Iceland’s (Eyjafjallajoekull) Volcano – a technologist’s perspective

In modern history it doesn’t seem like there was as much global disruption to modern technological life. Air travel (a major technology) has been the global enabler for economies, with that disabled on an unheard of basis, it makes one stop to think about how the Earth is pointing out to us every once in a while there are limits to our control and technology, and the Earth itself still can have its say. Whether it is earthquakes, volcanoes, tsunami, etc. The internet and global news/information have connected us in ways society has not been in the past. Prior to the internet many of us probably would have seen some short clip on the news about an event far from us on the nightly news, but perhaps now people have watched video’s of the disruption, video’s of the volcano, have read or seen personal comments from individuals actually affected by this event. Feeling more connected with the rest of the world than perhaps we did before. Knowing about some of these horrific events like the Haiti earthquake, Tsunami’s, and other natural events as spurred online giving to relief organizations helping our “neighbors”. What other surprises does the Earth have in store for us? I don’t know and with events like these I’m sort of worried to find out. At the same time I’m comforted by the fact that while the world doesn’t quite work together seamlessly, with the internet and technology it is quickly headed that way through the sharing of information, ideas and empathy.

The iPad first impressions

The iPad.

While all I did was quickly try an iPad in an apple store I wanted to give some first impressions.

The iPad has launched with nearly all the hype of the original iPhone, Apple has succeeded in once again creating a lot of marketing buzz for the touch screen category device.  This category has probably never had so much hype.

As soon as I picked up the iPad the first thing I noticed was the heft. The iPad was quite a bit heavier feeling than I expected.  The screen was very nice offering nearly full screen web pages.  I didn’t have the hang of all the gestures but many could be picked up fairly quickly.  The buttons on the on screen keyboard were big enough to be easy to hit.  I somewhat wished for a little haptic type feedback on button presses.  The screen was very fluid with the gestures.  I found myself wishing for a stylus to use for taking notes and the option of a real built in keyboard.    The lack of multitasking certainly could be problematic and limit some of the usefulness of the device.   The size and weight of the device were probably a little on the larger side than would be comfortable for an extended period.

Did I like it? In two words yes and no.  Yes I liked the concept and the idea of the form factor with the fluid UI that Apple is able to deliver.  No I still wanted 3g, keyboard, styles to take notes, the right apps to use it and multitasking, along with easier ways to get content to the device like an SD card or simple USB connection/drive copy.

Apple is surely on the right track, if they can give up on trying to pull every penny out of our pockets with their appstore and required accessories to get content on it this device might be a serious threat.  With Apple’s marketing muscle I’m sure the iPad will be quite possible.

For me I’m going to either wait for some of the mentioned items to clear up before I jump on board.  The device shows promise and I like the form factor enough to want one but I don’t think I can live with all the limitations.

Aliph Jawbone Icon

I’ve been using a Jawbone Icon for a few weeks now, I wanted to provide a quick review of what I’ve experienced so far.  One of the things I had been looking for in a bluetooth headset is the ability to be sure when I turn it off it stays off.  Most bluetooth headsets just by tapping or holding a button they turn on.  That means they often turn on accidentally, in your pocket, briefcase, etc.  Very few headsets offer a good switch.  The motorola flip out boom is one on some of their models.  Now the Jawbone icon adds a small slider switch on the back that seems to do the trick so far.

One thing to be aware of, while I’m not positive this is the case it seems to me that some of the units tagged to have a specific voice profile, like the thinker, etc. may not be what it says. (At least the one I got sounded like one of the other voice profiles).  I decided I liked the one I got better than the one I had planned to purchase though so kept it.  I have not tried downloading other voice profiles yet.

Fit:

I used the default earpiece that came with the unit which seems to fit pretty well.  It is a different type of ear fit then I have seen before but seems to work ok but takes a little getting used to.    It comes with in ear style and over the ear style pieces,  I only tried the in ear.

I tested with an original verizon blackberry curve.

Sound quality:

The sound quality is good.  Every caller I spoke with said the sound quality was good.  When windy people still did notice the noise.

Sound quality on my side was clear.  I did have to turn up the volume on my blackberry which made the sound louder on the Jawbone Icon.

There is no volume adjustment on the icon itself, it is supposed to auto adjust to the surrounding sound.  It seemed to be loud enough when I turned the volume up on my blackberry.

Battery:

Too early to tell.  Need more testing on talk time.

Voice status feature:

The voice notify on callers calling, startup, call reject were ok.  I found myself wishing for some better sounding ones like Arnold from “terminator” 🙂

Accessories:

It comes with just the wall charger and a really short cable to connect to it (and to usb to update the voice profiles/other features).  I tried the website but didn’t download any voice profiles to try yet.

Size/Style:

This is one of the smaller headsets I have seen.  It is nicely styled and looks good.  It seems to come in a somewhat glossy and matte style, with different default voice profiles.

Summary:

All in all so far a couple weeks in the Jawbone icon is the best bluetooth earpiece I have owned to date.   (I’ve owned mostly motorola bluetooth devices many different ones).  It seems priced reasonably for a high end bluetooth headset.  Those with corporate discounts at wireless providers like verizon might wish to purchase there and save on your accessory purchase.  With those discounts and getting a device like this is a nice deal.

Dell’s XPS 4xx/7xx demise

I had purchased a dell 600 xps some time ago on their outlet sight.  It was a great deal at the time, a near top of the line machine at only about $900 that supported 8GB of memory and close to the top of the line processor at the time.

My dual core 3.2GHZ processory now well behind the times, I was looking for a new dell xps to replace it.  I wanted a system with a 600w power supply to handle a high end graphics card and I wanted to be able to have 12GB of memory in a quad core system.

I hadn’t noticed that Dell basically dropped these series of machines to be replaced by the Dell xps 8100/9000 and the Alienware line.  The xps 435 seems to be equivalent to the xps 9000.  I realized that the power supply in that machine is only a 450w.  The alienware line the lowest price even on outlet is $1600 and new is $2000-$3000.

I found myself wishing dell continued the xps 7xx series, the alienware machines seem overpriced and now dell shoppers are left with a significant gap between the lower end lines of machines and their ultimate gaming rig’s.

I might consider purchasing an older outlet xps 435 even though the power supply is limited and the number of PCIe slots is only one.  Though I’m really hoping Dell sees the error of their ways and either lowers their alienware prices or brings back the xps 7xx series.

New Facebook “privacy” settings

Facebook has recently published their “privacy” settings update and are now forcing users to go through their transition. Facebook is forcing millions of users to expose information that many do not likely want exposed.
I think the government should investigate them for blatantly and without regard for the consequences and without due notice and recourse exposing user data.

This type of action should be considered illegal. For now all you can do is avoid logging into facebook if you don’t want your profile pic, friends, fan pages, gender and other information exposed to the entire internet.

The new controls facebook was adding would have been nice if their defaults were not for everyone and they let you control those settings on ALL information. They should not be able to choose/force you to expose public information. Though it seems that they have for millions of people.

Windows 7 Quick Review

New features:

(Not all features are on all versions of Windows 7 – make sure to check if a feature you need is in the version you plan to purchase).

(Only listing features I personally think most home users might care about or are otherwise interesting or significant).

Home Group – Easier file and printer sharing with other windows 7 pc’s

PlayTo – Play media to remote pc’s

Remote media streaming

Multi touch support

Aero Peek – See through windows to see what’s beneath to make finding obscured desktop items.

Aero Shake – Easy way to focus on a single window.

backup restore – Improved – full image restores supported

Calculator improved

Bitlocker supports USB drives for encryption

Internet TV through windows media center – launching you’ll get a warning if your video card doesn’t have enough video memory.  I couldn’t get this feature working.

Windows XP mode – run software in windows compatibility mode.  Requires hardware virtualization support.

Internet Explorer 8 – You can get this without Windows 7 (just download)

Faster restore from sleep and resume – (Wasn’t able to test this sleep was not working on my notebook.  Resume from hibernation is faster than previous windows versions.)

Snap – Allows sticking windows to the edges of the screen for easier alignment/usability.

Snipping tool – Lets you easily grab a portion of your screen to annotate and share with anyone

Sticky notes – Like having post it notes on your screen.

Not really a feature but less annoying UAC User account control

Tray icon control – This is nice allowing you to decide which icons get displayed or not on your taskbar and what they can or can’t do.

The installation went smoothly.  I did a clean install.  Upgrade is not possible from XP directly but you can upgrade from Vista.  I installed the 32 bit ultimate on a thinkpad T40 (a bit older notebook at this point.)  Two problems running on the older notebook were the default sound driver didn’t work and I had to dig around to find a driver that eventually worked.  Second issue is sleep no longer seems to work on my notebook, windows 7 does not handle sleep on the thinkpad t40.   It did seem to be a little sluggish compared to a base windows xp install but that might be a bit subjective.

I did have one hang with the OS but haven’t seen a problem since then.  I generally like Windows 7 OS.  For advanced users some of the windows are so high level now it’s hard to find parts you used to know where they were in older OS versions (example control panel).

I have an older Dell PC as well and it looks like dell does not support windows 7 on it, so I am worried about lack of drivers.  Unless your hardware vendor has drivers for Windows 7 and supports it you might want to dig around for drivers if you even want to consider installing Windows 7. 

 

My general recommendation is I don’t see enough differences from Windows Vista to really be worth a large upgrade cost,  and if your vendor doesn’t support windows 7 drivers for your hardware that’s even more reason to consider waiting till you purchase your next pc and get windows 7 with the new machine.

Windows 7 holds a lot of promise for multitouch and netbooks and I do look forward to seeing how well this will work with them.  I’m probably going to hold of trying to upgrade my dell machine given the lack of drivers available for it.

Belkin Network USB hub (F5L009 ) quick review

I have a network printer that uses proprietary software to connect to the printer via the network.  The network printing seems to always have issues, not printing, that is until I decided to work around the printers proprietary software and plug it in via a network usb hub from belkin.

 

I had enough with the printing issues so decided to try this.  The belking setup/install worked great got the software installed and set up the printer for automatic usb sharing.  I installed the belkin software on my various machines, and …. it worked!

Not only that I can connect other devices to the hub as well.  Printer sharing seems the most convienient as it doesn’t hold the connection to the printer.  Using other devices once conneced prevents other machines from using the device until disconnected, and there doesn’t seem to be a remote disconnect.

So you might want to think about how you plan on sharing your usb devices.  P

At least for my scenario problem solved and it has been working fine.

Rating 3.5 out of 5 stars

Belkin Powerline AV+ 200Mb/s (quick review)

I have a desktop pc downstairs in my home that had been connecting to our wireless router upstairs.

Our family got so fed up with wireless disconnecting I decided to look for other options.  I had been reluctant to use powerline connections due to their speed.  Then I saw the new Belkin Powerline AV+ at 200Mb/s and figured these were worth a try.

 

The setup on these could not have been easier.  I put one upstairs by my router and the other downstairs by my PC and decided to reset the security code, which is basically just pressing a button on one and then the other (best to do that in the same outlet to make it easy first then move them).  They sync’d up quickly and put the units back in place.

I plugged them into the router and desktop and away they went.

I had a direct connection, the connection seemed fast and available with no disconnects.

Setup was easy, use was easy, I have not measure performance but seems fine for normal internet usage.  I have not had any disconnection issues at all.  We are very happy with these units.

If you want to deplace a wireless connection due to disconnects on a wireless connection to a desktop pc, these seem to be a great option.  I’m even considering another unit to use when I’m stationary with my laptop!

Rated 5 out of 5 stars.

Linksys WPC600N Dual Band N PCMCIA card (Mini Review)

I installed this card on my old IBM T40 notebook.

The installation went smoothly and I was able to get up and running quickly.

For XP I chose the option to go with their network software as per their instructions rather than the built in xp wireless software.

 

The software seemed to work well initially.   I realized that it was not obvious from the app if it really was using the dual band mode or not.

The signal strength is better than the 802.11a/b internal card I had been using.

I switched from one account in xp to another and I was not able to connect.

I switched back to the original account I installed under and it was ok.

Ocassionally when restarting the PC or coming out of sleep mode it does not connect.

Range:

The range at speed for this card seemed improved over older technology, but no where near what you would expect for a dual band N system.  I suspect part of this is when you mix vendors in dual band N implementations.  My wireless router is a dlink DIR-825 (review on that later).  At about 25 feet downstairs from my router it was at 70% single and reporting only a 13mbps connection. 

I have a feeling this card may work better if I were using Windows Vista but don’t have that installed on this machine.

 

Given that I would only rate this card running on XP a 2 out of 5 stars.

Tivo HD (Quick Review)

As an original owner of a Tivo Series 1 I had not upgraded for a long time as I was a lifetime subscriber.  Plus I had upgraded my Tivo a bit to support Ethernet, extra space, etc.

I decided with the purchase of a new HD TV it was time to also look  at upgrading my Tivo.  Plus I wanted to get rid of the cable box so I could pay a bit less to the cable company.

I set up Tivo without the cablecard and setup went fairly smoothly.  Much better than the original series one and they set the guided install to only download the first days worth of data rather than get it all at once.  This definitely improved on the time to getting the unit running.

The picture with analog on an hd tv is about as pleasant as you could get (not very).

Later I was able to get a cable card, multistream mcard.  Which the cable company of course charged for the visit, I wish they had just allowed remote provisioning.  Tivo HD supports 2 cable card slots so if your cable company doesn’t support an mstream card you can get two single stream cards to allow recording two programs at once.  Tivo manual does not recommend using a single non-multistream card.

Initial impressions:

–          Menu’s seem slightly sluggish compared to my series 1 due to the way it refreshes and sorts items.

–          I found it very annoying to go to a bunch of menu items like Tivo search, download, kidzone,etc. and always be prompted to change my opt out status for privacy information.   I find it annoying they couldn’t implement some of these features without potentially exposing personally identifiable information.

–          I found the download options to be ok with Netflix and amazon but I really had wished they had included Hulu so you could actually get some decent free content.  There was some free content but it was pretty limited.

Video quality:

The video seems to me not as crisp as it was directly connected to the cable box.  It also tended to be pixilated occasionally.    The video was good definitely HD but definitely not as good as the straight cable box or direct cable.

Downloading and watching:

You can start a download and watch it in a few minutes after it starts if your connection is fast enough, if not you may see warnings like wait 20 minutes or more before you can start watching.  Some downloads were at a pretty good pace and others took a while.

I downloaded an HD video from amazon and the picture was good, better than normal cable viewing I believe.

Tuning Adapter:

Stay tuned.  The cable company apparently can’t provision a cable card and a tuning adapter at the same time as they claim it takes 48 hours to provision so they have to come out a second time.    I don’t have this yet hopefully soon.  For those that don’t know what a tuning adapter is don’t feel bad neither did I.  Apparently cable cards only have one way communication to your box, and can’t send requests the other way.  This is why you can’t do on demand with a cable card.  The tuning adapter apparently sync’s up with the cable card and allows for two way communication to support switched video.  Switched video in theory allows nearly unlimited channels as the cable company no longer needs to broadcast all channels all the time, they can instead let your cable box (or in this case tuning adapter) request the channel you want to view and then it broadcasts it.

Expansion it appears there is an Esata port off the back that allows expansion of hard drive space with Tivo approved devices (although we imagine others might work).  Have not tried this yet.

Upgrading: For users upgrading from a Tivo series 1 lifetime to a Tivo HD Tivo offers some special deals for you like $100 off of a new lifetime subscription and $100 off a new Tivo HD (at least at the time I purchased).  I called Tivo directly and asked, took a bit but they eventually came up with this offer.

Video modes:

The Tivo HD supports several different video format modes:Native, Fixed or Hybrid.  Native is for use with TV’s that support all video formats of 480i,480p,720p,1080i.  Fixed mode upscales video to keep the same video format which reduces flashing between screens while your tv resyncs.  Hybrid mode is useful when TV’s don’t support 480i so it upscales to 480p for standard or uses native otherwise.

Tivo Desktop software:

The free desktop software can be downloaded from the Tivo site.  If you don’t need the features of their pay version you can just use the free one.  The pay one allows for some video conversions.

The software connects to your Tivo and can download programs for viewing on your pc.  You can start watching after the show has been partially downloaded.

Recording:

I was able to easily  record one program at a time and watch another.

Summary:

The Tivo HD unit is as good as the original adding new features like downloading, internet connection, remote viewing and downloading with tivo desktops and other tivo’s, along with better search and grouping in their now playing.   Performance of the menu’s seems sluggish due to the way they display.  Using native format display flickers quite a bit between switching menu’s which is a bit annoying.  Some menu’s are in 720p, it would have been better to keep the menu’s in the format of whatever was currently playing before you hit the Tivo button to avoid flicker.  The video quality vs cablebox is a bit different.  Maybe there are some adjustments that are needed, it’s not a big difference it is very subtle but is noticeable if you look carefully, possibly just color differences in hardware.  Your average viewer probably won’t be able to discern or care. 

I don’t have a sound system set up so I can not comment on that.  The sound directly from my TV seemed fine with no issues using the HDMI cable.  If you opted out for the privacy option you will be annoyed with the constant questions about asking you to opt in for everything.  Former Tivo owners will find a bunch of new items many you will like some you won’t.  New Tivo owners should enjoy the experience and learn why Tivo became a verb not just a noun.

 Rating 4 out of 5 stars.

Updated 10/25/09 – When I went back to look at the image quality it now seems it is equal to or better than straight cable or the cable box.  I think software updates that updated Tivo from the default image improved the image quality.  It looks very good now.  I’m using this with the cable card  and it works great.  The only thing I’ve noticed is if you unplug it or lose power you will likely have to call your cable company to have them re-authorize your cable card.

Updated:The interface slowness that I mentioned was compared to my old, modified Tivo which was a bit faster than an original Tivo series 1.  The Tivo HD interface is faster than an original unaltered Tivo.  I had the older modifiedTivo for years and had forgotten about that particular alteration.