kdmurray.blog

The crossroads of life and tech

Tag Archives: Gadgets

MacBook: Day 1

Well the beast finally arrived! I’d like to think it was my scathing review of Apple’s customer service from earlier this month, but I highly doubt that Steve Jobs is an avid reader.

Well having had the chance to play with this new machine for only a couple of hours, I have to say I’m very impressed so far. The only practical applications I’ve put it to the test with so far are sending a few emails, taking some notes (questions about the MacBook), and writing up this post. The overall Mac experience has been very good, there certainly has been a great deal of care and attention put into “the little things”.

However there are a couple of pet peeves I have so far….

  1. Maximizing Windows is hard to do. I realize that this may seem like a silly concept for some in today’s open-a-million-windows-at-once world, but I like to have my current activity fill my screen. I’ve had some difficulty figuring out how to do this with my new Mac.

  2. Tabbing in windows. This may again just be a Windows-ism, but when I’m on a form, or in a window and I’ve finished typing, I want to be able to push tab and move to the next field, including any buttons. However the Mac OS X software only seems to want to send me to the next text field… managable, but annoying.

I’ll continue posting more about the MacBook in the weeks ahead, as I unconver interesting details, or annoying bugs. Stay tuned!

PC Anywhere? Try TV Anywhere!

SlingBox is a device which hooks up to your TV and your Internet connection and allows you to watch TV — or interface with your PVR – from the Internet!  Now you can catch the local news from your home in Vancouver on your EvDO-enabled cell phone while you’re on your way to a meeting in Boston.

The only real “catch” is that the product only allows a single connection over the Internet to make use of the TV signal (aparently this has something to do with re-broadcasting regulations).

The article on Engadget has several interesting replies that raise some curious technological questions:

[1] If it catches on, will it wreak havoc with Uplink speeds on broadband Internet connections?

[2] Will technologies like this become the next “TiVO” and be bought-out by multi-million dollar corporations?

[3] Why do people pay no attention to the content of an article and then ask questions about it: “Will this work from my house if I hook one up to my parents’ house in another state?” — Well, the thing works over the Internet so as long as your parents aren’t using dial-up you should be OK.  grr…

Either way, looks like a cool gadget, and from all reports that I’ve read (and heard first-hand), works like a charm.  Currently retailing for about $200 USD.

And for dessert… Wiki on a stick!

For those of you who have a burning desire to have a wiki that you can take with you anywhere, anytime Wiki on a stick is for you!  The wonderful folks at WikiMedia have put together this article which describes how to load up a memory stick or USB Flash drive (known to some as a memory pencil) with everything you need to run a wiki.

The setup looks pretty clean, a full installation of:

When I started writing this I hadn’t intended to try it out… but my curiosity got the best of me and I gave it a shot on my iPod(!) this evening, and within 10 minutes I had the Uniform Server up and running.

Once I got in to the admin screen, after stopping IIS (duh), I was impressed with the amount of control provided in the web-based interface.  The interface gave control over all the components of the server (apache, php, phpMyAdmin) and had several other add-on tools as well (version checker, download manager, migration tools, error log viewer).

After running through the installation directions in the Wiki on a stick article, I had everything configured and my PocketWiki was born!

Now that I got it… what do I do with it?!

The wiki on a stick implementation has lots of possibilities:

  • Portable Training Documentation
  • Group Collaboration Platform
  • Personal Documentation
  • Kiosk (Used with CD-based WinPE/BartPE for a hard-diskless solution)
  • The list goes on…..

Also, the installed package is completely portable.  You can pick it up and transfer it to another drive, a PC or even (like I did) your iPOD!

Admittedly most wikis will make use of the Internet for collaboration purposes, but if you need a small, self-contained easy-to-deploy wiki solution, check this one out!

  

Key Techie Tidbits…

  • Total Disk Consumption (no articles): 33.3MB
  • Total Install time: 10-15mins
  • Current Version(s): Apache 2.x, PHP 5.x, MySQL 4.x, phpMyAdmin 2.6.x, ActivePerl 5.x, MediaWiki 1.5.x
  • Supported OS: Windows 95, 98, Me, NT, 2000, XP, 2003
  • OS Note: Should work with other systems as well, but the packages above are the Win32 implementations of the server components (i.e. PHP, MySQL, Perl)
  • Supported Environment: Any valid FAT or NTFS partition including removable media.  Could be paired up with a Windows-PE instance for a no-hard-drive solution.

Sources: WikiMedia Meta