Nokia N810 Internet Tablet

I got the new Nokia N810 Internet Tablet and must say that this thing rocks! The processor speed has been bumped up to 400mhz and the browser now completely supports most AJAX and Flash sites including Google Docs and Flickr.  I love my iPhone but the N810 makes an excellent device to carrry around instead of a notebook with it's 800x480 resolution screen and builti-n thumboard..  Add a bluetooth keyboard and it can virtually replace a notebook.



I love my MacBook but let's face the facts. It's hot and has a crappy battery life of 2-3 hours. The N810 is pocketable and you never really shut it off. It just goes to sleep. It does VOIP through Gizmodo and Skype, makes a great IM client with the built-in keyboard and I can remotely access computers with VNC, Remote Desktop and ssh via the terminal application. The built-in thumboard makes applications like terminal and VNC practical now for real work.

Multimedia is not as good as the iPhone. The iPhone has a 600mhz processor and dedicated video subsystem. It can easily playback movies that I have encoded in full DVD resolution for my AppleTV. While the N800 has a higher resolution screen, it lacks the horsepower to properly playback full resolution DVD movies. That being said, properly encoded movies play just fine and the built-in speakers are stereo while the iPhone only does mono. The N800 also can access the Rhapsody "all you can eat" music service wirelessly. You can't download music from the site onto the device but you can queue up songs from you library and stream them just fine.

The N810 also includes a built-in GPS chip and has WayPoint navigation software built-in. This software is less than stellar but you can download and install Maemo Mapper for free. It also comes bundled with a car cradle and stand for use as a car navigation system making this a very nice car computer. Time will tell if developers capitalize on the built-in GPS for other applications.

Overall, the N810 is an excellent device with great build quality. It's another stellar device from Nokia. I wish they would market this device differently. Calling this an "Internet Tablet" is misleading. This is a full-blown pocketable computer running LInux.

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Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard Bugs

Well, Leopard finally arrived and there are some really cool features packed in. It definitely blows away Vista and I'm amazed at what Apple can churn out. Unfortunately, there are some glaring bugs in this version. Some of the new features just don't seem to work at all. Here is a partial list:

- Windows shares just don't show up in Finder as advertised.

- Can't change the Windows network name in system preferences. Whatever I put in there is not saved at all.

- "Back to My Mac" feature just does not work even with their recommended router. 

- Time Machine seems buggy and there is a "progress" window that you just can't get rid of. I thought this was all handled in the background?

- iChat quit on my forcing a reboot that led to non-working WiFi that required an AP Extreme reboot as well as a 2nd MacBook reboot.

More to come...

 

Thinking Different

Perhaps people experience a mid-life crisis when they discover the truth. Life is nothing as well as everything. You can reboot your life at any time. Escape the slavery and free your mind. You have all of the power in the world. Use it.

We Are Living in a Matrix

I realize that there is probably a ton of misinformation in the Zeitgeist movie but I believe the underlying premise. We are all slaves to this system. Slaves to "the matrix" mankind has created. Slaves to debt, slaves to media, slaves to religion...

You can break free. Take the red pill.

Latest Project

I have a Kill-A-Watt power meter coming today from New Egg. I've got way too much crap on 24x7 sucking down juice and want to meter that appropriately. I got a new logic board battery for my PowerMac to allow it to sleep again so I don't have to run it 24x7. Perhaps I can use WOL to bring it up remotely as well. My RAID-5 Linux box seems like overkill. I really don't need the RAID-5 protection since it's mainly just a backup disk. I want a machine that provides NAS, ssh tunneling, and perhaps iTunes serving. I'm thinking of just using the Mini-ITX PC that was my media computer. I'll connect 1 gb of disk to it via usb. It's small enough to fit in my stereo stand that I use as a network rack. Unfortunately, I'll have to run XP. I'd much rather run Linux on it for many reasons but using it as an iTunes server is key.

The best thing would be to use a Mac Mini as a server but I don't want to spend the cash right now. It could replace the PowerMac G4, Mini-ITX PC and the Linux RAID server. Perhaps I'll keep my eye out on Ebay.

iMovie 08 Not As Bad As First Thought

I have nearly finished editing my first video in iMovie 08 and there are more than a couple of things that I like about it. Unfortunately, it is definitely a version one product and needs quite a bit of improvement. First of all, the skimming feature really makes editing a breeze. Everything you do is nondestructive. This is something that I've wanted in iMovie for a long time. The audio editing is terrible to non-existent. Even changing the volume in multiple clips is quite a chore.

I've seen some complaints that iMovie is unstable but that is not my impression at all. In fact, it seems much more responsive than 06 ever was. iMovie 06 used to always pinwheel no matter which Mac I was running it on. I'm hoping that we some updates to this program over the course of the year. I'd hate to have to wait another year for more features to be added to flesh this thing out.

iMovie 08 Immediate Impressions

I'm about to turn in for the night but I've played a bit with iMovie
08. After our mini-dv camcorder bit the dust, I picked up a Sanyo
Xacti C6 digital MPEG-4 camcorder (damn you Adam Curry!) and I have
not made a DVD since. I have moved on to posting to Google Video. I
usually avoid YouTube because of the size restrictions. That said, my
initial impression is that iMovie 08 is geared more towards web video
publishing. After all there is no iDVD integration. I think the
writing is on the wall for home-made DVD's. Burning DVD's is time
consuming and wasteful to say the least.

Now after playing with this for awhile I must say that I'm lost. I
guess I'll have to go over the tutorials when I have a bit more time.
It's not at all intuitive.

Restarting this blog

So, I'm redoing my website in iWeb 08 and trying to bring this blog back to life. I was using Tumblr as a blog but have decided to put my original posts on this site. They will still be aggregated at Tumblr.

I was able to throw together a basic iWeb site very quickly that looks decent. I just don't have the time nor the inclination to develop anything too elaborate or customized at this time. My previous homepage was done with Google's fee page editor but thought it really looked bad. This new look is much better.