or how i learned to elevate the mundane

The rumor-mill is, of course, buzzing about what Apple will announce next week.  I heard today that Apple sent confirmation to all of its retail outlets saying only, “It’s showtime!”  Could that possibly mean that we’re seeing the “real” video iPod and the rumored $14.99 movies in iTMS?  T’would seem to be.

I personally would love to see a brushed aluminum Nano with a builtin FM tuner or builtin XM integration.  But those are probably not in the cards…..

I’ve had this one PC for 10 years now.  It’s undergone some upgrades since I initially purchased it back in January of ’96.  Here’s what it came with (IIRC):

• Pentium 1 – 150MHz CPU
• 16 MB RAM
• 2(?) GB HDD
• 2D video card

Total cost for this monster:  > $3500.

In ’98, I think, I upgraded the mobo+cpu+ram+hdd on this.  Basically, the only thing that remained of the old PC was the power supply and case.  Back then it got upgraded to a:

• AMD K6-2 350 MHz CPU
• 64 MB RAM
• 8.4 GB HDD
• 2D/3D video card (4 MB VRAM)

Pretty snazzy.  Ran Win9x like a charm.  Not so much WinXP when that eventually came out.  Since that major upgrade, I’ve added a new CPU (AMD K6-2 450 MHz) more PC133 RAM (it’s now got 640 MB) and it’s got more HDD space (70GB) and a good-for-its-generation video card (Nvidia GeForce2 MX400 – 64MB VRAM).  But the computer only serves 2 purposes:  print server and music server for my Roku Soundbridge.

Last Sunday, it served its last MP3 and printed its last document.  Now I’m in a bit of a quandry.  Do I purchase an ultra-cheap low-end machine to backfill this, or do I demote my current desktop to serve this function and get a new “high-end” PC as my main machine?

My main machine’s current specs:

• AMD Athlon XP 2700+ CPU
• 1.5 GB DDR2-400 RAM
• 330 GB HDD
• ATI All-In-Wonder-Pro 9800 w/128 MB VRAM (DVI-out only)
• Dual Layer DVD burner

The reason I’m balking is that a “low end” machine these days is hardly much worse than this.  Sure, I don’t get the big HDD or that much RAM, but the rest is fairly comparable.  Also, this machine is going to find a bit rough running Vista, unfortunately.

As I see it, I have 2 options:

1. Backfill low – keep my current machine and backfill the “server”.  From the looks of it, this will cost me about $400 after factoring in an inevitable HDD upgrade.  I can run XP MCE on such a machine and not only serve up music to the Roku, but also pictures and video to the Xbox 360.  The downside is that I will probably be looking at a main machine upgrade when Vista RTMs since I’m not going to want to run it on a “classic” PC.  That will almost certainly cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $1200 at the time which makes this total purchase $1600 or so.
2. Demote and backfill high – This means demoting my current main machine.  More than enough power there to run XP MCE easily.  However, to get enough headroom in today’s PC to ensure I have Vista strength, probably looking at closer to $1700+ for a PC today.  This option runs the risk of being on the low-end of Vista-capable.  Unfortunately, you cannot test drive PC’s at home for a few days before buying.

I need to decide relatively quickly.  We have no printing alternatives that work well, plus it’s a drag not having the streaming music.

The Wife has been jonesin’ for a new laptop lately. I selfishly bought her a Dell Inspiron 5150 a couple of years ago, mostly because it sports a whoppin’ 3.2 GHz Intel CPU. Unfortunately, it’s also a boat anchor and this is what she mostly hates about it. It’d be one thing if the GPU were upgradeable, but I don’t believe it is so I’m stuck with some crappy ATI video card that won’t do games very well, which is about the only thing that would make the phat CPU worthwhile. Stupid buy on my part.
So I’m looking for a replacement laptop in the Ultraportable category (not even gonna touch the UMPC here). The Sony TX series is priced WAY out of control. The Alienware Sentia series looks interesting, but starts to get pricey when you add in the options, and the Dell M710 comes in at a good price point when you find it on sale, but is very uninspiring in just about every other category.

Except now you can get Apple hardware and dualboot XP. How cool is that? Very tempting for the gadget fetishist in me to get the nice Apple hardware yet sacrifice none of the app interop. Plus for things like movies and photos we can get the user-friendly goodness that Apple leads in. It’s going to be hard not to consider this a viable replacement laptop option moving forward. I need to run the numbers now.

Last week I got an Xbox 360.  I’m such a slave to gadgets, it’s so bad!  When the original Xbox came out, I resisted until after the first price drop.  The Wife got me the Xbox for Father’s Day.  Note that I had been a father for all of a month at that point, but I still qualified.

This time out, I was determined NOT to put forth much effort in obtaining one.  I didn’t pre-order to slap down any money to reserve one.  I just would occasionally check with various stores when I happened to be near one to see if they had any in stock.  My local Game Crazy(tm) had one last Wednesday, so just picked it up.

First impressions are that PGR3 look pretty good on the ol’ high-def TV.  I’ve only played with it for a couple hours in aggregate so far, and I only have 2 games (PGR3 & Tiger Woods).

Some early observations:

• The Windows Media Connect support for media files is nice to have.  I have a Roku device upstairs that I use to stream music to the living room.  Now I have the same access to the music in the downstairs HDTV room.  Nice.
• The WMC music UI scales for shit.  God help you if you have 300 unique artists to scroll through.  I don’t even want to try scrolling through song titles.
• I love – LOVE – the wireless remote and that it turns on/off the console VIA RF (RF!) as well as IR!
• The optical out port on the A/V cable does not hold the toslink cable very well.  Lame.
• The boot sound scared Andrew the first time he heard it.

Overall, an improvement over the original Xbox.  Heck, it’d better be.  So far, unfortunately, the game selection has been less than inspiring.  I’m sure it will improve over time.  Unfortunately, the game library for the PSP really didn’t.  Sony has really under-performed with its handheld console.  The UMD movie format is all but dead.  And the PS3 will likely not see US shores until 2007.  This should be interesting.

Meanwhile, I’m looking to unload my Xbox and associated games and accessories.  Drop me a line if you’re interested.

My iPod Shuffle (512MB) doesn’t work. Whenever I try to play it, the orange and green lights blink on the front. Whenever I plug it into a USB port, Windows seems to recognize it but iTunes does not. Unfortunately, Explorer doesn’t let me do anything with it (e.g. no Format, browse, etc.).

I’ve only had it for 5 months or so. Now I have to deal with Apple support. Lame.

Optically real illusions get accented more inclusively. While any situation too odd to alarm like leaders, yet loom always muchos egregiously.

So, this is another story that lends more evidence as to why I should just buy everything online.

We were shopping today for various necessities, and I remembered that one thing we’ve been wanting to get is a handheld vacuum cleaner for those little messes the young’uns make that don’t require hauling out The Beast. So, I wandered into a local “Linens ‘N Things” to make what amounted to an impulse buy.

I was looking at the various options and boiled them down to 2: a $20 corded vac and a $60 cordless one that “supposedly” offered tons of sucking potential. As I was mulling over my purchase (no Internet on hand to make an educated buy), a sales drone came by and asked if I needed any help.

Well, sure. Why not? I mean, I don’t know which one I want. Perhaps this guy could be helpful. So I say to him, “I’m having trouble deciding which way I should go here. This one is 3 times more expensive and I’m wondering if it’s worth it.”

Well, he takes a look at both boxes, one of which (the $20 one) says “600 watts!” (which he points out) on the box and the other which says “12 volts!” (again, pointing that out) on the box and declares (pointing to the 12V one, which was the cordless), “Oh, well, with that one you’ll get a ton more power.” (or something extremely similar to that).

I look at him blankly and almost ask him if he even knows what he’s talking about since either he has a ton of E&M knowledge sitting around in his head because he was able to – at a glance – determine the relative Power of the vacuums with only those 2 figures at hand*, or he looked at the relative size of the boxes and the price tags and made a value judgement of quality based on that.

While considering whether or not to make this guy prove right then and there how he knew for sure which vacuum actually had more power, he managed to redeem himself by asking me, “Do you think you’ll always use it with an outlet handy? Like, would you use it in your car?” And, voila!, a sale was made!

I suppose the moral of this story for folks who work in retail is that you should never try and make a sale by trying to bullshit the customer into thinking that you know what you’re talking about (unless you DO know what you’re talking about) because while sometimes the customer may take what you just said at face value because (s)he may be completely clueless about what they’re buying, at other times you’re just making yourself irrelevant to the purchasing process and the customer no longer trusts that you add value. In this case, the salesperson was able to make a sale not by some mystical store of wisdom on vacuum cleaners, but by making me see why I would need one feature over another. That’s adding value in my book.

* NOTE: Being a bit “sciency” myself, my bullshit detector went off the scale the instant the guy said what he did. One should be aware that Power (measured in watts) is the product of voltage and current (P=V*I). And, really, I think that the “600 watts” on the box probably really refers to the amount of power the vacuum consumes and really has very little to do with how well it sucks, though there’s probably some correlation to how well the motor works. I assume an E&M and mechanical engineering savant is not who I ran into at Linens ‘N Things today.

I have a Motorola DCT-6412 HD DVR from Comcast and it is the worst gadget I own. You really only expect a few basic things from a DVR, only one of which is a must: record the shows I want.

It doesn’t do that, and I pay a small fortune every month for the privilege of wondering whether or not it has recorded the shows I’ve asked it to record.

Is it too much to ask to be even remotely as good as TiVo?

After my stint as Santa this morning, I ended up heading to U-Village to take our son to his haircut appointment. I was fearing the worst, as my thoughts were around battling an army of 3-series drivers for scarce parking spots. But in the end, parking was tight but not awful, and it really only took me 2-3 minutes to find a reasonably decent spot (aka “the first spot available”).

It was a nice trip to U-Village all-in-all. Our son got a nice haircut, he played well in the little play area, and then he let me head to the Apple store after getting a hot chocolate at Starbucks (we waited there longer than trying to find a parking space). My gadget goal for today was the iPod Camera Connector for my 5G iPod (60GB/black) and my Canon SD450 (don’t think it will work with my Canon EOS 10D) so that I can untether myself from a laptop on vacations.

I got home and tried it out and I have to say that it wasn’t as bad as I had feared. I’ve read iLounge and various other reports that say that the camera connector sucks the life out of both the iPod and camera batteries and while it did take longer than I would’ve liked and sucked more juice than I would’ve like, it wasn’t nearly as alarming as I had feared. There were 220 photos on my 1GB SD card (~60% used, I think) and they were copied over to the iPod using what seemed to be about 15-20% of the total battery. And at $29, it’s a pretty good price (especially given that the phrase “pretty good price” isn’t typically associated with Apple branded products).

Pros

Cons

All-in-all, I give this accessory a thumbs up! 4 stars (out of 5)! Whatever rubrick you so desire. It’s very much worth not hauling around a laptop with you even though it has its drawbacks.