Archive for the 'Technology' Category

News flash: iPhone found lacking

Published
by
Cody
on April 21, 2008
in Rant and Technology
. 1 Comment

This is probably a no-brainer, but the iPhone doesn’t do everything. I mean, it doesn’t even double as a flying car. How disappointing is that? In all seriousness, during my love affair with my phone, I’ve discovered a few things that I assumed it would have but didn’t. First off: a video camera. Nearly every modern cell phone has a camera built in. More expensive models go one step further and have a video camera. The iPhone…does not. No, the camera is just a regular still camera. For $400, the least they could have done was put in a video camera. I know, not that big of a deal, but I’ve always wanted to film people with my camera. It’s a geek thing.

The other major thing I noticed today is that the iPhone’s Bluetooth capability is limited to headsets and the like. While other phones (especially smart phones) have the ability to connect to a computer and transfer files via Bluetooth (my dad’s Samsung Sync can do that), the iPhone can only pair up with a Bluetooth headset or similar device, and even then it takes forever to realize that the headset is on and sitting right next to it. Again, it’s not really that big of a deal, since my laptop doesn’t have a Bluetooth card, but honestly, I expected the iPhone to be a lot more advanced than this.

Don’t get me wrong: the iPhone is the best phone I’ve ever used. The touch-screen interface works better than I ever expected, and it does just what I want. But there are a few things that just seem…missing. Hopefully, at least some of these will be fixed in the upcoming firmware update for the iPhone, but I get the feeling I’m going to feel gypped when Apple comes out with the second generation iPhone that has everything I’m missing in my current iPhone. Apple is like that sometimes. Or all the time.

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Ubuntu 8.04

Published
by
Cody
on April 16, 2008
in Personal and Technology
. 0 Comments

Following my computer problems of a few days ago, I decided to go ahead and make room to install a distro of Linux on my laptop alongside XP and Vista. I have to say, it was a lot easier than the last time I triple-booted. I installed XP first, then Vista, and finally Ubuntu. I installed Ubuntu’s bootloader to it’s own partition, which allowed me to use Vista’s bootloader to load up everything (configured with EasyBCD). It all works perfectly.

I took the chance to try out the latest beta version of Ubuntu, which is due to be released in about 8 days (as you can see by the nifty counter in the sidebar). Compared to past versions of Ubuntu I’ve used, 8.04 is amazing. Sure, the actual interface doesn’t look or act much different (it’s a little shinier, perhaps, and the new search function is pretty cool), but the main difference I noticed is that I didn’t get a debilitating error upon start up. See, with older versions of Ubuntu installed on my Dell laptop, the wireless and graphics cards would not work, and the alternate drivers Ubuntu tried to use would break the system, forcing me to drop into a command line interface to install a special script. But with 8.04, everything actually worked upon start up, displayed in my native resolution of 1280×800 (instead of a rather blurry 1024×768). I had to do some minor configuration to enable the non-free graphics and wireless drivers so I could use my graphics and wireless cards to their full extent, but it was much less work than before.

I’m definitely pleased with this version of Ubuntu. I still doubt that I’ll like it enough to abandon Windows, but at least I haven’t needed to wrestle with it just to make it work right. Hopefully it’ll just get better once it’s out of beta next week.

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B0rked

Published
by
Cody
on April 8, 2008
in Personal and Technology
. 1 Comment

This seems to be a theme with me. I get my computer to perfect working order, and then I decide to mess with it. Why? I don’t know. Some kind of weird compulsion, I guess. Whatever the case, I broke my computer. Again. Well, that’s not completely true. It was only partly broken. For a while, I’d been dual-booting Windows Vista and Windows XP. In case you think that’s odd, I’ll explain why: I use XP for games and Vista for everything else. Games played in Vista tend to have a lower framerate than when they’re played in XP, so I’m sticking with XP for my gaming needs. However, I prefer the Vista interface, which is why it’s my primary operating system.

I recently bought a 320 GB hard drive for my laptop and completely reinstalled everything from scratch. Everything was going great. Then I tried to install Linux. Again. Honestly, I can’t tell you why I have to try this time after time. Maybe I figure that I’ll like it this time, even though I haven’t the past 17 million times. At any rate, it shouldn’t have been a problem to resize one of my Windows partitions and try out a new distro of Linux I downloaded (the beta release of Kubuntu with KDE 4, ’cause the screenshots looked pretty). Turns out, it was a problem. Vista didn’t want to play nice, so I turned to GParted. That stalled out, so I booted up XP and tried out Partition Magic. That completely corrupted my Vista partition, making it impossible to boot into it. Luckily, XP still worked fine, so I was able to go into damage control. Damage control failed horribly (even when I turned to the Vista install disk’s repair function).

Luckily, I had, in my infinite wisdom, completely backed up Vista the night before. Since the only important information on XP was saved games and a few documents, I backed up a couple of folders on XP and wiped the hard drive clean. This time, I was going to reinstall everything and include Linux with it. But I abandoned Kubuntu and went with plain ol’ Ubuntu 7.10, which has worked for me in the past. In a couple of weeks, Ubuntu 8.04 will be out, so I’ll be able to easily upgrade.

The problem now is that I still need to copy over all my documents to the reinstalled Vista. And then I need to reinstall all my programs. And fix all my settings. And update everything…

I just did all of this a couple of weeks ago. It’s killing me.

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Firefox is a memory hog

Published
by
Cody
on January 29, 2008
in Random and Technology
. 3 Comments

The Firefox web browser is well-known for its memory leak problems. If you leave it open for a long enough time, it can take up as much as 200 MB of memory, even if you’re not actively using it. As an experiment, I opened up both Firefox and Internet Explorer and looked at the memory consumption of both when they had been open for a very short amount of time. The results are fairly interesting. Firefox was taking up almost five times as much RAM as Internet Explorer. And considering that Firefox was taking up more than 100 MB during my browsing session a short while earlier, it’s not inconceivable that the ratio would have gone up over time. Here’s the screenshot:

Firefox vs. IE

Granted, I may have a few extensions enabled on Firefox that IE doesn’t have, but that doesn’t help the memory leak problem. Or the incredibly slow startup time. Get working on this, Mozilla! Or I may be forced to switch to Opera.

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How to pretend you’re a Mac user

Published
by
Cody
on November 15, 2007
in Random and Technology
. 0 Comments

I was planning on writing a how-to on installing a hacked version of Mac OS X on a PC, complete with “DO THIS AND YOU ARE DAMNED TO HELL YOU DIRTY PIRATE” disclaimer and everything.

Upon reflection, I decided not to bother with the how-to. There are already countless guides out there (like the in-depth one at Lifehacker), and it’s pretty much pointless to install Mac OS X on a PC. It most likely won’t work as well as Mac OS X on a real Mac, which makes such an installation good as a proof-of-concept thing, but not really good for much else. Believe me, you’re better off sticking with Windows or Linux, both of which are legal to install on PCs. If you want a Mac, go buy one. Or go find someone who actually had the decency to provide a how-to guide after tempting his readers with one. (On a related note, please don’t hunt me down and shoot me. I don’t think I’d appreciate it very much.)

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Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States