Let’s say you’re looking to buy a car, you ask yourself or a salesman: “What can this car do/What can I do with this car?”  After skimming through a list of it’s capabilities you start to have questions that begin with “Can I/it…” or “Does it…” to which some answers will probably be “no”.  On the other hand, knowing that you want some thing that can transport you and your extended family on land and water while offering sleeping areas and a bathroom would lead you toward buying a RV or a “Duck” and modifying it OR taking the Star Trek route and just building a transporter while negating all the traveling related amenities you wanted in the first place.  I guess the more I explain it the more frivolous the point seems but it boils down to the importance of knowing what you want instead of knowing what you can’t have, can’t do, or can’t accomplish.

With that in-mind, a couple months ago I began to look into complimenting my mobile arsenal with a tablet device. I wanted a device that was as closely capable, if not more than, my net book but didn’t need to necessarily replace it. I enjoy my Dell mini 10v but sometimes I just want to browse the web, watch a movie, or otherwise kill some time without the need for a keyboard or the desire to boot it up (which is fast anyway) and have a bigger, more vertical screen for reading books or browsing the web. I found myself looking at various tablet devices including the Samsung Galaxy Tab, the Dell Inspiron Duo, the BlackBerry Playbook, the iPad, and several others that didn’t have the portability I was looking for or the interface didn’t stand up to the others.

Dell Inspiron Duo. I was really impressed with the form of this device, specifically the sleekness and the unique horizontally hinged/vertically flipping display.  It was exactly what I want out of a tablet: the ability to get some serious typing done for email, writing papers, or articles and to do away with the keyboard when I just want to watch movies, browse the web, or play a video game or two.   My hopes for this were spoiled when I saw how sluggishly the video and touch screen performed in all the demo videos I saw which were all of Dell representatives supposedly showing it off.  I would have been so embarrassed to tout this in front of a room full of critics and media representatives.  This would have been more of a candidate to replace my Mini if anything, not compliment it.

The Samsung Galaxy Tab. My initial impression was that this could make phone calls but I may have gotten the details mixed up after digging through so much information about tablets. The issue there though would be paying for the functionality of a phone without the mobility of modern cellular devices.  The Galaxy Tab’s real features, specifically the front and rear facing cameras and flash support, are pretty high on my list and sadly non-existent in the current version of the iPad. Unfortunately, the resounding answer to whether or not Android is ready for tablet sized screens yet is “no”.

The iPad. I want to make video calls and see flash on websites that aren’t specifically written for iOS’s limitations features but I can’t get away from the iTunes+iBooks+App Store and Jailbreak ecosystems which all together thwart any market place other manufacturer+carrier teams have come up with.  There is a lot of useless junk on Apple’s App Store.  So much that it’s obvious if there were some way to clearly define and remove not just redundant or simply non-functioning apps but also apps that haven’t been updated for the latest iOS, Apple’s App Store numbers wouldn’t appear quite so impressive.  Despite the disappointing feeling I get when I think about that, I have and continue to enjoy more completely free and paid-for apps from the App Store (and Cydia) than the utterly, frustratingly useless apps (some of which I’ve paid for).  One quickly learns to read the reviews prior to purchasing or even downloading free apps though.  Other than the market place, the community support is just as overwhelming and the iPad’s screen resolution and battery life is also superior to other tablets so far.

The BlackBerry PlayBook. Other than this device not being out at the time I was looking for a tablet (or the time of this post), I haven’t seen much that would have deterred me from purchasing it.  Of course, it’ll still be lacking the media and app ecosystem compared to that of Apple.  It is a little smaller than the iPad but makes up for it with a 3MP front and 5MP back facing cameras, it has both full Adobe Flash 10.1 and supports HTML5, and according to the PlayBook and iPad comparison video they have on their site it supposedly out performs the iPad in web rendering by quite a bit.  Even with the PlayBook’s shorter onscreen keyboard it’s taking up about 50% of the screen while the iPad’s keyboard takes up just under that in landscape mode.  It really is a fairly minor detail though, it was noticeable from the comparison video how much less of the background website was visible when the keyboard came up.  The PlayBook will also have 4G network access or a 4G model.

Conclusion. Well by the title and what I’ve compared everything to, of course I bought the iPad… but why?  If I had to pick only one reason it would be the market place/ecosystem, without a doubt.  Just the App Store and Cydia communities alone have provided limitless avenues for revenue, device customization, and user support.  The convenience of purchasing everything for my devices within iTunes or on the devices themselves with one account and the variety of music, books, or apps within all the categories, especially games, is the only reason most people have stuck with or purchased new iDevices (in my humble opinion).  Like many, I am not above buying something that I realize has drawbacks because everything can and will.  Do I want to have a flip out keyboard and full, native support for video chatting?  Well yea, and I can get that with other tablet devices.  Can I play music, watch movies, browse the web, remote desktop, read books, play games, use VoIP, chat, and use all my social networking apps on all of these devices?  Of course.  Which one of those would probably have the most options of both hardware and software?  Probably the Dell Duo with Windows 7, it is a full blown laptop after all but the performance wasn’t very good so… which one of those would have the best performance?  Probably the PlayBook but will it ever have all the games, apps or utilities that are available for iOS whether for a fee or free?  Probably not… all these carrier and manufacturer tag teams can try to reap the rewards Apple has from iDevices but they won’t come close until they can start pulling customers away from that ecosystem where they can obtain all their media or apps and get the support they need.

Kudos. VideoStream allows any iDevice to stream video directly from a Mac or Windows machine that’s on your local network or over the internet!  If, like me, you’re not thrilled about the hassle of converting your videos to a format iOS can play or can’t choose what you want to store on your device with the limited space then VideoStream is the perfect cure.    The free version only has a tiny banner ad at the bottom and the paid version, without the banner, is $2.99 currently.  Aside from streaming your videos off the server, you can also choose what video files you want the server to convert for you to download later and watch when you’re offline!

Gripes. The developers are responsive on the forums also which is a perk since the app and the PC/Mac server component still has a few bugs to work out.  One out of three of the videos I’ve attempted to convert actually converted completely and even then it was a 45 minute to an hour long video that took up about 1.1 GB on my iPad so… could use some work there also.  Also, when streaming or converting, my file server’s processor is basically pegged at 100% so having multiple streams coming from the server at once is out of the question for the time being.

At any rate, there’s not much to lose with the free version of VideoStream so give it a spin on your iDevice!

Music Controls has a wide array of features from status bar and lock screen tweaks to gestures and control for quite a few music apps out there.  The AVRCP support isn’t even a footnote on the above web page but it’s the only feature I cared about.  Music Controls comes with a full 5-day demo (which is activated through the settings app) after which it costs only $5!

So much for that, thankfully a third party solution has been around for what seems like at least a couple years.  It’s called “SuperCopier” (link below) and it somehow is able to intercept (and vastly improve) the default Windows copy and move dialogs.  SuperCopier has every option one would want for doing or skipping the usual questions explorer asks when copying or moving files.  If you’re a right-click and drag type of copier/mover you still have an option to use the default Windows copy/move dialogs but after installing SuperCopier it takes over by default when using ctrl+c/v or left-click and drag.  Some of the options include actions for when a file already exists, when there is a copy or move error, copy lists/cues, even speed throttling, and even checking if there is enough free space prior to copying everything in the cue.

SuperCopier Website.

Alas, after skin-deep googling I realized I wasn’t the only one having this problem and I found a couple of solutions, one which involved completely restoring the phone.  Since getting iOS4 on there and restoring all my apps and data took a few hours to begin with I wasn’t so keen on doing that without trying something else.  It turns out, hard resetting the device twice improved the speed quite a bit, to where I can actually use it without wanting to gouge my eyeballs out of my skull.

One note before you get to the link though: I have verbose boot enabled on my phone so I was able to tell that doing the hard reset (like the article hints toward, clears out caches and ram buffers) is actually causing the phone to do a consistency check of the file system which doesn’t sound safe to me so please backup prior to doing this and continue at your own risk!

Speed Up iPhone 3G + iOS4 with a Hard Reset? | Cult of Mac.

I love using Ubuntu and being able to add whatever software I want to it on a whim without illegally downloading software or worrying about viruses BUT… every once in a while I either need to test or use a Windows only program where one of my other virtualization modes won’t cut it.

• VirtualBox is great, but requires a lot of memory and a decent processor.  Not ideal for me while using my netbook since it only has 1gb of ram and a mobile processor, which is plenty for Ubuntu but not for running Ubuntu and Windows XP simultaneously.
• Wine, tried and true, without a doubt has it’s merits but getting everything working correctly can be quite a chore, even installing Internet Explorer is relatively easy but it doesn’t work 100% (understandably).
• Crossover, from codeweavers, takes a lot of the guesswork out of using Wine but it’s still Wine in the end and suffers from the quirks of Wine.  It does cost a little but I think it’s very affordable.
• rdesktop, is a Linux command line client which allows users to connect to a Windows machine with terminal services running.  There is a gui client ‘grdesktop’ which supports a little more than tsclient like copy/pasting from local and multiple remote clipboards.
• Now for Cendio AB – SeamlessRDP, first of all, it runs on the terminal server.  You use rdesktop from Linux to connect to the terminal server which you then specify in rdesktop you want to use seamlessrdp.exe as your shell and it basically gives you a remote desktop window that resizes with your application.  This is the same type of application publishing available in Windows 2008 server but on Windows client operating systems and I think SeamlessRDP also enables rdesktop to make a more published application feel while making it compatible with rdesktop’s seamless mode.  One Note: The instructions for getting this to work on the Cendio site didn’t mention enabling fast user switching in Windows XP to get this working, this may be a requirement of rdesktop’s seamless mode in general but it’s required nevertheless.

Published applications are processed and rendered on the terminal server and only the view of the application’s window is sent to the client machine.  So for me, on my netbook or otherwise and as long as I can connect to my terminal server, it’s ideal since all the processing and the majority of the memory consumption takes place on the server not to mention it’s an actual Windows environment, not Wine.  Also, I don’t have to deal with a full screen remote desktop session that I’d have to switch out of to get to other local applications.  If I were trying to play games this wouldn’t be ideal of course but for the applications that I run it’s doing well so far.

Terminal Server Patch at sala source.

File server. It all started when I was trying to watch high definition media located on my file server from my media center. The media center was connected to the network via wifi so that just couldn’t cut it for 720p stuff at all. Once I plugged it into the network the stuttering and chops got a little better but no where near watchable. So I broke down and took my cheap ass to the computer store to buy a USB 2.0 card for my poor old champ file server which was sporting a blazing fast pIII 700mhz processor. Turns out I never could get the card working and I tried two different cards.

Since I still wanted USB 2 and didn’t want to buy a whole new machine I decided to throw my old gaming machine in the file server case and go with that. Well after a little while that backfired as I ohh-so-intelligently decided to not look at the power rating of the 350w power supply I put in there which not only had to power 4 IDE drives but also the video card I had that would fit that board is a radeon 9800, which required additional power. Stability problems ensued, couldn’t boot off a working CDROM drive or USB stick even after updating the bios because it wasn’t looking at any of the choices I set. Also the only fans I had for that processor were quite a few decibels over what I was used to.

With power supply partially fried and motherboard and bios not behaving I decided to take another trip to the store and spent $100 on a used motherboard, processor, 1gb ram, a new power supply, and a new quiet fan for the processor. Great, dandy even, I’m set right? No. Well after cleaning up the destruction and getting the machine back in it’s place, reinstalling windows and finishing all the updates it starts blue screening on me at random. Tested the memory and sure enough, one of the sticks is bad so I had to make yet another visit to the store. I should have just spent the money on new ram but NoooOOooo.  I then exchange it for another stick of ram, ohh it’s bad too.  A few days of ram testing and not having consistent access to my media and it’s finally back in the stable condition it was before all this started, yay!

iPhone. Since my 2g iPhone I’ve rarely had issues that I couldn’t recover from but just a couple months ago when my 3g decided it wouldn’t boot after I restarted it when it locked up I was out of a phone for a couple days.  It was apparent how crippled my professional, educational, and personal life became without it… ‘fascinating’ </Spock>.  From internet tethering to facebook, sms, and conference calls; the practical uses created a void but unfortunately I hadn’t backed my phone for a couple months so after restoring it, jailbreaking, and unlocking it I still had a bit of work to do.

Thankfully everything’s working on it now except for the bottom speaker constantly stops working unless I grab the phone at both ends and give the entire thing a little twist.  I learned how to open up a 3g iPhone, attempted to clean out the insides with a few duster shots and after putting it back together 3 times it finally started working consistently for a week or so until about yesterday when it started cutting out again… bleh!

Netbook. I love my netbook and it was working great on Ubuntu 9.10 so why, god why, did I go ahead and allow it to update to 10.4 when it asked me to?  What a fantastic mistake that turned out to be… what gave me the impression this would be as painless as telling a WordPress site to automatically update itself?  At some point during the automated update process it choked and then couldn’t undo the changes it made and after rebooting the system was completely unusable (thank heavens for DropBox though).  I then thought rather than attempt to fix the issues with my less than expert Linux skills I’ll want to kill myself less if I just wipe the machine and reinstall so “… if I’m going to format it anyway I might as well just put a clean install of 10.4 on there”.  Well after a month and a half of battling email issues since I wanted to check out some of the new integrated features of 10.4, blue tooth nightmares with keyboard/mouse and iPhone tethering, and other network manager issues… it’s finally working just like I want. *whew*

Main Desktop. Sometimes, not always, I need to relearn lessons I learned long ago.  I don’t like having a virus scanner, no matter how good or low profile it is but I should run one on my file server at least or install a good manual scanner.  Not to be arrogant but it’s embarrassing even at my relatively inexperienced level to get a virus.  Thankfully this wasn’t just a virus though, it was an impressive category known as a ‘rootkit’.  I gotta hand it to the jackasses that embedded it into the software I illegally downloaded downloaded for educational purposes.  If they hadn’t also included that blatant, in-your-face ‘xp smart security‘ virus I’d likely not have searched for other issues and noticed I had a rootkit installed for some time.  Since I had been dealing with rootkits and that xp security scanner virus with one of my clients only recently I already had a firm grasp of what was going on.

Through some odd twist of wires, electrons, and fate it ended up nuking my Windows XP install so badly before I got it off that I could not boot and received blue screens every time I tried.  I even think the main boot record became corrupt somehow and I lost the ability to boot into Ubuntu.  After many late nights and looking up every problem I ran into on my tiny netbook screen I familiarized myself with grub and the windows recovery console, nuked my software and system registry hives and was finally able to boot into Windows without having to completely wipe my machine clean.  Thankfully the file server was infected with the rootkit also but wasn’t blue screening.  Nuking the registry hives wasn’t an option since I didn’t have a working CDROM in that computer then to use or copy over the recovery console from a Windows XP CD.  It’s all removed now, but let me just say: getting rid of some rootkits are a bit more challenging than removing any other type of virus, GMER to the rescue if you find yourself in that spot.

Is that the end of an involuntary spring cleaning??