Computer Tips -Tech Info

It seems that things happen in clusters, sometimes it’s more of a chain reaction. My longtime working laptop lost the ability to backlight the display. Yes, the backlight is replacable with a couple hours tear down and rebuild. Of course, they’re fragile parts and although I’ve replaced them in the past. I’ve got to a point that I didn’t feel it was worth it. The laptop was a ~1Ghz single core PIII or PIV with 2GB of memory. It has had flakey wireless lately, sometimes the machine will wake up and the wireless isn’t working. It’s clone had died with a power switch issue that could have only been solved with a motherboard replacement. So, I switched to an older spare while I ordered a replacement from Dell.

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So, today there is an advertising supported kindle that sells for $25 less than its cheapest cousin which is the kindle wifi. What will it look like? The screensavers are one place that ads will show up. Also at the bottom of the home page. (It appears that you won’t have ads in the middle of your book.) I’m wondering if a $25 discount is enough to encourage someone to go for this version over the wifi?

It’s hard for me to say since I went ahead and sprung for the 3g version at $189. From their descriptions the advertising support seems relatively unobtrusive. (Much less so than google ads…. I could see them setting aside a part of EACH page of a text to put ads which would be annoying.)

So what do you think – will the $25 discount make for more sales?

Is any kind of advertising too much on this kind of device?

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Well – Friday things started getting interesting on tech news sites. Most sites were running phony April fools stories and a few including websense was running with a major attack going on against many SQL based websites. Details were sketchy – people were told to look for ur.php files in their web directory (which isn’t exactly a good test to see if your site has been infected by this SQL injection…) “<script src=http://lizamoon.com/ur.php”> is an example of the code that is inserted into sql databases and what it basically does is force visitors to visit a scareware site where malware may be installed onto their computer that claims they have a virus…. (how many of those have we seen in the last 5-10 years?)

One of my annoyances with tech news (and especially virus news) coverage is that when a story gets big enough to be covered by the big media, they never do it justice. I want information. What is this attacking? What programs are vulnerable, is there a pattern?

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A couple of years ago I was given an aliph jawbone bluetooth headset. It was really convenient for using the phone without having to hold your cell phone up to your ear. Unfortunately it was stolen and when I went to replace it I found that the only available from the company was the jawbone II. Now, initially I read about the Jawbone II and it sounded like a disappointment after the first one. But, went ahead and ordered and found my expectations were surpassed.

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Wow…. Let me just say that I have typically been inundated with junk mail on my primary address. It’s associated with this domain and has been hosted in an older sendmail setup for quite some time (not really by choice, but because that’s what was installed on the old vps.) I’m currently migrating to postfix which I’m a bit more familiar with and had used successfully to at least tag my junk mail as SPAM for sorting at home. Well, my older postfix system didn’t have too many options to add on and tweak and so this weekend I’ve invested some time in migrating the main mail server over to a newer postfix install with amavis and postgrey and a few other tools.

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The Kindle is a wonderful portable reading device from amazon.com. I have one and enjoy it greatly, however I was looking for a case to get to carry it in. Why a case? I feel it’s a bit conspicuous without a case and perhaps a bit more tempting for someone to just “pick up” if it’s laying out. In a case it might look more like a dayplanner or non-electronic gadget. I was also a bit concerned about carrying it in the rain, or getting dust, debris and dirt on it while carrying it out and about.

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For the record…. no. Not in the least. I bought a Kindle 3 in December and have been using it quite a bit since then. Of course, the first few weeks I used it an awful lot. (It was around the Christmas holidays of course.) I haven’t had as much time in the last month or two to just sit and read, but when I have it’s been better than having a book. Why?

It’s smaller, yet it holds my entire library.

Well, not technically my ENTIRE library yet, but it does hold quite a few of my books (a couple hundred.)

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Last night I was working with an older HP laptop and things hit the fan very quickly. I discovered I couldn’t write a file to disk and before I knew it the system had thrown up to a black screen and needed the power cut to reboot. I immediately realized that there was a serious hardware problem. Then I spent the better hours of the evening trying to salvage everything from the old drive to a new drive, only to have the new drive seemingly show the same symptoms. It is a laptop of course and so I assume it’s the bus for the drives or the cdrom. I pull out the cdrom and it seems to behave itself just fine. This morning as I was checking the last of the package updates it dawned on me how different things would have been if it were a windows laptop. The laptop runs linux and when the system froze I immediately assumed it was either the hard drive or the drive adapter to the mainboard. Why?

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This will be the first of several posts looking in detail at the Kindle 3. Amazon has got at least one thing VERY right. Simplicity. The packaging is simple, you open the box and the kindle has directions for plugging it in to charge on the display. Then you are directed to slide the switch. When it comes up it’s already registered to the amazon.com account you purchased with and it hooks up to whispernet. At this time you can configure wireless if you like (with the 3g you have whispernet even if the wifi is not available or not configured.)

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Last year I got a Sansa Clip Plus 8GB. I just wanted to do a followup post after I’ve used it for a while. One year on (well 11 months on….) it’s still rock solid. I’ve had no problems with it, it has a really good battery life. I really don’t charge it for weeks at a time. (I’m not listening constantly, but when I listen more I would guess about 8 hours use per charge.)

I don’t think I’ve bothered to update the firmware (it’s not broken so I’m not fixing it…)

In general it reminds me of the choice to get the Kindle. It does one thing well! Nice and portable, standard usb charger and easy to add music to. So, one year on – I would definitely recommend it, if mine were missing I would get it again. It seems quite durable (my 2 year old got a hold of it once and it almost went missing – but cleaned up nicely.)

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