January 9th, 2009
The wifey gave me an Acer Aspire One for Christmas. The AAO, is a min-laptop, or netbook as this class of computers is often called. It weighs only two pounds or so, and is a full functioning Windows XP computer. Holding it closed in your hand, is like holding an average-sized hardback book.
After playing with this device for a couple of weeks, I love it. It is a perfect little laptop for surfing the internet, blogging, and listening to music. It also would be a wonderful little laptop to use as a dump station if you needed to make more room on your camera’s memory cards, while out in the field.
The screen is an 8.9″ LCD, with a native format of 1024×600. Yes it is a fairly wide small screen, but it is perfect for reading web pages and such. It produces very crisp and clean images and text.
The machine comes with an Intel Atom processor running at 1.6 Ghz, 1 GB of memory, and a 160 GB hard drive. This is not a powerhouse by any means, but it is more than sufficient for the purposes for which it was designed.
I have even played World of Warcraft on this computer some. It runs it fairly well at lower graphics settings, but the writing in the game is a bit small for me to see, and without an external mouse, nearly unplayable. The AAO will run lots of games just fine however, especially older titles, that aren’t as demanding as current releases.
The keyboard is smaller than a regular laptop keyboard of course, but with a little practice, even the fat-fingered such as myself, can type on it. The touchpad is right below the keyboard, and has a button on either side. This is my only gripe about the machine. The buttons on the sides are a bit ackward to click. Using the touchpad to click and double click works very well however, better than most I have dealt with in fact, so this alleviates the button problem for the most part. You can also designate the corners of the touchpad for certain functions, like going to the menu of the current application, minimizing the current window, and so forth. Finally, the touchpad also allows you to scroll using the bottom and right hand edges. This feature is very nice. There is no need to fumble with the arrow keys on this one while reading long web pages.
One interesting aspect of the device is it’s lack of an optical drive. There simply is no way one could be fitted in this configuration. It would just add to the weight and bulk of the machine anyway, which would defeat the purpose of the whole design. There are plenty of other options for transferring data however. You can use the built-in SD reader (perfect for cleaning out the camera’s memory or transfering files. The machine has three USB ports so thumb drives, external hard drive, and external optical drives are all options as well. Obviously if you are on a network or the internet you can transfer files to and from the AAO easily that way as well.
This machine is made for surfing at the coffee shop (not something I ever do) or sitting in a comfy chair on the back porch. It has built wi-fi support of course, and the battery lasts around three hours. Bigger battery packs are avaiable, and I plan on getting one.
As I mentioned mine came with XP, but you can also get a Linux version for slightly less if you are so inclined. Mine cost around $375 I am guessing. That is probably the best argument for the netbooks. They are cheap. You really do get a lot for the money. If you are looking for a desktop replacement, obviously this is not the machine for you. If you need a cool, ultra-portable, second or third computer, you might take a look at them.
Categories: Tech |
Tags: geekery | No Comments
January 9th, 2009
While playing around on my new Acer Aspire One (story upcoming), I was thinking about probably my favorite time in my history with computers. This would have been back around 1999-2000. I was young and idealistic.
This was the time of uncapped cable modems, and all the music you cared to download via Napster. TechTV was in full swing, and I lived and breathed all things computing. The magic of online gaming with ever improving performance consumed much of my time. The internet, while not something new, became more than a slow novelty with the addition of broadband. I was young and idealistic, and foolishly thought it would never change. Alas, this is all for another post. For now, we will look at two bits of technology whose promise seemed almost endless to me, and who both were complete disappointments that totally failed in their goals.
First, let’s look at the now defunct BeOS. BeOS started as a PowerPC operating system that was to be run on Mac hardware. The company wanted their software to be the new OS for Macs. Unfortunately for them, this did not happen, so in 1998 they released BeOS R3 for x86. It was a very neat OS, and I ran it on one of my machines for quite a while. It was a fairly thin OS, and as a result was very fast booting. Beyond that, I don’t know why it was so attractive. Most likely its underdog status really appealed to me at the time. Not many people ran it, so it felt like I was part of a special club.
By this point Be was doomed already. They gained no traction on the desktop market, and the tech just was not there for the little internet devices and tablets they aimed at once they knew the desktop market was out of reach. We all remember the endless promises of neato tablet PCs, and small net appliances of that time. The magic devices never materialized, and by the time they did become viable Be was long dead.
This leads us to my second disappointment of the era. The Transmeta Crusoe processor. The President of Transmeta was on every tech show constantly regaling us with the magic of his new chip. It was supposed to use a lot less power than anything else out there, while still having great performance.
This played in well to the promise of the tiny web appliance running Be of course in my mind, and a tablet PC prototype is usually what the Crusoe was demonstrated on. Throw in the fact that the firm hired Linus Torvalds to write software, and you had a geek dream. At the time, I bought into the stupidity that big companies were evil, so anything that challenged them was a good thing in my mind.
Transmeta’s hiring of Linus was probably their high point however. Once the chip became available we all found out the sad truth. It sucked. Crusoe turned out to be a slow performing, not all that energy efficient chip. In the real world you saved about fifteen percent on power consumption, at a lesser level of performance as a comparable Intel chip, and the Crusoe cost more. This truth came out once people tested the chip with real-world software. Their weird software x86 emulation just did not work all that well. Their promised results had come from benchmarking software only, which turned out to be completely unrealistic.
So it goes. Two companies that one could be excited about, that made poor business decisions. They are certainly not alone, as there were hundreds of such examples when the dot com bubble bursted.
If only TechTV had survived, this would not be such a sad story.
Categories: Life, Tech |
Tags: geekery | No Comments
January 8th, 2009
Has been turned on for new posters. It sucks too. I don’t have very many commenters, and now I have to do this to try to combat the freaking spammers. Hopefully any new commenters will understand.
They spammers found my blog I guess, as it has gotten worse, and worse over the last couple of weeks. You few guys that comment here regulary should not notice a difference.
If you are a new commenter your comments will not appear until I approve the first one.
HANG ALL SPAMMERS!
Categories: Tech |
Tags: blog matters | No Comments
January 5th, 2009
Part of our new financial cutbacks in our household included acquiring a Netflix account over the weekend. We won’t be buying DVDs, or going to the movies much this year. Adding a monthly subscription fee to our bills may seem counter-intuitive at first glance. The fee will be paid for by my giving up of my Morningstar premium service that costs about the same. So we are not going to be spending anything more for it, and we will be cutting out our DVD purchases for now.
My wife had been a Netflix customer for years, and enjoyed her experience immensely. I have heard nothing but good things about the service for years, and finally took the plunge this weekend. The bonus that convinced me to do so, is the new Netflix streaming ability that is now available on the X Box 360. This allows you to stream Netflix’s Watch Instantly content via the X Box, on your TV.
I was not familiar with this aspect of the service, so we decided to try it out. Once you download the Netflix software on the gaming console, you simply create a new Netflix account if you do not already have one. After a few minutes of going back and forth between the X Box and the computer all was ready to go.
You simply add a title from the Watch Instantly library, to your instant queue via Netflix’s website, and within seconds the title pops up on your Netflix screen on the X Box. It is a pretty neat setup really.
After watching a couple of movies, and becoming more familiar with the process, it became apparent to me, that this is just an OK setup. First, the video quality is not the greatest. It is not unwatchable, but it is certainly not as good as even a progressive scan DVD.
It is like watching decent quality video via the internet. The first movie we watched, had a shuttering problem. The video had a very slight shutter to it throughout. Again, it was not unwatchable, but it did irritate me a bit.
The shuttering was not a problem on any of the other movies we streamed. The picture quality was not awesome by any means, but it was adequate. Fortunately most of the available titles, aren’t titles that one really cares about seeing in high definition anyway.
This unfortunately leads to the second, and possibly bigger problem with streaming Netflix movies. The selection kind of sucks. There are supposedly twelve thousand possibilities, but we struggled to find content that was interesting. There are not hardly any new titles, and the titles that are available are generally not the best. It states this on their website, and I am on a free trial at the moment, so no great loss, just disappointing really.
It is a neat bit of geeky tech, but not of great use. As a value-added service from Netflix, sure it is worthwhile. If one was looking at getting Netflix just for this service, I would advise against it.
We received our first DVD from Netflix very promptly after adding it to our queue. It worked flawlessly, and was very easy to repackage, and put back in the mail. This aspect of the service is going to be a wonderful thing it seems. They have a massive catalog of movies and TV shows to chose from.
Categories: Entertainment, Tech |
Tags: movies | 1 Comment
December 9th, 2008
This may not be true, but it seems fairly certain that nothing has pushed hardware manufacturers harder, at least manufacturers of computer hardware used in the home, than the video game. Sure a lot of the technology may have been born for other uses, but much of it has been optimized and pushed to it’s limits simply for improved video gaming performance.
The overclocking and computer customization craze is almost exclusively the domain of gamers. No one risks popping a $1,000 processor so they can run Microsoft Word faster. The hardware manufacturers have no doubt built super-performing hardware for business and scientific reasons. I am not saying games are the reason we have fast computers, simply that they drive the home computing market and have for a long time.
History Before My Participation
The very first video games were created by scientists as early as 1947. Wikipedia has a good article on the beginnings here. The first high performance computerized video game, was Spacewar!, which was created by a trio of geek heroes at MIT in 1961 on a DEC PDP-1. The wiki article on the PDP-1 is fascinating as well. We owe much to the guys that pioneered so much using that machine.
All of the early examples of what would become known as video games were created by really geeky men in lab coats. Their computers filled up whole rooms, and a modern iPod shuffle’s computing abilities would put them to shame. The men worked with what they had, and more often then not used their simple games as a way to interface the public with their expensive sci-fi hardware.
Early commercial games started appearing in the early 70s, with Atari’s first game Pong being the first success commercially. All kinds of games, good and bad started popping up.
In 1978 Tomohiro Nishikado came up with the most awesome Space Invaders. He had to customize the hardware, because existing hardware could not keep up with the game. It was based on an Intel 8080 CPU, and was a groundbreaking game at the time. Nothing like it had been seen before.
The home video gaming front was opened by Magnavox in 1972, when they released the first console named Odyssey. It was a weird device by today’s standards. It ran on batteries and had no sound.
The Beginning
My first memory of a video game of any sort was William’s 1980 release Defender. I was four at the time and my Dad was quite the Defenderplayer. I remeber standing next to him and watching him play the game quite a bit. Every once in a while he would waste a quarter and let me play for the several seconds it took me to lose all my lives.
The first video game I ever really played was probably Space Invaderson the Atari 2600. The Atari version of the 1978 original game featured simplified graphics and different game modes. The game created a video gamer for life. My Dad’s Atari 2600 spent many a weekend with my cousin and myself at the helm. A few of the games I remember specifically include, Activision’s Stampede, Atari’s Combat, and Parker Bros. Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back. I always owned my cousin at Combat for what it’s worth. 
I lived with my Mom and Step dad while growing up so the Atari was only available to me when I went to see Dad. This was supposedly to be alleviated when we got an Intellivision. The Intellivision console was technically superior to Atari’s 2600 at the time in several ways. The problem with it however was that it used different games and had fewer games available. This hurt the console’s appeal with me. There were lots of nice sports and board games, but I wanted to play Space Invaders or Stampede. The extra buttons, flashier graphics, actual 16 bit processing, and the additional 9 controller buttons didn’t mean squat to me.
Finally there was an adapter released that allowed you to play 2600 games on the Intellivision. It was great, and my first game purchase was Donkey Kong. Donkey Kong is one of my most hated games, seeing as I have never made it past the third level. Before we could get any other games for the console, power supply was left plugged in overnight and it burnt out! My Step dad decided not to get a new one, and that was it for the Intellivision. It sat up on a shelf in our den for at least fifteen years. My Mom probably threw it away at some point.
This began a long drought in my video gaming. I still played the Atari at Dad’s house, and played games on my TRS-80 that I had to type into the machine in BASIC every time I wanted to play one, and any available Commodore 64 machines. This corresponded, unsurprisingly, with the video game console crash of 1983. The PC became the domain of video gaming for several years. At the tender age of 8 my funding abilities were severely underdeveloped, so these obsolete options were all that were available to appease my lust for electronic gaming action.
Actually, let me take a step back here. That is not entirely true. My gaming activities were limited during those years at home. The best games were still only available at the neighborhood arcade anyway. Many of the best games were ported to the 2600, and other consoles, but the ports were generally of much lower quality. This was fine with us little kids, as we didn’t have many quarters to go around anyway. The teenagers at the arcade were pretty pushy, and always occupied the best machines indefinitely.
Once the crash went down, all the new awesome games were only available at the arcade. You could also get a quick fix at your local 7-11 or skating rink. They usually had several cabinets set up. Even grocery stores would have something around occasionally. The mall arcade was my Mecca at this time. We went to the mall quite often, and sometimes my Mom would actually give me a dollar or two to “waste” in the arcade.
Some of my favorite games at the time included Pac-Man(already a classic at that point), 1942, Spy Hunter, Galaga, and multitudes of others that have slipped my mind permanently. These machines were everywhere. A dedicated kid did not have a hard time find a video game to play in those days.
Pizza Hut usually had at least one sit down Pac-Man or Donkey King to mess with. The movie theaters had their own mini-arcades, and some industrious youths actually told the start time of movies to their parents wrong intentionally. This allowed them to get there early and get a few games in before the movie.
One of the biggest day’s of the year for me, was my birthday of course. This meant it was time to go to Chuck E. Cheeses and have a birthday party. The greatness of this place was not their automatons stuffed animals, or their crappy pizza. The place was full of arcade games of course, and the birthday boy got pretty much all the tokens he could ask for. I remember getting in trouble for ignoring all the kids that were invited because I was too engrossed in playing some game. Another favorite memory involved a lesson in honesty.
So I was strolling along looking for the next cabinet to feed, and saw a token sitting on the floor. After picking it up, I spotted a man working on one of the machines. After presenting it to him, and telling him that it would be stealing to just take it, he reached into the machine he was working on, and grabbed a handful of tokens. This nice guy proceeded to drop them all in my token cup, and my eyes probably began to bulge with excitement. After he told me that was a reward for my honesty, I thanked him, and ran along my way. These little tokens may as well have been krugerrands to me.
Well, this is enough for now. In the next installment we will take a look at the most amazing thing my young self had ever seen. It would change my life, and reinvigorate my at home gaming. The infamous, awesome, and still extremely cool Nintendo Entertainment System.
Categories: Entertainment, Life, Tech |
Tags: geekery | 5 Comments
December 5th, 2008
Once again Borepatch has inspired me to write something. He posted a picture of an old IMSAI 8080 in his appropriately titled Retro Tech post.
This is the personal story of my love and hate of technology. I have been messing around with these gizmos for nearly my entire life now, right at twenty five years. That thought is almost unbelievable to me. Having been a part of the first generation with computers in their home, is a unique experience in history. Having a computer at home was not a fact of life like it is now of course. They were not rare necessarily, but in 1982 they surely were not an everyday household item.
That was the year that my journey began. This post will cover my early years of being exposed to this glowing gadget of utter fascination. Later, I will discuss my years long hiatus from the computer world, and my rediscovery. For now, we look only at the early years.
One day when I was in the second grade or so, my parents brought home a strange box. It looked like a TV with what turned out to be a couple of floppy drives and a keyboard. Someone at work had given them this machine. It immediately perked the interest of my seven year old mind.
After setting it up, and turning it on my father could not get the box to do a damn thing. He had a box full of disks that the company he worked for had used for various purposes, but he was unable to get them to do anything. All he could do was type on the screen of the computer. After messing with it for about five minutes he gave up. Cautiously asking if I might have a chance to interact with this possible oracle, he said it was a waste of time, but that as long as I didn’t break it, he did not care if I messed around with it.
So there I sat for about an hour typing random stuff into this machine, and was equally unable to get any form of response. Over the next several months my intrigue led me to explore the fairly large programming manual that came with the machine. Amazingly GIS had a picture of the manual. My very first programming manual. Seeing it brings back so many good memories.
That is right folks, my first foray into the larger world of computing was confined to the realm of a 48k TRS-80 Model III Micro Computer.
This big heavy brick of a machine was not new tech at the time I started messing around with it. The model III was an upgraded version of the Model I. It had more memory (a whopping 48k), a faster processor (a z-80 heh), and mine came with two internal floppy drives. This was the hot rod version and cost about $2,500 new.
I never understood how to get the drives to work, so for about a year I simply typed in the applications in the book, or made up my own. Once the power supply was turned off, they were gone. This led to me plotting on ways to end my sister one day. After about ten hours of laboriously inputting the BASIC code for a graphical chess game, I took a break to get something to eat. My sister took the opportunity to run over to the computer and turn off the power supply. She didn’t know how to use the computer, but she knew that it would not save anything, and that my labor would be in vane.
She purposefully ruined my project. After all that work, I never even got to see it run! It was obvious that she must be punished for her treacherous act of technological sabotage, but my parents intervened before my revenge could be exacted. After this depressing episode, my soul could not bear typing all the information again, so chess was never to be played on my beloved trash-80.
After about a year of this, I was introduced to the wonderful Commodore 64 at school, and a friend that lived down the street had one. This is where the concept of a disk operating system was picked up. This was the missing link! If only there was an available DOS for my computer, I could save all the wonderful little BASIC programs I had been coding up until that point!
About this time my Dad decided to use the computer for bookkeeping purposes for his small company. He bought something akin to QuickBooks, and set out to install it. Hours later he called their tech support line, and was told that he needed TRS-DOS to mount the drives so that the accounting software could be loaded. Upon hearing this news, we made the journey to the mall to the local Radio Shack. They did not have a copy that was compatible with our ancient machine. This was probably in 1984 or so, and they tried to sell my Dad their latest computer, which I of course was in full support of. He chose to order the magical disk instead and a few weeks later this bit of wonderment arrived.
Finally, I could actually save my programs, and run them whenever I wanted. Mwahahahahah! My world was complete. All I had to do was leave the TRS-DOS disk in the primary floppy, and boot up the computer. It loaded DOS, and allowed me to access my other drive. This jubilee only lasted a short time, as I got more and more into the Commodore 64.
The Com 64 was so much more than the lowly Trash-80. It was newer tech, and had a color screen! There were tons of games available, and I had dozens of them stored on my precious collection of 5.25″ floppies. A friend at school and myself were the local computer nerd contingent. We spent every moment we could in the library glued to the screens of our technological wonders. We also became the school’s tech support. We did not realize it at the time, but we were indeed computer dorks of the highest order. Who else smuggled illicitly gotten games into the school in our backpacks? We each had a hard case that held ten floppy disks, and they were our prized possessions at the time.
The school administrators did not approve of normal video games being played on their hardware. The only software available at school for the Commodore’s consisted of lame math and reading learning games. Our wonderful librarian at the time, turned a blind eye to our shenanigans. I begged and begged for a Commodore for Christmas. Santa was asked as well, but it was not to be. I was stuck with my crappy TRS-80 for several years.
I lived vicariously through my friend’s machines, found occasional software and stuff for my 80, and got addicted to my NES for a couple of years. We played all kinds of games on their old 64s. There were lots of text based role playing games, and tons of D&D stuff on the Commodore.
Finally, sixth grade came along and my parents bought a Tandy 1000 TX. This was quite the machine for its time. It boasted a flaming hot 80286 processor, even thought the machine was still only 8 bit. There was generous memory to be used as the wonderful device had 768 KB of memory I believe. The TX was a nice machine. It came not only with 3.5″ and a 5.25″ floppy drives, but also included a whopping 10 MB hard drive. I remember thinking that I would never fill that thing up.
The neat thing about the Tandy was that it had DOS built into its ROM, so it booted without a boot disk and was very fast in doing so. The computer came with Lotus 123, and Deskmate. Deskmate was a neat little attempt at a graphical interface with several tools built in. You could draw pictures in a paint app, compose simple music if you had a sound card, keep a calendar, and several other features.
My main purpose for the machine was of course computer games. There were tons of games for these things. Some favorites I remember include the King’s, Space, and Police Quest lines. My favorite game for it was Silent Service II. It was the last good submarine game I played. That is pretty sad considering that was about twenty years ago.
Chuck Yeager’s flight simulator was another big favorite of mine. You could fly so many different planes in that game. It spanned the years between the Sopwith Camel, and the F-18. There were all kinds of fighters, cargo, commercial, and experimental aircraft to play with.
This reminds me of another blast from the past, the keyboard overlay. Heh. These were card stock cutouts that fit over your keyboard. They had notes on them to remind you what action was tied to a certain button. There was no mice to use, so you had to make as much use of the keyboard as possible. They were neat items and there was a different one for each game.
The Tandy had 16 color video graphics. This was awesome for the time of course. My friends and I all copied each other’s games and game manuals. At that time the only way a company could keep you from copying their software was to, make you enter some word contained at a random place in the manual every time you ran the software. We got around that by photocopying the manuals of course.
Well that covers the first part of my technological adventures. Next time, we will talk about my time away from computers in high school, and my reacquaintence after high school.
Categories: Life, Tech |
Tags: geekery | 7 Comments
December 3rd, 2008
Well, Kim du Toit has emptied out his virtual inkwell, and quit blogging. Kim and Chris Byrne were my biggest inspirations to start a blog myself. While I did not always agree with Kim and Connie, their very well written arguments where always something to be respected.
This is one blog that I will personally miss a lot.
Categories: Life, Tech |
Tags: blog matters | No Comments
October 16th, 2008
The welcome post should be first even though it was written before this post. If so, then the Sticky Post plugin I downloaded worked.
Edit: Woot, it worked.
Categories: Tech |
Tags: testing | No Comments
October 16th, 2008
Welcome to the new home of my Guns and Guts blog. My wife and I decided to start up a family website recently. The host had the ability to use Wordpress, so I decided to move my blog off of Blogger. While I get used to Wordpress and learn more about its abilities things will probably change around here quite a bit. I hope that my few readers will continue to check out the space.
After considering importing my old content, I decided to just start fresh here. The old Blogger blog will remain up indefinitely. I will be adding a link in the template over there to this new blog. Most of my little bit of traffic, comes from Google searches, so if the reader is interested in learning more, they will be able to follow me here.
A few things will be copied over here. This will include my book posts and my “Guns That I Own” series.
If you have me in your blogroll please update it to point this new site. I appreciate all of you that link to my little blog, and thank you all for reading it. I have learned a lot from all of you.
There are several other reasons for my switch to a privately-hosted blog. I don’t like the idea of Google owning my content, or relying on them for hosting. Their anti-freedom policies in China turn me off. The blogger software was also pretty limited. I am excited to explore all that Wordpress has to offer. There is a huge community of people that are doing work on it across the globe.
I now have the ability to back up my content and go somewhere else if need be. I can run this blog from home if I want in the future, or at another host. There is little doubt that we freedom-loving gun bloggers may be squeezed during an Obama administration. The likelihood of them every getting to little ‘ol me is slim, but why not be prepared. We should all be prepared to get our voices out in the event something like that happens, even if we are only talking to ourselves.
Categories: Tech |
Tags: blog matters, blogger | No Comments
October 15th, 2008
Wow, I have a lot to learn. Wordpress is awesome, but very complicated. So far I am really, really liking it. Blogger was OK, but its capabilities are lacking compared to this software. Most of the items in my sidebar are widgets, which is great because I don’t have to code anything for them to work. The only problem I have run into is you can only have one “links” widget, which I am using for my blogroll right now. So, I am either going to have to settle with that, find a different widget to use, or kick it old school.
The interface for Wordpress is very well refined. I have been able to figure out a lot very quickly. If anyone else is thinking about making the jump to a privately hosted blog, I would recommend it so far.
Categories: Tech |
Tags: blog matters | 2 Comments
