Posts by Michael Kean 177 publicly visible posts • joined 17 Jan 2008
... for my job as an IT guy.
One of the big problems in Australia is you have to register every car you plan to drive even though you can only physically drive one at a time. As a result, there's no incentive to have an efficient small car as well as a standard or large car. The government doesn't give a damn or they'd change the law.
Until you've owned one, you tend not to realise just how handy the camera and flash are. These little bastards make great photocopiers!
As the owner of a 7" one, it's really handy just being able to reach behind a device and go click. Bang - you've got the model and serial number on your screen and you can zoom in to buggery.
Also handy for reading tiny details - a SIM card blown up to 7" is easy to read... And they copy an A4 page in under a second. (Phones do too of course, but they're a bit of a scroll-fest) The LED flash helps of course, but sees equal utility as an LED flashlight.
I still reckon 7" is the ideal size for most convenient portable use, and accept that almost nobody agrees.
As a Galaxy tab owner I'd have to say the 7" form factor is great. Despite what people think when they see it, it does fit comfortably into the average pair of work trousers.
I use mine daily as a phone and email device. As a phone it's a bit odd since it's hands free only, but unless in the company of other people, this is quite handy as it means less head cooking :) With space for decent speakers it doesn't sound like a tinny hands free
... but I also carry a diminutive Nokia E51 which is ideal for quick one-handed calls and texts while walking.
The 7" 16:9 factor is ideal for video watching as well as wasting time reading news sites, and as a camera it's great since you can clearly see what you're snapping. I use mine as a photocopier as well since you can just snap a pic of a page, model number, serial number, SIM card, whatever, and it's perfectly readable.
But I'd have to agree that this Dell product is woeful in their choice of resolution. Not sure what they were thinking when they chose that. Mind you the worst 7" tablet I've ever owned is the Pioneer Dreambook - a $100AU cheap chinese knockoff tablet that is so mentally challenged that you have to hold each letter for at least .3 seconds for it to register, and most video operations take .5 to 1 second to render. Fortunately it does Kindle OK so it gets to live.
For me, it looks like one of the great features on Google Plus is that you can add people to a group (circle) even though you know they're not going to get a Google plus account.
When you create a post it has a checkbox to send a copy of the post to those who are not a G+ member - which means you can still communicate effortlessly with them. They receive a copy of the post complete with media.
This is so much better than those annoying "You have notifications pending" emails that Facebook uses because they want to force you into their world...
As an owner of a Galaxy Tab 7" I find it hard to see the attraction in a 10" unit. 7" ones are easily pocketable, but 10" is too big to carry with you all the time. Who's still making 7" tabs tho? Everyone who sees the GT 7" tends to agree, and it's annoying having to tell them 'you can't have one' in a Cartman-like voice.
Re. photography, it might look daft, but it is handy having such a large and bright viewfinder. The ability to zoom in immediately after the shot is quite handy too to verify that you got all the detail in the pic.
Hmm :)
Since most computers can now read the details of the battery themselves, why don't they just have a button that asks the ACPI system what the battery serial is, and initiate the recall that way? Perhaps serial numbers aren't presented there, in which case they should consider adding it in future.
we live in.
A world where, really, for most people a NetBook or Tablet would suit best.
.. except that NetBooks are destroyed by Windows 7 making them slow - a NetBook with XP on the other hand will run most day-to-day software (Office 2007) without issue. But Microsoft doesn't like selling XP.
As a mildly biased owner of a 7" Samsung Android tablet I'm happy to see technology moving in that direction for the average home user. It's not likely to be killed off, unlike NetBooks. And that probably isn't great news for Intel.
"If you're using a VM every day then you'll be writing a hell of a lot more than 9GB a day to disk surely?"
Not necessarily. You'll be saving just the machine state when you put it to sleep, so if it's an XP VM with 768MB RAM assigned, that's a 768MB write (if it's not compressed on the fly.) While using the VM of course it will do its own usual reads and writes.
There are a number of free programs for exploring the content of your iPod and retrieving said audio files. As an IT Consultant I deal with this regularly when someone gets a computer after they first got the iPod and want to keep their music that they ripped on another computer.
Hard to beat the Rii Mini Keyboard - a palm sized keyboard with trackpad, backlighting and laser pointer built in. Great for the HTPC, particularly if you can get the earlier model with the larger USB receiver for better range.
Also handy for laid-back computer repairs, and for fixing customer computers where the kids have nicked the cordless mouse batteries.
http://boingboing.net/2010/03/05/rii-mini-wireless-ke.html
Google is such a pain when looking for software. Lots of results from fake search aggregators, etc. Now when looking for software I don't bother with Google, and just head to alternativeto.net.
I wonder if this 'beefing' will reduce some of the crap that Google links to.
"With that option selected, you’ll discover that you’ll not get a peep out of your PC, you'll need to have an FM radio tuned in to hear it now."
Some multimedia programs support specifying which audio device to use, so rather than sacrificing your local peeps, you can have the normal system sounds via your computer's speakers and just the 'tunes' broadcast :)
Nice to see someone finally making something like this. I've made many in the past by reversing the USB output on some cigarette lighter adapters - give them an A to A lead and the usb power runs the transmitter. Some PCs output noise over the USB power however in which case lopping the plug off an old Nokia switch mode charger cable and soldering on a USB A end resolved that.
This from another article...
"The pressure sensors contain unique IDs, so merely eavesdropping enabled the researchers to identify and track vehicles remotely. Beyond this, they could alter and forge the readings to cause warning lights on the dashboard to turn on, or even crash the ECU completely.
Unlike the work earlier this year, these attacks are more of a nuisance than any real danger; the tire sensors only send a message every 60-90 seconds, giving attackers little opportunity to compromise systems or cause any real damage. Nonetheless, both pieces of research demonstrate that these in-car computers have been designed with ineffective security measures."
http://arstechnica.com/security/news/2010/08/cars-hacked-through-wireless-tyre-sensors.ars
Another handy thing with some of these drives is that sometimes they're cheaper than buying a raw drive; depending on the price of the local retailers. It's relatively simple to extract most of these drives from their shells, swapping them with the one in the laptop and then cloning the swapped drive. You end up with a faster laptop drive, and a spare case for the original drive.
This isn't true of all however. The 160GB WD drive is a funny one where the USB socket is actually part of the drive, and not a separate interface board.
... get rid of stupid search results that have no bearing on what I actually want - such as those sites that then go do another 'search' based on what I searched for but then only pick some of the keywords selectively, giving useless results.
Web Of Trust (Firefox addin) for the win in this case :)
Hmm - it will be interesting to see what they've done to search.
Google Desktop Search will work, only until you install an Thunderbird update; at which point you have to uninstall and reinstall Google Desktop Search for it to start working again.
Microsoft Search will not index Thunderbird messages out of policy to not support the competition
Yahoo Desktop Search doesn't exist any more as a free product.
Copernic indexes it, but has no qualms about throwing animated GIF ads into your search results.
I forget what the other free ones are.
So yeah, I'll be waiting a while before upgrading :)
In my '86 Bluebird, even with the chair as far back as it'll go, there's not enough space to fit a laptop in front of the steering wheel. Before rushing out to buy one of these (or making your own with a jig saw and an old chopping board) first check that
a) Your chair goes back far enough
b) Your laptop fits between you and the wheel
c) You are not pregnant.
I wonder if these previews will be editable, and if so will the edits automatically be saved into the version attached to the email itself. Every now and then I get a customer who opens an attachment from email, makes changes, and is then puzzled that his changes disappeared when he re-opens the attachment from the email.
I used to use O&O Defrag, but switched to MyDefrag (free) since it seemed to better understand that the beginning of the drive is the fastest area and used it intelligently. I'd like to see a test between it, defraggler, O&O, PerfectDisk and whatever else you can find to see if it really makes a difference.
I helped a partner write a book in Word 2.0 on Windows 3.1. There's little new in Word since then - frames were replaced with text wrapping for images; that's about all I can think of that I'd have noticed going forward.
I read somewhere that the harder a program is to pirate, the less it sells; because less people get to actually use it. (Can't find the article at the moment.) That's perhaps analogous to why some AV companies have free home versions - marketing :)
Since the advent of OGA, I tend to steer customers towards OpenOffice if they can't find their old Office CD when they get a new computer. I used to give them the benefit of the doubt and use my copy; but now it's too risky - even though it's easy to remove OGA.
Telstra, $15 a month, excellent coverage, approx. $1.00 per minute
TPG, $20 a month, lesser coverage, approx. $0.08 per minute
Telstra = incoming
TPG = Outgoing.
Bonus: Telstra message retrieval approx 65c/min. With answering machine software on E51 message storage and retrieval = free :)
The "Tree Style Tab" extension already partly solves this problem, by providing a hierarchical and collapsible listing of open tabs. It's quite handy for developers who want to have several pages of a project site (cPanel, phpMyAdmin, Joomla, etc) all open but want to be able to hide them with a click when switching to another project.
Hmm :)
Perhaps another approach that could work would be to in some way combine AdBlock Plus with the Web Of Trust extension so that visitors can optionally rank sites on how annoying their ads are; and then use this to determine whether ABP blocks the ads on that site.
I guess webmasters could 'game' it, or give that job to Conficker, but that aside it could perhaps work?
Cheers, Mike
I had 8.0.4. Was nice. One day, I let it do some updates. White screen of death. Blew it away and downloaded 8.10. Could not install, doesn't work with Toshiba A200 ATI video card in 8.10 so installer never loaded.
Not sure I want an OS that can commit suicide so easily.
I have an old Clevo M375C Laptop that does the same thing.
This laptop is a fairly thin model for it's age, and featured 4 typical crap tiny speakers plus a 3cm x 3cm x 1cm "subwoofer." (Well that's that they called it; but to me it was the thing that made the case, keyboard and trim rattle - although it did work well on resonant surfaces.)
There were certain video files that would hit the right notes to kill the hard drive, and of course when this happened the sound card would loop it's buffer over and over too; so the only solution was to either grab the laptop and hold it hard to reduce it's vibration; or to plug in headphones. (Volume and mute buttons didn't work without the HDD being cooperative.)
The hard drive always recovered however once the sound stopped.
Here are two free tools that may help:
http://www.grc.com/wizmo/wizmo.htm
(Command is wizmo standby or wizmo hibernate)
http://www.snapfiles.com/get/idlemonitor.html
(Watches mouse idle time, but to use with wizmo you need to make a batch file as this freeware is a little dumb.)
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