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help: portable, internet capable devices

Mar 26th, 2008
by Jim Reverend.
23 comments

Long story short, my day-job is locking down our company laptops leaving me with no computer for personal use when on business trips. Not really eager to carry two laptops on a business trip and already having one laptop in the family,  I’m not really considering buying another full-blown laptop. However, I am potentially in the market for a small, portable, Internet capable device or an alternative. Here are my options.

Nokia N800. This ultra portable device can be had for $220. It has built in WIFI, Bluetooth, and webcam. It has a touch screen and an onscreen keyboard and is also compatible with a bluetooth keyboard which can be had for about $50. It has upgradable SD Card storage and features two slots to make using only one of them as removable storage a breeze. There is a huge user community and lots of available applications as well. Plus, it’s linux based, so it’s a hackers dream come true. Assuming the audio on it is decent, it could also potentialy replace my iPod and maybe even let me trade my smartphone (currently a Blackberry) in for a tetherable dumbphone. To be fair, however, I’m going to need a few SD Cards for storage. 8GB SDHC cards run $40 right now.

Nokia N810. Very similar to the N800, this device includes a slide-out keyboard, a GPS receiver, and 2GB of internal flash ram. On the down side, the webcam is in a fixed position, it looses one of the card slots, and only accepts MicroSD. Additionally, the keyboard is very small and would be difficult to use for any real typing. I already have a Bluetooth GPS receiver if I need that functionality. And, at $400, it’s almost double the price of the N800.

Asus EeePC. On the surface, this appears to have a similar feature set to the N800 and N810. However, unlike the handheld, pocket-sized N800, this device is quite clearly a laptop, although a very small one. It has a larger screen (though the same resolution), a faster processor, a full (though small) keyboard, and a built in wired ethernet port. It looses the touchscreen in trade for a touchpad and also loses bluetooth connectivity. With a more laptop-like stance, this device comes with more offline style applications and the processing power to handle running them. Like the N810, I can pick one up for $400, if I’m willing to go with Pink.

Linux bootable flash drive and my work laptop. I would have to have a fairly large card and a VERY paired down Linux distribution. Storing data on the laptop’s hard-drive is not an option due to part of the lock down. Additionally, a full-blown portable hard-drive is not an option because it takes up both of my USB ports and is far more wires than I’d care to deal with. The plus side is that this would be fairly inexpensive. At average prices, I can probably find a 16GB card and small card reader for $80-140. The downside is that I’d have to roll my own when it comes to fine tuning the Linux installation. My work laptop is a bit lacking in features so this would mean I’d have to find PCMCIA wireless drivers, and the bootable flashdrive would take up one of my two available USB ports.

iTouch.  For $300, an 8GB version of the iTouch can be had. This has the apple seal of approval, which all of the apple kids say is a good thing. I’m not too familiar with anything other than my iPod which I find acceptable but not exceptionally so. While there are very few 3rd party applications available, Apple’s recent release of the SDK means there is likely to be many more on the way. With what little time I’ve spent with the iPhone I can say that the user-experience is quite simple, intuitive, and fluid.  I have no doubt that the applications that come with the phone will be easy to use and perform as expected, if not better. The touch-screen keyboard isn’t the easiest thing to use from the get-go, but iPhone users say you get used to it pretty quickly. I lose the Bluetooth connectivity offered by the N800 which means that a fullish-sized keyboard is not possible and neither is a mobile, tethered network connection. Additionally, I lose the ability to expand my available memory or swap out my storage by using SD Cards. To counteract this, a 32GB iTouch can be purchased, but the price goes up another $200. While this is the “coolest” option, it is also most likely the least flexible, least future proof, and most expensive option of the bunch.

So, what are your thoughts? Is there an option I left off? Which of these makes the most sense?

Make Your Wish

Dec 19th, 2007
by Jim Reverend.
No comments yet

I believe this is a beautiful idea during this gimme-gimme holiday season.

1) Make a post in your blog/journal containing your 10 holiday wishes. The wishes can be anything at all, from something cheap and simple, to a your very own country. Include a method of contacting you if it isn’t already well know.

2) Look around amongst your friends and the blogs and journals that you read and see if there are any wishes you can afford to grant. If there is, and it’s in your heart to do so, then give. If you have the ability to “tag” in whatever you use to blog, you may considering using the tag “makeyourwish” so others can find your list more easily.

There are no rules, no guarantees, and no strings attached. Just wish, and it might come true. Give, and you might receive. And you’ll have the joy of knowing you made someone’s holiday special.

My list:

1. original art by YOU and other LIVING art
2. photographs and drawings of animals for the baby’s room
3. human subjects for photography projects
4. A Nikon D300
5. a hiking/camping partner
6. peace within and without
7. large, empty-ish, enclosed spaces for photography projects (warehouses, barns, garages, photo studios, etc)
8. mostly natural land to use for photography projects (fields, pastures, woods, etc)
9. secrets
10. a device to allow for nearly instantaneous transportation (see any number of sci-fi series for reference design, i.e. Star Trek, Star Gate, etc)

email: jim at revjim dot net

I need some spare muscles

Oct 6th, 2007
by Jim Reverend.
No comments yet

If you’re not doing anything tomorrow around noon-ish I could really use a hand picking up a piece of furniture at a place near my house and bringing it home. It’s not all that heavy, just a bit too awkward for me to lift alone and Jess is a bit too pregnant to help.

Thanks in advance!

send them all to me!

Sep 27th, 2007
by Jim Reverend.
No comments yet

I have a new phone email address. Well, no. I have a new way of getting email to my phone and I’ve now altered the old address to use the new method.

If you’d like to help me test it, that’d be great. Just locate or create a recording of yourself making lewd sounds or statements. Or, instead, find or take a suggestive photo of yourself that you’d just die if your family ever saw them. Then email those items to the following address:

danielNOSPACEHEREphone@inklog.net

You will, of course, need to remove the part that says “NOSPACEHERE”.

Thanks in advance.

Good advice

Sep 25th, 2007
by Jim Reverend.
1 comment

Thanks to those of you who chimed in to my call for opinions regarding our moving situation. (Actually, most of the responses are on the LiveJournal version of that entry, if you’d like to read the discussion yourself.) And, if you haven’t yet, your opinion is still considered valuable so, please, let me know what you think. At least until I make up my mind. Then just keep it to yourself, cause if you start changing my mind I’ll be pissed.

To sum it up for you, the discussion brought forth the following very good points:

  1. If we don’t move into this house and yet we still move to NY, given the time table of buying a house there, our only option will be to get an apartment until after the baby is born. Short version of the math: it will take 9 weeks to get to NY, find a new house and close on it, putting us at moving in just 3 weeks before the baby is due, which just isn’t going to happen.
  2. Logically, staying in Dallas makes the most sense.
  3. Emotionally, getting to Syracuse as soon as possible makes the most sense.
  4. Jess and I really dislike the location, commute time, layout, size (both too small and too big), and neighborhood of our current house, yet moving somewhere else in Texas prior to having the baby is not an option. Moving to this house in NY makes all of that go away.
  5. We just sank money into buying carpet we don’t even want which we will, logically, be stuck with for 3 years or so if we stay here.
  6. Karma/Fate/Destiny/Meant-to-be-ness seems to be steering us toward staying. (This was mentioned twice in comments, and once to me in bed last night by Jess).
  7. As *BIG* as moving and location stuff is, it really is all superficial in the grand scheme of things. My wife, my new baby girl, my family, my friends and our happiness is what matters most.
  8. Boobies make it all better… at least temporarily.

At this point, I think the best moment of clarity came with Nic’s comment, which said:

My take is this, you wanted to move to Syracuse because a couple of things fell into place to make it possible. Those things have all flipped since then, leaving you with pretty much only the desire to move. The problem is, the means to move seem to be slipping away.

So, why not take your foot off the sinking ship now. There are way too many gambles and what-ifs, and with your special circumstances, you really should be thinking about security right now. A while down the road, where things are less chaotic and you have the time/means to make a safe move, you should go for it. I would just hate to see you guys gamble and lose, especially at this critical time in your lives.

So that’s where it all sits now.

Here’s what I’m leaning towards. Call the powers that be and find out if staying is still an option (since I’ve already officially indicated that we’d still like to go). If it is, then wait out the current housing situation until 2 weeks after our rough closing date — which would be 10/15. At that point, if there’s no house, then we just stay here. Meanwhile, go about our lives as though we are staying. Start getting the house ready for a baby, making changes we’ve been putting off, etc. If staying is no longer an option, or isn’t an option I can drag out until 10/15, then just move into an apartment in NY and consider that “done” until March or April of next year.

Thoughts?

House News; Old Fashioned Internet Poll

Sep 24th, 2007
by Jim Reverend.
1 comment

I have absolutely no idea what I’m doing any more.

Jess and I were worried sick that our house would never sell. Especially after hearing that some friends of ours with a similarly priced house in a different neighborhood have had more visits than they can count in the past month and yet Jess and I have not even had one in 2 weeks. So, we worked it all out and decided our best option would be to rent the house at a loss and that that would make much more sense than selling it at a loss. This way, we don’t have to compete with the foreclosures and, potentially, will lose less money.

We no more than decide that one day when our lawyer in New York has some bad news the next (i.e. today). It seems that the seller’s lawyer is being slow. Hence the reason it’s taken so long to even get this information. However, now that we have it it seems that there is an uncleared lien on the property that is over 10 years old. It is from the owner of the house before the current owner. Logic would indicate that the current owner couldn’t buy it without that lien being cleared, so, more than likely, there really isn’t a lien on the house. But, in order to find out, Chase bank, the holder of the lien, has to dig through their records to find out. To make matters worse, our Lawyer’s assistant has indicated that working with Chase on this type of thing is generally very slow. Further more, since these records are over 10 years old, they may potentially be paper records in a box that someone has to track down.

So, this could take weeks — maybe months. So, Jess and I have a few options.

  1. Sit around and wait with our thumbs up our asses until someone tells us the house is ready to close on. This could be 2 weeks, 2 months, or 2 years.
  2. Wait until the proposed closing date of 10/1 and then submit a “Time is of the Essence” statement and wait out the 2-weeks required there and then start the house hunt all over again if we haven’t closed by then.
  3. Withdraw our offer, eat the earnest money, and start looking for another house now.
  4. Just say “Fuck It” and stay in Texas.

Also of note is that, any of the “look for a house” options actually entail moving to an apartment in New York and then looking for a house from that apartment while keeping our belongings in storage. There’s really no other way to manage it at this point.

As Joel suggested on Sunday, everything is best decided by a good old fashion Internet poll. And I think I agree. But I’m too damn lazy to figure out how to do a poll that will span the 5 or 6 different outlets this information might show up on, so we’ll do this the old fashioned way: just comment with your choice. Choose any of the above options or feel free to submit one of your own. Feel free to elaborate on your choice or let it stand alone. Bribes and suggestive banter will earn your vote extra weight in the final tally.

Game on!

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