IT Legends – Tech in Connecticut

I absolutely love this new EeePC I bought from Asus.  My laptop at work died, and seeing as it was over 6 years old I decided I didn’t need to replace it with anything too powerful.  Most of my heavy lifting is done by other computers.  The computer I use most often I use for Microsoft Office, web browsing, and controlling other computers.  So, my needs were simple.  I didn’t need the latest 3D graphics for gaming.  I thought – well what about these little netbooks that run Windows on them?

I’d been using something similar for a month or so at the office (a self-built nettop, uses the same kind of processor) and was pleased with the results.  So I thought, what they hey and took the plunge.  $360 (I added RAM) later, I have this awesome little netbook as my most-used computer.  I’m not worried about its small size, because usually when I’m using it its hooked up to a large LCD flat panel, keyboard and mouse.  When I’m on the road with it, in meetings etc, the keyboard on this model is large enough to type effectively.  It has WiFi, wired NIC, 3 USB ports, 160GB of hard drive space, 2GB of RAM…  sweet little machine.

One thing that was starting to bug me was the number of things I had to plug into the machine when I sat down at my desk.  I’ve been able to reduce it to 4: network, monitor, power, USB hub (for headphones, keyboard, mouse).  I could, if I really wanted to, move the network and monitor over to a USB replicator and only have to plug in two devices – but I’ll wait on that.  Another thing that was bothering me was the monitor setup.  Whenever I was in the office I was reconfiguring video settings every time – that was before I found the scheme settings in my graphics adapter (Intel) that allowed me to save many preferences.  And I can even have a program run when I choose a scheme – like mapping all of my drives (since its Windows XP Home, its not added to the domain – but I can still access the devices if I put in the right username/password).

I specifically didn’t buy this unit from a cell phone provider because doing so signs you up for a 2-year contract for $40 (or more) a month to get Internet service from them for it.  Almost everywhere I go I have access to WiFi, so I didn’t think this was necessary.  Also, having the Internet built into the netbook would have been limiting for me. I can always get one of their new MiFi devices or get the USB wireless adapters for more portability between devices.  This way I can just buy 1 of these for the company and hand it out to whomever needs it the most at any given time.  Or tether my phone (Verizon lets you do that for a fee….  AT&T doesn’t with their iPhone – another reason for me not to switch).

Anyway, I vote yes to netbooks.  But I have a lot of other computers, too.  So, for gaming I have my home PC set up to game on.  This will still play some good games ,but not the new intensive 3d graphics ones.

So I have this great 32″ LCD HD TV from Vizio in my office at work.  So my partner and I decide to buy a mini computer and turn it into a streaming video machine.  I thought I’d try hulu.com on it. Burn Notice doesn’t look so good – very choppy even at full buffering.  Just to check to make sure the PC can handle the 1920 x 1080 resolution on the TV, I decided to try and watch some Daily Show clips off Comedy Central.  They are not choppy at all – the resolution leaves something to be desired, but the playback experience as a whole on the Daily Show was a lot better than on hulu.com.  I’ll update to see if different shows on hulu.com from different producers looks any better, but I am beginning to think that hulu.com just won’t be what I want it to be because the content makers are hampering it (it’s not a hulu.com technical difficulty – its just that the content providers still don’t get it).

I used to own a nice 4gb iPod Nano.  It was cool.  It was sleek.  It was black.  It was expensive.  It’s broken.  Haha.  I was dog sitting for someone who ended up lending me a car for a month when mine was being fixed, but her dogs ate my iPod.  Well, they cracked the screen anyhow.  Liquid Crystal Displays (LCD) don’t work nicely with the cracked screens and the liquid seeping out.  I listened to music on the iPod, sure…  but my real passion became listening to podcasts instead!  Specifically, Security Now! and FLOSS Weekly.  I never got into buying music through the iTunes music store (though I did purchase Seasons 1, 2 and 3 of Battlestar Galactica – then the network execs yanked it from Apple’s store and I have to buy season 4 on DVD when I can).

So, I was thinking to myself, do I really need a new iPod?  I really just need something that will play MP3 format files.  If I want to buy music, Amazon.com sells legal non-DRM MP3 files.  Or I can just buy the handy CD-ROM and rip it with Windows Media Player (or iTunes, you just have to configure it to use MP3 format).  So I ended up picking up a refurbished Sandisk Sansa e260 from buy.com (same place I bought my mighty Thinkpad).  The refurb unit was $39.99 – price was nice.  Has 4gb of built-in memory, a microSD card expansion slot, FM radio, and voice recorder to boot!  Not bad.  This is the version 1 of the device.

One of the features I didn’t like in the Sansa e260 was the ability it has to scan through audio files.  It was tedious and time-consuming.  Some of these podcasts are 1.5 hours long, and if I hook my Sansa up to my PC (say for new content or to charge), I lose the place I was in listening to a file.  It wouldn’t be so tedious if all I had was music, but my main purpose for the device is podcasts – much longer files than your typical song.  In order to scan, I’d have to turn the wheel and each full rotation of the wheel only got me a few seconds.  So to skip to 30 minutes… well you do the math because I got frustrated with it.

Then I just happened to be listening to FLOSS Weekly Episode 43: Rockbox.  Rockbox is an open source system that gives you an alternate interface for an MP3 player.  They said they support some Sandisk Sansa devices.  So I go check, yep – they support the entire e200 series (this includes my e260), provided its the version 1 of the devices (yep, check that as well!).  Scanning through a file now is a much nicer experience.  And multiple bookmarks, which I haven’t figured out how to use yet, but I imagine will allow me to keep my place in many files instead of just the last one I played!  I even get to play minesweeper on my MP3 player while listening to audio files.  And a whole bunch of other things.  They even have voice-enabled navigation which helps the hard of seeing rather nicely.  And huge fonts you can choose.

So, I love Rockbox, i’m so glad they made it so easy to hack my mp3 player.  I had to do a manual install, which wasn’t too difficult for me to manage.  They have an auto installer, but it wouldn’t work on the device.  the manual install basically has you copy the Rockbox files, the fonts it needs access to, then I had to download an updater program that would allow me to modify the Sansa bootloader so it would load the rockbox firmware instead of the Sansa firmware.

If you’re not happy with your MP3 player, take a look to see if Rockbox will run on it.  You might be impressed with it again :)

Rockbox doesn’t now, and likely never will, support DRM-encoded/encrypted files (but neither did my Sansa e260, either).  This is by necessity since all of Rockbox is open source, and in order to natively support the DRM files (like iTunes or Audible.com), the source code must be released and that violates the agreement you sign up for when you are given the code to process these files.  However, rockbox does have a plugin architecture…  so perhaps someone could write a free, or cheap, closed-source plugin that will allow the use of DRM files.  That would be very nice, because I want to be able to use Adubile.com on this device (currently I use my TomTom for my audio books).

OK, so I noticed one of the most popular tags on this site was “rants”. I’m really not that negative a guy, though granted I did start this site to start ranting about a recent Dell experience. So I thought, well hey there are a lot of products I use that I also really like! Why not mention a couple here.

I just recently bought a TomTom Go 720. It’s pretty neat. Has handsfree with my phone, multiple methods of getting audio to me (via internal speaker, line-out, wired headset 2.5mm cell style, and FM transmitter), and an expansion slot for SD cards that I can put my Security Now podcasts on. The player is a lot better than the Windows Mobile player on my phone, so that makes me happy. It also has voice-activated commands! Yeah, I can talk to my car now. “Computer… navigate to…” almost like Star Trek. (oh god, I’m such a dork)

There is a feature that doesn’t work, but its because of my phone and not the TomTom. It will use the data plan on a PDA phone to update things like traffic. I’m considering buying a phone on the Bluetooth compatability list (scroll down and you’ll see a link for the compatibility list), but none of the PDA phones I’d be interested in do anything more than my current phone – which is just for handsfree.

Buy your own! I bought mine “recertified” – cheaper and works just fine for me.

TomTom GO 720 4.3″ Automotive GPS Navigation TomTom GO 720 4.3″ Automotive GPS Navigation