There is something about networks that I just don’t get. It is not using networks or the internet, that I do every day. Networking with a Windows Domain server I understand. It’s when configuring a home network that I run into a minor problem (well, maybe not so minor!). Getting various computers to connect to a wireless router along with wired connections is no problem. Neither is connecting to the internet. It is the simple task of sharing resources on a home network. Now at work I have absolutely no problem with this, but then professionals have set up the network. It is at home where I run into problems. The simple matter of sharing a directory (folder) just causes problems. Getting it shared is not the problem, it is having Windows crash when I copy from a shared folder to another computer. Admittedly it could have been overzealous antivirus or firewall software which I was using at the time, but eventually I gave up.

Then I found a product similar to Encore Network Now! Pro. It made networking simpler. One of the things it did was recommend a range of IP addresses of my computers which had to be entered as a local network in my firewall. It paid for itself when I was able to install and share a printer connected to one of the PCs, and print from a wirelessly connected notebook.

Lenovo’s latest ultraportable notebook, the Lenovo ThinkPad X300, is only slightly wider and thicker than the Apple MacBook Air, but can still fit snugly into a manila envelope. The ThinkPad X300 tops the MacBook Air by packing in a built-in DVD burner, a removable battery, and multiple USB ports. The weight of the ThinkPad X300 varies from 2.9 pounds with a 3-cell battery and no optical drive to 3.3 pounds with a 6-cell battery and DVD Burner.

The X300 has a 13.3 inch screen with a 1440 by 900 native resolution. It has a full sized keyboard, the same keyboard found on Lenovo’s 14- and 15-inch models, as well as both the red eraser-head Track Point pointing stick and a touch pad. It has a fingerprint reader (after seeing the price you’ll be glad there is one!). There is also a 1.3-megapixel webcam and a noise-canceling digital microphone for Web conferencing.

There is no hard drive option on the X300, only a 64GB solid-state drive. (If you choose Windows XP Professional instead of Vista, you’ll still have some space left for your own applications and files) It has 2GB of RAM, upgradeable to 4GB.

As for connectivity, the ThinkPad X300 features 802.11a/b/g/n Wi-Fi), Bluetooth 2.0 EDR, Intel UWB, GPS and Verizon WWAN (EV-DO).

So what is the best mobile device for browsing the web? By mobile device I’m excluding small notebooks and tablets which run Windows.

Firstly there are a number of factors which influence the quality of web browsing. The actually web browser engine, physical screen size, screen resolution, bandwidth and ease of navigation all play a part in the browsing experience. On the “Mobile browser rendering” webpage by Mark “Tarquin” Wilton-Jones, a series of tests performed in 2005-2006 were used to compare mobile web browsing software.

Normal cellphones – in other words cellphones without extra large screens, non-converged mobile phones, non-smartphones – generally have the worst browsing experience. This is usually due to small screens coupled with rather average browsers and bandwidth. Usually with these cellphones you can only browse to the sites which the carrier allows you, via text menus. In contrast I’ve seen the Motorola A780, not much bigger than most cellphones, but which runs Linux with the Opera Browser. You can go to any webpage, and pages are rendered really fast. This is a good mobile browsing experience but the cellphone is a smartphone.

Of course I cannot mention browsing on a smartphone without mentioning the iPhone. With a screen measuring 3.5 inches diagonally and resolution of 480 by 320 pixels, running the Safari browser, it naturally has an advantage when it comes to mobile browsing.

They say that you can never have too much memory (in your PC), but with 32-bit Windows XP and Vista you can.

On machines with more than 3GB of RAM, Windows XP and Vista will report total System memory (RAM) of less than 4GB, often considerably less.

So why is this? Oversimplified, ranges of physical memory are shadowed to support devices in a PC, and above 3 GB larger chunks of memory are used. Daniel Rutter explains it quite well on his Blog “Dan’s Data” in the article “Ask Dan: What’s with the 3Gb memory barrier?“.

The Microsoft knowledge base article No 929605: “The system memory that is reported in the System Information dialog box in Windows Vista is less than you expect if 4 GB of RAM is installed” explains how memory above 3GB is used. Naturally Vista Service Pack 1 has a fix - knowledge base article no 946003: “Windows Vista SP1 will report 4 GB of system memory (RAM) on systems that have 4 GB of memory installed“. Of course this is “a reporting change only“, so the actual amount of RAM is reported corrected, but large chunks above 3GB are still used in the same way.

Basically what this all boils down to is that on a 32-bit Operating System, more than 3GB of RAM is a waste. So the HP (Hewlett-Packard) Pavilion dv9810us Notebook with 3GB of RAM has enough RAM, not too much.

While doing research for a blog about smartphones, I came across some figures which blew the whole idea for my blog out of the water. The Symbian Operating System is not very well known here in the US, with roughly a 5 percent market share of smartphone sales. However, Symbian smartphones make up well over 50 percent of the smartphone market worldwide. RIM (think Blackberry) is in second place worldwide, and the Apple iPhone in third place with 6.5 percent. (Figures from February 2008 report by Canalys and
“Canalys, Symbian: Apple iPhone Already Leads Windows Mobile in US Market Share, Q3 2007” from Roughly Drafted online magazine) .

The Symbian OS is a proprietary operating system, designed for mobile devices. Note that it is Symbian and not Simian. Symbian is jointly owned by Nokia, Ericsson, Sony Ericsson, Panasonic, Siemens, and Samsung. (see Symbian OS article in Wikipedia).

An example of a smartphone which runs Symbian is the Nokia N95 Smartphone. The N95 is loaded with features: 5 Megapixel Camera with flash, FM Radio, MP3 Player, Video Capture and playback, voice Recorder, productivity applications and web browsing. The N95 is expensive as no US carrier has picked up the phone. However, since it is unlocked and Quad-band, it can be used on any GSM network anywhere in the world.

My previous blog about Memory Cards got me thinking, so here is more about Memory Cards:

Physically the largest memory card available is the CompactFlash Card. This format has been around since 1994, and is still popular in high end digital cameras. The largest capacity currently available is 32GB, with Samsung having announced a prototype of a 64GB CompactFlash card in 2006.

On the other end of the scale, the tiny, fingernail-sized microSD Card is physically the smallest. I always get a bit nervous when handling a microSD card as I’m concerned I may drop it and never find it again. Fortunately microSD cards are almost always packaged with SD Card adapters, so they can be read in SD Card readers. MicroSD cards are mainly used in cellphones, portable media players and handheld GPS devices. The largest capacity microSD (actually microSDHC – High Capacity) card currently available is 8GB.

Somewhere in between the microSD and the SD card format is the miniSD card format. It was originally intended for use in cell phones, digital cameras and MP3 players. It seems to be slowly being supplanted by the microSD card.

Some card manufacturers have a neat product which can be used as a microSD, miniSD or SD Card – like the SanDisk 2GB microSD Card with miniSD and SD Adapters.

We’re a watched society. A few nights ago, I caught Prime Suspect 7: The Final Act on DVD, and the plot was sustained by showing the police work involved in tracking down particular cars seen by surveillance cameras planted all over London. (Of course, Jane Tennison’s team kept waving videotapes around, which was rather boggling. One would have thought the London police department would have finally discovered DVDs by the time the series was filmed in 2006.)

There’s something both creepy and cool about the mix of IP cameras you can buy and install these days. No longer do you have to sit on your porch to monitor that the neighborhood kids are stealing apples and having fruit wars in your front yard. Now you can place a digital eyeball there and sit in a back room watching it real time or simply capture it on a hard disk for later filing of criminal charges.

The most highly rated IP security camera on Pricegrabber comes from Toshiba. As its product description points out, the camera captures “live, high-resolution video that is viewable anywhere in the world through a standard web browser.” That’s right. You can be quaffing a grappa in a Milanese cyber-café while checking out what your teenagers are really up to while you’re out of town. (The grappa is bound to help their case!)

A couple of customers weigh in on the Toshiba model. According to one reviewer, the IKWB15a has a limited zoom and setting it up on your network is complicated. He or she notes that it only records JPEG images, rather than video. That means, if you set up the camera to record images on motion detect, “you could have thousands of images you have to go through.”

But Lionhearted, the second reviewer, points out the other value of an IP camera — it can be used for webcamming along with surveillance. He or she uses it at a remote mountain site (and even posts a couple of photos to show just how remote). According to Lionhearted, “We wanted a camera that had features for surveillance like motion detection, yet also had good color image quality for public benefit — AND we didn’t want to spend a fortune… After exhaustive searching we bought this camera and have no regrets.”

When I had a second home, I always wondered what was going on there when I wasn’t around. Should I ever have a second home again, I could install a few of these things, crank up my browser and look for myself.

The first time I came across a memory card was with my first Palm-OS based PDA, the Sony Clie PEG-S300. This was Sony’s first Palm handheld, and it shipped with an 8MB Memory Stick, which was about the size of a stick of gum. This Sony 32MB Memory Stick looks almost identical to that first 8MB Memory Stick. Only a few years later I used a 128 MB Memory Stick with a Sony Clie NX60. A flash update allowed the use of the new Memory Stick PRO format which started at 256MB. From there the Memory Stick spun off into multiple variations (see the “Memory Stick” article in Wikipedia). Nowadays the Sony PSP uses the Memory Stick Duo and Memory Stick Pro Duo format.
Although the Sony memory Stick is produced by other manufacturers like Sandisk and Lexar, they are almost exclusively used in Sony branded digital cameras, PDAs, cellphones. The Sony VAIO line of personal computers includes Memory Stick slots.

When Sony pulled out of making Palm PDAs, I switched to Palm branded handhelds. These, and most Windows Mobile handhelds use the Secure Digital Card format. The postage-stamp sized Secure Digital Card format supports capacities from 8 MB to 2 GB. The SDHC card supports sizes from 4GB to 32GB (see the blog entry “SD, SDHC Cards, Say what?“).

There is just no space to go into the myriad of card formats here: CompactFlash, SmartMedia, miniSD, microSD and many other variants. Wikipedia’s “Comparison of memory cards” has an extensive table and comparison of memory card formats.

Are you a binary horse — somebody who can look at binary and convert it in your head rather than going to some website that will calculate it for you? If you are, then you need a binary clock, which will keep the connections in your brain snapping whenever you need to know the time.

Each column on the clock represents a different part of the time, with blue LEDs turned on or off to represent a given number. In the picture I’ve provided here, the left-most column represents 1. The next column represents 0. The third column is 4. The fourth column is 8. The fifth column is 3. And the right-most column is 6. Put those numbers together, and you get 10:48:36.

How long did it take you to figure that out? Took me about 10 minutes — using an online binary converter. I’ll never be able to use a clock like this, because it’ll guarantee my late arrival to any appointment in my calendar.

According to the description, you can run it in 12-hour (and look out the window to know which half of the day you’re in) or 24-hour mode.

In idle moments between jobs, I grab a magazine and read an article. Perhaps this little product would be a nice change of pace. Hmm. Or perhaps I could take up Spider Solitaire.

I’ve noticed lately that many of the people I talk to who work with computers have become a nostalgic lot. We’re all getting older. We speak fondly of our first Apple, lovingly recall reading our first issue of PC Magazine or PC Computing and chortle at the memory of attending some computer event where some now-bygone industry luminary was blind to his own company’s future downfall.

I’ve learned about a website for people like us: Old-Computers.com. You can read up on practically any ancient computer that ever existed and watch a 75-minute demo — perhaps the first ever recorded — given by Doug Engelbert and other researchers at Stanford in 1968 showing how computers could share information. (You’ll recognize such concepts as the mouse, hyperlink and email.)

Are you old enough to remember the Kaypro? I lugged one around in the mid-80s, thinking I was really cutting edge with my portable. (It had the heft of a sewing machine.)

Young people don’t talk about their first computer. The computing machines themselves are irrelevant. It’s all about the services they use. But you watch. Someday they’ll get that same  dreamy tone in their voices when they remember their first iPod or cellphone.