I love slickdeals.net

I subscribe to the slickdeals.net RSS feed and have found quite a few great deals on it (for example, the 20% off coupon that helped me get a new Dell PC for under $500) and the occasional cool gift idea.

Today’s gem: a tiny USB Bluetooth adapter for $3. I’d been thinking about getting one of these to leave connected to my Eee PC. The one I have now is large and sticks out pretty far so I can’t leave it plugged in and slide it into its neoprene carrying case. I leave it in the sleeve and am always worried it’s going to fall out and get lost. The little Kensington model I had been considering was $27 but for $3 (with free shipping), I’ll give this one a try.

Windows 7 Beta

win7-712425

Last Friday Microsoft released the public beta of their next operating system, Windows 7. I tried several times over the weekend but was unable to download it (and I wasn’t alone). Finally this morning I was able to grab the 2.1gb ISO, and the download was surprisingly fast.

I did a clean install of Windows 7 on an old spare laptop here at work (which was below the minimum requirements as it only had 512mb of RAM). The install was just like Vista: answer a few initial questions and then the OS is installed from the DVD, relatively painless.

As expected, after the initial boot into the new OS, I found quite a few components not working properly. Windows Update installed a driver for the ATI Mobility Radeon 9200 video card so I could up the screen resolution. Windows Update also tried to install a new audio driver but it keeps failing, so I have no sound. Worse, I can’t get the wireless to work. Sony never produced Vista drivers for this old S Series unit and the drivers I downloaded directly from Intel didn’t work either. These kind of problems I expected, though, running beta software on older hardware (a colleague at work installed the beta on a newer Sony SZ series laptop and everything worked just fine, including his wireless).

Most of the corporate apps we use at work installed without any problems (Office 2007, Reflections, pcAnywhere, Citrix, etc.). One notable exception was McAfee Antivirus 8.0i which was blocked “due to compatibility issues.” This could be another beta thing, but I recall Vista had a lot of antivirus and firewall problems initially as well. AVG installed just fine.

Except the new, improved taskbar (and the neat new boot animation), Windows 7 looks a lot like Vista (and IE8 looks a lot like IE7). I need to play around some more and maybe check out the release notes to see what else is new and different.

Easy Peasy upgrade on the Eee

I’ve been running Ubuntu Eee on my Eee PC for just over a month and am really happy with it. Earlier this week though, the new version of Ubuntu Eee, now re-branded Easy Peasy (as in “easy PC”) was released. I can’t say I love the new name (the new logo even has a lemon slice in it!) but it’s still Ubuntu underneath, customized for netbooks.

Since I’d spent a lot of time tweaking Ubuntu Eee and had it just the way I liked it, I decided to try an in-place upgrade (after making a full backup first, of course). It took a while but went smoothly and I’ve now got Easy Peasy 1.0 (or Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex) running on the Eee.

Everything seems to be working just like before, with two exceptions:

  • I can connect (authenticate) to the VPN at work, but the routes don’t seem to work so I can’t actually connect to (or ping) any of my servers. Apparently a lot of people have issues with the new Network Manager in Intrepid so this is not something specific to Easy Peasy.
  • I can’t print to my Epson AL-CX11NF laser printer at home. The error says the pstoalcx11.sh “driver” is missing, but it’s there under /usr/local/bin where it was before.

So I’ve still got a little cleanup/tweaking to do.

Oh, one other “benefit” of doing the dist-upgrade instead of a fresh install: I’ve still got all the old Ubuntu logos, boot screens, etc. instead of the new Easy Peasy graphics. 🙂

Palm’s new handheld is Pre-tty cool

Today at CES, Palm unveiled its new smartphone: the Pre, running webOS (formerly code-named Nova).

The Pre has a 320×480 high-resolution touchscreen display, built-in 3G/GPS/WiFi/Bluetooth, a 3 mega-pixel camera, 8gb of user storage (the most on any Palm handheld ever), an accelerometer (for screen rotation), and the Treo’s familiar keyboard (it slides down from under the screen, or rather, the screen slides up). Though I hate to say it, it’s basically Palm’s version of the iPhone. The market seemed to like what it saw … shares of PALM jumped 34% today!

webOS looks slick … and finally Palm has a multi-tasking operating system! I just hope it’s faster than Windows Mobile (my Treo might not have 3G or be able to run two applications at once, but the user-interface speed blows away any WM6 device).

So, any bad news? First, the Pre will initially be available only on Sprint (CDMA), in the first half of 2009. Hopefully other carriers (like AT&T) will follow. Next, and I couldn’t confirm this, it doesn’t look like there’s any backward compatibility with PalmOS. There is a huge library of third-party applications out there and none of them will run on the Pre. I’m sure developers will jump on the platform relatively quickly, though, and it’s probably better to leave the legacy of PalmOS behind (how about a PalmOS emulator for webOS? 😉 ). No Flash support either. I’ll bet it has cut-and-paste though!

There’s a lot more good information over on Engadget (except pricing, which hasn’t been announced yet) and some videos of the Pre in action from Gizmodo. For now I’ll have to wait and hope that my next smartphone is going to be a member of the Pre family.

Heh, there’s already a wiki page.

Is AT&T quietly downgrading its EDGE network?

I manage a lot of AT&T mobile phones at work, mainly Treos (plus a few Centros) and Windows Mobile devices like the Tilt. Starting about a month ago, the Treo users (myself included) started having data coverage issues. Areas of the office that were fine before were suddenly dead zones and phones would drop data coverage (even while outside!) and not automatically reconnect.

Since this was only affecting the Treos, it seemed obvious that it was a problem with AT&T’s older EDGE network (the current generation of Palm OS-based devices can’t do 3G). When I called AT&T Mobility’s technical support earlier last month, I was just told there were “network issues” in the area and they were being worked on. But a month later, the strange coverage problems persist.

Then today I came across this article on Open for Business, via Engadget:

In an act affecting owners of 2G cell phones on AT&T Mobility’s network, including the highly visible, and originally highly expensive first generation iPhone, Open for Business has learned that AT&T has been quietly sacrificing 2G signal strength in an effort to speed up the build out of its next generation 3G network.
…
While previously the company had been primarily relying on the 850 MHz band that offers a more robust signal, including superior indoor reception, company technicians confirmed to OFB that transmitters for the 2G signal used by the original iPhone and most other handsets, including most AT&T offered BlackBerry and RAZR models, have been shifted to the weaker 1900 MHz band in some areas.

Are you kidding me? It makes sense, from a conspiracy standpoint (get people to upgrade to newer, more expensive 3G devices like the iPhone) and could explain our current coverage problems, but from a business standpoint it seems like you’d end up with a lot of angry customers who suddenly have non-working data connections on their phones, not to mention a looming PR nightmare.

Now this whole thing could be heresy, so as usual don’t believe everything you read on the internet (just check out the comments to the OFB post and you’ll see what I mean).

Fortunately, my desk at work seems to be a “good” area because usually when someone brings their phone to me, it’ll start working. Then I take it back to their own desk and it drops the network connection again. sigh

I can play Wii during a power outage …

… for about 10 minutes anyway.

Last night I tested my new APC J15 home theater power conditioner and UPS. A neat feature of the unit is the front VFD that shows various informational screens, one of which is the total watts being drawn. With everything connected turned on (receiver, DVD player, TiVo, Wii, and plasma display), I’m pulling between 560 and 570 watts:


Which according to a different screen on the display gives me roughly 7 minutes of battery run time (again, with everything running). “Normal” usage (one component and the TV) is about 340 watts, most of which is the plasma. I ran the calibration test (which puts the unit into battery mode until the power runs out) and confirmed everything was able to run off of battery. Pretty cool.

Ok, so I’m not really going to be watching TV (or playing Wii) during an extended power-outage, but at least my equipment is protected from the occasional brown-out or surge.

I did find an irritating bug in the firmware of the J15 during my testing. There are separate options in the setup to control the brightness of the status LEDs and the VFD. Each of those options has either High, Low, and Off. Since the unit is in a closed cabinet, I don’t really need either one on, so I tried setting both to Off. What I discovered though is that when both are set to Off, the display will blank (no text) but the backlight will not turn off. So the status LEDs are off, the display is blank, but it’s a big glowing blue rectangle. If I leave the status LEDs on Low and set the display to Off, the display properly turns off after a few seconds of inactivity. Also, you can’t turn off the circular blue light around the power button which shows you the unit is on. Again, nothing earth-shattering especially since my equipment is all behind the doors of a cabinet, but in a normal family room setting those blue LEDs could be annoying. I’ve used small pieces of electrical tape in the past to cover up those annoying “standby” LEDs on other equipment, but it’d be hard to nicely cover up that circular glow.

Home theater re-org

I started out 2009 by re-organizing my home theater media cabinet.

Several years back I used to have a UPS in the cabinet to protect the various components and keep the TiVo running in case of the occasional power fluctuation (which can happen a lot during the summer months here in Florida). That UPS eventually died in late 2007 and due to the complicated nature of the electrical setup in the cabinet (the outlet is inside the wall which requires me to climb up into the attic to reach it from the ceiling), the need for a quick fix, and the need for additional plugs, I just replaced it with a heavy duty 8-outlet power strip/surge suppressor.

I had always meant to pull the strip out and put a UPS back into the cabinet, but somehow time just slipped away and soon it had been over a year. So this Christmas, I put an Amex gift card I had won at the office Christmas party, along with some other gifted cash towards a home theater UPS: the APC J15 power conditioner with battery backup. Then I spent New Year’s Day pulling all of the components out of the cabinet, cleaning/dusting, installing the APC unit, and then re-organizing everything else around it. While I was in there I also made the opening in the back of the cabinet a little larger so a) I could better fit my hands into the intra-wall space to grab cables and b) allow for better airflow out of the cabinet (I have a small fan in running to keep the components as cool as possible). The screenshot above is the end result.

The J15 is a monster! It measures 5 x 17 x 18 (HWD) and weighs about 50lbs (with the battery installed). However, it has an output capacity of 865W (1500VA, or 1.5kVA), sports 12 outlets, and includes protection for cable/phone/network connections. It has a front panel display that can be used to show statistics like the current load and estimated battery run-time. You can also use it to access a few setup options like the LED brightness (yes, another component with bright blue LEDs!), alarm signals, run self-tests, etc. The outlets are grouped by filtering type (digital, video, analog, high current) and labeled for common HT components (TV, RCVR, DVD, CD, AUX, etc.):
j15-rear-757238Two sets of outlets are “delayed” so that when you turn the J15 on, everything doesn’t power on at once. You can set the delay time (the default is 5 seconds) via the front panel. It also has a USB port in case you want to control/monitor it with APC’s PowerChute software.

I was originally considering the J10 (which is only 600W/1kVA and lacks the splitter feature for the coax and phone connections) but for some odd reason, the J15 was cheaper on Amazon. So I ended up with more capacity and was also able to eliminate an old coax splitter from my setup. So far, I’m pretty happy with the new UPS. My next step is to turn everything on and then flip the breaker to see how long the battery will last. 😀

Blogger and FTP problems

I’ve been unable to post to the blog for the past few days as Blogger has been having issues with sFTP. Whenever I tried to publish a post, I was getting this error:

java.net.ConnectException: Connection timed out

Apparently I wasn’t alone as I found quite a few posts on the Blogger support forums about the problem, like this one. It was only affecting people who host their blogs on their own servers, but that’s still a good number of people. I was really getting frustrated but am glad they finally resolved the issue.

I’ve got a few backlogged posts to get to now …

Santa’s gone Centro!

I’m a long-time Palm user: I’ve owned four different Palm OS devices over the past 12 years from the original Pilot 1000 to my Treo 680.

Palm is finally starting to do some advertising, and the latest round of Santa’s Gone Centro videos are pretty funny.

I’m looking forward to CES next week as Palm will finally be unveiling it’s new Linux-based Nova OS and supposedly a new smartphone to run it. Nova will be the first new version of Palm OS since Garnet was originally released in 2002! I love my Treo but sometimes wish I had some of the cooler features that other phones have, like 3G, WiFi, GPS, etc. The new Nova devices might be the answer to that prayer.

Merry Christmas! Now go frag someone …

We got back this evening from our trip to Los Angeles, CA where we spent Christmas with my wife’s family.

Back in 2004, my brothers-in-law and I started a (somewhat dubious) new tradition: the holiday frag fest. We were all at my in-laws house that year and we all had laptops and my father-in-law had just put in a wireless network. One of us (I think it was me) came up with the idea of playing a game over the network on all of the laptops. Since this wasn’t pre-meditated, the only free, easily downloadable game we could come up with on short notice was Doom II. So sure, it was some classic retro gaming, but it was fun! I think we went a little (ok, a lot) overboard that first year, deathmatching into the wee hours of the morning (our spouses were not amused).

Christmas 2006 found us back at my in-laws and the tradition “officially” became a tradition (you have to do it more than once, right?) as the laptops returned. That year’s game-of-choice was Doom 3. Once again, much joyous fragging of family members occured into the wee hours each night.

This year, I suggested Assault Cube, a small, free, cross-platform, open-source FPS. While AC doesn’t have the crazy range of weapons like the Doom, Quake, or Unreal series of games, it has enough to be fun (including grenades!), plus a lot of maps and several different game modes (our favorites being capture-the-flag and one-shot-one-kill).

We really put AC through its paces: we used two Vista laptops (both of which needed video card driver updates to run smoothly), a MacBook Pro, and my Eee PC running Ubuntu. In fact, I hosted the AC server running our LAN game on my Eee (while playing via the client at the same time). That shows you just how a small a footprint AC can run in (my Eee only has a 900MHz processor with 1gb of RAM). There were times when my framerate got choppy (and thus caused me to be gibbed by my opponents) and the 7″ screen is a little small for gaming (yes, I probably could have used an external monitor), but overall the experience was pretty good. We tried to cut back a little this year so as to stay on the good side of the other family members so we didn’t play as extensively in past years. Still, a good fragging time was had by all involved.

Now to start planning for FragFest 2010.