December 29th, 2003
I picked up a Hitachi/IBM 180GB drive for $69.99 this weekend at Fry’s Electronics. It was essentially $179.99 with a $90 and $20 rebate. The evil thing about Fry’s ridiculous deals is that most of the rebates expire that same day! No one ever mentions it to you and it only says so in the small text of your receipt. Of course, any smart consumer always double checks their receipts before they leave the store but I’m pretty sure a whole bunch of people who purchased the drive thinking they got a sweet deal didn’t end up sending out the rebate and will get a rude awakening when they realize it’s too late. Of course, one could simply return the drive (assuming they haven’t cut up the box for the UPC label). Anyways, I rushed home filled everything out and dropped off the mail at the post office.
Now that I have this nice new drive, I decided to stick it in my external Firewire/USB2 enclosure which currently only has 80GB in it. To my dismay, the enclosure only sees 128GB which means the current firmware doesn’t support larger than 137GB drives. Ugh! So, now I’m trying to figure out a way to update the firmware. I’m constantly amazed at how a lot of systems and enclosures don’t support the super large drive sizes even though the drives have been out for a long time. I think it’s part of a major conspiracy by manufacturers to constantly try to get you to upgrade.
December 26th, 2003
Omigosh! I did not realize the comments system was totally busted on this site! My deepest apologies. I should have known something was up with so many visitors and not one comment.
At any rate, the problem has been fixed and you may comment away on anything you please to. I know you will all be busy with New Years coming up so hopefully next year will bring a lot more interesting stuff on this site and lots of comments from you visitors!
I have spent the last couple months trying to figure out if it was possible to upgrade the wireless in my notebook and I just recently successfully did it without too much hassle. You can read about the experience and the very nice Netegriti/Wistron miniPCI card I installed here.
So, I’m pretty happy right now as I now have 802.11a/b/g capabilities further extending the usefulness of my already very useful Sony TR notebook.
This should be the last update for this year as I will take a small break to refresh myself for next year. There’s still a ton of stuff to review and so little time.
December 15th, 2003
I’ve been busy helping a friend move and haven’t had as much time to work on my projects. However, we’re nearly done and I have been working on plenty of stuff in the background. I just haven’t had time to document any of it.
There are a few new goodies in the lab such as Sony’s Cybershot T1 5 megapixel slim camera and an upgrade to my Sony PCG-TR1AP notebook. All of that is forthcoming once I get some personal matter squared away.
December 10th, 2003
I was informed of this really interesting look at Sun’s vision of the next generation desktop. I’m not sure exactly what the technology is behind the demonstration but it certainly is impressive and a glimpse of what the future may hold for us in the next couple of years.
You can see the presentation here.
Apple already has their OpenGL/PDF desktop engine which is an impressive piece of work and the first step we’ve seen in this direction. We all know that Microsoft is working on the DirectX based DCE (Desktop Compositing Engine) which is about 2 years away. By then, it should be able to do some impressive stuff but as of right now, they really haven’t shown any real innovations. I’m hoping we don’t actually have to wait too long for all of this stuff and stuff trickles out as its ready. Of course, a brand new change will be welcome as long as productivity is impacted at all.
