Things Smackie Thinks You Need to Know...

Originally posted by vansmack:
In following up on my reaserch, the higher end models (900 & 1000) have built in Bluetooth. They sell for around $549.

Hey kosmo and others who are interested in the subnotebooks/ultra-micro pc's, I checked out the Eee PC (8G) over the weekend:

</font>

• &lt;font size="2" face="Arial, Veranda"&gt;The Screen size on the #G models is a waste. Sure 7 inches is small, but on each side of the screen is a big speaker. Why bother? They were better off using the full screen like they do with the 900 &amp; 1000 models.&lt;/font&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
• &lt;font size="2" face="Arial, Veranda"&gt;Performance was surprisingly strong (this was a WinXP model) and I bet the Linux model is even better.&lt;/font&gt;&lt;/li&gt;
• &lt;font size="2" face="Arial, Veranda"&gt;The keyboard is really small. It's sort of a tweener. Remember when you first got a blackberry or some other full QWERTY smart phone and it took you a little while to get used to using your thumbs? This keyboard is the same way. The bigger your fingers the harder it will be to get used to.&lt;/font&gt;&lt;/li&gt;

<font size="2" face="Arial, Veranda">
I'm going to pass on the 2G, 4G and 8G models. I don't like the price point of the 900 and 1000 models, but I think they'll come down in a few months as the competition heats up. That's when I think I'll make a move.

I was tipped off on the new MSI Wind Laptop (US release is supposed to be today). It has a 10inch screen, 6 hour battery life and the linux model comes in at $399 (can be upgraded to run WinXP - the OEM XP model sells for $549). The downside is it uses a regular old 80gig HDD. I really want to go Solid State Drive (or SSD Flash) so I can boot it up in under 20 seconds.

I don't remember what thread it was where we were talking about the two candidates energy policies and I mentioned both candiates have severe holes, but here is an example of where McCain has it right and Obama has it wrong. Contrast this with drilling for oil off the coast and you'll see that neither canidadate is going to lead this country to a proper energy solution as long as one is sucking up to the oil companies and one is sucking up to the US corn based ethanol lobby….

Biofuels in Brazil
Lean, green and not mean

The United States may drop a tariff on Brazilian ethanol. But the industry is still the victim of much misplaced criticism


WHEN John McCain laid out his plans for reducing Americaâ??s dependence on oil to an audience in California on June 23rd, the candidateâ??s keenest listeners were 6,000 miles away in São Paulo. Mr McCain argued that the tariff on imported ethanol of 54 cents per gallon should be scrapped. Others in the Senate (though not Barack Obama) are pushing for it to be reduced. Either way, the case against the tariff has been strengthened by high oil prices and by the June floods that damaged the mid-western corn (maize) crop. That sent corn prices soaring and made subsidising corn to produce ethanol look like an even worse idea than it did before, given the greener, cheaper ethanol that the United States could buy from Brazil instead.

hunh, the wash post energy op ed yesterday mentioned the ethanol tariff as well. maybe a real issue this time?

i like how people think mccain and obama are different. they are the same, will be the same in office, and come out rich like reagan, bush sr., clinton, bush jr., ect………

lobbyists will control them, like they do the senate, and the house, and you. religion will scare you, life will swallow your mind as you tvo, taxes will take from you and give to people leeching off the system as you go see shows, and freedom will taste like sweet destruction as you finally give in to walmart's low prices. the president of every country that has oil will somehow be connected or once worked for a major oil company (like afganistan). people will bitch about who they voted for one to two years after the fact, hate people who don't vote, and then go ahead and vote another idiot in.

Originally posted by god's shoeshine:
hunh, the wash post energy op ed yesterday mentioned the ethanol tariff as well. maybe a real issue this time?

Yeah, like the farm bill was…

gotta love this: the us goes to war with iraq because they have wmds. then they have no wmds. then 5 years later the us attempts to "secretly" ship out 500 tons of yellow cake uranium out of iraq (dating back to saddam, though no one has heard or knew about this until now) and sell it to canada. can this war and country and government get anymore shady?

http://www.gaywired.com/Article.cfm?ID=19526

god . . . you fucked women over since eden and this religious thing was invented by men. way to go, fake jesus.

Originally posted by vansmack:

Originally posted by god's shoeshine:
hunh, the wash post energy op ed yesterday mentioned the ethanol tariff as well. maybe a real issue this time?

Yeah, like the farm bill was…

true, but the farm bill wont let us keep our h2's

Originally posted by god's shoeshine:
true, but the farm bill wont let us keep our h2's

Actually, with all the subsidies for corn based ethanol, it might be your best hope (assuming they make a flex fuel H2 someday).

Originally posted by walkonby:
http://www.gaywired.com/Article.cfm?ID=19526

god . . . you fucked women over since eden and this religious thing was invented by men. way to go, fake jesus.

Yep, we've covered this topic in this thread before and it's going to keep coming up until brave Muslim leaders in free countries step up.

Put him on trial for murder, convict him, and don't give into the Muslim pressures of tradition. Then the brave Muslim leaders in this and other free countries must publicly support the decisions of the courts.

science - 1, false idol religion that has controlled humans for far too long - 0.

way to go, vision of gabriel.

Originally posted by walkonby:
i like how people think mccain and obama are different. they are the same, will be the same in office, and come out rich like reagan, bush sr., clinton, bush jr., ect………

(edited)
Originally had a question for Walkonby, but then I realized, he has nothing interesting or intelligent to say about… much of anything, but likes to dress up his comments in non-sequiter space-case random-for-the-hell-of-it language to make himself look soooooo deep. So fuck it.

Originally posted by vansmack:

Originally posted by god's shoeshine:
true, but the farm bill wont let us keep our h2's

Actually, with all the subsidies for corn based ethanol, it might be your best hope (assuming they make a flex fuel H2 someday).

can i change my flip remark to 'yes, but brazil is my new favorite country to obsess over'

Originally posted by god's shoeshine:
can i change my flip remark to 'yes, but brazil is my new favorite country to obsess over'

Sure. You can obsess over Brazil and I'll continue to obsess over Turkey. I think you're winning this one.

Kosmo's post about htpc's (home theater personal Computers) has inspired me to start talking about…

SMACKIE'S DIGITAL REVOLUTION 2008

Around December 2007/Jaunary 2008 Smackette told me what it would be like to be married to a Doctor in their first year of residency. Basically, it was "I'm not going to be around so get a hobby and think of some big projects. I can't have you going to the bar every night I'm not around, and I'd rather you spend that money on something useful."

She probably meant paint the apartment (which I sort of did), but I took it upon myself to reorganize my home entertainment this year.

I took stock of current inventory, decided what needed to be replaced, what needed to be better utilized, and set some ground rules:

(1) No copper wires. Think Faye Dunaway playing Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest. If the technology existed 150 years ago and was barely improved upon, it doesn't work in my revolution.

(2) $400 price point for any new devices. Desktops are dead, laptops are overpriced and under-utilized and I already own an HDTV, so $400 seems like the proper price point for any new devices (feel free to disregard this rule if you don't own an HDTV). We're not wealthy by any means, and a $400 price point, spread out across the year meants that I had checks on my spending and forced me to be creative.

(3) Think catch-up, but plan for next year. It wouldn't have done me any good to simply set out to get everything working today, just so I would have to change it all in the fall. Sometimes this wasn't possible, but other times I went out on a limb.

(4) Lastly and most importantly, plan in such a way that a non-techie person can run it. They may not be able to build it, but if Smackette wants to listen to music, watch a movie, see her photos, etc., she should be able to do it with reding a guide or following 15 steps.

I would also point out here that I beta test for Sprint, Microsoft, TiVo and DirecTV so if it looks like I favor those companies, it's because I do. And sometimes I'm an apologist for these companies, but it is what it is. I took long, hard looks at a lot of companies over the years and these are the ones I work with.

Originally posted by vansmack:

Originally posted by god's shoeshine:
can i change my flip remark to 'yes, but brazil is my new favorite country to obsess over'

Sure. You can obsess over Brazil and I'll continue to obsess over Turkey. I think you're winning this one.

not that turkey isnt facinating, but i now want to start a construction/irrigation startup in mato grosso. i mean, a good portion of the best construction workers around here are from bolivia, anyway

First upâ?¦Internet Connectivity

I had been waiting patiently for Google to roll out their Free Wifi for San Francisco, but it was held up by our Board of Supervisors for so long that both Earthlink and Google gave up on the project. Major Bummer. Had they offered 300kbps for free and a pay service for even 1MB, I would have been all over the pay service. But alasâ?¦

So I was left with the Cable vs. DSL. Itâ??s amazing that the majority of the US is still deciding between only these two options â?? if you can even get both. Those of you in Verizonâ??s FiOS area should consider yourself very luckyâ?¦

My local providers are Comcast and at&t. Comcast is blocking at&t from rolling out U-verse, so I have no Fiber option, yet I live 30 minutes from Silicon Valley. Yes, I see the irony.

We used to have at&t DSL, but their service was spotty at best and we would experience frequent outages. They claimed that the buildingâ??s wiring must be too old and there was little they could do about it. So we switched to Earthlink, but we suffered the same problems. Iâ??m still not sure if at&t is right, because as it turns out Earthlink simply leases at&tâ??s wires.

In looking at DSL, youâ??re paying less than cable for internet service, however, you canâ??t have DSL without a working phone line, so itâ??s not really cheaper than a cable modem. If you live in the 21st century, what do you need a land line for, other than international long distance calls? So no land line, no DSL. That ruled out at&t and Earthlink. This led to me the no copper wires rule.

Internet Connectivity (cont.)

So, Comcastâ?¦.Iâ??m not sure if Iâ??m still banned from Comcast. After all, that was over 5 years ago and on the other side of the country..but Iâ??d had a few run-ins with Comcast in DC. Look, donâ??t get mad at me because I know about your technology than your customer service reps, and the supervisor, and some of the tech support specialists. So we didnâ??t rule them out, just in case theyâ??d forgotten who I was.

But in order to get an affordable cable modem solution, you have to bundle with their other services. Hereâ??s my problem with bundling â?? I donâ??t write a check any more as it is. NOT ONE. If everything is autopay or online banking, how much easier is â??bundlingâ? really? One bill. Whoopdy doo. Nobody snail mails me a bill any more either. This is a scam folks. And one that many people are buying into.

Iâ??m going to have the Satellite TV vs. Cable TV discussion at another time, but letâ??s just say that youâ??re going to have to pry DirecTV out of my cold, dead hands. With Comcast not being an option for TV and us having absolutely no need for VoIP, the $60 a month for cable seemed steep, but was the early leader. Ouch.

My disdain for Comcast led me to start searching for other options. What do the folks in the sticks do? Most of them live to far away from the switch to use DSL and Cable wonâ??t pay the price to lay wires to their place. Turns out, they use either their cell phone companyâ??s data plan or satellite internet.

Internet Connectivity (last post)

Satellite internet has a huge latency problem (think delay between clicks) that is impossible for a gamer, let alone anyone who want to stream something. Itâ??s also really expensive.

So I looked at Verizon and Sprint, at the time the only Wireless providers with a 3G network in my neighborhood. Verizon has a 5GB download limit so I immediately threw them out. I download way more than 5GB a month with all of my gaming and trial software for various companies.

Sprint offered unlimited download for the same price as cable modem service, so I talked to the folks at Sprint. Unfortunately, WiMAX is still months off, but they said there would be upgrades available to existing Sprint data users. They also said that they would be ending the unlimited download in July, but that they would be grandfathering existing users. Hmmmâ?¦

Switching to a Cell provider for home internet has its downsides. One, your existing routers wonâ??t work with a cell phone modem without extra equipment and two, the speeds arenâ??t the same as Cable or DSL. At first we were going to use our cell phones, hooked up to each computer, but this wasnâ??t efficient for two reasons: (1) each phone has to pay for broadband access (adds up) and (2) you canâ??t receive incoming calls when youâ??re using your phone as a modem.

Sprint gave us a 30 day trial of one of their USB modems, and we liked it. It offered about 1MB speeds and was fairly reliable. It was also very portable â?? we could take it anywhere we get cell phone service and have DSL speed internet connection. We make frequent trips between SF and LA and the service is very strong.

In order to share it with other computers, I bought a Cradlepoint CTR-350 EVDO router off E-bay for $100, which is also very portable (about the size of a deck of cards. As ridiculous as this sounds, with the car charger, we can plug the router and modem in to the cigarette lighter and have wifi access for all laptops in the car. You can set up a mini-network anywhere you want basically â?? coffee shops, conference rooms, hotel rooms, the beach, the park, you name it.

Once WiMax comes out, and speeds rival Cable modems, I canâ??t wait for the opportunities.

So I sacrificed speed for portability, and bucked the at&t/Comcast duopoly. Almost three months later, I still feel pretty good about it.

DIGITAL REVOLUTION: Media Centers

Alright, so I bored you with my ISP decision making. Sorry about that, but it will all come back together in the end.

At the beginning of the year, I made a heart breaking decision. I had to get rid of the last TiVo in the house. As most of you know, I was an early TiVo adopter and quickly joined their beta team. They were doing some great things with DirecTV (dual tuner recording was on directv almost a decade ago now), and ever better things in their stand alone models, but neither Directv nor TiVo really wanted to play along. TiVo wanted Directv to open up their TiVo boxes for media features, DirecTV refused to pay the price and started building their own box. TiVo then decided to jump on the cable bandwagon and ditch DirecTV all together. This left me in a quandary. I REALLY liked both companies, but I couldnâ??t keep both.

DirecTV finally won out by providing a ridiculous amount of HDTV, exclusive sports and by inviting me to help build the next TiVo-esque box for DirecTV with Media Share and a whole host of other features. More on that in a minute.

Way back in 2007, after I expelled my last Stand Alone TiVo from the arsenal, I had my computer hooked up to both my stereo and my HDTV. We could have â??youtube offsâ? after a drunken night or play the music collection via the stereo to our hearts content. I could download HD broadcasts of pay-per-view soccer matches and watch them on the big screen…you get the point. Smackette hated the computer in the front room, and frankly, I was over the desktop too, but it was too useful to get rid of.

Conveniently for Xmas, Smackette gave me an Xbox 360. Sweet â?? Halo, Rock Band, WWII games. I was in heaven. What I failed to properly assess was the Media Extender built into the 360. The Xbox recognized the other computers on the network and allowed me to play the music files on the desktop or smacketteâ??s laptop, stream the movie files on the desktop, view pictures, you name it. I used to be able to do that with the Stand Alone TiVo, but now I can put the desktop in any room in the apt and play my media out here. Sweet. Sure, there are many other music players out there that stream, but they all have their limitations. Some only do music, some canâ??t do video, some do photos, but no music at the same time, etc. But why buy an entirely new device if I already own a device that has these features built in?