I signed up for a new 2-year agreement with Verizon Wireless this week, and got a new Kyocera KX414 phone. The reviews on this phone over at Wireless Gaming Review aren’t too good, but I wasn’t really intending to use it for gaming. I’m trying to decide if I should sign up for Get It Now for e-mail and web access, then just cancel my palm.net account. It’d be cheaper, but the screen is so tiny, and there’s only the numeric keypad, so it seems like it’d be a pain to use.
Category: hardware
backups
I got tired of trying to back up my 80 GB hard drive to 15 GB tapes today, so I ran out and bough a 120GB Maxtor OneTouch. Much faster and easier.
iPod
A nice article about the iPod from the NY Times Magazine: The Guts of a New Machine
handhelds
A little press release related to my company’s handheld computing program turned up on the Extended Systems site a while ago.
Burn, Baby, Burn
I’ve got my 52x CD writer working at 48x now, which is much better than the 16x it was originally doing. I think the trick was to not let Nero try to figure out the max speed, but just let it go. And just for yuks, I typed “burn baby burn” into Google, and found this year-old article from Time. The song remains the same.
CPU
Here’s a little hint, if your CPU is running too hot: Open the box and blow all the dust out. I did that last night, and it knocked about 5-10 C off the temperature.
Canon LiDE 30
Picked up a new scanner today — a Canon LiDE 30. Had a heck of a time figuring out how to clear up enough desk space for it. I had to turn my mouse pad sideways so it would fit, but I still seem to have enough room to use the mouse comfortably.
printing
Hey! I got my iBook to print to my desktop printer, attached to my Win XP machine! Okay, maybe that doesn’t sound impressive, but it’s something I’ve wanted to be able to do since I had the PowerBook 1400, and I’ve never been able to do it until now. Relevant links:
Gimp-Print — for PC printer drivers
Mac OS X Hints — search for “SMB”, “printing”, or something similar.
Essentially, you need to enable SMB printing, install relevant printer drivers, then add your printer, using the arcane syntax “smb://user:pass@workgroup/server/sharename”.
new iBook
The iBook showed up this week, too. It’s great. OS X is much better than OS 9. It looks great, too. DVD playback is nice. The sound quality is good, if you use good headphones. Lots of stuff to explore… I haven’t really even looked at the underlying BSD stuff yet.