XBR update..

Much to my pleasant surprise, I called Circuit City’s extended service warranty line today, relayed the problem of the dead bulb in the Sony XBR1 and they are “sending one out, [I] should have it within 7 to 10 business days”… Yay…

I may still seek out a local bulb because a Wayne without his Sony is a sad and potentially hazardous puppy. Might actually *shudder* clean the house out of sheer boredom, and we wouldn’t want that..

My Sony XBR1 just bit the dust…

As if life wasn’t already difficult, the $250 bulb in my Sony XBR1 50″ TV just blew. Memorial Day night, while everyone’s closed, and no one in town could provide an instantly gratifying replacement.

It was purchased late June 2006 from Circuit City with the 3 year service plan, but given Circuit City’s own financial issues, I am hopeful, but not holding my breath for a resolution through their extended service plans department. Otherwise, I’m on the search for the cheapest (but most reputable) place to buy a XL-5100 replacement bulb (including the housing).

Being a holiday week, it will probably be, oh, I dunno, Monday or so before the house is alight with the sound of mind-numbing video noise again. Until then, Hulu and the video store, here I come.

Mafia Wars on the iPhone

Just loaded the Mafia Wars app/game on my iPhone.  If anyone wants to add me to their mafia, 4403 1366 75

My honest ups and downs of loading Mac OS X on a Dell Inspiron Mini 9 netbook

Ok, as promised, I spent almost a week with my new Dell Mini 9 netbook computer.  What I wasn’t quite fully honest about was that it was loaded down with Mac OS X 10.5.6.   I’m not here to give pictures, and promote how to do it.  There are plenty of articles out there for that (see below).

Also, before everyone — and hopefully Apple execs — get upset, somewhere between my youth and today, I’ve become pretty much a staunch supporter of buying and using legitimate software, rather than pirating it like I did rampantly in the 80’s.

For the record, I’m not here to promote doing this, as I agree that the legality of following the articles on the Web for doing so is questionable.

The reason for this article isn’t promotion of “hacking your Dell Mini” but — while admitting it’s certainly possible – unlike most of hackintosh crowd out there, I wanted to share, as well as address some of my great positives, along with my sincere concerns over putting Mac OS X on this thing to make it usable (which I don’t consider Windows to be).

On February 17th, when I decided to buy a Dell Mini 9, I had exactly ZERO idea that it could be loaded down with MacOS X.  No idea of its real capabilities, and little idea of how very useful it would really turn out to be.  I bought it simply to walk from room to room with while occasionally checking IMDB and using ICQ.

It wasn’t until SamsClub.com and their truly screwed up “4 to 6 week wait for delivery” crap that I started investigating my purchase, found the 2 different articles on installing MacOS (see ZDNet and Gizmodo) and I truly became enthusiastic about my purchase.

So, with a looming road trip, and having received the device at 9pm on a Friday night (thanks UPS), I sat up all night installing my ligitimately purchased retail copy of MacOS X 10.5.6, 2Gb RAM module, and 32Gb SSD from Crucial.  I accomplished the install using an 8Gb flash stick, some printed instructions, and a USB CD Rom drive.  The whole install from power on to power off took about 3 hours..  Somewhere along the lines however, I must have missed a step.

I played with it that Friday night until about 4am Saturday morning.  Happy as a proverbial clam, I turned it off, sat it aside, and — since my weekend was firmly screwed for sleep — collapsed into a heap of snoring mass.

Enter Monday morning.  Proudly, I packed the device and its power supply into a Kinko’s paper bag, and took it to work hoping to show it off to my fellow Mac buddies.  I get to work.  Tap the power button on.. “Operating System Not found”…. Crap..

I left work mid day last Monday to prepare for the road trip Tuesday morning. Went home, did about 20,000 loads of clothes while reloading Mac OSX.  This time, making sure to disable the sleep and hibernation features which seemed to have caused the previous failure.

All seems well, good, yes, thank you.  Power down, pack it, the PS, and a Logitech BT mouse in a leather “Padfolio” which serves the purpose well enough for the moment.

Tuesday morning, wheels up for DC.

So.  After a week of on-the-road travel, I have found sincere concerns along with a lot of good things to be said about my experiences (and I presume the experiences of those going the same route) so I thought I’d share you the trouble, or at least point you in the right direction:

The Good:

• Once the netbook boots and does all its caching of sorts, it’s REALLY, REALLY fun, and infinitely more usable than Windows XP for the average user.  Peppy as all heck, but again, that’s AFTER it does its thing of fully booting.
• The 9″ size and being 2.5 pounds makes it wonderfully transportable, and the Air Nazis (the TSA) had a lot less bullshit hassle with the netbook in a padfolio than they ever had with the 15″ mac laptop in a thin sleeve.
• The 32 gigabyte SSD seems to be around the right size.  You could buy 64gb SSD and load Office (maybe) but you really need to examine what the laptop itself is for.  It’s NOT a work replacement, so much as a really convenient way to get small tasks like e-mail and web surfing (and even high-level programming) done on the road.  You can however load OpenOffice and be just as happy.
• I thought for sure the tiny keyboard would be an issue, but I guess that over the last 8/9 months or so of getting used to the iPhone, using a condensed kb on a netbook wasn’t THAT big of a deal.
• This little beasty has all of the ports you’ll need for everything EXCEPT firewire video.  3 USB ports (1 more than my mac pro laptop), SD/HDSD capability.. check.  It’s even got an external plug to drive a monitor, but I haven’t yet been that brave..
• Everything works.  3 hours to install, mostly because of the USB CDROM, but thanks to the Type11 install (see the aforementioned articles) everything from the webcam to audio, to photo booth to Macromedia Fireworks works on it.  As a matter of fact, the only thing I’ve found which doesn’t work is Boot Camp Assistant, but trying to install Mac OS on a PC to run a PC emulator seems kinda moronic doesn’t it?

The Bad:

• This is *not* a Macintosh computer.  I know a lot of people will disagree with me out of principle, but there are lots of little noticable things, like bootup and overall speed, that simply don’t convey the “Mac feel”.  A Dell hacked to try to make it run Mac OSX does not an Apple make.  I find it difficult to believe that anyone who disagrees with the ideal of this statement has ever truly owned and/or loved their Mac as I do both my iMac and Macbook Pro.
• Speaking of the bootup times the problem is that start up times can reach 5 minutes or better, and starting programs up can be lethargic.  Reminds me of the old G3 laptop days.  – That being said, part of this may be my fault, as I bought a slower 32gb SSD from Crucial.com because the reportedly “much faster” “Runcore SSD” is not currently available for purchase.  According to tests by other peeps out there, the stock SSD as well as the Crucial.com one is 70MB/sec read, 15MB/sec write speed.  The Runcore SSD is supposedly 80MB/sec read, 40MB/sec write speed.  For the record, I really have zero idea how this compares to standard notebook hard drives.
• What troubles me about the “Crucial/stock versus Runcore issue” however is that there is apparently only one single dealer in the world for said chips, and all the positive reviews about the Runcore seem to be put out by either relatives, or owners of the same Chinese company that makes them.  Don’t know, but when/if they ever become available, I may have to invest a little bit to find out.  I can always sell either the Crucial or the Runcore on eBay.

In the end, my feelings are this…  If you go the route I did, you’ll end up with a fun, usable little computer that’s good for small tasks provided you’re willing to let it boot up and have patience to let it shut down on it’s own.   In my experience, it’s just about as fast whether you’re running XP (which comes loaded), or Mac OSX 10.5.6 so the operating system you choose is purely a matter of preference.

The resultant machine however is NOT a Macintosh computer, so don’t try and fool yourself into believing somehow or another that it is.

I am pleasantly surprised by the speed and peppyness of the machine once it gets past the limitations of the current, “slower” SSD card, but I don’t know that I’d be all that jazzed about trying to get all my friends to buy one just to put OSX on it.

If I’d had the money to spend (me being cheap is what started this, remember?) I would have just bought one of the refurb 13″ Macbook Airs from apple.com for $999.  I don’t however have that kind of money in this economy and if I did, I might have gone the more well established, non-pro 13.3″ macbook route.

Meanwhile I still had the need for a netbook sized device that I could literally take with me anywhere, which — for all intents and purposes — is exactly what I got.

Rumors have been circulating about the idea of Apple coming out with a netbook in Q3/2009, but that remains to be seen.  Unfortunately I suspect that even if they do (and I sincerely hope they do), it’ll be more in the range of $800 (just like Sony tries to charge for the same features as my Dell), or something equally unobtainable for us broke-ass mortals just trying to get by.

Your call on hackintoshing the Dell Mini 9.  I’ve given you all I know, and even admitted where I might have done things better.  Just don’t go into it thinking you’re “sticking it to Apple”, because the inevitable truth remains, you get what you pay for.

Dell Inspiron Mini 9 – a cursory glance.

After spending weeks looking for a laptop to use at home for under $400, I finally gave up and ordered a Cherry Red, Dell Inspiron Mini 9 from SamsClub.com.  For $254.00 delivered, I got a 9″ netbook with a dual-core 1.6ghz Atom processor, 1 gb of RAM, and 8 gb of Solid State Disk (SSD) that it uses as a hard drive.   It also came preloaded with Windows XP Home SP3, which — for a Microsoft product — is still the best Windows out there for the casual user like me.  I — for the record — loathe Vista with every fiber of my being, as reinforced by my recent experiment with a Dell Studio 540.

Anyway, for a 9″ screened computer which weighs in at around 2.5 pounds, this thing is pretty snappy, pretty cool, and actually usable.  The keyboard, as I’m sure you can imagine, is a bit on the small side for my pudgy fingers, but it’s certainly faster/better than trying to legitimately surf on my iPhone.

So, with the plethora of netbooks out there, why did I choose the Dell Inpiration Mini 9?  There were certainly larger (10″), faster notebooks out there with real 160gb hard drives, but for me, it boiled down to two things:

1. Price — No one seemed to be able to get near the $245 price tag, unless you counted the president’s day sale direct from Dell, but that one had Ubuntu on it which — in this case — doesn’t really matter when my hopes are finalized (more on that shortly).
2. Expandability — Unlike the more popular Acer, EeePC or other netbooks (that I could find), the Dell actually encourages expansion by putting a big door on the bottom of the machine which allows easy access to add more memory, bigger SSD storage, bluetooth card, and even a WWAN (3G) card if you’d like.   I already ordered a 2gb RAM stick and 32gb SSD from crucial.com and will probably order 2 more in order to be able to easily jump between operating systems such as Ubuntu, XP, and even maybe, just maybe MacOS X if I get REALLY curious.

As of Tuesday, I’m going on my first road trip with it to DC and will update the blog later with a full “seriously, how usable is a netbook in the real world?” post when I get back (or maybe from the road if I get really, really bored.

Where are the $300 laptops?

Ok, everyone flash back to a time seemingly long ago. You know…. Christmas 2008.

As I seem to recall, we were awash with advertisements for sub $400, if not $300 laptops. Sure, they weren’t usually Core 2 Duo machines with the latest and greatest (though I do recall one or two of those slipping through the cracks occassionally).

Insert the fancy Wayne’s World flashback special effect to today and tell me, where have all those deals gone? See? Perhaps bad timing on my part, but I’ve ALMOST decided that I’d like a cheap laptop for carrying through the house to use for everything between cooking, to ebay’ing and imdb’ing before I forget what I was trying to do on the way to my iMac in the computer room.

I’m not talking about needing a full ruggedized, killer game laptop. Just something with decent resolution and a good browser.

Enter the “netbook”. The nemesis of all men with large hands and fat fingers. Seems I can’t turn around without tripping over one, but I still have major concerns. Dell sold their Ubuntu Linux one yesterday for $199 on sale, but that’s with 4GB worth of SSD for a hard drive, and only 1gb of RAM..

“Only 1GB of RAM”. Is anyone out there old enough to realize the amount of irony in that comment versus 20 years ago when computers and the Internet were really in their infancy for the average person?

Anyway, I digress. Windows being what it is, 1GB of RAM simply isn’t enough. I can’t however speak for Ubuntu Linux, so — probably to my chagrin — I didn’t buy one.

Anyone out there know whether the “netbook” has surplanted the reasonably priced laptop forever?

A potential Eureka moment.

Greetings fellow earthlings,

I know I haven’t been around much, what with travel, the holidays, and now a sinus infection that’s got me scrambled, but I have an idea.

In the last month or two, I’ve found myself addicted to Facebook (gee, thanks sis ), meaning I forget about everything else and end up over there dribbling away and playing the terribly addictive “games”.

I wouldn’t call them games so much as distractions really, because for the most part they’re no-brainers.

THEN, the programmer in me kicks in and I begin to consider the fact that — to the best of my wanderings — no one has created an Open source version of Facebook/MySpace/etc in CMS fashion.

I’m not talking about cloning Facebook or the others. That would be illegal of course, but building a Content Management System (CMS) engine that has the same appeal and “I’m an individual part of a community” drive as those other more famous sites, then make it available for anyone to run a site on, ala PHPNuke, Xoops, and the other similar CMS engines.

Toss in personal blogging for the members like we do here, and I really think the potential is there to change the world, or at least the face of the Web.

To that end, I believe I may not be posting too much in the near future until I can jot down my ideas and move forward in a way that makes sense for me. Heck, if anyone’s smart enough (or more enthusiastic enough) to beat me to the punch, I’m ALL for it, as it’s less for me to do..

“I’d give good money if he’d shut up”

I love the title, but once again, Friday night and I’m bored to death.  Can’t sleep, so I thought I’d see how far I’d progressed down the padawan’s path to podcasting (say that 5 times really fast)…  Anyway, click the play button for my review of the Apple iPhone 3g.

or just click me

iPhone sinks from “maybe” to “probably not”.

Been thinking about this and the weight of the “no” has overrun the “yes” in determining whether or not I want an iPhone.

With the phone release yesterday, AT&T let go of more information. In my particular case I have two reasons to go with AT&T. The first is a dying cellphone, the second is that T-mobile won’t reach inside the building at work, meaning I basically can’t use the phone during the day. AT&T is the only provider that seems able to reach.

I was willing to overlook the fact that AT&T essentially *doubled* the cost of my phone bill for fewer minutes per month (especially considering rollover). However, in order to connect to the wifi at work which uses WPA2 encryption, AT&T wants to consider me a “corporate customer”. Not only that, but they want more money to add on text messaging (which is pretty much the biggest reason to have a smartphone)

So, considering that I normally use about 600 minutes per month, I’m looking at;

$89.99 for basic service (900 minutes)
$45.00 for “corporate” service
$5.00 for 200 text messages
——
$139.99 plus taxes versus T-mobile’s $39.99 plus tax for 1500 minutes

In the end, I’m not willing to triple my cellphone bill just to have the iPhone. I could just as simply pay $200 for a new T-mobile smartphone and just forward messages to my work phone during the day..

iPhone goes from an absolute, to a maybe..

Almost a month ago, I was giddy and schoolboyish about the new iPhone 3G rollout. Now I’m not so sure, and I’ll tell you why;

1) The hype has been overwhelming, and nothing good ever comes from things that are over-hyped.

2) I’ve no intention of standing in lines for hours on the 11th for the privilege of giving Apple, or AT&T $300 for a phone.

3) No home activation. This means that I’ll have to activate the phone in store. I have no problem activating the phone/accounts (save for costs, discussed later). It’s just having to wait longer in line at Apple with the potential of them sending me to AT&T’s store for whatever reason. Apple stores have phones, but AT&T stores are the ones trained on the speedy activation.

4) Cost of the AT&T plan. — I use about 500 minutes a month. Right now, I have T-mobile with 1500 minutes for $39.99 per month plus about $10 in assorted taxes/usage fees, etc. Adding Internet and 500 text messages takes me to $59.99 plus the requisite taxes, etc.

When I go to AT&T, I’ll have 900 minutes plus rollover and that’ll include the Internet and messages (maybe?) for $89.95 (currently guessed price). *BUT* it’s my understanding that even though it’s a personal phone paid by me, they will consider me a “corporate customer” (read: more money) if I try to access the Exchange server at work, which as you might imagine, sucks hard…

It’s not the cost of the phone. Hell, I paid $200 for my currently dying PEBL, and almost $300 for my 60gb iPod. I also realize that — as my only phone — I’ll always have a cellphone bill. It just shouldn’t, in my never-so-humble opinion, cost $100 per month.

THAT being said… as a piece of ironic cruel fate, thinking my contract ended in October 2008, I called T-mobile last night to examine my options as far as replacing the current phone and getting better coverage in my office only to discover that my current contract with them ends on Monday the 14th…

This means that *if* I’m going to jump, it might as well be now…

To Phone, or not to Phone, that is the question.