musings about tech & miscellanea
Posts tagged computers
Tethering with Android
May 18th
Android Central has a great post on the basics of tethering for an Android phone. Link to PdaNet, video on WiFi tethering, and the pearl of info, using HTC Sync if your Android is using the Sense UI.
“If you have a phone running Android 2.1 with HTC Sense, mobile network sharing is built into the operating system. Don’t get too excited though, because your carrier decides whether or not it will work. If you want to try it for yourself, make sure you have the latest version of HTC Sync and plug your phone into your computer. In the connection options, choose Internet sharing.”
Google Owns More Than 2% of World’s Servers
Apr 23rd
Check out this great infograph from Intac.net showing who owns the most servers. Google is depicted as the large yellow block below the others.
EricTric.com: “Think Google’s worldwide operations are gigantic? Well, you’re right. A new infographic distributed by Intac displays exactly how many servers some of the world’s top technology companies own and use to power their incredibly large and sophisticated operations.
For example, RackSpace (who hosts Erictric) is said to own over 56,000 servers. Trailing close behind is The Planet, a popular host who cares for over 15 million websites, with a server count of just over 48,000. What about Facebook? 30,000. Intel? 100,000.
But what about Google, the internet’s superpower? Try over one million servers. According to the graphic, “it is speculated that Google owns more than 2% of all the world’s servers.””
Gizmodo.com: “You already just sort of know, logically and instinctively, that Google’s got a ridiculous number of servers working for them. That doesn’t make it any less mind-boggling when visualized. Get ready for a lot of scrolling.
Of course, not all servers are created equal—so “more” is a problematic word here. And I’m betting this wouldn’t look quite so lopsided if big hitters like Microsoft, Yahoo, and Amazon were represented. Regardless, though, such a massive difference of scale is incredibly impressive, even if not entirely surprising.”
New Dell in the house
Mar 26th
Just picked up a Dell Studio XPS 8100 desktop at Bestbuy for $1,080, which is $278 cheaper than Dell’s site with the exact same configuration. So with the money saved, now looking for a 24″ LCD monitor, which is really the sweet spot for 1920 x 1080 resolution; crisp high res without having the fonts too small as with 22″ monitors and smaller in this resolution.
This one’s replacing 1 of the 2 desktops I use across 3 LCD monitors for my daily use; one for Outlook and various widgets across 2 screens, and the new Dell for my main
BTW, the ATI Radeon HD5770 graphics card has 1GB of dedicated memory and is an excellent performer, especially with today’s multimedia needs (and yes, great for gaming whenever I get back into WoW).
Product Features
- Intel® Core™ i7-860 processor
Features an 8MB cache and 2.8GHz processor speed. - The all new 2010 Intel® Core™ i7 processor
Features 8-way processing for ultimate smart performance. Intel® Turbo Boost Technology automatically speeds up your processor when your PC needs extra performance. - 8GB DDR3 memory
For multitasking power, expandable to 16GB.
Navigating a 13.3 gigapixel image on a 22 megapixel display wall
Mar 24th
This is so impressive! “What we’re looking at here is a 22 megapixel display, stitched together from the output of no less than 28 projectors (7,168 x 3,072 total resolution), which just happens to respond to touch-like input in a fashion even Tom Cruise would find fascinating. You don’t have to actually touch the wall, floor-mounted cameras pick up your gestures in 2D space and a 30-node computer setup crunches all the computational and visual data to deliver some buttery smooth user interaction.”
Synaptics driver enables multi-touch gestures on older trackpads
Mar 19th
This is fantastic, updating your laptop’s Synaptic touchpad with multi-touch gestures!
From Engadget.com:
“As a user on the Hardware Zone forums discovered, the latest Synaptics driver seems to enable multitouch gestures on older laptops that didn’t previously support them, including two-finger scrolling, and three-finger click. What’s more, while the drivers themselves come from HP, they should work just fine on other laptops with a Synaptics trackpad.”
Hardware Zone has the drivers for Windows XP and Windows Vista/7.
Ipower.com = FAIL
Feb 6th
I’ve been migrating all of my various websites to Hostgator.com and so far have been very pleased with load speeds and especially the admin control panel.
My Stickist.com site gets a lot of traffic and with its MySQL database backend supporting the forums, fast loading is of the utmost importance. Hostgator also utilizes AwStats for webstats on traffic and generates separate stats for each of the many domains I have under my single account; this is great. Users in Europe have now reported snappy web performance, even with almost instant load speeds. Finally!
Which leads me to rant on Ipower.com, my previous host. I’ve had an account with them for a little over a year and saw significant degradation in their performance, with the last couple of months totally awful. They were slow, laggy and their admin control panel took forever to accomplish admin tasks. More importantly, Stickist.com took 30 seconds or more to load, and at times, took a couple of minutes…that is, if you didn’t get a General Error of not being able to connect to the database. This is crap. I’ve had loads of rounds with their tech support, had escalated to higher tiered support, and basically they couldn’t do anything. The last straw with another tech support go-around, the techs didn’t even acknowledge that there were any problems. They got loads of complaints from me when I had filled out their customer support surveys
Prior to signing up with Hostgator, I did a lot of research on various web hosts user review sites. WebHostingReviews.com was one of the better sites, which Hostgator had great reviews and one of the highest rated web hosts with the features I was looking for. It was validating to see that Ipower had gotten terrible reviews and users commented on problems almost exactly what I had experienced, especially regarding their recent degradation in performance and tech support. Anyways, I’m almost done migrating all of my sites from Ipower over to Hostgator, and revising my settings for all of my email accounts and clients on different computers, laptops and Blackberry.
Now to decide if I want to revise this blog from Flatpress which doesn’t use MySQL and stores content in text files, and install WordPress which does uses MySQL. Another migration project I’m not looking forward to if I go the way of WordPress.
The Other Tablets Available
Feb 6th
Apple just announced yesterday (Jan 27 – I’ve migrated this site at a later date) the iPad with its tablet form factor. TabletPC’s and slates have been around and UMPCportal.com is an excellent resource with a very comprehensive interactive database.
From GottaBeMobile.com:
“UMPC Portal has the best database of web centric Tablets that I’ve seen. Intriguingly it leaves off more traditional Tablet PCs from the likes of Lenovo, HP, Fujitsu, Motion, MobileDemand, TabletKiosk, and others. That said, it’s a good roundup of what some manufacturers are hoping (against hope?) that can grab some of Apple’s coat tails in the march to sell consumer consumption devices. Not only are there pictures, but the 46 Tablets listed have specs in the database as well. It’s a good source to review the day before it all changes.”
Check out all the tablets and the interactive database at UMPCportal.com – tablets!
Google Chrome Extensions Available
Feb 6th
Google now has extensions for its Chrome browser!
Check them out at https://chrome.google.com/extensions
I use to use Firefox but it started to get slow and piggy regarding resources. Google’s Chrome is fast and most importantly, each tab has its own process so if a site crashes/glitches in a tab, it doesn’t affect the whole browser and the other open tabs continue to work. I did miss customizing Firefox via extensions and really pleased that Chrome now has this feature.
Pogoplug – your external USB drive on the Internet
Feb 6th
The Pogoplug has to be one of my favorite computer peripheral devices. It connects my USB drives to the Internet so I can easily share and access my files from anywhere. Using the downloadable free app, it also makes an external USB drive recognizable on my home network for use as NAS (network attached storage). It has 4 USB ports but you can add more via a USB hub.
It has an embedded light Linux webserver OS which offers some cool features via a browser, such as playing media or slideshows. There’s also folder sharing options, for individuals who can be notified via an email, or for public sharing which you just provide a link. This has been really handy for uploading photos with family and friends, for their viewing and downloading. It’s $129 and there’s no subscription fee like with other remote file access services.
MSI’s 10-inch tablet & Archos 9
Feb 6th
Other new tablets will be available this year, such as from MSI.
From Engadget.com:
“MSI’s 10-inch tablet launching this year at $500, patently ignoring the elephant in the room?
By Tim Stevens posted Jan 28th 2010 10:54AM
Ready for some more tablet news? Yeah, we know, this one’s different. Promise. It’s MSI’s 10-inch, Tegra-powered machine we checked out a few weeks back at CES. We were reasonably smitten then and, despite the new competition, we still think it looks promising. But, a $500 MSRP probably isn’t going to help things much when it launches sometime in the second half of this year, if a report from DigiTimes proves to be correct. Specifications are said to be “flexible” and the company will “launch different models based on market demand,” meaning if everyone coughs at that price point there’s a good chance MSI will dig deep and release an even cheaper model. Sounds like a good idea to us.”
ARCHOS has also come out with their ARCHOS 9 PCTablet, running Windows 7 and costing $550. It’s basically a netbook in a slate form factor. From their site:
“ARCHOS once again is leading the way in innovation with the introduction of the Netbook of the future, the ARCHOS 9 PCtablet. The new ARCHOS 9 PCtablet combines the performance of a high end netbook with breathtaking aesthetics, excellent ergonomics and a tactile interface on a superb screen.
Pure lines, extreme thinness (0.67′’), 800g and a stunning black finish, the ARCHOS 9 PCtablet pushes the boundaries of elegance and simplicity on a Netbook, fulfilling the expectations of the most mobile users. It provides all the power and comfort needed for daily usage.
With this ultra-light and thin PCtablet, you can watch you videos (including Full HD format), browse the web, “video chat”, or write your mails or documents.
- Play all your multimedia content including HD* videos
- Use all your daily software such as Windows Live™ Messenger or Skype® with Windows® 7, or Lotus Symphony as a productivity suite
- Stay connected to Internet and your emails with the built-in connectivity”
More info and specs at the ARCHOS site.
We’ll have to see if the current interests and competition amongst manufacturers will be sustainable amongst consumers. A few years ago UMPC’s (ultra mobile personal computing) were brought out into the market as small tablet/slate devices for the consumers, but never really caught on in the mainstream. If you want to experiment and play with a small tabletpc but not wanting to invest too much money, pick up a used Samsung Q1 and play with that for awhile to see if this form factor and UI is worth more of your time and money. Check out Craigslist for various models of the Samsung Q1; you might luck out and find someone selling off their Q1 bundled with its various accessories at a really cheap price.
Apple’s New iPad
Feb 6th
Steve Jobs announced and demonstrated Apple’s new iPad at yesterday’s Apple event, and it looks like it will be a winner. I’ve had tablet PC’s/slates/UMPC’s, the most recent one a Viliv X70 running WinXP, but eventually had gotten rid of them since it just didn’t work out for me as an ancillary computer; I still went back to one of my laptops (Lenovo X300). But, with the iPad’s UI and focus on multimedia and a color capacitive touch screen, I can see the iPad being a great device for reading ebooks and couch web surfing content rich sites such as blogs and online magazines. The iPad’s integration with iTunes and also being able to run iPhone apps is also a big plus.
I don’t see this as a laptop replacement and hopefully it won’t be just an expensive color ebook reader for me. When I think about this more, Google’s new Nexus One also provides an adequate approach to ebook reading and web surfing in addition to being a “superphone,” more portable and and easily a daily carry device. We’ll see how the iPad pans out when it becomes available in 60-90 days.
Some editorial comments at Engadget.com.
And, Apple iPad launch day roundup: everything you need to know at Engadget.com.
And a little humor from The Onion:
Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard
…and a little more humor…
