I got an HD-DVD player today, the Toshiba HD-A3. It was on sale at Best Buy last weekend for $200, with 10 free HD-DVDs (2 in the box, 3 at the checkout, and 5 by mail). I still have an old-fashioned CRT TV, so the actual HD stuff isn’t really going to come through just yet. I’ll probably buy a new TV early next year.
To make room for the HD-DVD player, I had to do a bunch of rearranging in my living room. I finally got rid of my old casette tape deck, which apparently wasn’t even hooked up to my receiver. (I’m not sure how long it’s been disconnected, but I don’t think I’ve used it at any time in the last five years, at least.) And I put my old laser disc player aside, since I haven’t used that in the last few years, either. My VCR is still plugged in, but I don’t actually have any cables from it running to the TV anymore.
I’m keeping my old DVD player (also a Toshiba; picked up from Woot for $40), since I think it supports a few formats that the HD-DVD player doesn’t, such as DivX.
So, that leaves me with a receiver, DVD player, HD-DVD player, Sony PS2, Wii, and Tivo. The Tivo output goes into one video input on the TV, while the other four items go into a four-port switch box that goes into another video input on the TV. Complicated, but I guess not as complicated as it would be if I tried to keep the laser disc player and VCR in the loop.
I haven’t had a chance to actually do much with the HD-DVD player yet, but it seems to work OK. It takes about a minute to boot, and about 30 seconds to load a disc. That seems kind of excessive, but I guess it’s still typical for an HD-DVD player. I think I may continue using the old DVD player for regular DVDs, just due to the quicker load time.
Meanwhile, I think I still have about 50 DVDs I haven’t watched yet. (Most of them are anime DVDs I got during a big sale at Right Stuf. Still, that’s a lot of DVDs.)
Category: hardware
getting rid of stuff
I’m selling my old Toshiba E310 Pocket PC on eBay, if anyone out there is even vaguely interested.
I bought it back in 2002 mostly because my company was doing some stuff with Pocket PCs at the time, so I just wanted to familiarize myself with the platform, and also see if was any better than my Palm. Well, it never wound up replacing my old Palm i705 for day-to-day use, even though it was technically a better machine. (The i705 doesn’t even have a color screen.) I did have some fun playing games on it, and I also read a few eBooks on it. It was pretty good for that kind of thing. But I could never talk myself into using it as an organizer.
It does look a lot like the non-phone PDA is just about dead now. There’s really nothing new in that category coming out from either Palm or any Pocket PC vendor, except for some vertical market stuff.
Sony Reader
I was wandering around Costco today, and saw that they had the Sony Reader PRS-500 on sale for $250. I almost picked one up, but thought better of it. I’m glad I did, since a little research reveals that the new model, the PRS-505 came out last week. It’s available for $300 direct from Sony. I’ve been mighty tempted to pick one of these things up since they were first announced about a year ago, but I figured I should wait for the second gen, at least, assuming there would be one. Well, I guess now there is.
It’s still not altogether that compelling. It does 8 shades of grey (vs. 4 on the old one). Supposedly the screen refresh is faster. The interface seems to have been improved a bit. It appears that it still doesn’t support full-text search within a book, though. I really think that a decent search interface, along with the availability of a large number of technical reference books, would make this a killler device for programmers and other tech folks. And a partnership with Safari would be great too. Imagine being able to sync all the books on your Safari bookshelf down to this device. Safari’s nice, but you can’t really just sit back in a recliner and read a book off the Safari web site; it’s basically just good for reference. (I guess you *could* read a book off Safari, but I’m not comfortable doing it, even with my iBook. Notebook screens just aren’t good enough for extended reading sessions. At least for my tired old eyes.)
It’s still an interesting device, even if it’s only good for stuff that you’re going to read in a linear fashion — novels, mostly, and maybe some non-fiction. I like the idea of carrying a nice small device around, rather than carrying, say, the 1250-page Essential Ellison. Of course, they don’t have much Ellison available at the Sony ebook store. Heck, they don’t have any Tolkien, or any of the Harry Potter books either.
Maybe I’ll wait for the third generation!
cleaning stuff up
I’m getting over a cold right now, so I’ve stayed in all day, watching college football, and working on various things around the house. Once again, I found myself about 6 months behind in entering my Merrill Lynch statements into Quicken, so I took care of that. And, I did another round of going through old papers, shredding old receipts and filing some stuff I wanted to keep. I found a bunch of stuff from my fraternity, Alpha Phi Omega, including my “plausible deniability award” (don’t ask).
I also found receipts from the first two PC-compatible machines I owned. The first was an Amstrad PPC-640. (Check that web link. I’d forgotten that I could power it with ten D cells! Try that with your MacBook Pro! And, yes, it was a 22 lb portable!) The second was a fairly vanilla 286 Wang. (Alas, I can’t find a picture of that one on the internet.)
And I found some receipts related to my Amiga 500, though I didn’t find the receipt for the machine itself.
open source stuff
My company is setting up a new (small) office in Pennsylvania, and I’m thinking about using some Linux stuff down there. I’m planning on using IPCop for the firewall, and maybe Openfiler for a NAS.
I’ve been using IPCop in our main office for the last few years, so I’ve got no doubts about that, and I’m quite familiar with it. I’ve never used Openfiler though, or any other open source NAS package. I considered putting an old Dell PowerEdge box running Windows 2000 Server down there, but I’m not really enthusiastic about that; it’s an old box, and an old OS, and I don’t really need all the overhead of a full Windows server. Nor do I want to pop for a Windows 2003 Server. I just need a place to put shared files for a small workgroup. I’m hoping Openfiler works well for that, and is easy to access from a Windows XP client. I’ve been looking at the Openfiler forums, and I think this thread may prove helpful. I haven’t actually gotten around to installing OF on a box yet. I downloaded it Friday afternoon, but I mistakenly downloaded the 64-bit version, and I didn’t realize that until after 5pm on Friday, so I left my machine downloading the 32-bit ISO and went home. I’ll give it a try on Monday.
new monitor
My old Planar LCD monitor died this week, so I went out to Best Buy and bought a new LG monitor, a 19″ widescreen. This new monitor doesn’t have any more screen real estate than the old one, but the widescreen thing is interesting. I’m not sure I like it better than the standard aspect ratio on the old monitor.
I’m also thinking that I may not have got the color calibration quite right; I went through the whole process of setting it up, using the LG software, but it still looks a bit too pink. Maybe I’ll have to try it again. And maybe I need to look at the video card driver too, and see if anything there needs to be adjusted.
I dropped off the old monitor at the Somerset County Recycling facility today. Conveniently, it died just a few days before the monthly drop-off day. I’d never been down there to drop anything off before. It went relatively smoothly; I just had to wait in line behind a few other cars for a few minutes, then they just took the monitor out of my car and off I went. (On my way out, the line had gotten much longer, so I think I need to remember to get there before 10am, if I ever have to go back.) I was surprised at how many computers they had piled up there. I saw an old first-gen iMac, a blue & white G3 tower, and a big pile of beige/grey/black boxes of various models. I’m hope they’re doing something responsible with them, and not just burying them in a hole somewhere.
lots of computers
Right now, I’m running a full backup of my desktop PC to my new 500 GB external drive. I’m also working on wiping my old Gateway and reinstalling Windows XP on it, so I can hand it off to a friend who has some use for it. And I’m also installing various things on my new Vista laptop. So I’m jumping around from machine to machine, checking on stuff, pressing “OK” a lot, and stuff like that.
On the Vista laptop, I’ve spent several hours trying to get Visual Studio 2005 and SQL Server Express set up. Everything seems to be working now, but it sure takes a long time to get that all set up. First, you have to install the original VS 2005 package from DVD. That takes a while. Then, you have to install SP 1. That can take quite a while: several hours. There’s a good explanation for this lengthy install here, and apparently Vista adds even more of a complication to this, so it takes even longer under Vista vs. XP.
After SP1, you need to install the Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 Update for Windows Vista Beta. I’m a little alarmed that this is still a beta; you’d think that one of Microsoft’s first priorities would be getting a good solid development environment running on Vista.
And, if you want to bring SQL Express up to date, you need to install SQL 2005 Service Pack 2. I’m not 100% if I had to do both of these, but I installed “SQL Server 2005 Express Edition with Advanced Services” and “SQL Server 2005 Express Edition Toolkit”. Then, I went back and installed the latest Books Online files.
So, all that took about four hours. Call me crazy, but that really seems like too long just to set up your development environment. Back in the old days, it’d take maybe 5 minutes to install, say, Clipper 5.2 or Turbo Pascal. I guess this is progress, but it doesn’t feel like it!
progress
I hooked up my new 500 GB external drive to my desktop computer today, so I’ll be ready to try a full backup tomorrow. I’m probably going to take my old 100 GB drive and use it to do full backups on the new Vista laptop and my old iBook. I’m not sure if I really want to keep that drive though; I don’t really have any place to keep it. (I’m just running out of room in my apartment!)
I also figured out that the DVDs I used to backup my Vista laptop at work yesterday were probably DVD+R (rather than DVD-R), which may explain why they worked while my DVD-R media wouldn’t. Maybe the drive just doesn’t work well with DVD-R? I’ve seen reference to the idea that DVD+R is more reliable, but that was on Wikipedia, so who knows it that’s accurate.
If I can manage to get my full backup(s) done tomorrow, then I can finally get around to installing Office 2007 on both my desktop and laptop. Maybe I can get some of the other installs I need to do on the laptop done too. Of course, I’d really like to get out of the apartment for a little while this weekend!
complications
Everything’s complicated. I wanted to do a complete hard drive backup on my desktop PC before upgrading to Office 2007. I’ve got a 250 GB hard drive in that machine, and I’m using about 200 GB on it. I’ve got an extra internal 100 GB HD, and an external 120 GB HD, so I should be able to get the backup done across those two devices without too much grief. But no. I burned up a bunch of time yesterday getting about halfway through the backup, then watching it blow up when it ran out of room on the internal drive. I’ve done this backup before with Retrospect, but it just isn’t working now. After tweaking a few things, I think I’ve got it right, and I start another backup. I’m puttering around doing other stuff in the apartment while this is going on; at some point, I decide to turn on the TV and check the weather. Boom. Turning on the TV causes a momentary surge (or sag, or something) that causes the computer to reboot. End of backup.
I’ve got a new UPS on order that should prevent this sort of power thing from happening again. And I picked up a 500 GB external drive at Best Buy today that should allow me to get the whole backup on one drive. (Then, I can maybe use the secondary internal drive for automated backups of key files. Wouldn’t that be nice?)
new Vista laptop
I just ordered myself a new Dell Inspiron E1505. I got a pretty good deal on it through Dell’s EPP (employee purchase program) site. (I have access to that through work, since we do a lot of business with Dell.) I got it with Vista Ultimate installed. I still can’t say that I’m really enthusiastic about Vista, but I do think that I’ll need to learn it, just for the sake of keeping my skills current, if for no other reason.
I need to pick up a book on Vista too, either Brian Livingston’s Vista Secrets or David Pogue’s Missing Manual, I think. I probably still have Livingston’s original Windows Secrets, for Windows 3.1, floating around here somewhere; I remember that being a really good book. And I have a couple of Pogue’s Mac OS X Missing Manual books, and those are pretty good too.
I should try and get myself a copy of Office 2007 too, so I can learn that. I might pick up the upgrade package from CostCo, or wherever else I can find it discounted to a semi-reasonable level.
Really, Microsoft is just getting out of hand with pricing. They do have the “Home and Student” version of Office now, and that’s relatively affordable, but it doesn’t include Access or Outlook, so that’s a bit of a deal breaker for me, at least. And Vista pricing is a joke, if you’re buying it off the shelf.
Meanwhile, I’m still getting over my cold. I feel a lot better today, but I’m still feeling a bit weird. As long as I’m back to normal by WonderCon, I’m good.