Posts Tagged ‘computers’

« Older Entries

Laptop: The Next Generation

By Chief Oddball on July 29th, 2010 at 8:55 pm

Filed under Journal ··· 2 Comments

In my life, few purchases (besides an automobile) are more exciting than a new computer or some other piece of electronic gadgetry. So I was particularly geeked today when I finally pulled the trigger on my new mobile workstation — a laptop for business, in other words. My last laptop purchase was in 2006, and looking back, it seems that most of my machines are bought during the summer months, though not as a result of any conscious design. Perhaps it’s an internal biological clock that still remembers when I spent every summer playing the latest games, pushing my systems to their limits!

Sony Vaio F Series

As with everything these days, I tend to buy the best equipment that I can afford and make use for it for as long as possible, until it either just plain craps out or my needs significantly eclipse its capabilities. Today’s purchase was no exception, as I decided to choose a loaded-to-the-hilt Sony Vaio F Series, a 16.4″ Core i7 beastie that I optioned with enough equipment to stave off obsolescence for a good long while. What’s perhaps most significant about this purchase, for me, is that it’s the first laptop I’ve ever bought from someone other than Dell.

Excluding the first laptop I ever owned — a 486-powered Canon Innova Book — which was a gift, I’ve only purchased Dell Inspiron or Latitude systems for myself. The quality of these machines got progressively worse; the Inspiron 3200 was a solid (literally!) notebook, but the 8600 that came next was creaky, flaky and hot. Worst of all was the Latitude D620 I bought in 2006 for business use, which turned into a complete heap of slag in two years’ time. Its LCD backlight became dim and uneven, the lone monaural speaker blew out, the battery was reporting imminent end-of-life within six months, and the system gradually slowed to a molasses-laden crawl that even a full reformat and reinstall of Windows couldn’t cure. (This makes it all the more ridiculous to read my glowing impressions of the D620 on my first day of owning it…I shall endeavor to remember this and temper my review of the Vaio F accordingly!)

Although I have since heard that 2006 was perhaps a perigee for Dell and that the quality of their current line of notebooks is much better, I honestly just can’t stomach taking the chance. For the last few months I’ve been quietly looking at various notebook manufacturers, from Sony and HP to Lenovo and Asus, searching for the perfect configuration for my needs. I kind of expect my laptop to do it all: It needs to have a high-resolution screen for my design activities, sufficient RAM for heavy Photoshopping, dedicated graphics for gaming and video playback, a great keyboard for speed typing when I’m writing, and good thermal management so it doesn’t turn into a furnace beneath my wrists. Try finding all of that in a notebook, and at an affordable price — it’s not easy.

Continue Reading…

Comments (2)

Slingbox Setup with Wireless Ethernet Bridge

By Chief Oddball on November 10th, 2009 at 1:27 pm

Filed under Journal ··· Leave a Comment

From time to time, I’ll post something here that’s primarily a note to myself. You might wonder why I don’t simply write this down in a document and store it on my computer someplace. In addition to my hope that these notes may offer some value to others as well, the reason is largely organizational. After all, as I back up stuff, move files around and archive things, eventually I can’t remember where I put that one file across all of the various terabytes of storage. But in the case of notes I’ve left for myself on this site, I can always find them in an instant.

So last night I was wrapping up work for the day at around 10:00 and decided that I should plug the Slingbox back in, after not having used it for a while. Actually, it was Apple who had suggested it to me earlier in the day, since we’re going to be on vacation this weekend and it might be fun to use the Slingbox while traveling. Because the Slingbox SOLO doesn’t have built-in wireless, and because it’s situated at the opposite end of the house from my main router, I needed to hook up a second router in bridge mode. Unfortunately, the network setup confounded me for some time, as I seemed unable to remember how to properly set up my second wireless router. I finally figured out what I was doing wrong, so here I’ll describe the setup that worked for me.

First of all, my primary router is a Linksys WRT54GL version 1.1, running Tomato firmware 1.25. The secondary router is an older WRT54G version 2, running HyperWRT Thibor 15c, which I put into bridge mode so the Slingbox could be plugged into it and still have access to my wireless network. With that established, here are the steps:

Primary Router

  1. Set up Static DHCP so the secondary router always gets the same IP address. I assigned it 192.168.1.149, which is the last assignable IP in my DHCP range.
  2. Forward the Slingbox port (5001 by default) to the secondary router’s internal address (192.168.1.149 in my case).

Secondary Router

  1. Change the router’s mode to Wireless Ethernet Bridge.
  2. Configure the wireless settings to match those on the primary router (SSID, security type, password, etc.)
  3. Change the Internet access mode to “Static IP.”
  4. For the router’s Internet IP, enter the same IP you assigned it in your primary router. (Again, in my case that was 192.168.1.149.)
  5. Enter your primary router’s address in the Gateway field — mine is 192.168.1.1.
  6. Enter a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0.
  7. For the router’s internal address, I think I entered 192.168.1.2. I don’t think this is too important.
  8. Disable the DHCP server. A device that you plug into the secondary router will be assigned an IP by the primary router.

That should get it working. Strangely, when I was Googling around for help on setting this up, I found a huge load of articles that all seemed to describe a different way of getting this to work, and none of them gave me the right advice. In the end, amusingly, it was an article in Sling Media’s own knowledge base that gave me the clue I needed — I should have gone there to begin with.

Comments (0)

An Apple For Apple

By Chief Oddball on November 1st, 2009 at 8:00 pm

Filed under Journal ··· 2 Comments

Apple MacBook

“What the hell’s wrong with this computer now?” I groused this past Friday morning as my wife reported to me that her Dell laptop had suddenly lost connection to our wireless network…again. As I futzed around with the machine, I eventually realized that the cooling fan was running full-tilt and the keyboard felt like there was a five-alarm fire raging underneath it. To make a long story short, there was a runaway software process — the one that controls the wireless networking hardware — and the machine was cooking itself in its own juices. A reboot fixed it…for the time being.

“You know,” I said, “that machine is about ready to die.” I shake my head every time I say this, because it’s yet another reminder of what pieces of crap Dell makes these days. Perhaps saddest of all is the fact that the machine I just mentioned was a $2,000 Latitude business notebook which I bought for corporate use. (Or as close as my one-man company comes to “corporate,” at least.) And my wife is only using it now because the Dell Inspiron she had before that degraded to such a degree that it was unusable for anything but simple word processing. This has become a dilemma, naturally, because I no longer have a trustworthy business machine when I need to go portable. Fortunately, that need arises very rarely anymore.

Whenever Apple’s laptop does something stupid like this, the conversation always turns to the subject of replacement computers and what our options might be. We’ve been talking about it for over a year now, in fact, but there was never enough money to do anything about it — nor did there seem to be the “perfect machine” available for a reasonable price. My wife wanted a laptop that was small and light, but which had decent video and audio capabilities so she could watch her favorite Asian TV series and movies on it. For some time we were considering a Mac, but in order to get the kind of hardware we wanted, we’d have had to choose a MacBook Pro, and the cost was prohibitive.

But on Friday, after the Dell’s latest meltdown (literally), the puzzle pieces fell into place in a way they’d never done before. Only a week ago, Apple (the computer company) released an update to their entry-level polycarbonate MacBook, otherwise known as “the white plastic one,” which introduced a pretty healthy dedicated graphics array, a nice LED-backlit screen and a nicely-sized hard drive for $999. An update to the Mac operating system (called “Snow Leopard”) had just landed as well, which seemed to make it a good time to buy into the Mac platform. But none of this would have mattered all that much if it hadn’t been for Apple’s 12 months same-as-cash offer. You might say that sealed the deal.

We were only going to stop in the Apple store for a quick look on Friday night before we picked up dinner at P.F. Chang’s. Just, you know, to see what the new MacBooks looked like, how they handed, and whether we could apply for that financing offer in-store. But everything went so well that we walked out of the store with a brand new MacBook in hand, which I had the Apple guys upgrade with 4GB of RAM right then and there, plus the 3-year AppleCare plan…because my luck with laptops is oh, so awful.

Since then, we’ve been on quite a little adventure.

Continue Reading…

Comments (2)

Review: Windows 7 Enterprise Edition

By Chief Oddball on August 10th, 2009 at 10:55 pm

Filed under Reviews ··· Leave a Comment

Okay, so this isn’t exactly the typical Oddball Review…no Asian horror or computer games in sight. However, after installing the final version of Windows 7 Enterprise Edition this past weekend (courtesy of MSDN), I am finding it significant enough to warrant a review of its own — particularly in light of certain earlier posts I’ve made here about Microsoft’s operating system.

In fact, it’s my opinion that Windows 7 is a slam dunk for Windows users, particularly in light of what an utter abomination I found Vista to be in many respects. It builds upon the behind-the-scenes changes in Windows Vista and simultaneously attempts to correct the egregious user interface catastrophes that product introduced. The result is what Windows Vista should have been, which might make you understandably annoyed had you paid for both. Being an employee of a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner who has access to these things as part of his job, it was not so difficult for Redmond to redeem itself in my eyes. In fact I will be happy to forget the Vista fiasco ever occurred.

Trivia: Windows 7′s name is rooted firmly in marketing, and may be perhaps its most disingenuous aspect. Just as CPU clock speeds were put forth as the primary means of differentiating the power of two systems in the old days, the big, shiny “7″ on this operating system’s box art is meant to propel you into the next generation of Windows computing, forgetting whatever came before. In actuality, this version of Windows is not 7.0, but 6.1. Since Windows Vista was 6.0, this means the much-vaunted Win7 is merely a revision!

When you think about it, though, this makes perfect sense. Windows XP (version 5.1) was, after all, “merely a revision” of Windows 2000 (version 5.0). Yet look what a success XP was, and how long it stuck around. Windows 2000 was only on the market for a year or two. See any parallels?

It seems to me that Microsoft can be counted on to get an operating system really right only on the first revision of a major release. (That being the case, we might all want to sit out whatever really ends up wearing the Windows 7.0 badge.)

Anyway, enough semantics: On with the review.

Continue Reading…

Comments (0)

ComputerWeek

By Chief Oddball on August 5th, 2009 at 12:04 pm

Filed under Journal ··· 4 Comments

Wasn’t “ComputerWeek” once a publication full of hardware deals and stuff like that? Seems like it was, but we’re reaching back into the 1990s with that one.

Regardless, I’ve certainly spent a lot of time around computers this week. Not that I don’t normally; after all, I work with them for my job, which has me sitting in front of one for at least 8-10 hours a day. But this week I’ve been engaged in a lot of fussing around with hardware and software, researching compatibility, coming up with contingency plans and even overclocking my own workstation here at home (something I haven’t dabbled with in some years). It’s to the point where today feels more like a Thursday or Friday than a mere Wednesday.

Since this past Sunday, I’ve put most of my efforts toward setting up my dad’s new notebook computer. It’s a Toshiba Satellite A505, if I recall correctly, which he will be using as his main workstation during his upcoming work-from-home efforts. This is actually a really nice machine — 16-inch ultrawide screen, backlit keyboard with full numeric keypad, excellent sound (for a notebook, especially), slot-loading DVD burner and a number of other cool things. There’s a lot of attention to detail evident in the design of this machine, the kind of attention I never saw Dell put into anything. The form factor and weight are a little unwieldy if you want to carry it around a lot, but as a desktop replacement it’s a good size.

The problems I’ve been having, though, aren’t related to the Toshiba, really, but to the Palm Treo that my dad uses as his phone, master organizer and PDA. This Treo runs Palm OS, and I’ve since come to learn that Palm completely dropped the ball with their Palm OS-based product line. The new laptop shipped with Windows Vista 64-bit, so as to take advantage of the preinstalled 4GB of RAM. Unfortunately, Palm’s support for 64-bit operating systems (and Vista in general) is woeful, to the point where you cannot even plug your Palm Treo into the computer via USB. There are no drivers for the USB cable.

All this means you have to sync via Bluetooth, but the Toshiba Satellite A505 doesn’t have Bluetooth. So we had to make an emergency run to Best Buy to pick up a micro Bluetooth adapter. (For reference, the Rocketfish RF-BCDM4 works right out of the box with Vista x64, using Microsoft’s own built-in drivers — and as a bonus, it’s ridiculously tiny.) Despite having to travel to the neighboring city to find a Best Buy that had the thing in stock, we finally got one, loaded it up and it worked great. So I thought our Palm problems were over.

I was wrong. While HotSyncing my dad’s Treo via Bluetooth worked perfectly, the Palm Desktop software did not. The issue is that Palm Desktop version 4, which he’s been using for some time now, doesn’t work in our configuration. Palm claims it doesn’t work under Windows Vista at all, a claim I seemed to refute by installing it successfully on my own Vista-based machine. The problem, though, is that Palm Desktop 4 doesn’t support Bluetooth syncing, and Vista prevents you from using USB syncing. In other words, I can’t see any way to friggin’ sync the phone under Desktop 4. So, Palm advises that you upgrade to Palm Desktop 6.2 instead. OK, fine. I downloaded it. It’s two versions newer, so it must be better anyway.

Boy, was that an asinine assumption. Palm Desktop 6.2 is way worse than Palm Desktop 4. This is perhaps the first time I’ve ever experienced a full-on software regression. The biggest problem is that version 6 completely drops the color-coded categories feature in an astounding display of poor judgment. It’s also missing the Expenses and Notepad apps. Tasks no longer have the “Repeat” function. Birthdays are no longer supported in Calendar. And there’s also a superfluous pmTraceDatabase failure message on every sync (which at least Palm has issued a fix for). This is unconscionably bad. Horrible, actually.

Continue Reading…

Comments (4)

WAMP, Vista Style: Pitfalls to Avoid

By Chief Oddball on February 2nd, 2008 at 2:29 am

Filed under Journal, Rants ··· Leave a Comment

Last week, I decided to try migrating to Windows Vista again. Yeah, yeah, save it. Anyway, after spending the last two hours trying to figure out why Apache’s mod_rewrite feature was not working, and then discovering it was the stupidest of the most stupid possible reasons, I decided to post a few “warning signs” here for you comrades who are traveling the WAMP road. (For the unitiated, that’s “Windows/Apache/MySQL/PHP.” And if you don’t know what that means, then this post isn’t for you anyway.)

And hey, it’s already two in the figgin’ morning and I’m sure Apple is already asleep by now, so I might as well waste even more time. <sarcastic smirk>

Pick the Right Version

When installing Apache on Windows Vista, use Apache 2.2.x, not 1.x. Of course, you could always install IIS instead, if you like that sort of thing. I like to run both — since I often develop for both ASP.NET and Linux/PHP architectures. Two HTTP servers will coexist if you bind them to different ports — say, 80 and 8080.

Fixing Slow Apache Response

After Apache is installed, accessing it through your computer name (in my case, http://exeter) may be very slow. To correct this, add this line to your HOSTS file (you’ll find it in C:\Windows\system32\drivers\etc):

127.0.0.1   exeter

Of course, you’d replace “exeter” with your computer name. This is not necessary if you prefer to access your server via http://localhost or http://127.0.0.1, as those should be working perfectly right out of the box.

Can’t Get the PHP MySQL Extension to Load?

No matter what your settings are in php.ini, The PHP MySQL module will not load unless you copy libmysql.dll to C:\Windows\system32. You will find this file in the PHP root directory.

MySQL Instance Config Wizard Hangs on Last Step

When configuring your MySQL 5 server with the Instance Config Wizard, when you get to the last step and press “Execute,” the wizard may lock up. If so, open Task Manager, right-click on the MySQLInstanceConfig.exe process and select “Properties.” On the “Compatibility” tab, check “Run this program in compatibility mode for:” and then choose “Windows XP (Service Pack 2)” from the drop-down menu. Click OK, then terminate the process. Run the MySQL Instance Config Wizard again. It should work this time.

Lastly, Make Sure You Edit Config Files on C: with Elevated Privileges

This is the pain-in-the-ass step that cost me two hours of time tonight. When editing config files for your server software — for example, Apache’s httpd.conf — make sure you launch your text editor as Administrator. In other words, with elevated privileges. Otherwise, it may not have the ability to write to files on the C: drive — but it may not tell you so, either.

I have my favorite text editor bound to a shortcut in my context menu, so I can right-click on any file and open it in my editor. But this context menu shortcut does not launch the editor with elevated privileges. Absurdly, I spent two hours continually editing, checking and re-checking httpd.conf, thinking I had enabled Apache’s mod_rewrite module, when in fact I had not — because the file was not getting saved, due to the editor’s lack of security privileges.

Unfortunately, the editor threw no error messages and in fact behaved as if everything was normal. It wasn’t until I shut down the editor, started it back up and opened httpd.conf that I noticed none of my changes had actually been saved. RAGE!

By the way, this “elevated privileges” crap is a new requirement of Windows Vista, which is the first Windows operating system that runs the typical user account with a restricted set of privileges. It’s safer to do this, but it’s a new concept to Windows users (and developers of Windows software). This creates problems with all kinds of older, pre-Vista software in particular, because all of it was designed around the assumption that every user would have admin-level access all the time. That is no longer true.

Sigh. Anyway, everything with my WAMP setup is finally working now. This rigmarole was the perfect way to terminate a screwed-up, costly, merry-go-round of a week, which I’ll tell you about in more detail tomorrow. For now, suffice it to say, I’m going the frak to bed.

Comments (0)

That About Sums It Up…

By Chief Oddball on August 6th, 2007 at 1:44 pm ··· Leave a Comment

Check out what Reaper sent me today — a link to the daily User Friendly comic strip. It totally sums up my experience with Windows Vista, sadly enough.


What’s Your Phishing IQ?

By Chief Oddball on July 28th, 2007 at 8:53 pm

Filed under News ··· 3 Comments

You’ve probably heard of those false emails and websites that try to trick you into giving away your passwords, credit card numbers and soforth by pretending to be legitimate — a practice called phishing. McAfee has posted a ten-question “Phishing Quiz,” where you can test your knowledge and observation skills by correctly identifying 10 common phishing sites and emails. Give it a shot and see how well you know this stuff.

I scored a 10 out of 10 — making me a so-called “Safety Guru.”

Here’s a hint: Do you really think Bank of America would direct you to a page full of misspellings and poor grammar? Hmm!

Comments (3)

Yay! Internet Explorer 3!

By Chief Oddball on July 27th, 2007 at 11:23 pm

Filed under Journal ··· Leave a Comment

You experts probably beat me to the punch on this — after all, the original technique for this was first conjured up three whole years ago — but it wasn’t until today that I found out about Multiple-IE. This handy package lets you install any previous version of Internet Explorer — all the way back to 3.0 — on your Windows XP system, simultaneously.

As a web developer, this is particularly exciting for me. Since the release of IE7, I’ve been running into this problem where I need to test a web app against both IE6 and IE7, but I have no easy way to do that since Microsoft only lets you keep one version of IE on your machine at a time. Until now, I’ve had to keep my laptop handy, and specifically avoid the IE7 upgrade on it.

However, Multiple-IE solves that problem, so now I’m running IE6 (and 5.5 for good measure) on my primary workstation. Every version of IE, all the way back to 3.0, is included in one handy installer that you can download, and when you run it, you can simply select which legacy version(s) of IE you want to install. It won’t mess up your IE7 at all — at least, it didn’t for me.

Yep…Internet Explorer 3, baby. In case you wanted to, you know, hit up www.whataburger.com and giggle yourself silly like it’s 1996 all over again. (“You mean they have a Coca-Cola website? Who the hell would want to go to a website about Coca-Cola?” – Me, eleven years ago)

Comments (0)

Ultimately, Vista Fails To Deliver

By Chief Oddball on July 25th, 2007 at 3:05 pm

Filed under Journal, Rants ··· 2 Comments

By the end of the week, I will once again be running Windows XP.

Although it wasn’t long ago that I wrote about upgrading to Windows Vista, and how it was going pretty well so far, I’ve now had a few weeks to work with Microsoft’s new OS. Having used Vista in both a business and leisure capacity, I’ve come to the conclusion that this OS is just not ready for prime time. Or, at the very least, it’s just not ready for me.

In the beginning, I actually had very few problems with Vista. Sure; my firewall of choice wasn’t compatible, but I found a new one. Yeah; file transfers take longer than it seemed they should, but I learned to live with it. But over time, more and more of these little idiosyncrasies started to pile up, culminating in the huge headache I had to deal with today when I attempted to install Visual Studio 2005 Team Edition.

Visual Studio 2005, a Microsoft product, has “known compatibility issues” with Windows Vista, another Microsoft product. At least, that’s what I was told in a dialog bog about halfway through the installation of Visual Studio. I admit I had a chuckle over this, since practically every piece of non-Microsoft software I’ve used so far has been perfectly compatible, but one of Microsoft’s own most prominent development tools isn’t. However, it wasn’t a big deal, because this same dialog box also informed me that a service pack for Visual Studio was available for download, and it would fix these issues. Great, I’ll get the service pack and be on my way.

I completed the install (which took more than half an hour, as VS2005 is such a huge piece of software that gets its tendrils into everything). Then, I used Vista’s built-in update manager to go out to the web and get that service pack. It was almost 500 MB, so it took a little while to download. When it finally came in, Vista proceeded to install it — and then seemingly got stuck.

The installation progress bar quit moving, and all hard drive activity stopped. I could still use the computer, but that wasn’t very helpful, given that I needed to use Visual Studio for something. I decided to give Vista a bit more time, and in the meanwhile, got out my laptop — which runs Windows XP, and already has Visual Studio installed — to finish my assigned task.

Fifteen minutes later, with that task finished and ready to be emailed out, the Vista update still hadn’t installed. In fact, it hadn’t budged.

Continue Reading…

Comments (2)

« Older Entries