Tag: Technology

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Coming within 20 feet of Jesus

Today as I was leaving Moscone West to head on over to Moscone South, I noticed a group of people at the corner, one of the women had an Apple badge that said Events (not an expo badge, but a permanent one); then I saw that she had an Exhibitor VIP badge holder for the Macworld Expo. I thought it was interesting, but continued walking. As I was waiting for the light to change so I could cross I heard some commotion behind me and saw Jesus, I mean Steve Jobs, in that group of people crossing the street with me. I’m kind of surprised that no one else even noticed or didn’t say anything. With so many Mac fans absorbed in the reality distortion field, I expected some type of uproar.

I continued walking and went on my way. I have no idea where Steve and his Entourage went.

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Macworld off to an excellent start (at least for me)

Even though Macworld Expo 2008 hasn’t even started, it is off to a good start. 2 companies, Fujitsu announced the ScanSnap S300M (similar to the S300 which doesn’t work on the Mac; the Mac specs aren’t online, yet) and I.R.I.S. announced the IRIScan2. Both scanners are portable scanners similar to the Pentax DSMobile and make them perfect fits for ReceiptWallet and DocumentWallet. I’ll go visit their booths tomorrow when I’m at the expo and check them out. The problem is that I have to buy 2 more scanners; just what I really needed!

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Wire cleanup

Like any computer geek, I have a ton of stuff on my desk which leads to a ton of wires. Periodically, I attempt to figure out what to do with them. When I got my new desk, I put some wire runs under my desk to help with the clutter. That lasted a little bit, but I kept adding more stuff and it became a mess again. This week, I added another wire run, got some velcro ties and switched out a surge suppressor to one with 12 outlets! (I call it my vampire surge suppressor as I turn it off at night so that all the stuff that sucks power when not on won’t suck power.) I seem to have a lot of power bricks on cords, but not many of the large transformers that seem to block outlets. This is handy as I come shove them up in the wire racks.

Here are some after pictures (I didn’t take before pictures, but trust me, it was more of a mess!):

Wires Under Desk - 1Wires Under Desk - 2
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Tech reporter who doesn’t know tech

There are a few tech reporters that are well known and well respected in the industry. David Pogue and Walt Mosberg to name the most famous. Both men write pretty good reviews and seem to be right on the money with what they say. So much so that their reviews can greatly influence a product’s success in some circles. Today I read a review by Jonathan Blum about the Navigon 2100 and can’t understand how he gave it a positive review. (I’ve seen a few other positive reviews of it and my conclusions below apply to all of them.) One of the following explains the review:

  1. He never actually used the device (it looks great on paper). I used one for about 5 minutes and was disgusted by it.
  2. He has very low standards for GPS devices (my old Garmin iQue 3600 performed better than this)
  3. He has never used a competing product from Garmin or TomTom

You might be saying that these are serious acquisitions, but has anyone actually used one of these devices? It is slow, cumbersome, and lacks decent points of interest.

Am I writing this because I’m a fan of Garmin having written positively about them in the past? No, I’m writing this because if you want a decent GPS unit, don’t get the Navigon!

(Generally I like Garmin, but my biggest criticisms of the company are a) their dizzying array of similar units (they’re competing against themselves and driving people away because consumers have no idea which one to choose) and b) their units are quite expensive.)

Disclaimer: I own stock in Garmin, but have no inside information about the company, don’t know anyone at the company, and they don’t pay me to write this stuff.

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Gadget Drool Day

Yesterday I was in drooling all over my desk at some tech rumors and product announcements. First up was Garmin’s announcement of the Forerunner 405. While I don’t plan on running another marathon, I do plan on running to keep in shape. It’s hard to justify purchasing it, but since it can work as a normal watch, maybe I need a new watch!

Second up on my list is the rumor that Apple will have a dockable laptop based on a patent application that was recently granted. Unfortunately the patent was filed a year and a half ago, so it coming to light now could be a mere coincidence. Apple patents everything, so who knows if this will become a product. I’m crossing my fingers that it will be, and I’ll jump at purchasing it if it comes to be. Right now my MacBook Pro has 7 cables coming out of it that I have to unplug every time I want to move it which is a pain.

While not really a gadget or technology, LEGO released new sets for 2008 including Indiana Jones based sets (which don’t really fit into my collection, but they’re cool). They also have new City sets which will fit in perfectly in my collection. The problem is, plastic LEGOs aren’t cheap!

I’ll start saving my pennies now to buy all my gadgets.

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Navigating with printed directions

Last night I had to pick up something for my wife. Unfortunately it wasn’t going to fit in her car which has built-in navigation, so I had to take my car. As I gave my Garmin iQue 3600 to my father and haven’t replaced it, I had to print out directions and follow printed directions. It seemed so archaic to have to do this, but I didn’t have a choice. I guess I’ll have to wait for a new car to have navigation again as I still can’t justify getting a portable GPS unit for the little driving I do in my car to places I’ve never been.

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Watched my first movie rental on TiVo!

Awhile back, Amazon Unbox came to TiVo. I thought this was great as my wife and I are a bit too lazy to goto the store and rent a movie (even more so now that we have an 8 month old son). Well, nothing ever came of it as we never rented a movie. The other night, when there was nothing on TV because of the writer’s strike, I mentioned it again to my wife and she checked out Amazon, saw that Ocean’s Thirteen was available for rent for $0.99, so we set it up and started the download. It was quick and easy! Last night we got around to watching the movie and must say that the experience renting the movie was excellent. I think our threshold is probably $3.99 for movie rentals. The problem with Unbox is that the selection isn’t all that great for rentals. Maybe I’m just picky, but not a whole lot jumped out at me.

The rumors are circulating that Apple will have a rental setup for the iTunes Music Store soon which would be cool as we could watch stuff from our AppleTV. However, it will require an upgrade to the AppleTV’s software which will knock out my Squeezebox hack on it. We’ll just have to wait and see.

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VMWare Fusion saves the day

While I was working on a ReceiptWallet issue, I needed an older data file, one that was in XML format and created from an older ReceiptWallet version. I have recent backups of all my data, but don’t generally keep an archive of the data as the amount of storage space to keep regular archives is enormous and I’ve only thought about using archives once or twice in the last 10 years. I thought I was hosed, until I realized I had backups from my server before I retired it. Problem was that my server backup drive were formatted as ext3 (Linux format) and couldn’t be read on the Mac without installing some extra stuff that might not even work on Leopard and could make my system unstable. So I looked for an alternative. I downloaded a CentOS virtual appliance from VMWare’s Appliance Marketplace, ran it under VMWare, plugged in my backup drive, in VMWare, connected the USB drive, mounted the drive, found my backup, tar/gzipped the directory and then FTPd the archive back to my Mac. It sounds complicated, but the most time consuming part was downloading the 691 MB archive of the virtual application. The rest was just a few simple UNIX commands.

While Fusion worked great in this scenario, it isn’t working with the Slide/Negative Scanner I just bought. I bought it to transfer some of my old negatives into digital format even though it got mixed reviews. With the lifetime guarantee that Hammacher Schlemmer offers, I couldn’t go wrong if it didn’t work or the quality was awful. Maybe VMWare will be able to address this issue with the next release; I suspect that the device is trying to pump too much data through USB or is doing something non-standard with USB.

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Garmin is too cool

I’m subscribed to Garmin’s blog and saw that they have a “garage” where you can customize the car icon on your GPS unit. While this seems like a gimmick, it shows that Garmin has a little sense of fun and forward thinking in developing their GPS units. In addition, Garmin has new “tours” if you will, that you can purchase which you load on the unit and has points of interests and directions. I’m not sure that the tours are up my alley, but being able to add this is just another cool feature of the Garmin units.

With all the free publicity I’ve given Garmin with my Forerunner 305 review, the least they can do is send me a nüvi 360 🙂 My review (which I wrote over 1.5 years ago) still gets about 3000 hits a month!

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Roomba isn’t saving us time

I hate to say it, but the Roomba isn’t saving us time. I love the Roomba and Scooba, but the promise of time savings just isn’t there. How can that be you ask? It is quite simple; my wife and I hate vacuuming and the cleaning crew we had wasn’t doing a good job, so the house wasn’t getting vacuumed regularly. While our house is usually “in order”, we had dog hair all over the place and the carpets didn’t get vacuumed as often as they should.

So now that the Roomba is handling the floors, our carpets look better, there is less dog hair on the tile and our house looks better, but it still isn’t saving us time!