Recent Gadgetry

My recent gadgetry have been mostly related to netbooks.  Nothing to major though.  Mainly re-installing the linux os on my EEE 1000 (down-graded from Ubuntu 8.10 to the EEE tailored 8.04.1) and getting familiar with my wife’s Mini 9 (N270 1.6 GHz atom, with 1 GB ram, 16 SSD, and Ubuntu 8.04).  I mainly downgraded because the performance on my wife’s new Mini 9 was a lot better than on my EEE 1000.  I think that it mainly has to do with the SSD, as my EEE 1000 has a sh!%%y controller that only allows for around 33 – 35 MBs reading, versus my wife’s Mini 9 reading at around 60 -  65 MBs.  The downgrade from the full version of Ubuntu 8.10 to 8.04.1 EEE did help quite a bit.  I was able to salvage all my wine installed programs without reinstalling, and have not put back as many applications as I had before to try to keep things running as smoothly as possible as long as possible.  I have read a lot of articles about the Runcore SSDs for the EEE and am considering getting one, or two (a small one and a larger one, as the EEE 1000 has two SSD ports).

My wife’s Mini 9 is a lot better than I was expecting.  I did not have high hopes for Dell’s first foray into the netbook realm, but have been pleasantly surprised with the performance and usability of their small machine.  I was trying to think of a complaint about the Mini 9 but am unable to think of anything other than the function keys (f1, f2, etc) being fn keys, which makes it harder to launch programs by using alt-f2.  The keyboard quirk is nothing major though, as I have become familiar with the keyboard layout and have instinctively started hitting alt.fn-s to open the run application window.  I can see the advantages of the keyboard layout utilized by the Mini 9, as 5-rows (instead of 6)  and the keys other than a-z are smaller to allow for the letter keys to be as larger as possible.  Just typing an email or a search phrase is just as easy as on the 92% keyboard of my EEE 1000, despite the 2″ in wide that the EEE has on the Mini 9.

My brother and his wife came in from CA for the holidays.  My brother has recently purchased a HTC Dream/Google Android Development phone.  I played with it for only a few minutes but could tell that Android might be here to stay, especially if they are backed by awesome HTC manufactured devices.  I have always been a crazy HTC fan, and I have only had HTC phones since my BlueAngel 4 years ago.  I am wanting to get a new phone, which runs Android, but I am on AT&T, and cannot afford the $400 for the Android development phone for Google.  2009 looks like it will be the year or Android though, as Samsung, Sony Erricson, and several other big names have stated that they will be delivering Android based devices this year.

New Year, New Plans

This is going to be one great year (I believe, and hope). My wife and I are expecting to have our first child around the middle of 2009, and things are going to change. I have bought gadgets that help to make my wife and my life easier and more connected, the challenge now is to do the same for a baby/small child. I already have a good idea of what one of my first projects will be, related to the baby and technology. I am planning on building a media/learning center from an old computer, a used (but decent) resistive touchscreen Elo monitor and a waterproof keyboard. I want to create a colorful, arcade game type enclosure, which can withstand the assault of a child.  I do not have the specifics of the project on paper yet, mostly they are in my head. I know that I want to create a user interface for playing games that utilize the touchscreen, as well as, allow for watching videos (Barney or whatever kids are into these days). This might not be a project that gets utilized during 2009 (as the baby will only be around 6 months old when 2010 rolls around) but I plan to get it ready for as soon as our child is ready to start learning about technology.

Looking back on my life I want to do as my parents did with me and my brother. If my child (or children) have a toy or gadget and take it apart, so be it. I learned almost all that I know about technology and repairing stuff from having taken my things apart when I was a child, and having to fix it to use it again. I think that I was pretty lucky with my tear downs, as most made it back together functioning as they were designed, but the education that was gained was priceless.

Recent Gadgetry… Part 3 (Dell Mini 9)

My brother ordered a Dell Mini 9 for my wife and myself a while back and we received the machine yesterday. I received it at work, which is probably better than home, with my eee 1000 was here, as well as an Asus S101 and 3 Asus eee 901 (may 904, 904ha, 900, 901ha, it is getting hard to tell), so comparison could be done with a wide array of netbooks (as far as with Asus). The size is roughly the same as the 901 eee, and about 1.5″ smaller (length and width) than the 2 10.2″ netbooks. The 901 and eee 1000 were a little taller than the Mini 9, with the S101 quite a bit shorter. This is to be expected as the eee machines have 6-cell batteries that are a little taller and raise the machines up a bit, compared to the 4-cell within the Mini 9. The S101 has a very thin battery and is a decent bit thinner than the Mini 9. The keyboard is strange, it is basically the same size as the 8.9″ eee but it is a lot easier to type on because the function keys (f1,f2,etc) are fn keys, going from the “a” key to the “;” key. The letter keys were a lot bigger than the other keys, which made typing words faster than on the 901 eee, but using shift, tab and some other buttons were greatly hampered.

The specs on the Mini 9 are the 1.6 GHz Atom (N270), 1 GB of DDR2 ram, 8.9″ 1024 x 600 lcd, and a 16 GB SSD. The os is Ubuntu Hardy (8.04) with a customized desktop launcher. I do not care too much for the launcher, but apparently Jenn does, as she got mad at me for changing the desktop mode to the standard gnome desktop. The SSD speed was hoovering between 66.7 MB/s and 69.8 MB/s, versus the 34 MB/s on the eee 100 with “40 GB SSD” (it is actually two different controllers, one with 8 GB and one with 32 GB) I have. The eee 901 (with a 120 GB hdd) was getting around 66 MB/s and the eee S101 was getting between 76 MB/s and maxing at 99 MB/s.

I plan on acquiring a 2 GB stick of ram to max out the Mini 9 and hope to do some more testing/playing with this device. My first impression of this device is that it is a solid entry into the netbook realm. There are some minor quirks but for the most part it is a good device. One thing that made me mad was that the motherboard supports a WWAN device and had the solder points showing when you remove the back panel (and “WWAN” written in big white letters so that you know it). The connector for the WWAN device however, is not soldered on. It is like Dell is saying, yeah we could give you the ability to add a WWAN controler later if you want, but we aren’t going to.

Recent Gadgetry… Part 2 (xbox, old school not 360)

I mentioned hooking up the diNovo Mini to an xbox, well, Jenn my loving wife got me a used xbox for x-mas as well. Since the dashboard (xbox Live was installed) was already updated, to 5069, I couldn’t use the simplier save game/action replay exploit. After digging around on the interweb I found some posts mentioning a method of unlocking the newest dashboards. It basicly used an application called ndure, which will install a new dashboard onto an unlocked xbox hard drive (it will do a lot more, such as backup and restore and other similar functions, but I only needed the new dashboard, as of now, probably will go more in depth this weekend). The hardest part about using this method was getting the drive unlocked; for those of you that don’t know, the xbox motherboard and harddrive have a paired key, which is used to unlock the drive for reading and writing. To unlock an xbox harddrive you can copy a song from an audio cd, then play the copied song from the harddrive, pause the song (or use a number of errors, I used error 12, unplugging the dvd drive’s power will allow for this error). After unlocking the harddrive, I had to hot-swap the drive to a computer into the primary ide master, this was the real problem for me as the only desktop I had at the time had only 1 ide port (it uses SATA drives) and i couldn’t use the cd-rom as a slave device (this application was a linux live cd, which couldn’t be ran on a bootable usb drive) without a master present.

So after trying to use my desktop several times, and fearing that I might destroy the harddrive of a motherboard if I kept hot-swapping I desided not to use my desktop. I had been tasked with trying to salvage 3 Dell Optiplex computers at work, and after discovering that all three had popped several capacitors, my boss said that they would be trashed and to not worry about them. I looked at the motherboards closly and discovered that between them there were enough good capacitors to make a single working motherboard, I removed and replaced the bad capacitors on one. I then used this newly salvaged desktop, with two ide controllers so I can have the cd-rom on secondary master and the xbox harddrive on primary master. I tried as the article I was reading to unlock and hot-swap the harddrive to no avail, but I wasen’t giving up. The reason I could not use the article’s method is that the live cd could not find the hard drive after hot-swapping, so I decided to try hooking up the harddrive to the computer, booting the computer, going into the device boot menu to stall the system, then swap the harddrive from the computer to the xbox, unlock the harddrive, switch the drive back to the computer and run the live cd. This method finally worked, and I can now install homebrew applications and other dashboards. I then installed XBMC and set it up to work on the samba network I already had in place.

Recent Gadgetry… Part 1 (Logitech diNovo Mini)

It has been a week now since I first received my main x-mas gift from my wife, the Logitech diNovo Mini, and I have to say that I am still thoroughly impressed with this device. I am not typing at a blazing speed when using this device, but I didn’t expect to when I ordered it. You can clearly see in any picture of the device that it is basically a pimped out, up-scaled, bluetooth thumbpad. The buttons remind me of the htc phone keyboards I have had (not the blue angle though, it had a weird keyboard). The range of the diNovi Mini is very good. My couch is only 15′ away from the computer/tv so I walk about 25′ from the computer and from what my wife was telling me (I was in another room) all signals from the buttons I was pressing were being received. I am loving the dual use touchpad (a switch will change the touchpad to a directional pad), with the led back-lighting indicating which mode you are in (the whole keyboard is lit orange when in touchpad mode and green when in d-pad mode). I have read many posts with negative comments about the cover on the diNovo Mini and I am not really as disappointed over it as other people are. Sure it is kinda “hard to open” (not really, but you do have to use both hands), but in the long run the protectiveness will outweigh having to use both hands to open the cover. I cannot comment on battery live beyond the fact that it is still on its first charge after a week. I have not used the device extensively, only here and there, so I will need to give it a thorough workout and run it dead to know the actual charge life.

I had read several posts about how that this device will not work with an xbox, and I have to say it was really simple to get it working; I basically replaced controller 4 with a usb extension (female end) and plugged the dongle that came with the device to said cable (I then tucked the dongle/usb cable behind the harddrive to have everything hidden). Since the dongle processes the bluetooth signal and interfaces through usb as a HID there was no setup, it just worked. Granted most people on the forums talking about the inability to use this device with an xbox are not like me, buying an xbox, with no games, just to hack the device and use it as a media server and cutting/rewiring within the console, but it can be done.

X-Mas Shopping Made Easy

A little while back, after finding out that my wife and I were expecting, I stumbled across the new kids section on ThinkGeek. While looking within the section at the products that they offer I noticed that they had several neat onesies (not for sure if that is spelled right, also called crawlers). Jenn is really getting into the spirit of motherhood and is wanting to get little baby cloths and nursery furniture everywhere we went. So for x-mas I decided to get her a onesies that had a rough drawling of a computer on it with “newbie” written underneath. They were out of stock for the 6 and 12 month olds so I put myself on the notification list and looked for some other stuff to get her. I had seen this maternaty shirt before, but forgotten about it, and decided it would be perfect for her (for those of you that didn’t click the link, it was a parody of the intel logo that says “geek inside”). I also found a shirt that had “mom” written in binary and decided to get it as well. I have decided that my child will be a techno-loving geek, and am going to try to get him/her started as early as possible.

PS Those of you who are thinking that I have ruined the surprise, I do not think that Jenn even knows that I have a blog yet. I think that I mentioned it and she just shrugged it off.

Logitech diNovo Mini: First Impressions

I received my Logitech diNovo mini bluetooth keyboard yesterday afternoon. I played with it for a few minutes while at work and my initial thoughts are that this device is pretty impressive. The packaging was nice, and not wasteful. Upon removing the device I put the battery in and plugged it up for a few minutes while getting the rest of the contents out of the box. I grabbed the included bluetooth donle and plugged it into my eee while running linux. The device was recognized right away and after unplugging the keyboard and pushing a button I was up and running. This device is made for Windows Media Center but works almost fully with linux. I believe the almost compete usage and easy of setup is because of the pre-paired bluetooth dongle that was supplied with the device. I later checked more in-depth and confirmed my thoughts that the dongle is seen as a HID and that the bluetooth signal is processed by the dongle, not by the computer, and passed in as though it is a usb keyboard (it can be paired with bluetooth enabled devices as well).

Being geared towards Media Center PCs, the diNovo mini comes with a row of media-centric keys (volume, rewind, stop, play/pause, etc) which can be remapped on my future pc for use in my living room. The only keys which did not seem to function with linux were the Start Menu button and two buttons that appear to be zoom-in and zoom-out. I may be able to use these buttons yet, but have not had a whole lot of time to play with this new gadget, as it is a x-mas present and my wife took it away from me as soon as I got home. I did find her hiding spot and show her how it worked with my eee plugged into the new LG lcd we have, but did not get to do more than show her the basic functionality before having to give it back and go outside for a while so she could re-hide it. Based upon the limited time I have spent with this device I would have to say that I am quite impressed. I am also very fond of the dual purposes trackpad, you can move a switch to toggle from trackpad to directional pad. I am hoping to get a computer to put into our living room and should be able to do more with this device and have a more thorough review.

Oh The Sweet Sweet Shipping Notification

I just receieved an email from Amazon and it seems my newest gadget will be arriving alot sooner than previously expected.  I ordered a Logitech diNovo Mini bluetooth keyboard to accompany the LG 32lg30 lcd that my wife won at her office x-mas party on Saturday. I am pretty excited, as I have a lot of media and am tired of watching it on my 10″ eee 1000. I am kinda putting the horse before the cart here, as I don’t yet have a computer to hook up to the lcd tv, but am sure I can scrounge up something. Today, at work, I combined two Dell Optiplex GX260 workstations to get a single well functioning machine, hoping along the way that there would be enough working parts to scrounge together a makeshift media center pc. I was unable to do so with the Dell Optiplex machines, but am now finishing up removing Linux and installing Windows XP on an old laptop for my wife’s mom. I should be able to get the old Dell Dimension 2400 that I gave her a couple of years ago. It will not fit in our tv stand like the Optiplex would have, but it will work till I can talk my wife into letting me order parts to build a HTPC built off of a mini-itx motherboard (this will be hard as we are now expecting our first baby). I plan on doing a write up of my thoughts and first impressions of the Logitech keyboard once I receive it tomorrow, and from the previous reviews and specs I think that I will really like it and that it will be perfect for a media centric living room computer.

Into the fast lane…

I don’t really know why, as I have always been really big into technology, but I have never started a blog or created my homepage.  I guess I am just   a hermit and keep to myself.  Well the days of old are no more, when I hit post on this page I will officially be in the 21st century (only about 9 years late).  I am not for sure what this blog will be focused on, but just looking at my life at the moment, it will probably be about gadgets, technology and my wife/unborn child.

I may not have had a blog prior to this, but I do have a web presence.  FYI…

twitter – andrewsben

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email – andrewsben@gmail.com