I have been looking into buying a new laptop. My current one, an HP Pavillion ze4530us isn’t bad, but I need something more powerful. I originally got it on sale site unseen. I was looking for any relatively cheep laptop to replace old Dell (bought used) I had that was physically falling apart. The one I wanted sold out but they said they had this one and I said ok. I had never bought an HP before, but it has been a really good laptop. I know nothing about their support though, I have been lucky enough not to have needed it.
While I bought that one without much research, this one I planed on getting exactly what I want. As I found out, that isn’t at all possible. In my search for a new laptop I have used a lot of gas. I have been to about six electronics/office supply store (some more than once) to see what is out there. Most everything about laptops is going in directions I don’t like. Lots of extra buttons, wide screen, glossy screens, and tiny touchpads are on most every notebook on shelves.
I can live with extra buttons or a widescreen monitor, but glossy I think I would get sick of quickly (pretty, but too much glare). But the worst is the mouse. What part of the computer do we most interact with? Lets see how small we can get it then. And to make things even harder to use, why not recess it. Thankfully at least Sony, Gateway, and maybe Dell (but they don’t sell retail so I can’t actually look at them in person) still make reasonable sized touchpads. The MacBook wasn’t bad either, but not good enough to overcome my fear of OSX and/or WinXP under BootCamp with a one button mouse.
Well, the real reason I decided to post this was when I got finished configuring what was likely to be my next laptop, it was a bit expensive. So looking to shave a few dollars here and there, I looked at what I upgraded. First being Windows XP Pro for $100. XP Home and Media Center Edition add nothing to the base cost. I know Home sucks, but I couldn’t find any information on exactly what the difference between Media Center and the others were. I tried Google and had little luck.
Then falling for all the TV ads I have seen lately, I tried the new Ask.com. I asked “what is the difference between Windows Media Center Edition and Home Edition.” The first result was a pretty helpful forum post pointing someone to the Wikipedia page on Media Center. Maybe I just got lucky with that result though, since others on the page weren’t as factually accurate or not direclty on topic, but Google just wasn’t getting it done. The best I could do with Google was this thread.
For anyone else wondering what the difference between XP Pro and Media Center, it seems to be that Media Center is based on Pro and has most of its features. I am not 100% sure about all the differences, but it seems that it will do what I want. According to Wikipedia, other than not being able to join an Active Directory domain (which there are hacks availble for), it “retains most other Windows XP Pro-specific features, such as Remote Desktop and the Encrypting File System.” Some place even said the setup screens call it Windows XP Pro.
Anyway, I am going to give Media Center a shot. I hope it isn’t a mistake. If it is I will update this post.
I had two very similar setups from Gateway and Dell and was having a hard time choosing. One of the final deciding factors came when I used each site’s online chat to ask questions about the systems, most important being touch pad dimensions. Gateway didn’t have them. Dell did, but was not sure if those dimensions included the buttons as well. From the size I doubt it did, the measurements seemed close to what I was estimating for Gateway. That didn’t help me decide, but the sales people and chat programs did. Dell’s chat window sucked (I was using a Firefox 2 Alpha/Bon Echo nightly so that could be partially to blame), it kept refreshing and scrolling back up to the beginning of the conversation.
Plus, after I pointed them to the system I had configured, they were pushing upgrades on everything. Bigger hard drive, faster hard drive, surge protector, etc. When I asked if the faster hard drive would use more power and create more heat, she said no. At the time I thought that was clearly wrong, a bit of Google research shows that might not be/isn’t always true anymore.
What really got me though, I did not type back fast enough to Dell’s (probably automated) are you still there question and the chat session was ended. I was in the middle of chatting to Gateway and researching things on the net at the same time. Isn’t that an important feature of chatting over the internet, you can do more than one thing at a time. Cutting a prospective customer off is certainly not the way to make a sale, so they didn’t. I ordered the Gateway NX560XL shortly after that.
June 6th, 2006
My mom has been talking about wanting a camera and it was her birthday so I figured why not kill two birds with one stone. She gets a camera and I get to try out one of the new Canon models. I could easily have gone with a cheaper model, but I found a pretty good deal on the Canon A540 (six megapixels), $36 below average street price and free shipping. Most reviews say it is worth the extra cost over the very similar A530 (five megapixels).
It seems to me that the A540 shares at least some of the new hardware being used in the Canon SI S3 that I want. Reviews of the S3 have not been so great because it is basically the same as the S2. You get one more megapixel but they say ISO 400 is less sensitive than it used to be on the S2 (because now it is a more correct measure) and ISO 800 is basically unusable. After trying out the A540 I agree, 800 is basically unusable unless you really must have the picture and don’t care about the quality. And even then it doesn’t seem much better than the old S2’s 400 in the dark though that is with image stabilization so hard to compare directly.
Full reviews of the S3 are now up at dpreview.com and dcresource.com. Both have some pretty good comparisons photos from the S3 and the S2. While I still think it is a great camera, I have decided (for now) it is not worth upgrading from my S2. But if my S2 died, the S3 certainly would be on the top of my list.
Back to the A540, other than ISO 800 being so noisy most people will never use it and the long flash refresh time, it is a nice little camera. I would prefer a bit more zoom, but you know I am addicted to my 12x. For most people 4x would be good enough. I really like the size, I was a bit shocked when I saw how small it was. It would be a bit of a bulge in your pocket, but it would certainly fit. It makes my S2 look giant. I miss the image stabilization of the S2. Without it, the camera is not very useful indoors without the flash. But few cameras in its class have any kind of image stabilization.
One of the reasons I went with the A540 was it had an optical view finder. My mom can hardly use my camera because she has trouble moving focusing between the fold out LCD and the subject for aiming. The viewfinder of the S2 is also an LCD, so she thought a viewfinder like a real camera would be better. Turns out the optical viewfinder isn’t much better. Part of it has to do with her bifocals, but I am not sure all of it can be blamed on that. I don’t really like the viewfinder since I am used to the LCD live preview, but I don’t have a problem using it.
You can read more on the A540 at dcresource.com and CNet.
May 29th, 2006
I have been doing some more graphic editing. This time placing my cousin’s face in the poster for one of her favorite old movies. To go a bit further, I then started looking for the font used so I could match it and add her name. The first place I tried was Identifont, there you answer questions about characteristics of the font and it narrows down its database. The second place I tried was WhatTheFont, with this site you send in an image and it attempts to find the most similar font in its apparently much larger database.
The first site gave me 30 possible results, with the first being Arial. That greatly lowered my expectations of success. Based on the questions I answered, Arial is similar but not close to what I wanted. Some of the rest were much closer and finally I found one that looks to be a close relative if not a perfect match.
But just to make sure, I ran the font by WhatTheFont and got five possible results. All were similar, but none were as good a match as Identifont had given me. I was a bit surprised.
The trouble now that I found the font is they aren’t cheep. I don’t think this project is worth spending $49 on a font. I will have to dig through my old font disks and see if I have something similar or maybe I will get lucky and already have it. Years ago I used to collect fonts, I had so many I was choking Windows 3.1 with them. That was until I learned how just having too many fonts takes a lot of memory and slows Windows.
May 26th, 2006
I just read an interesting digital camera story on Wired. It is not the first on this topic I have seen lately. According to this and the other article, camera manufacturers are having to come up with more innovation than just increasing megapixels now that most consumer cameras have reached high enough for most people. And that innovation is a really good thing for consumers.
From this article I discovered this really nice looking camera, the Panasonic DMC-TZ1K. It is a super zoom in a compact body. It uses folded optics, whatever that is.
I have also tried out Riya recently. It uses face recognition technology to automatically tag people in your photos so you can better search your collection. It of course requires training, but in the little testing I did, it did a pretty good job.
May 11th, 2006
I have no clue how well it works, but WikiHow explains a couple possible ways to fix a stuck pixel on an LCD monitor. I have heard about the video of quickly flashing colors fixing things for some people. But this site suggests something else for when that doesn’t work, you lightly massage the area of the screen with the dead pixel. This blog post adds some confirmation that these methods can work and suggests you might try combining them. Massaging my LCD is not something I would like to do, but if the pixel was annoying enough I guess I would give it a try as a last resort. Luckily so far I don’t have any that I know about.
April 3rd, 2006
Yesterday I posted of my rabbit photo hunt, just in case anyone actually reads my blog, here is the explanation. For the last few years one of my usual April Fool’s pranks is to find a photo on my victim’s desk, scan it, edit it, and replace the original. This year involved a couple bald heads, tattoos and a spiky dog collar, and bunny ears and buck teeth.
Don’t remember how I ran across this, but Filmwise specializes in removing actors from photos. They leave the clothes and you have to guess what movie it is from. Very interesting. And very good photo manipulation skills. Since I am into photo manipulation a bit I was really impressed, what I do is not simple but compared to these mine are nothing.
I also found this when searching for a screen saver that flips the screen upside down (which I was unable to find). I was working on late April fools for work. No one at work to fool on Saturday, but it also gave me more time to prepare. How about a start menu that keeps avoiding you when you try to click it? Or a program to flip the screen (not screen saver as I wanted), but still pretty good. How about one that you can email prank people that open executables in email.
It acts like it is sending an email to everyone in your address book and you can’t close it. I just did it to someone I was otherwise unable to get today. She fell for it. I walked by and heard a lot of mouse clicking, must have been frantically trying to close it. 
It makes a pretty good case for why you should not open EXEs even from people you know. AOL’s spyware blocker did catch it, but not before it ran long enough to give her a good scare.
The Museum of Hoaxes has the Top 100 April Fools hoaxes of all time. Also interesting there is the list of real discoveries that were believed to be a hoax.
Since this post is partially about digital photos, this isn’t too far off topic. I found something to look into if you need photo organization and searching on Linux. It is imgSeek. It has lots of organizational stuff, lets you search by picture similarity, it even lets you draw what you are searching for and apparently finds things. My Linux box is slow and the hard drive is still nearly full so it will probably be a while before I try this out. In the mean time, Picasa is pretty good at managing my digital photos for Windows, but doesn’t offer nearly the image searching capability of imgSeek.
April 3rd, 2006
Hunting for rabbit photos for my annual April Fool’s photo editing, I ran across an interesting site archiving photos of yawning bunnies.
April 1st, 2006
Firefox 2 Alpha, branded Bon Echo, was just released. As usual with Firefox releases, it was announced on a number of big websites before it was officially ready. I downloaded it a day early too, but I knew what I was getting. This is an Alpha release meaning it is for testing, not for most users. It is not near Beta quality as previous Firefox Alpha releases have been so be prepared if you try it.
I know it is an alpha, but the new stuff is a mess and the old stuff isn’t improved much if any. If Mozilla is hoping to get the final 2.0 out before or around the same time IE7 and Vista are released I fear it is going to be pretty rough and not going to stand up to IE7’s advances.
I read a comment that compared this to a version 1.6 Alpha rather than 2.0 Alpha because of the few improvements over 1.5. He was optimistic that by the final release it would be worthy of a .5 version increase. The currently planned features would do it for me, but are they going to be done in time or will features be thrown out to make the release date?
So far it appears to use less memory than FF 1.5 but I haven’t used it heavily. If it does, that is a really good thing since that was a frequent complaint about 1.5. It still uses a lot, but at least it doesn’t go wild eating up whatever free memory it can get.
I thought part of the point of moving Bookmarks and history into an SQLite database with Places was so having a lot of Bookmarks wouldn’t slow down the Bookmarks menu. It is still takes several seconds to display the menu after I click on Bookmarks just as FF 1.5. I have a lot of bookmarks, over 2000 bookmarks which is still more than 600 KB after removing embedded favicons and some other meta data.
But so far Places is very rough, it currently doesn’t even have as much functionality as the old Bookmark system they are replacing. But supposedly it only landed on this branch two weeks ago. For two weeks work it seems pretty good, but that isn’t how things work I am sure. It has surely gone through a lot of development before it landed. I have high hopes for Places though. I liked having my Bookmarks in HTML format, but that just isn’t efficient.
A simplified version of Places should open up in a sidebar by default. Users of IE7 are going to like their Favorites Center dropdown menu that can turn into a sidebar. I have seem several older users that like to have their bookmarks or history sidebar open all or most of the time in both IE and FF.
How about the biggest mistake of all? Close buttons on every tab. There are two major problems with that.
First, you can accidentally close a tab while switching to it. I could live with the close buttons on tabs if the buttons weren’t active when the tab isn’t active. Currently even though the buttons are still active when the tab is not, they are grayed as if they are not active. I know you will be able to undo closing tabs, but you shouldn’t have to. Opera 8.5 does the exact same thing and it is pretty annoying in the little I used Opera. I closed a bunch of tabs by accident while switching. Opera already has the undo function built in as the usual Edit, Undo. That is easily discoverable and something Firefox developers should think about copying. Current FF extensions that provide the undo function I think are too complex for most users. They are great for advanced users, but for most people a whole lot of undo close choices such as window or tab and which ones or all going back several actions is too much.
My other complaint about having close buttons on tabs is because each takes up valuable horizontal real estate. The more windows you have open the worse it will be. Currently the solution is to hide the close button on tabs when you reach a certain number of tabs (or maybe it is by tab width but it doesn’t appear that way). For my setup, after 7 tabs the close buttons hide on inactive tabs. I am sure it is just a bug, but currently when you close the 8th tab they don’t come back though, you have to get back down to 6 tabs. Not considering that, this is an inconsistent interface. Either the close buttons should always be on inactive tabs (which is not a good idea) or they should always be hidden. It is an inconsistent UI feature otherwise.
There is all kinds of discussion on handling tab overflow but there just is no good method. So preventing the overflow condition as long as possible is important. Clearly that is why the inconsistent UI is meant to solve, but a much better solution would be to only show the X on the active tab.
It is hard to believe, but Microsoft does pretty much exactly what I want with tab close buttons in IE7. In addition to them only being shown on the active tab, they stand out less. Firefox’s are big and bright red so along with the favicon the page title is surrounded by graphics. I wonder how many people will make their site’s favicon into FF Xs just to throw people off.
I discovered hitting “Use Current Pages” as Homepage adds all the open tabs. Clearly the button text says that but last time I did it in 1.5 I didn’t have more than one tab open. As currently displayed all on a single line, a user may think FF is adding only the first tab in the window as the homepage. I did and I even knew FF could have multiple homepages.
What is with swapping the Stop and Reload buttons? Neither are likely frequently used when compared to the back button. And if you are putting them in order of most use, I suspect the forward button is used less by common users. But that would clearly be dumb. My point is, don’t swap buttons just for the sake of moving them. Consistency in placement is also important (just look at the huge mistake IE has made with IE7’s toolbars). Every time I go to hit stop now I end up almost hitting Reload. I am currently using large icons which I don’t normally do so that proves to me that my brain looks for the stop button in Firefox as the third button from the right, not the distance and clearly not first looking at the image.
I have also read that the Home button may be on the way out (by default). Maybe that was just discussion or a planned “feature” since it is still here in 2.0 Alpha. Based on usability tests the home button may never get used, but does that really reflect actual usage? I don’t think so. I know there are a lot of people that probably never use it, but a lot of people don’t use Bookmarks/Favorites either and that isn’t being thrown out. When I am using one of my computers I use the Home button pretty frequently. I have a custom homepage with most of the links that I go to frequently. The default homepage is just a Google search page. It is not necessary to go Home to run a search since we have the search box. IE7 hasn’t gotten rid of the Home button though they did move it in their scattering around the toolbar buttons.
The Home page is where a portal site makes sense. When I setup someone’s browser for them, I usually choose Google News or Yahoo News. My Yahoo or Google’s Personalized Home are great choices even if the user doesn’t have an account. The page non logged in users get already have a good selection of information (more so on My Yahoo).
Back to the Bookmarks and History menu, why do we have two options in each that do basically the same thing. Bookmarks has “Search in Bookmarks” and “Organize Bookmarks” which both bring up Places just the same. History does exactly the same with “Search in History” and “View All History.” Not only is this pointless, it takes up space and is are just more menu options you must read through. Even if they are intended to do a slightly different thing eventually it seems a waste to include both. The idea of places is to have everything in one place. Searching and managing. No need for menu items for both.
One reason the wasted space in the Bookmarks menu bothers me is because the overflow scrolling sucks a whole lot. If you have a ton of bookmarks and don’t have them in a well organized hierarchy using the scroll up and down “buttons” is horrible. It is very slow to reach where you want, but too fast to actually see where you are going. Clearly those are contradictory needs, but that is where the problem lies with this implementation. It doesn’t meet either need because it tries to meet both at the same time.
I don’t have a good suggestion how to fix it though. Something like Microsoft’s Personalized Menus would certainly be possible now that Bookmarks and History are in the DB, but I hate that in UIs. A scroll bar would be a bit more usable, but not consistent with what users expect from dropdown menus. K-Meleon uses submenus to deal with this. At the bottom of what Bookmarks could be displayed on the screen it has a [more] “folder” that expands into another row of Bookmark items. It is an easier to use solution than what is currently in Firefox, but it is not a great one.
And a longtime annoyance is the Add Bookmark menu items scroll with the bookmarks. It is a major pain to scroll back up to the top to bookmark a site. I know Ctrl+D bookmarks the page, but I had to look that up, I don’t remember it. Why would I, they letter ‘D’ has nothing to make me think bookmark, favorite, or add. Too bad ‘B’, ‘F’, and ‘A’ already have pretty standard uses.
I have read that Bookmarks/Favorites aren’t used by many people. My observations of others show the same thing. As for myself, I bookmark a lot of stuff but I don’t often go back to them. I bookmark them mostly just in case. Of course, part of the reason I don’t use them is the UI sucks and is slow when handling lots of bookmarks. The other reason is because I built my own custom homepage with most of the links I go to regularly.
They also badly need to get Native Theme Rendering done. FF menus just look horrible on Windows other than those using the Luna theme on XP. It is listed as one of the “Nice to Have” features of 2.0. Meaning we still probably won’t see it till 3.0 if ever.
I also decided to give a Trunk build with Cairo a try (Trunk is where work on the road to Firefox 3.0 is done). Cairo is much better than I imagined. I figured it would still be pretty slow but it wasn’t bad. There are display bugs with it, but my main concern was the speed. Don’t know about slow machines, but it runs fine on my laptop which isn’t the fastest anymore. Other than Cairo there aren’t many visible differences from the Firefox 2 Alpha.
Update: Mike Beltzner, user experience lead for Mozilla, posted a bunch of info on the direction they are planning for Firefox 2. This comes from open discussion with users in their newsgroups. This is a very good sign and I like most of what is planned. But we will see how much actually makes it into Firefox 2.
March 22nd, 2006
Several months ago I decided it was finally time to buy a good digital camera. I have been wanting a good one for years but was never really happy with the ones anywhere near my price range. Previously the best I had was a 1.2 megapixel “keychain” camera. Anything would be a huge improvement, but I wanted a huge zoom and lots of megapixels. After lots of shopping and reading reviews, I finally chose the Canon Powershot S2 IS. I am really glad I did.
There wasn’t (and still isn’t) a lot of choice in the super zoom category and I knew I didn’t want to go all the way up to a D-SLR (too big and expensive plus no live LCD preview). The main part of my shopping involved testing out display models to see which ones I could actually get good pictures out of. Since no store has all brands and models, this took several days and a lot of driving. Best Buy turned out to have the best selection to look at. Circuit City would be second best. Both had cameras the other didn’t. Get a feel for them this way was also important, some that looked good online were just awkward to hold.
I had borrowed a friend’s Kodak a few times and much of the time I had blurry images. I just wasn’t keeping the camera still enough when I clicked the shutter. Being used to film cameras and higher ISOs, that was never a problem before. The last part of the name of my S2 is IS, which stands for Image Stabilization and it works really well. Except in low light, I almost never have that problem. That was the biggest selling point for me, I wanted a camera that I could actually use.
Thousands of shots later I still love this camera. There are some limitations like a max 400 ISO (which gets pretty grainy/noisy), its size, and it uses AA batteries. The AA battery limitation turns out out be a big plus for many users, me included now. You can buy your own rechargeable batteries (I bought two sets) and if you run out you can always buy some AAs almost anywhere to keep you going till you can recharge. That convenience is pretty good since there is little warning before the batteries run out. You get only a few more shots once the battery indicator comes on. But two sets of good rechargeable batteries and a charger adds a bit to the price which I didn’t really take into account originally.
I wish it was a little smaller. It has a nice size for fitting in you hand when you are shooting and it isn’t really heavy, but it stands no chance of fitting in your pocket. The lens of course takes up a good bit, you just can’t squeeze a 12x optical zoom into nothing. Having to choose between super zoom and pocket size I choose zoom and still would today. I am not sure how much I would like a tiny thin camera anyway. Hitting the buttons and just holding it would be awkward I think. But being able to put it in my pocket might make up for that.
Most reviews will complain that the lens cap comes off too easy. I agree. But it seems to be on purpose. When you turn it on with the cap on, the strap would put pressure on the lens motor which can’t be good. Of course a simple solution to that would be make the strap a tiny bit longer. It doesn’t come off just from gravity or shaking, it actually has to brush against something. I have gotten used to it and it stays on most of the time.
The other common review complaint is the plastic threads for a tripod. It holds just fine, but I guess the fear is they could be stripped easily if you use a tripod often. Mine has only been on one a few times so for me it is not a problem I worry about.
The price was a bit more than I wanted to pay, but it was worth it and it has come down since I bought it. Canon recently announced the S3 IS which I am already a big fan of. There aren’t a lot of changes, but more megapixels and double the ISO are big selling points for me. I am a little worried about the 100 gram weight increase, currently I don’t think it is heavy, but it would be nice if the new one weighed less, not more.
And to prove banner ads actually do make a difference sometimes, I clicked on a Sony camera ad and found this really nice camera. The Sony Cybershot DSC-R1 makes the S3 look pathetic, but it also costs a whole lot more. It is a bit less than a D-SLR and you don’t need to add more for a good lens since it is built in. Interchangeable lenses are of course a must for some people, but even on my Dad’s old film SLR I usually used only one lens (with amazing zoom). It was big and heavy, but I love zoom. The one downside of the Sony camera is the zoom is only 5x optical zoom compared to the 12x of the Canon S2 and S3.
I also looked at some of the competition for the Sony DSC-R1. Canon has a camera up in that price range too with a body similar to my current S2. The zoom is better than the Sony, but only 7x so still not as good as the S2/S3. I just wonder if the higher megapixels make up for that in ability to crop photos later. I like some of its features, but it is more of a pro camera than I want.
While I am looking forward to the S3, if you want to save some money on a super zoom camera, the S2 is a still a good camera and the S3 so far doesn’t seem to be a great deal better. Once the S3 is out the S2’s price should drop even more though not necessarily in stores. When I was shopping for the S2 the S1 was still pretty high priced. Try online but be careful where you buy from.
March 21st, 2006
If you ever needed to pull a practical joke on a techie, this would be a good one. It takes some setup time, but seems well worth it. We all know keyboards can collect a lot of dirt. What if when your victim returns they find plants growing from between the keys? Johannes gives an account of how he did it using the small and fast growing plant, cress commonly used in plant research.
Found via Crazy Hacks.
March 20th, 2006
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