infrant is very quiet (Net wisdom is that this is quieter than the competitive Buffalo NAS), producing about 10 percent as much noise as the desktop PC, which was custom-assembled supposedly as a 'silent PC'.

  "I use the Infrant as the core of a whole-house music system. When the Windows machine needs to be rebooted or is suffering a 100 percent CPU load doing photo processing the Sonos music boxes just pull the MP3 files directly from the Infrant...."

• Another person commented: "Unlike a lot of the low-end NAS boxes, this one is designed and supported in the USA and it shows. The designed-in-Asia NAS boxes have much more cryptic interfaces, less elegant firmware, fewer features and marginal documentation."

A 600 GB file vault ought to do fine for our house for at least five more years. I think we could do a lot worse than to buy either the Infrant ReadyNAS RN600-1000 or the Buffalo HD-H1.OTGL/R5 TeraStation. Hopefully I'll find the money to make this purchase in the next month or so.

Technorati Tags: ReadyNAS RN600-1000, Buffalo TeraStation.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Daring Fireball written by John Gruber is a Macintosh-oriented site that often publishes long essays that contain gems of information for readers who are patient enough to read to the end. One example is the information about the MacBook that appeared in the Confidence Game, an essay that was published about two weeks ago:

I always liked Apple’s iBook laptops, but it was often quite obvious that Apple crippled the machines in certain ways so as to protect the sales of higher-profit PowerBooks.... Not so with the new MacBooks. For $1099, you can get a MacBook today that’s almost every bit as good as the $1999 MacBook Pro that first shipped just three months ago.

Gruber goes on to say that the differences between the MacBooks and the MacBook Pros are that MacBook Pros have:

• bigger screens,
• more ports and expansion slots,
• backlit keyboards, and
• a different case {and screen} finish.

I never mentioned this here, but Kathleen and I went to the Apple Store in King of Prussia, PA to see the MacBook on the Sunday before Kathleen gave birth to our son Jimmy. When we took a look at the 2.0-GHz MacBook side-by-side with the least expensive MacBook Pro, we found it hard to detect performance differences. We realize that we were not using software that would tax the graphics hardware, but, we agree that the MacBook is a suprisingly aggressive move by Apple.

That experience and the confirmations of our analysis that we've seen in places like Daring Fireball and from respected technologists like Walter Mossberg in The Wall Street Journal, I wonder if I was mistaken when I recommended that my wife buy a MacBook Pro as her next computer?

Technorati Tags: MacBook, MacBook Pro.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 4:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My wife Kathleen has used a Pentium II desktop computer with a gigantic 21-inch CRT monitor as her home computer for at least five years. The hard disk drive on that computer is dying, and so we are looking at buying her a brand new computer for the first time since she was in college.

Kathleen would like to switch back to the Macintosh platform with this computer purchase, so we started looking at Macintosh laptops at the brand new Apple Store at Suburban Square in Ardmore, Pennsylvania on Saturday.

We arrived at the Apple Store three days before Apple formally announced the MacBook, the new low cost Macintosh laptop that replaced the iBook. We knew that we could not see the MacBook, so we went there to get a sense of how the MacBook Pro would work for her, and to try to guess what the MacBook features would be.

I think the MacBook Pro is a beautiful looking, high performance laptop. The Mac OS X operating system is the best operating system for personal productivity that's ever been shipped. I'd love to have one of these machines myself, and I'd be happy for Kathleen to have one if that's what she wants.

The big question about the 15-inch MacBook Pro is whether it's worth $500 more than the new 13-inch MacBook? I haven't seen one of these new MacBooks in person yet, so I'm basing my current opinion on information available on Apple's web site and commentary from people who have played with the MacBook already.

I was impressed when I learned that Apple decided to bump the processor speed on the 15-inch MacBook Pros to 2.0 GigaHertz and 2.16 GHz respectively, up from 1.83 GHz. They had to do this if they wanted to release the MacBook at 2.0 GHz, which seemed like a must considering the $1,100- $1,500 price.

I was hoping that the new MacBooks would be widescreen laptops, and I wasn't disappointed when the annoucement was finally made. I think the 1280 x 800 display on a 13.3-inch screen is a nice improvement over the iBook, but isn't as good as the 1440 x 900 display on the 15.4-inch MacBook Pro. The difference in resolution is a clear reason for a price differential between the MacBook and the MacBook Pro.

I was somewhat disappointed by the shared video memory scheme employed on the new MacBook, and this is probably the biggest issue I have with that machine. I think that Apple could included something better than an Intel GMA 950 graphics processor which takes 80 MegaBytes of system memory to drive the display, leaving 432M of system memory free for normal operation. The other Macintosh that uses this video scheme, the Mac mini is a lot less expensive.

Beyond that, I question the decision to price the Black MacBook at $200 more than the White version when the only significant difference apart from the case is an 20 extra MegaBytes of hard disk space.

I think the only way I'll know if the finish of the new MacBook cases will work in our house (in other words-- if they will be unlikely to become visibly scratched in normal use) is to see the machines in person. That's easy to do by going back to an Apple Store.

Knowing what I know today, my tentative recommendation to Kathleen is to spend the extra money and get the 2.0 GHz 15-inch MacBook Pro for $1,999. I think this is the machine that will have the longest useful life of all of the Mac laptops available today. If we go back to the Apple Store to compare the 13-inch Black MacBook to the 2.0 GHz 15-inch MacBook Pro I'll report on that here on Operation Gadget.

Technorati Tags: MacBook, MacBook Pro, Apple Store, Mac mini, Mac OS X.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Brad Feld's Treadputer: Venture capitalist
Brad Feld added a 3.2-GHz IBM ThinkCentre
to his Vision Fitness T9450HRT Treadmill.
This lets him get his runs in while he's on
conference calls. [ Photo: Brad Feld ].

Brad Feld is a managing director at Mobius Venture Capital based in Boulder, Colorado. He challenges himself by running marathons, and has set a goal of running a marathon in every state in the nation within the next 10 years.

Around the beginning of the year he and his coworkers built a "treadputer", a fitness club-quality treadmill with a big, fast Windows PC, and three 19-inch LCD displays.

The amazing aspect of Brad's story is that he finds he can use his PC while walking and running on this treadmill. According to the article:

It turns out that the Treadputer is highly functional when I’m running, which enables me to do some of my longer runs during the day while I’m on a call rather than having to get up at 5am to get them in before the day starts....

When we first assembled the Treadputer, {a co-worker} was skeptical that I would be able to read the screen while walking and assumed that reading while running would be impossible. While the three monitor setup helps a lot, it was surprisingly easy to read while walking or running. We’re running all three monitors at their standard 1280x1024 resolution and haven’t juiced up the font sizes.

Brad's article includes more details about his treadputer's configuration, and what he's learned about typing and mouse / trackball use. I found it quite interesting.

At least one other person bent on improving his life has built a treadputer. Walking Guy has begun a blog discussing his experiences building and using his treadputer. He says he began this quest because he needed to take off at least 40 pounds but was stuck in front of a computer 80 to 100 hours a week. He has his treadputer setup and has already gotten himself mentioned in the Lifehacker Coolest Workspace Contest.

I wonder how many more treadputer setups already exist, and how many will be built now that these articles have appeared on the Internet? I'll have to start looking for "bikeputer" articles as well.

Technorati Tags: fitness gadgets, treadputer.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Martin O'Donnell is the proud owner of a new MacBook Pro. He reports that Apple Mail, part of Mac OS X Tiger is a significant improvement over Eudora 6, the latest version available for the Mac. Martin writes:

I've been using Apple Mail 2.0.8 for about 10 days now, and I've been pleasantly surprised at how good it is. Overall, I find it far superior to Eudora 6 on either OS X or Windows, mostly because of performance: when I do some operation that hits the {IMAP} server, like moving many mails, I see a symbol showing me that work is going on, but it doesn't block me from moving on to some other task. My Eudora experience was the opposite, I hesitated to do something like open an enormous spam mailbox, lest it bog down the client for 10 minutes and prevent me from getting any work done.

Part of the performance is undoubtedly the raw power of a native Intel application running on a (powerful) Core Duo chip, but I suspect most of what I'm feeling is the asynchrony that Apple Mail allows.

There are a few Eudora features that I miss that I haven't figured out in Mail, but I can't imagine going back to Eudora.

Technorati Tags: MacBook Pro, Apple Mail, Mac OS X, Eudora 6.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 6:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I was thrilled to see that Apple introduced Boot Camp yesterday. Boot Camp is a free-standing add-on to the next release of Mac OS X that gives Intel-based Apple Macintosh computers dual boot capability. All you need to do to run Microsoft Windows on the same machine is to install your own copy of Windows XP.

This is an 80 to 90-percent solution for people that want to upgrade their primary workstation, are currently Windows users, and can't drop Windows because of the need to run an application that has no Mac OS X-equivalent. I am even more interested in owning a MacBook Pro now than I was before the announcement.

The next logical step for the Mac OS X-- beyond Boot Camp-- is to vitualization of the Windows operating system. I've been a big fan and heavy user of VMware for the last three years or so. What VMware's products let you do is run a logically-separate computer in a window on your Windows or Linux workstation desktop. This has meant that I've been able to create virtual copies of servers that my company has running on the Internet, so that I can do testing before we make major infrastructure changes.

What I hope to see soon is a VMware Workstation as an alternative to Boot Camp. VMware Workstation for Mac OS X would run Windows XP at the same time as you run Mac OS X. It could also run other Intel-based operating systems. Based on the current cost of Workstation for Windows and Linux, it would probably cost about $200.00

Apple could go and build a virtualization product like VMware Workstation on their own-- call it Boot Camp 2, but I think it would be far more efficient for Apple to encourage VMware to come out with a version of VMware Workstation for Mac OS X. This would allow casual Windows users to continue to use Boot Camp and gradually wean themselves from Windows, while power users who need access to both platforms would be able to go the operating system virtualization route.

Technorati Tags: Boot Camp, MacBook Pro, Mac OS X, VMware, Windows XP

Posted by Dave Aiello at 1:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The ViewSonic VX2025 won a 20-inch Widescreen Monitor Group Test published yesterday at Bit-Tech.net. The VX2025 was judged the best value for the money against the following competitors:

• BenQ FP202W
• NEC MultiSync 20WGX, apparently not available in the U.S. but the closest model is the NEC MultiSync 20WMGX2-BK
• Acer AL2032WA

On performance alone, Wil Harris liked the NEC, but it was 25 percent more expensive than the ViewSonic. Unless you need the highest possible LCD response for gaming, you'll probably find the ViewSonic to be the best buy.

Technorati Tags: ViewSonic VX2025, BenQ FP202W, NEC MultiSync 20WGX, Acer AL2032WA, widescreen LCD monitors

Posted by Dave Aiello at 1:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Wall Street Journal reports that Microsoft will delay the general release of Windows Vista until January 2007. According to the article, "Mr. Allchin {co-president of Microsoft's Platforms & Services Division} said that the major reason for this delay -- which amounts to several weeks beyond the original expected launch date -- is to give Microsoft more time to improve the "quality" of the Windows Vista. Specifically, he said Microsoft needs a few more weeks to test the security and other quality aspects of the product."

The announcement was made in a conference call with analysts late this afternoon.

I've never been to iterested in Vista because I think desktop operating systems other than Mac OS X are commodities. I have to admit that now I'm really intrigued. Who knows what will happen to the market for new Windows PCs now that consumers won't be able to get Vista for at least 10 months? [ Registration required to view most articles in The Wall Street Journal. ]

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've noticed recently that a lot of people commenting on the Apple MacBook Pro who aren't Macintosh users have focused on the comparing the CPU speeds of the new models with the final Apple PowerBook models and found the MacBook Pro models somehow lacking.

It's hard to believe that the people making these points really considered why people buy-- or should buy a Macintosh in the first place. You know as well as I do that most of the pundits making these comparisons can't be Mac users.

I'm not sitting in front of a Macintosh right now, but I've been a Mac developer in the past and I understand the Macintosh user experience quite well. The User Interface of Mac OS X is simply the best available for any personal computer. I'm not talking about the appearance of the desktop here as much as the productivity that an average user can expect to achieve with a Mac versus a Windows PC.

Apple has invested a lot of their R&D efforts into building services into their operating system that enhance user productivity. A great example is Spotlight, Apple's successful attempt to build "just do what I want" search technology into its desktop. This feature, which debuted in April 2005, really enhanced the value of Apple's own add-on software. If I had Spotlight available to me, I'd probably switch to an email client that supported it and strongly consider changing the business applications I used if they didn't integrate well with it.

Apple's Automator is another feature that dramatically increases user productivity for repetitive tasks. There's nothing that really compares to it in the Windows world, mainly because it's not a core function of any Microsoft operating system. A technology like this wouldn't be supported by as many line-of-business applications if it came from a third party.

That's why I say that you should buy a MacBook Pro for the user experience, not because the benchmarks say that it's CPU is x percent faster than its predecessor, or another Intel-based laptop running a different OS.

The thing that would stop me from buying this generation of MacBook Pro would be if I learned that the apparent speed of applications, expected reliability, or battery life were less than that of the last PowerBooks. Walter Mossberg of The Wall Street Journal addresses these issues in his MacBook Pro review, published in the Personal Technology column of today's print edition. He says:

I've been testing the MacBook Pro and comparing it to both a late-model PowerBook and a roughly similar Windows laptop, the new H-P Pavilion dv5000t.... In my speed tests, the MacBook Pro beat the PowerBook at such tasks as importing photos and music, burning CDs, opening multiple Web sites and launching some programs. But most of the speed gains were slight, and even the biggest gains were nowhere near the 400% speed increases Apple claims.

For this and other reasons, Mossberg concludes, "The MacBook Pro isn't revolutionary, but it's a promising start to the era of Intel-powered Apple laptops."

I think Walter Mossberg's review indicates that people who are interested in buying a Macintosh as their next laptop can feel confident when purchasing a MacBook Pro. I hope to join you soon. Peformance of the MacBook Pro will only get better as third-party software makers port their applications to take advantage of the Intel CPU.

Finally, I think it's dumb of Apple to throw out figures like "four-times faster" when it's unlikely that regular users will be able to feel that much of a performance increase. Apple clearly needs to turn the Intel Core Duo processor into a major feature of it's first Intel-based Macintosh laptop, but the way they are marketing the MacBook Pro lead me to believe that a PowerBook user would be blown away by the MacBook Pro's performance. From what I've read and seen so far, that's not going to happen.

Technorati Tags: MacBook Pro, PowerBook, Mac OSX

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:50 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

While researching my article on the White Screen of Death problem my Treo is having, I ran across a recent piece by Stewart Alsop where he asks "Do the vendors choose the color of the death screen intentionally?" He says that the screens of death for his favorite gadgets are:

• Blue for many flavors of Microsoft Windows
• Green for TiVo and DirecTiVo
• White for Treo 650Treo 650 handsets that work on the Cingular, T-Mobile, Sprint, and Verizon mobile networks

Stewart and I both have each of these products. I feel fortunate to be able to say that I've only seen two of the three screens of death that Stewart has seen. (I own two TiVos, but I've never seen the Green Screen of Death.)

I told my friend Chris Nolan about Stewart's story. She laughed out loud when she heard it because she knows Stewart pretty well. Small world. Chris has a TiVo, but hasn't experienced the Green Screen of Death either. She has made other platform choices for her computer and her phone, so those two other colored screens don't apply to her.

Do you know of any screens of death that are notorious because of their telltale color? Let me know by posting a comment and I'll add them to the story.

Technorati Tags: Treo 650, TiVo, DirecTiVo, Microsoft Windows, BSOD, WSOD, GSOD

Posted by Dave Aiello at 6:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Macintouch produced a very detailed Macintosh laptop reliability study with responses from its readers. Forty-one different models of Mac laptops are covered: everything from 233-Megahertz PowerBook G3s to 1.67-Gigahertz 17-inch PowerBook G4s.

There are a lot of interesting results here, well worth reading for Mac laptop users and non-Mac users alike. Maybe the least surprising conclusion is that the 12-inch Apple iBook is the most reliable of the current crop of Mac laptops. It's got the smallest footprint and it's made of the simplest laptop materials. When you compare it to the 17-inch PowerBook G4, you can see why:

• The PowerBook screen is huge, so there's more of a chance of the display going bad.
• The alumnium alloy case is very lightweight, but is also subject to failures from wear and tear that the plastic surrounding the iBook is not.
• The PowerBook is more prone to heat dissipation problems due to its exotic design.
• Innovations like the illuminated keyboard are the kind of thing that makes that laptop more likely to be returned for repairs. The only devices I own with illuminated keyboards are mobile phones.

On the other hand, wouldn't you prefer to have a PowerBook G4 if you could afford it? I'd probably prefer the 15-inch PowerBook G4, but I'd choose the PowerBook over the iBook if price weren't an object.

Technorati Tags: PowerBook G3, PowerBook G4, Macintosh laptop, Apple Computer, laptop reliability

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Martin O'Donnell ponted out that Wall Street Journal columnist Walter Mossberg called the iMac G5 "a new gold standard for PCs" in his The Mossberg Solution column published in today's print edition. Mossberg wrote:

We've been testing this new iMac, and our verdict is that it's the gold standard of desktop PCs. To put it simply: No desktop offered by Dell or Hewlett-Packard or Sony or Gateway can match the new iMac G5's combination of power, elegance, simplicity, ease of use, built-in software, stability and security. From setup to performing the most intense tasks, it's a pleasure to use. And, contrary to common misconceptions, this Mac is competitively priced, when compared with comparably equipped midrange Windows PCs; and it handles all common Windows files, as well as the Internet and email, with aplomb.

What a rave. Everytime I read Walter Mossberg singing the praises of a Macintosh I ask myself, "Why don't I see more opinions like this in the major gadget blogs?" The biggest reason I can think of: it would be bad for their advertising business.

Technorati Tags: iMac G5, Walter Mossberg

Posted by Dave Aiello at 2:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Earlier today Claude Sanford wrote to me with the following questions:

I have a computer running windows 98 that has been giving me a lot of trouble...freezing up, taking forever to crankup, etc. I am on Road runner and I feel like its all the spy programs and firewall stuff that they have. I know I need more memory as the system indicates I am about 60% usage without a program running. When I attempt to copy a CD into the computer for my music machine, It will stop about half way through, it will freeze....

• Would it be better to add more memory and change to Windows XP?
• Can I load XP over the 98 or will I have to reformat?
• Should I just look for another machine, mine is Pentium3, 750 mhz?

Windows 98 is an awful operating system that isn't supported by anyone anymore. You are right to think about changing operating systems. The question is "How?"

Claude, take a look at what $620 buys at Amazon.com. The HP Pavilion a1220n Desktop PC includes a 2.93-GigaHertz Pentium 4, 512 Megabytes of RAM, a 200 Gigabyte hard disk, a dual-layer DVD/CD burner-- all running on Windows Media Center 2005.

In my opinion, if you have both an old operating system and a memory issue with your PC at this point, you're probably best off shopping for a new PC. I estimate that you'll spend at least $200 to upgrade when you add the cost of a legitimate copy of Windows XP to the cost of half a gig or a gig of memory. When you're done with the upgrade, your CPU will be running at less than one-third the speed of a new machine.

Getting the new machine is going to solve a lot of problems that the upgrade won't address. You'll have a DVD burner and a very fast CPU, along with a properly-installed copy of a multimedia friendly OS. You might still want to upgrade to a gig of RAM or more, but at least you'll be doing it to a brand new PC.

I'd also recommend throwing in something like AlohaBob PC Relocator Ultra Control 2005, which gives you a hand migrating your files and application settings from one machine to another. YMMV on this software-- I haven't used it myself yet.

Technorati Tags: Windows 98, PC upgrade, HP Pavilion a1220n

Posted by Dave Aiello at 12:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

miniVox MV100: Speakerphone
for VoIP is available through
Amazon.com

Yesterday, Andy Abramson of VoIP Watch pointed out a portable speakerphone for use with VoIP services called the miniVox MV100 USB Speakerphone. I had never heard of this before Andy mentioned it. He said:

If you think Polycom makes the best desktop speakerphones, these guys deliver something at a fraction of the price that goes with you and works very well. In most cases it has caused me to abandon using the headset entirely.

This little box is about two-thirds of the size of my Treo 650 and it plugs into your PC using a mini USB cable. It's used mainly as a speakerphone, but you can also plug a mobile phone headset into it for privacy.

mVox also has a Bluetooth device for considerably more money called the mVox MV900 which interests me because I'm always looking for things I can use with both my mobile phone and VoIP.

More information about both of these products is available at http://www.mvox.com/.

Technorati Tags: Bluetooth, VoIP, mVox

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:27 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Josh Hallett of hyku.com asked:

Did you notice that {Al Trautwig} had a LiveSTRONG laptop on the desk during the OLN pre-show?

I missed that the first time I watched the Pre-race Show, but I was able to go back and look carefully at the lid of Trautwig's laptop, at the extreme left of camera shots of him. That definitely is an H-P Special Edition LiveStrong Notebook PC he's using.

I'm glad to see they thought enough of the AMD-HP effort to support the LiveStrong initiative to put one of these laptops on the set. What surprised me about seeing the notebook on the screen is how small the words "LiveStrong" appeared on screen if the camera wasn't focused on them. Although the letters are yellow on a black background, I didn't see them unless I looked very carefully.

If I were AMD, I'd have a special notebook made for OLN's on-air use that had larger, bolder letters on the lid. This way it would be clear to even a casual viewer that the notebook said "LiveStrong" on it.

Technorati Tags: Tour de France, LiveStrong

Posted by Dave Aiello at 7:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My friend Bruce from AMDprocycling.com pointed out that the LiveStrong Special Edition Notebook PC is now available from authorized e-commerce resellers and will be available shortly at electronics retailers across the country. The e-commerce reseller that we recommend most at this time is Amazon.com because they've offered the original version of the LiveStrong Notebook PC as well as this upgraded version:

• Order the LiveStrong Special Edition Notebook PC from Amazon.com

Hewlett-Packard and AMD are making a $50 donation to the Lance Armstrong Foundation for each LiveStrong Special Edition Notebook PCs sold. AMD expects its contribution to this initiative to be $4 million over the next two years, so you can imagine how many of these they expect to sell. As I said at the announcement of the LiveStrong Special Edition Notebook PC about a month ago, this is a great way for a LiveStrong supporter to show his or her commitment to the cause.

More information about the LiveStrong Special Edition Notebook PC is available at AMDlivestrong.com.

Technorati Tags: Lance Armstrong

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

H-P L2000 Special Edition Notebook PC
will let PC users LiveStrong. See the
high-resolution image for a better
idea of what the notebook will
look like. [ Photo: Business Wire ].

Advanced Micro Devices and Hewlett-Packard today announced a joint initiative to support the Lance Amrstrong Foundation through a series of special LiveStrong Notebook PCs.

The H-P Special Edition L2000 Notebook PC will include the LiveStrong message and a reproduction of Lance Armstrong's autograph. They will be powered by an AMD Turion 64 mobile processor. A $50 donation to the LAF will be made for each one of these notebook PCs sold. Sales are expected to begin on-line in June, with in-store sales beginning in July. Each notebook purchaser will receive a LiveStrong Yellow Wristband and yellow stereo earbuds. Sources within AMD say that the notebooks are expected to be priced between $999 and $1,399, depending on configuration.

AMD is backing this effort by making a two-year commitment to help generate a minimum of $4 million for the LAF from this initiative.

"In my battle with cancer, I learned that knowledge is power and attitude is everything," said Lance Armstrong, cancer survivor, champion cyclist and founder of the LAF. "Empowerment plays an important role in dealing with a cancer diagnosis, and technology provides a way for patients and their loved ones to take control by arming themselves with information."

I've seen a couple of articles about this announcement already suggesting that this is some sort of Lance Armstrong brand extension. I don't think so. This is really about AMD and H-P supporting the LiveStrong program in a major way. These notebooks are hitting the stores in time for the Tour de France, and I can't think of a better way for a LiveStrong supporter to demonstrate his or her commitment than to use one. This would mean more than putting a "Join Lance!" sticker from the Lance Armstrong Foundation on the notebook case, as I've done in the past.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:25 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The working environment for credentialed members of the media when I was at the Dodge Tour de Georgia was different every day. We worked in two different offices, a hotel conference room, the theater in the observation tower at Brasstown Bald, and a conference room at women's club, depending on where the stage finished.

The two constants in our work environment were electricity and a WiFi network. Cramped working conditions and long walks with all of our gear just to arrive at some locations meant that having the laptop with the biggest display and desk footprint could be a drawback. Hassle-free wireless network capability was the key.

In a report from Rome called WiFi Working Again for Me, I lamented the fact that my laptop didn't have built-in WiFi. My D-Link DWL-G650 AirPlus XtremeG Wireless Card that had worked well for a year became so flaky that it was effectively unusable. I had to replace it. I replaced it with the same brand and model WiFi card, but that didn't work until I downloaded and installed a new driver off the Internet using a hard Ethernet connection.

It would have been a lot easier to cover the Tour de Georgia with a compact, easy-to-use laptop with built-in WiFi, and the laptop of choice in the media center was an Apple Powerbook.

I would have chosen a 12-inch Apple PowerBook with a 1.5GHz G4 processor, an 80-Gigabyte hard drive, and an 8x-Speed SuperDrive (DVD+RW/CD-RW). The small form factor would have worked well at the top of Brasstown Bald or at the women's club in Dahlonega where we worked in pretty close proximity to each other. The 12-inch display still gives you 1024x768 resolution, which is good for the small size of the notebook itself, and would be good enough for photo selection and editing.

I would have teamed this up with a multi-function USB 2.0 memory card reader to make camera memory card handling painless.

These gadgets would have made me the master of the Tour de Georgia media work room.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 5:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

PC Magazine is out with its review of the Mac mini. They rate it "Very Good" with comments like this:

The Apple Mac mini makes an attractive entry point for the Windows-to-Mac switcher, the Mac user who needs an upgrade from a pre-1-GHz Mac, or the user on a budget who wants a small, silent desktop with a really cool design. Just be sure you already have the essential peripherals... since purchasing them separately quickly makes the system not such a great bargain� especially given the low RAM and hard drive space that come standard.

We're all upgrading the our Mac minis to half a gig or a gig of RAM when we get them, right? [ via Pocket Factory ]

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I should have placed an order for a Mac mini with a SuperDrive on the day of Steve Jobs' keynote at MacWorld, but since I didn't I'll have to get my Mac mini fix today with the box unpacking photos that were posted on UNEASYsilence.com yesterday.

There are two things that I find interesting about this photo gallery and its associated comments, other than the fact that they got a Mac mini ordered through normal channels (i.e. The Apple Store) already:

1. This series of photos is in an HTML frameset. I think that they'll miss some direct linking opportunities from other websites like Operation Gadget. A good example is the size comparison shot with a standard desktop hard drive. Yes, they've watermarked each photo with their URL, but linking to the photo directly brings up an HTML page with no navigational tools, no captions, etc.

   By using Coppermine for the Operation Gadget Photo Gallery, I'm trying to provide visitors who drop in from other sites with more obvious links to the rest of the services on the main Operation Gadget site.
   

2. Someone brought up the idea of using a Mac mini as a "file/web/print/media/server" and connecting to it via VNC. I'm not sure the Mac mini is particularly well suited to that use from a components standpoint. I would have particular concerns with the expected life of the hard disk if the Mac mini were used as a server. Maybe I'll have to do some research into this, and see if it's a real issue.

   Another issue related to using a Mac mini as a file, web, and print server is the opportunity cost, for lack of a better term. The Mac mini is pretty much designed as a "switcher's desktop Mac". Sure you can use it for a home theater or in-car project if you are a hobbyist, but why you'd want to forego the use of included applications like iLife '05 by making the machine a server is beyond me. Maybe if you already sit in front of a Mac all the time, you might think this way.
   

Posted by Dave Aiello at 3:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Apple Tipping Point: Paul Nixon
explains Apple's pricing strategy
in a chart.

While browsing Philip Torreone's Flickr Photostream, I came across a really effective infographic developed by Paul Nixon of Nixlog. It explains the evolution of the pricing of Apple computers and iPods in terms of all the products that they have currently announced or are already on sale. In other words, it illustrates the range of iPods from the iPod Photo to the iPod Shuffle and the Power Mac G5 to the Mac mini.

Paul explains the thoughts behind his graphic in a separate entry in his weblog:

The Sweet Spot. Until January 2005, Apple had no iPod or PC products that served the mass market. With the launch of iPod Shuffle and Mac mini they have finally converged two product paths with the mass market in mind. This will not only drive more iPod sales (via the Shuffle), but also fulfill the promised "halo" effect of the iPod products as PC users jump to the Mac mini. Over the course of 2005, Apple will continue to dominate and grow its MP3 player market share, while steadily growing its PC business through the Mac mini. As with the original iPod, the Mac mini could build slow, but serious momentum in the market place.

I never heard of Nixlog before I stumbled on to this graphic, but I'm adding it to my Bloglines feeds.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 2:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Bryan Greenway of Home Theater Blog and Jonathan Greene of Atmaspheric Endeavors are teaming up to launch a new blog called Mac HTPC to explore the potential of the Mac mini as a home theater system.

A number of people (including me) think that the Mac mini has many of the features necessary to make it an excellent home theater system. It's good that two experienced bloggers have moved to fill the need for a blog in this emerging niche.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:43 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

MacNews.de, a German Macintosh news website, has published an extensive Mac mini photo gallery including disassembly photos. Great job to get these photos up so quickly.

The Mac mini motherboard photo confirms that there's one PC2700-compatible memory slot. Therefore, the most obvious place to save when upgrading your Mac mini would be buying a 1-Gigabyte SDRAM DIMM in the aftermarket. You could easily save $125 that way. [ via Engadget ]

Posted by Dave Aiello at 2:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Before the opening of the NASDAQ today, Apple Computer announced record breaking sales and profits in the fiscal first quarter of 2005. Sales were up 74 percent to $3.49 billion. Profits were $295 million or $0.70 per share. This is the latest confirmation that the iPod and iPod mini product lines have remade Apple.

I realize that this is not often done, but I like to think of iPods as computers in their own right for the purpose of comparing Apple's market share to that of its competitors. (They are probably more profitable on a per-unit basis than most Macintosh computers, after all).

Financial analysts have repeatedly underestimated Apple's growth in the last two years, even while they stand in line at Apple Stores to buy their family members iPods. A good example of this tendency is Apple's Down-Market Gamble, an article from BusinessWeek. In it, Peter Burrows' first thought about the Mac mini and the iPod Shuffle is cannibalization of the existing product line. This is such an obvious example of old school, "PC vs Mac" thinking, and deep seated ideas about the fact that Windows-based devices will always have more than 90 percent of the computer market in the U.S. and other industrialized nations.

As the media has gradually come to grips with Apple's market success, most articles up to now have taken on a "yea but" tone:

• The iPod is obviously selling in huge numbers, but will that translate into sustainable growth for Apple? [ Yes. ]
• iPods are redefining the portable music player market, but is that success masking a decline in the rest of Apple's business? [ No. ]

It's time for the business press to move from nagging doubt to something else. We'd take disbelief at this point. The business press needs to start giving credit to Apple, because they're the technology company that has done the best job over the last three years of presenting exciting and fun products to potential customers. The sales and profit figures clearly indicate that the public has voted with its wallets. [ Thanks to MacDevCenter.com for repeating the lead sentence in its "More News" column, pointing out a grammatical error in the process. ]

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I was happy to see that Apple Computer announced the Mac mini series of computers yesterday at MacWorld Expo in San Francisco. It's hard to call a machine that fits in a 6.5 x 6.5 x 2-inch case a desktop computer. What should we call it? A compact computer? A digital lifestyle hub?

What I like most about the Mac mini is the video adapter. You get an ATI Radeon 9200 graphics processor with AGP 4X support capable of driving a DVI monitor at 1900 x 1200 or VGA at up to 1900 x 1280. Although Apple came out with two versions, a 1.25-GigaHertz and a 1.42-GigaHertz, both come only with Combo Drives (DVD-ROM/CD-RW). The Mac mini of my dreams would come with a SuperDrive.

Update: Jeff Hoppe and an Operation Gadget reader named Pradeep both pointed out that the Mac mini can be ordered with a SuperDrive for $100 more from The Apple Store. (You have to choose the SuperDrive from the "Optical Drive" pop-up menu on the "Customize your Mac" page.) I thought I had seen that the SuperDrive was available, but when I went back to write this article, I couldn't find it. It would help if I took notes. [ Thanks guys. ]

I think Apple hit the target in terms of offering a machine for people who want a second or third computer for their homes, or people who want a cheap way to more fully enter the Apple lifestyle now that they have their iPod. I don't have a Macintosh on my desk today. I expect to have one on my desk by the end of the month. What more can I say?

Operation Gadget regulars probably already read the article called How We Installed a Home Theater with DirecTV and Over-the-Air HDTV. If this home theater were in the Home Office and not in my friend's living room, you can bet I'd have an order placed for one of these Mac minis already. Imagine being able to use an HDTV set in your living room as a 1900 x 1200 display for a $600 Macintosh.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 2:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

I got the second Samsung 770 TFT (17-inch flat panel display) for the Blogging Workstation yesterday afternoon. I installed it and found that it had quite a few dead pixels. This was not supposed to happen, since the 770 TFT was supposed to have been reconditioned by Samsung to its original specification.

I had confirmed the specification in advance in an effort to save time. There were supposed to be no more than three dead pixels on the entire display. On the reconditioned 770 TFT I received, there were more than three areas where multiple dead pixels could be found.

I have a call into the reseller to see how they want to proceed. This sets my work back a few days, but it doesn't make sense for me to get frustrated.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Blogging Workstation Upgrade Phase 1: Replaced
the video card and added half a Gigabyte of memory.
More photos in the Operation Gadget Photo Gallery.
[ Photo: Dave Aiello ]

I guess this is upgrade week on Operation Gadget.

I'm supposed to get the second 17-inch flat panel display for my Blogging Workstation on Monday. Yesterday, I received the components I need to install inside my PC's case. They are:

• an ATI Radeon 7000 Multi-Display Edition Video Card, and
• 512 Megabytes of 333 DDR-PC2700 memory to bring the machine up to 1 Gigabyte of RAM.

I decided to install these pieces today so that I didn't spend the entire day on Monday "underneath the hood".

The new video card and memory were easy to install, as you can see in the Blogging Workstation Upgrade- January 2005 photo album. The problem came later when I had to troubleshoot Windows 2000 video drivers because the PC kept crashing when a piece of software (like a Windows installer) tried to switch video modes.

I eventually got the Blogging Workstation stabilized again, but I had to uninstall the ATI video drivers and re-install them. If you ever do an ATI video card installation, I strongly recommend downloading the drivers you need for ATI's website and burning your own driver installation CD.

This also allows you to avoid the possibility of messing up the PC by installing an old version of a Microsoft subsystem like DirectX. I knew I was in trouble when I found out that I had to install that package.

Next week I'll finish the upgrade by connecting the second flat panel display and configuring the video driver and desktop management software.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Jeremy Zawodny wrote a really interesting article illustrating the dramatic decrease in cost of disk storage for desktop computers and server. He pointed out that 250-Gigabyte SATA (Serial ATA) disk drives can be purchased for as little as $120. That means you can buy a Terabyte (1,000 Gigabytes) of disk space for less than $500.

Here at the Home Office, we're going to be in need of disk space soon. The Canon PowerShot A95 I just started using takes photos that are 1 to 2 megabytes in size, by default. Do the math and you'll realize that a 72-Gigabyte file server will fill up quickly no matter how it's partitioned.

Because of the price of SATA disks, I'm guessing that I'll be building a 1 to 2-Terabyte Linux-based file server for my office before the end of 2005. I hope I can put that off for a couple of months by utilizing all of the storage that's already here. I'm also going to have to answer a few questions before embarking on such a project:

1. Is there a motherboard that supports a relatively large number of SATA connections? If not, how do you put that many disks into a low-cost server?
2. Where am I'm going to put a box like that? I don't want a RAID-5 server with that many spindles in the same room with me when I'm trying to work.

If you've thought about this already and have some suggestions, let me know. Anybody else thinking about doing this too?

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:09 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

My brother-in-law John Kuykendall is in the market for a new laptop. One of the products he's considering is the Apple iBook. He's primarily looking at the 12-inch iBook while I've been nudging him toward the 14-inch iBook with the SuperDrive because that model has a much bigger hard drive and the SuperDrive (DVD-R/CD-RW) enables the use of iMovie and iDVD.

One of the useful websites I stumbled across in the course of discussing iBooks with John is the Mac Buyer's Guide from MacRumors.com. This site looks at the different Apple product lines from a historical perspective, tells when the last time each line was updated, and gives a purchase opinion (buy/neutral/don't buy) based on the likelihood of a new product announcement in the near future. There's no rumor or innuendo on this page, just information about what Apple's done in the past.

I'm planning on buying an iPod, and I agree that it would be better for me to wait a couple of weeks right now, given that:

• Macworld Expo begins on January 10,
• Apple typically announces new products at this event, and
• Mac Buyer's Guide recommendation is: "Buy only if you need it - Approaching the end of a cycle".

The Mac Buyer's Guide says it's ok to buy iBooks and iMacs at this time, since they both been updated in the last four months. It's saying to hold off on purchasing PowerBooks, PowerMacs, eMacs, and xServe servers.

One other note on Apple purchases; I normally steer people to local Apple stores because the purchase experience and support available there is worth a few extra dollars. However, people buying today need to look at the deals at Amazon.com because they are offering $100 to $150 rebates on iBooks at the moment. This makes Amazon about 10 percent cheaper than buying directly from Apple at the moment.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 12:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

MacMinute pointed out that Apple has pre-announced a sale that will take place on the day after Thanksgiving, Friday, November 26, 2004. The sale will involve both the Apple Online Store and Apple Retail Stores throughout the United States.

The "Black Friday Sale" has a dedicated page on the Apple website: http://www.apple.com/retail/thanksgiving/. I could use an iPod, if anyone's buying.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Wall Street Journal columnist Walter Mossberg raves about the iMac G5 in his column published today. He says that the computer is "essentially invisible" now that it's embedded in the rear of a 17-inch or 20-inch flat panel display. The iMac G5 is significantly faster than a PowerBook G4 that Mossberg also uses.

I like Walter Mossberg's reviews because he thinks about little things that matter to me. He points out an obvious shortcoming of the iMac G5: all models come with 256-Megabytes of RAM. But, he also points out this key fact: "About the only important feature the new iMac G5 lacks is a built-in reader for memory cards used in digital cameras, PDAs and smart phones, which is becoming common in better Windows desktops." I would want a memory card reader for any computer I used for day-to-day work, so I'd have to find one that worked well with the iMac G5 before I bought one.

Mossberg's review also includes a rather lengthy explanation of why the iMac G5 is not expensive when compared to Windows PCs. He says, "Consumers perceive Mac desktops as pricey, partly because the company doesn't play in the very cheapest segment of the PC market, and partly because Apple's prices include built-in monitors that are often unlisted extras in ads for bargain Windows machines." He goes on to compare the iMac G5 to the Gateway Profile 5, finding the Gateway lacking in terms of overall unit thickness and lack of dedicated graphics card. He also compares the iMac G5 to a Dell Dimension 4600, which comes slightly out more expensive when the best CPU is chosen and a high-end 17-inch flat panel monitor is added.

Walter Mossberg was also one of the first technology columnists to compare Mac OS X Panther to Windows XP and found Windows XP wanting. He takes the opportunity of a Mac G5 review to restate many of the reasons why he prefers OS X. Among other reasons, he says, "{Mac OS X} frees users from the worry and expense of battling viruses and spyware, because there has never been a successful virus targeting the Mac operating system, and there is little or no spyware for the Mac."

Microsoft fans love to bash Walter Mossberg when he writes a review of an Apple product that's this glowing, but he rarely makes so many good points about a product in one column. There's no way I'd buy a new desktop computer today without looking at an iMac G5.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:39 AM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Earlier today, Apple Computer announced the iMac G5 at the Apple Expo in Paris. The computer, ranging from a 1.6 to 1.8-Gigahertz 64-bit PowerPC G5 CPU with hard disk and DVD/CD drive, is integrated with a 17 or 20-inch widescreen LCD display in a single 2-inch thick enclosure. The computer is so thin relative to its other dimensions, that in promotional photos, it's difficult to see the slot-loaded DVD/CD drive on the right side of the unit.

Apple Senior Vice President Philip Schiller said that the iMac G5 is aimed at radically changing the feature set of PCs. "Just like the iPod redefined portable digital music players, the new iMac G5 redefines what users expect from a consumer desktop. With the entire system, including a gorgeous 17- or 20-inch display, just two inches thin, a lot of people will be wondering 'where did the computer go?'"

This product will find its way into the homes and workplaces of people who have a flair for style and who appreciate an uncluttered workspace. I continue to wonder, however, how many people who are considering a unit this small would purchase something other than a laptop? I have to look into how much more reliable a desktop unit like the iMac G5 is than the equivalent lower-cost Apple portable, the iBook. [ product photo courtesy of Apple Computer ]

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The steadily decreasing cost of laptops and PCs is almost universally considered a good thing. But, if you talk to people who have show-stopping technical problems with their inexpensive computers, you realize that customer support is one of the places where costs have been cut.

As the article in today's USA Today indicates, the off-shore consumer-level customer support infrastructure is showing signs of extreme stress. The widely-adopted cost minimization approach is buckling under the collective weight of virus and spyware problems, inexpensive components, and feature bloat. This has resulted in a decrease in reported customer satisfaction levels.

The article provides a number of anecdotes from real customers, including people who were dissatified with the support they received from Dell and Sony. It also includes the results of the annual support survey done by PC Magazine.

Toward the end, it talks about options that are available to consumers who are willing to pay for a solution to their problem. These include H-P Total Care Owner Services and GeekSquad, a service of BestBuy. I believe that these are good options for many people, if they think about the value of their time and the loss of productivity that they experience from home technical problems. [ via Slashdot ]

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The July 19, 2004 issue of Time Magazine contains a six page photo essay called Welcome Aboard: The Democratic Ticket. One of the photos, shot by Diana Walker, shows Presidential Candidate John Kerry talking to John Edwards on the telephone while working on his Apple PowerBook G4 computer.

We rarely get a glimpse of political leaders sitting in front of a computer, and this photo tells us something about Senator Kerry's taste in laptops. [ photo from Time Magazine, emphasis added, subscription required to access the complete photo essay ]

Posted by Dave Aiello at 2:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1)

I spent most of the late morning and afternoon yesterday building my first AMD Athlon-based server from individually bought parts. Here are the pieces that I assembled:

• ASUS A7N8X-E Deluxe motherboard,
• Western Digital WD Caviar WD1600JD 160GB Serial ATA (quantity 2),
• AMD Athlon XP 2500+ 1.83GHz 333FSB 512KB cache, and
• Corsair VS512MB333 512MB DDR333 PC2700 RAM.

It took me a while to figure out how to put these parts together. The ASUS motherboard and the AMD Athlon are really well documented. Installing an Athlon with the heatsink on top is a new experience. I was sure I was breaking the processor when I was trying to lock the heatsink onto it.

I don't normally put ATX systems together, so this was the first time I had to figure out how to connect the front panel power switch correctly to the motherboard just to get the machine to start. The first time I did it I had the wires flipped.

The key to this project is not installing the CPU correctly, attaching the hard drives to the case, or installing Linux, it's getting Sendmail to work with SpamAssassin and Vipul's Razor. That will be taking a lot of my time for the next few days.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Microsoft Watch reports that Microsoft should release the first official alpha version of Longhorn at WinHEC2004, a hardware engineering conference this week in Seattle. Longhorn is a future generation of Microsoft Windows that will not be ready for "at least a couple of more years".

Ready for some big numbers?

Microsoft is expected to recommend the following as the "average" Longhorn PC configuration:

• dual-core CPU running at 4 to 6GHz,
• RAM of at least 2 Gigabytes,
• disk capacity of up to 1 Terabyte,
• Gigabit Ethernet (for wired connections),
• 802.11g wireless networking, and
• graphics subsystem running at three times the speed of what is on the market today.

Do you think that by late-2005 or 2006 most people will be sitting in front of machines that are as powerful as this?

The hardest thing for me to understand about these requirements is the wireless networking component. With all of the other leaps in performance that Microsoft is expecting and the rate at which wireless network performance is increasing, wouldn't you expect that the requirements would be beyond 802.11g, a standard that is readily available today?

Posted by Dave Aiello at 7:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

I love Walter Mossberg's Personal Technology column. He has a terrific ability to explain technology issues to business-oriented people. Earlier today, he published a brief laptop buyer's guide. Rather than try to entice readers with features of specific models, he offers advice on factors to consider before a laptop purchase is made:

• Size and Weight,
• Processor,
• Battery Life,
• Screen and Keyboard, and
• Wireless Networking.

I'm sure that a few Operation Gadget readers will find some of the advice offered here rather basic. But, friends and business associates often show me laptops that are inappropriate for the task for which they were purchased. If you are in the market for a new machine, review these guidelines before falling in love with a specific model.

One of the best uses of a guide like this is to help friends and family choose their equipment. Keep this guide in mind, because nothing Walter Mossberg says here is going to be obsolete anytime soon.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Back in January, I mentioned that Linux Unwired was just about ready to ship from O'Reilly and Associates. It turned out that Amazon.com's product availability information was wrong, and this book just came out. You can get it now through Amazon and many other booksellers.

If you followed the progress of my wireless network deployment in the Home Office, you already know that I got it working two weeks ago and so far it's been great. My laptop is reporting 54 Mbps throughput, and performance is so good that I haven't used the 100 Mbps PC card in my laptop since then, because I haven't noticed any real loss of performance.

I got some level of security running on my wireless network on April 8. Since my laptop runs Fedora, I had to read through its documentation, as well as that of the MadWiFi Project, which is the name of the driver that supports my D-Link DWL-G650 AirPlus XtremeG PC Card. I opted for WEP initially, because my network is not as exposed as it would be if I lived in a denser area, and because I wanted to get some security up as quickly as possible.

I intended to pick up Linux Unwired as soon as I could, because it appears to be a one-stop source for Linux wireless networking tips. I think it will be a good companion to the Wireless Networking Starter Kit that I mentioned in a previous article on Operation Gadget. Linux Unwired is probably also the quickest path to getting a higher level of security in place on my network.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 2:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Fazal Majid asked an important question on Saturday in an entry on his weblog entitled Are Americans becoming second-class consumers? He cites several situations where manufacturers shipped products with the same name in two different markets, but the U.S. version had fewer features or lower quality components than the equivalent product destined for other markets. He cites:

• the Sony Clie PEG-TH55 Handheld, which ships without Bluetooth in the U.S. This was discussed on Operation Gadget on March 5.
• The Canon EOS Digital Rebel with 18-55mm Lens, which "has the smooth and fast USM ultrasonic motor in Japan, but uses the inferior AFD micro-motor in the US". That's news to me.
• The Epson Stylus Photo 2200 Inkjet Printer, which "does not include in the US the gray balancer, special software and calibration sheets used to improve the neutrality of black and white prints."

Majid also cites laptops and portable electronics imported by vendors like Dynamism that U.S. subsidiaries of international electronics companies consider poor fits for the largest single electronics market in the world.

These are all good points. But, when we discuss products that make it to the U.S. market late or not at all, how about GSM phones like the Nokia 6600 that's been out in Europe and Asia for months, but has only been made available in the USA by T-Mobile within the last week? This phone is hot and it's hard to understand why Nokia would not want to ship as many of these in this country as it could. I'd think this would be particularly important, considering Nokia's recent problems achieving predicted handset sales volumes.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 1:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Brad Choate is considered a Movable Type guru. (That's the weblogging tool that tons of sites use, including Operation Gadget.) He published a list of software that he has installed on his Macintosh since he switched to a 15-inch Powerbook G4 back in October.

I'm always interested in the programs that people run on their Powerbooks. Some of the coolest applications get developed for OS X and I never seem to get to run them. Brad has a good list of programs here that will be of interest to people in the software development and system administration communities, and a good mix of commercial and free software. [ via dive into mark b-links ]

Posted by Dave Aiello at 5:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Daily Wireless put together an excellent article about RSS use on mobile devices. The article includes a list of RSS aggregators for platforms from the PC and Macintosh all the way down to the iPod. [ via MobileWhack ]

One suggestion that the author, Phillip Torreone, makes is Syndigator, a Perl-based RSS aggregator based on Gtk that he believes is a good choice for Linux users. I have been using Straw since I got Fedora Core 1 running on my laptop. I will have to try Syndigator and see how mature it is relative to Straw.

BTW, Phillip Torreone and I seem to have a lot of interests in common lately. The other day, I noticed his website about exercise technology called /run. Today, I found him writing for Daily Wireless. He's blogging as much as I am, if not more.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Fujitsu LifeBook P5020 is an interesting machine that I discovered while reading the April 2004 edition of Mobile PC Magazine. Weighing in at only 3.9 pounds, the P5020 sports a 10.6-inch letterbox-format TFT display, a 1-Gigahertz Pentium M CPU, 512-Megabytes of RAM, and a full size keyboard. It has a 60-Gigabyte hard drive and a removable CD-RW/DVD drive that can be swapped for a second battery. For card-based expandability, it supports both Compact Flash and Secure Digital/MMC cards. It also provides S-Video-out, VGA-out, FireWire, and 802.11b support.

DesignTechnica reviewed the LifeBook P5020 back in December and awarded it 9 out of 10 stars, calling it the "Mini Cooper of the laptop world." If you've tried to travel with a desktop replacement before and you're looking for something much more compact but still quite usable, the LifeBook 5020 is a great choice. It's got more connectivity options on board than any other ultralight I've ever seen.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 5:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

BusinessWeek published an article about increased reliability of semi-rugged laptops and how the Panasonic Toughbook series is proving itself in Iraq.

Toughbooks have been around for a long time, but they rarely get this kind of press in mainstream publications. Usually I read about them in industry automation and manufacturing IT publications. This BusinessWeek article has a number of really interesting statistics in it that make a good case for considering a ruggedized laptop. Here are the one year "casualty rates" for standard laptops:

• 20 percent fail overall,
• 35 percent fail if a laptop frequently leaves its docking station,
• 50 percent fail if a laptop is frequently used outdoors or on shop floors, while
• only 5 percent of rugged or semi-rugged machines fail.

A good example of a semi-rugged laptop that's reasonably priced and pretty available is the Panasonic Toughbook 48: magnesium alloy case, 40-Gigabyte shock-mounted removable hard drive, Intel Centrino CPU at 1.5 or 1.4 Gigahertz.

I realize this is kind of the polar opposite of the laptop I've been wishing for (an Apple PowerBook 15-inch laptop), but I can definitely see myself using a Toughbook and liking the image that would create in the minds of people who see me using it. I'd have more peace-of-mind with a Toughbook than I would with other laptops. I think every laptop users' fear is a dead machine when you take your laptop out of your bag-- I'm no different.

As for the suggestion in the BusinessWeek article that the Toughbook 72 can stop a bullet, I wouldn't want to test that if I could avoid it.

On the other hand, I think that a number of late model laptops might stand a chance of stopping a bullet. Two people have stopped what they were doing in the last week and gasped at my Dell Inspiron 7500 because it's so big and heavy. I bet those people think my laptop could stop a bullet. I know better. [ via Boing Boing ]

Posted by Dave Aiello at 4:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Doc Searls' latest SuitWatch column for LinuxJournal talks about what it will take for Linux to become a viable option for mainstream laptop users. At first glance, pointing to this article might seem a little bit off-topic on Operation Gadget, but Doc makes a number of good points in this article that are worth knowing about:

• IBM has made a commitment to deliver Linux on at least one commercially-available desktop and laptop by the end of 2004. IBM has already deployed Linux on the desks of 15,000 of its employees, so it will quickly develop experience supporting end-users.

• Apple Powerbook G4 laptops are currently the best option for people that want to run a Linux-like operating system. This is because Apple's OS X is derived from the BSD branch of UNIX. If you dig down, you can use the UNIX features. As Doc says, "...it obeys common UNIX commands. Its default shell is bash. On it, I can ssh to my servers at home or to my Linux server at Rackspace...." OS X can also run Microsoft Office, which still beats OpenOffice in terms of stability and compatibility with documents you might receive from other people.

• The
  IBM ThinkPad T40 is an ideal candidate for IBM's Linux laptop effort. Doc describes it as follows: "The screen is bright and sharp, the keyboard layout and feel are close to perfect, the magnesium-alloy body is sturdy, it's light (4.9 pounds), the battery life is outstanding, it has both a trackpad and a nub pointer (a total of five mouse buttons) and it's about as fast as a laptop gets. All of this is great if you're a road warrior running Windows or a hacker running Linux."

  
  

The article goes on to point out areas where particular emphasis needs to be put before Linux will be acceptable to regular folks: power management, printing, device drivers (for electronic accessories), WiFi, package management (for additional software), DVD burning, and technical support. He's right on all of these.

I think IBM's commitment to Linux will result in some individuals eventually buying PCs that primarily run Linux. This is not going to happen in large numbers too quickly-- there are too many issues that are show-stoppers for the non-technical. But, if IBM maintains their current level of commitment, they ought to be able to work the kinks out of a distribution that could at least be used on corporate desktops. So, some of us will undoubtedly be sitting in front of Linux in the future.

In the meantime, this Dell Inspiron user lusts after the 15 or 17-inch models of the Apple Powerbook G4. With it, you get Microsoft Office support, good power management, DVD playing and burning, excellent wireless, and UNIX features if you want them.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It's been too long since I did a laptop review, so I'll begin to remedy the situation with the Sony VAIO GRT260G. It just got an enthusiastic endorsement from Bill Howard in PC Magazine-- about all he didn't like about it was the fact that you need to carry a PC card adapter with you if you want to read CompactFlash and Secure Digital media.

The VAIO GRT260G is a desktop replacement-class laptop for people who want the closest thing they can get to a 17-inch Apple PowerBook at least from a video playback perspective, but still want to be running Windows XP. It weighs just over 9 pounds with the optical drive installed. This makes it over 30 percent heavier than the 17-inch PowerBook. The VAIO comes with a 16.1 inch SXGA+ LCD display in a 4:3 format that excels at displaying TV broadcasts captured by its integrated TV tuner. The display is driven by a 64 Megabyte nVidia GeForce FX Go 5600 3D video accelerator. This laptop also looks good playing back DVDs, with very good contrast and brightness.

Everyone who buys a laptop this big has to have a good reason. I mean, people have gotten used to seeing smaller ones, so yours better draw a crowd. What can this one do that other laptops will have difficulty matching? The first thing I can think of is good quality TV reception. You get a pretty sharp image out of the built-in TV tuner. This stands in contrast to a lot of aftermarket tuners that for any number of reasons don't seem as well integrated with the laptop or PC that they were bought for.

This VAIO makes the Giga Pocket PC-based Digital Video Recorder software look good. I hadn't really taken Giga Pocket seriously before I saw it work on this laptop. I think people who are serious about time-shifting TV will still prefer TiVo over Giga Pocket on a laptop, but for occasional use, this software and hardware combination is handy.

The GRT260G is chock full of storage and connectivity options. It has an 80-gigabyte hard drive, a DVD multiformat rewritable drive, wired and wireless networking, as well as USB, FireWire, and Flash Memory connectors. This VAIO also takes advantage of Sony's Click to DVD authoring application to produce DVDs in a fairly foolproof fashion.

This laptop is designed to be a traditional computer, not an appliance. As such, it runs Microsoft Windows XP Home, or XP Pro by special order. Some of the reviews I've read say that it would have been better had this laptop shipped with the Media Center Option on it, but I disagree. I can't imagine using a laptop in a traditional way if it has Microsoft's software designed to turn a PC into a home theater component. Your mileage may vary on this one.

Finally, the GRT260G has a 2.8-Gigahertz Pentium 4 with 512 Megabytes of RAM in it. This is fast, but people who review systems like this all the time say that some early models have unimpressive performance from an office use perspective. I have trouble making that judgement, because I mostly use slower machines running Windows 2000 and Red Hat Linux.

I think I still want a PowerBook G4 for my next laptop. But, if I had my heart set on running Windows natively, I'd definitely consider the Sony VAIO GRT260G. It's a lot of machine for the money.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Apple Computer announced the iBook Logic Board Repair Extension Program covering "repair or replacement of the logic board in specific iBook models manufactured between May 2002 and April 2003 that are experiencing specific component failures." The problems that are covered under this repair program include:

• Scrambled or distorted video
• Appearance of unexpected lines on the screen
• Intermittent video image
• Video freeze
• Computer starts up to blank screen

Apple is going out of its way to make whole the iBook owners who have already paid for repairs. According to the website, "Apple will reimburse customers with eligible iBooks for the cost of repairs covered under this program, and will pro-actively contact affected customers where Apple has their contact information." If you own an iBook that has already been repaired, you should probably call the Apple Authorized Service Provider that performed the repairs for you.

It's good that Apple admitted that many iBooks built in 2002 and early 2003 have logic board problems, and that they are going the extra mile to find and compensate people who repaired their machines already. A lot of owners of the defective iBooks are probably wondering why Apple waited so long to do something about this. If I owned one of these machines, I know that I would have complained long and loudly. [ via CNet News.com ]

Hopefully, this repair program will give people more confidence in the iBook laptop line. A number of people I know have heard about problems with late-model iBooks and either waited to purchase until they have did extensive research, or chose a competing laptop. If this was ever a big problem, it should be off the table now because Apple is responding to the manufacturing defect and has defined the scope of it.

So, people who are shopping for laptops today can buy the current iBook G4 models with confidence that the problem has been eliminated. The iBook G4s are very nice machines for the price. The thing I wish the iBook G4s had as an option is the "SuperDrive" that allows the Apple Powerbook G4s to burn DVDs.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Looks like Apple Computer has filled the channel rather well with the new 20-inch iMac. The computer is now available from Amazon.com at a competitive price. It's also available from J&R Music and Computer World via Amazon's web site.

I think it's amazing that Apple has grafted a 20-inch flat panel display onto the iMac. You can tell that this puts the iMac in a new league, in that the 20-inch model weighs in at a whopping 45 pounds. Any wonder why Amazon is not offering free shipping on this puppy?

Posted by Dave Aiello at 5:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)