BunkBlog

Last week, the Nokia N800 tablet started dropping in price at various retailers, from its MSRP of $400 to a new normal of $240.  So, it’s hardly surprising that Nokia has announced the N810 this week.  The jump in specs is pretty impressive.  Not only did they add a built-in 2GB of storage, in addition to the 128MB of RAM they had in the N800, they’ve got a GPS receiver in that bad boy now.  And, of course, the big jump – a real keyboard.

My N770 is looking pretty “first generation” now, but considering that I don’t need the thing in the first place, I still don’t regret buying it when it went on clearance this summer.

In case you’re interested in comparing the three Nokia tablets that have been released, here ya go:

Nokia also claims the screen is brighter than the N800, and there’s a built-in FM transmitter (according to one site anyway). The web browser is now Mozilla-based (instead of Opera) and handles AJAX, Flash 9, and all the rest of the Web 2.0 stuff. A Skype client is pre-installed instead of being an additional download.  The Gizmo client now handles video.

The N810 is coming out next month for $480, which is about what I could spend on a cheap laptop. As the Internet Tablet has always been a niche product, is the higher price going to kill it, or is the addition of GPS and a keyboard going to save it? If the battery really does last for four hours of use, as claimed, it’s going to beat most UMPCs for portability and battery life, so it may do well.

I have moved from the moribund and seemingly unmanned CCLHosting to the more vibrant and hopefully operational Dreamhost. We’ll see how this goes.

Right now, I’m hoping that the LJ crosspost plugin still works. And…it does! Woohoo!

Do cell phones make schedules permanently flexible?  Is the very concept of a fixed meeting time completely outdated?

Some people believe everyone has a cell phone with them at all times.  This means that, if you’re running late, you can reschedule on the fly.  As a corollary, it seems that a distinct lack of respect for other people’s schedules is common.  After all, you can always reschedule everything on the fly, as well.

Since I don’t have a mobile phone, I don’t understand this attitude.  To me, a decision to meet at 10am at the corner of Hollywood and Vine means exactly that.  To others, it means to try to meet at 10am, but maybe 1pm, and maybe in Santa Barbara.  Hey, it’s all good, right?

What have cell phones done to our society, for good or ill?

There was an ad in the paper yesterday for an external Hitachi hard drive. The drive was less than 300 bucks and had one terabyte of capacity. That used to be a number listed just below “kajillion” in computer terms. It made me look at my current gadgets and toys and put them in perspective.

For Christmas in 1980, I got my first computer, a VIC-20 – it had 5000 bytes of memory (3000 for the user) and no storage other than a cassette drive. I don’t know what the capacity of a 90 minute cassette was, but I’m reasonably certain it wasn’t a lot.

In 1984, I got the Commodore 64. As indicated by the name, it had a whopping 64 kilobytes of memory, of which 39k was available for use. I traded in the cassette deck for a massive 1504 floppy drive, which was larger than a shoe box and recorded to 5.25 inch floppies with a capacity of 170 kilobytes. Combine that with my 1200 baud modem to connect to the River Conditions BBS, and I was styling. RC had the largest hard drive of the underground C64 scene in Los Angeles when I was in high school – 20 megabytes. Oh, yeah.

In 1992, I belatedly saw the writing on the wall, as Commodore continued to find ways to make superior products fail in the marketplace (I can also tell you about the Atari Lynx if you want further proof of my lack of prognostication ability). I bought a CompUSA 486DX3, with 120 megabyte hard drive and 4 megabytes of RAM.

In 1994, I bought one of the Quantum Bigfoot drives that were so cheap that I was able to get 500 megabytes for less than 300 dollars.

So, let’s compare a few things from the past 15 years or so. On my desk right now is a defunct Sony Clie. Sony no longer supports it, the battery is dead, and I can’t take it to work anyway. But, in 2002, it was brand new and had better specs than that 486 for one quarter the price. And, unlike the 486, I could put the Clie in my pocket.

I recently bought a Nokia N770, because it was on clearance and the N800 is far outside my price range. The N770 has 64 megabytes of memory (16x the 486), I’ve got a 2 gigabyte RS-MMC card in it (16x the 486), and it has wifi. The screen is about twice the resolution of the 486, and I could buy over a dozen of them for less than the 486’s price. Oh, and it fits in my pocket.

My DVR, desktop computer, and external backup drive for my desktop now have a combined capacity of something close to two terabytes of space.  And Alex was worried about having too many shark shows recorded.  🙂

No wonder nobody can predict technology for crap. Who could have imagined, looking at this game of the 1980s, that we’d have all the cool toys we have today?

One of my cow-orkers delights in learning things that are relatively old news and then acting as if he’s sharing something of earth-shattering importance.  Among his recent discoveries: Agile Development, AJAX, Six Sigma, and Ruby on Rails.

It’s always cute to hear him espouse the way something from 3 years ago will change everything. And it’s always buzzword-compliant too.  For good or ill, he is on to the next old new thing often enough that he rarely implements much.  Well, there was that Agile Scrum thing, but I avoided it.  Meanwhile, I just put together a database documenting the capabilities of all the disparate simulations the programmers have built this year.  Not a word of appreciation from the boss-types.  *sigh*

And, now I’ve gotten the N770 to post on my main site, too. Geek Power!

Oooh, pretty.  I want one.  My Clie is about dead, the Palm “next big thing” is a useless piece of telephone-tethered nonsense, and laptops tend to be not very portable these days (19 inch screen, really?).  So, an ultraportable for less than the cost of a new car is very neato.  Too bad it’s just a reference design so far.  Hopefully it’ll show up soon.

Anyone using an online dating service should watch this and then really think about how accurate photos might or might not be.

I was pointed to the creepy ad site today, and this one I have to share with the three people who read my site:

XKCD has posted this awesome map, comparing various online communities based on their subscriber base, rendered as an old D&D campaign map or “here be monsters” style navigation chart.

The Palm folks have announced that they will be building machines using their own homebrewed version of Linux with Palm OS 5 compatibility, by the end of the year.  Good thing I didn’t buy a T|X this winter, eh?  What seems to be missing from all commentary is the question of non-Treo Palm machines.  I’m one of those people who have no desire nor need for a cell phone.  Since my Clie has a battery that is now only capable of holding a charge for a few minutes, is my only choice for handheld geekery going to be a UMPC?  I hope not.

Man, I really wish this tie were real, and not just one of ThinkGeek’s annual jokes.

I don’t think anything can top last year’s Wireless Extension Cord – that even got written up in the real press. Amazing.

Happy April Fool’s Day.

As expected, the Boy and I watched The Last Mimzy today. The source story is very different from the movie. Spoilers ahead…
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From the inestimable ikilled007, I give you – the definitive LARP movie.  Of course, there aren’t really any others, so the field is not all that competitive, to be sure.

Since I got 25 of 25 correct, that means that less than 2% of respondents did the same.  Ouch.

I killed Concho Online today. I attempted to launch this site a couple years ago, as a citizen journalism site, or hyperlocal media site, depending on your inclination. Since nobody but me had posted anything on it since last winter, it had obviously devolved into another personal site. Eh. I’ve got enough self-aggrandizement going on.

Voltron makes no sense at all. Giant robotic lions that merge to form a massive universe-defending robot, and they’re afraid of a black cat and witch. Did they merge two different stories here?

I’m bored.  Happy New Year.

In the continuing saga of Microsoft punking its customers and partners, they’re killing the MSN Music store. Due to legal requirements, they’ll offer links to the Real PlaysForSure/RDNA music store, as well as the Microsoft Zune Store.

Real is moving away from PlaysForSure to their Rhapsody DNA, paired with the Sansa e200R series. Napster never really got much traction as a legit music store. MyCokeMusic, a UK music download store, is gone. I see a trend here. PlaysForSure, which never really had the market penetration of the iTunes AAC digital restrictions software, is dead and just doesn’t know it.

Anyone who bought music from a DRM-encrusted store is a sucker to begin with, but if you have PlaysForSure music, now might be a good time to stop buying any more of it, and find a copy of the FairUse4WM program and convert those soon-to-not-work tracks into something more lasting.

South Park tonight not only includes Flying Spaghetti Monster references, but the oh-so-important Buck Rogers sequence.  Have Stone and Parker been hanging out with Seth MacFarlane?