The desktop and laptop killer that they won't make

Netbooks are the latest rage.  They are light and portable, and have enough power to do basic internet browsing  , word processing and other light computer chores.  Are they good for editing movies and photos?  No.  Are they good for gaming?  Absolutely not.

Netbooks are perfect for performing the tasks that 75% (pure guess) of computers are used for.  Web and email.

Enter the smartphone.  First the Apple iPhone, now the Motorola Droid.  These are sophisticated computers.  Not smart phones, but computers that happen to be phones too.  The iPhone 3gs and the Motorola Droid both pack a 550 MHz processor.  The new Google Nexus phone has a 1 GHz processor.  There are tons of netbooks out there that are being sold with the 1Ghz ATOM processor.

So, today's smart phones and netbooks are close or equal when it comes to computing power.

My Droid came with 16GB of storage standard and can be upgraded to 32GB by simply replacing the MicroSD card.  16GB or 32GB is plenty of storage for a netbook.  We are not talking about a machine that we will be archiving family photos and videos on.

There should be dockable home and mobile computers that can interface with our smart phone.

How about a laptop that has nothing but a screen and keyboard that you can slide your droid into.  Once inserted you can use a full size keyboard and monitor with your droid.  You have fast 3G internet speed.  Most people would need nothing more than this.  The droid would draw minimal power at this point, because the phone's screen could remain off.   The laptop dock would need power, but only for the LCD monitor.

At home, we have a similar docking station, one that has interfaces for our keyboard, mouse, monitor and printer.  When docked, the droid could even be used as an additional input device, making use of custom touchable icons.

It's ingenious.  Your mother needs a cell phone and computer?  Give her the Droid and a dock and she's all set.

I'm not sure if the video output of the Droid is high enough resolution for an external monitor, but I have no doubt it would be easy to do.  The current Droid may be a little underpowered as a netbook, but the new Nexus phone and all smartphones in the future should be able to handle day to day computing tasks with no problem.

I'll bet we won't see something like this at CES.  I wonder why?  I can't be the first person to have thought of this.

USB devices not recognized until reboot

Issue: USB devices not recognized by OS until restart: iPod Shuffle, WD External HDD and multi-card reader. Digital camera is recognized immediately when connected.

Getting the Acer 5620z w/ Broadcom BCM94311MCG to work with Ubuntu 9.04

I, along with my friend Chris, have been working on this for two days now. I tried 3 different tutorials on getting this card to work.

I finally found a tutorial that did work, but there was one step that was hanging me up.

Here are the definitive steps to get the Broadcom BCM94311MCG (ver 1.0) to work with Ubuntu 9.04.

*****I'm stealing the steps, slightly modified from https://help.ubuntu.com/community/WifiDocs/Driver/bcm43xx/Feisty_No-Fluff#Introduction

I'm emailing those guys to let them know. I'm hoping to ease the pain of others with this laptop that are going to Ubuntu.

Open a terminal and copy/paste each one of these commands. After you have successfully accomplished all commands, pull the ethernet cord, restart, and you should (hopefully) be golden.

echo -e 'blacklist bcm43xx' | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

sudo apt-get install ndiswrapper-utils-1.9

mkdir ~/bcm43xx; cd ~/bcm43xx

sudo apt-get install cabextract

wget ftp://ftp.compaq.com/pub/softpaq/sp34001-34500/sp34152.exe

cabextract sp34152.exe

sudo ndiswrapper -i bcmwl5.inf

ndiswrapper -l

sudo depmod -a

sudo modprobe ndiswrapper

sudo cp /etc/network/interfaces /etc/network/interfaces.orig

echo -e 'auto lo\niface lo inet loopback\n' | sudo tee /etc/network/interfaces

sudo ndiswrapper -m

echo 'ndiswrapper' | sudo tee -a /etc/modules

echo 'ENABLED=0' | sudo tee -a /etc/default/wpasupplicant

UFRaw from the command line!

Learned how to use UFRaw from the command line today. Whenever I have a lot of shots that are taken in the same light, I just save the settings for the first file. Then, at the command line, I enter a command to write out "settings" files for each photo. Then I enter another line to have UFRaw batch convert everything according to those setting. Much faster!

http://ufraw.sourceforge.net/Guide.html

Thumbnail size in folder view

Issue: Would like to change the size of the thumbnail preview in my folders.

Ubuntu 9.04 not seeing external hard disk without reboot

Issue: Ubuntu 9.04 not seeing external hard disk (WD 300 GB USB 2.0) when I plug the drive in. I have to reboot, then the HDD works fine. Is this an issue with Ubuntu or do I not have something set up correctly?

Good things about Windows

It's not official yet, but a lot of people and news sources are proclaiming Windows Vista to be a disaster. Some are comparing Vista to be a disaster on the scale of Windows Millenium. Some sites will tell you that Microsoft is about ready to cut bait on Vista and move on to the next OS.

I personally have taken great pains to remove Vista from my laptop and install Windows XP instead. I don't consider myself to be a typical user, however. I expect great performance from my applications, and from my computer hardware. I wasn't getting it.

I'm not down on Microsoft, mind you. There will be growing pains with any major new OS release. There are more computers out there now than when XP was released. A ton more peripherals are on the market now also, both old and new. Still, people expect their applications and components to all work seamlessly with the next OS. It is a reasonable, yet hard to deliver upon expectation.

Moving forward, let's take a look at a few of the good things about Windows Vista. I have put together a poll of 20 random Windows Vista user to find out what they LIKE about Vista. That's right, some people actually found some GOOD point regarding Vista. I asked each person in my informal survey to name three things they like about the OS.

Let me preface the review of this chart by saying that a lot of the things some people consider positives about Vista, other people consider negatives. In the next day or so I will publish a similar article entitled "What people dislike about Windows Vista".

Not surprising, almost everyone surveyed approved of the Aero theme in Vista. It is very aesthetically pleasing, and it is something I missed when I went back to XP.

The other positives many people agree on are Security and the Search features. Vista feels and I think actually is, very secure. The UAC (User Access Control), while a pain in the butt at times, does make it fairly difficult for someone to hijack your PC. The Search features of Vista are nice also, but it comes at a cost. The indexing service in Vista seems to ALWAYS be running in the background, and is ALWAYS hogging our valuable PC resources. Is it worth it?

Several people identified the interface as being superior. I'm not sure if they meant the UI was actually better, or just prettier.

The rest of the items on the list were noted by just a few. I've had problems with performance, the compression utility, compatibility and stability in my trial run with Vista. Apparently others have not.

Vista - pretty and secure. Next time I'll look at what survey respondents considered to be weaknesses of Windows Vista.