Gadget Bag 101

 minutia, nerdery  No Responses »
Sep 302010
 

So I’m packing up for the trip to Las Vegas to play in my first ice hockey tournament with the Bucktooth Angry Dolphins, and I am now taking the time to indulge in the time honored tradition known as “Loading the Gadget Bag”.

Here’s what’s in my Crumpler™ ‘Considerable Embarrassment’ bag for the trip:
– MacBook Pro w/AC Adapter
– Podium CoolPad for aforementioned MacBook
– 1TB Western Digital Elements USB hard drive for Time Machine backups
– NASA-branded 4 port USB Hub
– 32GB iPhone 3GS
– 16GB iPad (WiFi)
– Apple 10W USB Power Adapter (for iPad/iPhone)
– Apple iPod USB Power Adapter
(two people, two iPhones, 1 iPad. Need more than one charger.)
– Razer Copperhead 2000dpi mouse
– Sony MDR-V6 headphones
– SkullCandy Full Metal Jacket iPhone mic’d headphones
– Microfiber towel (yes, I’m a hoopy frood who knows where my towel is. Don’t Panic.)

What did I forget?

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 Posted by at 12:54 am

I hate Microsoft Entourage

 nerdery  No Responses »
Sep 152010
 

Latest hate:

Has anyone EVER changed the “printed items” font and had it do ANYTHING?

I’m pretty sure it’s just another one of those ‘features’ in Entourage that doesn’t actually work. It’s just useless UI.

Screen shot 2010-09-15 at 9.31.23 AM.png

I hate Entourage. It cannot die quick enough for me.

iTunes: On Eagles Wings by Theocracy, from Mirror Of Souls

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 Posted by at 9:54 am

Simplenote.

 iPad/iPhone, Mac OS X, nerdery  1 Response »
Sep 012010
 

Screen shot 2010-09-01 at 9.25.42 AM.png

This is something that should have been part of iOS/MacOS/MobileMe from the start. It’s a little bit of a bummer that I have to rely on a third party solution for a fully sync’ed plain text notebook across all of my devices, but at least there is a solution.

Just a couple of things I like about it versus the also somewhat useful Evernote:

1. It’s just plaintext. No fancy formatting, nothing to bog down the process of getting an idea into my digital universe. Just a simple text input interface, with basic tagging for organizational purposes. No funky RTF issues (yes, Evernote… I’m talking to you). This is not a ‘catch all’ notebook. It’s someplace to dump those things I want to look into later, when I have time. For instance… what ever happened to my copy of Knee Deep In The Hoopla, or how wide is Idina Menzel‘s vocal range?

2. Native apps EVERYWHERE. In the case of my Mac, I can use Notational Velocity, a very cool and very clean open-source notepad app to access my notes. And when I take a note in one place, I get it everywhere. Ubiquitous data for the win (FTW). Oh… and though I haven’t bothered to use it, there’s apps that work on that buggy, sucky OS I use for playing a couple of key games to my nerd lifestyle.

iTunes: Concerto in E Major for Two Pianos and Orchestra: I. Allegro vivace by Love Derwinger and Roland Pöntinen, from The 99 Most Essential Mendelssohn Masterpieces (Amazon Exclusive)

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 Posted by at 9:30 am

MSNBC: Why Windows 7 tablets won’t work

 iPad/iPhone, nerdery  No Responses »
Jul 132010
 

Microsoft’s tablet woes: Why Windows 7 won’t work – Technology & science – Tech and gadgets – msnbc.com

This wonk from MSNBC gets it. Monkey Boy doesn’t. Here’s the reasons why Windows tablet computers, and will continue to do so… Windows7 or not:

1. The hardware required to run Windows 7 with full graphic support isn’t thin or cool.
2. The interface was designed for a mouse, keyboard and larger screen.
3. PC multitasking is not the same as tablet multitasking.
4. There aren’t (m)any touch apps for Windows 7.

“The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over
again and expecting different results” – Albert Einstein

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 Posted by at 6:50 pm

Microsoft CEO touts new Windows tablets vs iPad | Reuters

 iPad/iPhone, Mac OS X, nerdery  No Responses »
Jul 122010
 

Microsoft CEO touts new Windows tablets vs iPad | Reuters

Yeaahhhhh… that’s gonna help. So I can’t help but wonder how a Windows7 tablet is going to improve over a WindowsXP tablet… seeing as how they pretty languished in mediocrity before. A desktop OS is just NOT going to cut it, dude.

I mean, the entire ‘tablet market’ was expected to max out at around 1.5 million units sold worldwide last year. And then Apple came out with the iPad and sold 3 million in 80 days.

If you treat the tablet just like a laptop in a slightly different shell, you’re going to fail. And that’s what Microsoft is doing here. And that’s what’s going to be the end result.

As my friends at MacDailyNews say:
May Steve Ballmer remain Microsoft CEO for as long at it takes.

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 Posted by at 3:16 pm

Evernote for PC, Mac, iPhone, iPad

 iPad/iPhone, nerdery  1 Response »
Jun 282010
 

OK, so the premise behind Evernote is a good one. It gives you a web-based notebook that syncs to various devices. It’s a great way to take notes that can be accessed from several places.

I find it extremely useful when passing information from my MacBook Pro to  the Windows partition on my MacBook Pro.

As a notetaking platform, it has a tremendous amount of potential.

Except that it completely sucks.

The thing has massive bugs in it, particularly when trying to pass rich text (such as bold, italic or colored text) back and forth. For this reason, I find myself looking for reasons to us it, then dying a little on the inside when it inevitably fails miserably.

It’s free and all, but if it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work. And when it starts hindering you more than it helps you, you start looking for ways to replace it.

Am I confident that there’s a reasonable replacement that does what Evernote says it does without sucking? No. But I’m open to the idea.

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 Posted by at 8:51 pm

Bloomberg: An Exercise in Self Delusion

 nerdery  1 Response »
Mar 062009
 

Bloomberg.com:
Investment Tools

Palm Inc.’s new Pre smart phone will lure customers away from Apple Inc.’s iPhone when subscribers’ contracts start expiring in June, Palm investor Roger McNamee said.

“You know the beautiful thing: June 29, 2009, is the two- year anniversary of the first shipment of the iPhone,” McNamee said today in an interview in San Francisco. “Not one of those people will still be using an iPhone a month later.”

Wow. Talk about myopia. Daring Fireball commented: “Not sure why he’d want to raise expectations like this.”

I have the answer. The reason why he wants to raise expectations is that Palm is D-E-S-P-E-R-A-T-E for a buyout, while the company is still solvent. They have completely squandered the dominant position in the PDA market, and succeeded in pissing away any momentum they had in the smartphone market. And now they’re on the verge of death. They released a “me too” iPhone clone OS called Pre, hoping against hope that they could somehow convince developers to ignore the App Store and develop for this totally new and untested (and completely incompatible with everything else in the world, including their own legacy platforms) smartphone OS.

Palm is going to die. Sad, but true. They’ve been circling the drain for some time now, and rightly so. They had it all and they squandered it away, watching as Microsoft bumbled around with Windows Mobile for *years* and then having the nerve to act surprised when Blackberry hopped on the scene, and then again when Apple released the iPhone platform.

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 Posted by at 4:24 am
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