Recently in Technology Category

I've been using Windows 7 on several machines since the beta first came out, and now I've upgraded those installations to the Release Candidate, which is still available for a preview that will expire next spring. (The official expiration date is June 7, but the operating system will start shutting itself down every two hours starting on March 1.)  I used the beta-to-RC upgrade trick that Microsoft has made available to enterprise customers and haven't had any problems.



I've taken advantage of the pre-order special on upgrades available until July 11: you can get the Home Premium upgrade for $49 and the Professional upgrade for $99. It's available, among other places, at amazon.com and newegg.com (generally my preferred site for computer gear, but they've imposed a limit on the pre-orders). I've ordered three Home Premiums and two Professionals. I know, I know ...

I've tried Windows 7 on a number of different machines. It didn't work very well on my old Inspiron 3500 because of an inadequate graphics processor, but it works like a charm on my Dell Inspiron Mini 9s -- yes, I have two, because after I installed OSX on my original white mini in place of the Windows 7 beta, I picked up a refurbished black one and loaded up the Windows 7 RC in place of the Ubuntu it came with. (In case you're interested, Windows 7 has a much smaller foot print than OS X and fits on a 16GB SSD; OS X gets the 64GB Runcore.) Tomshardware.com (one of my favorite tech sites) has a good article on using Windows 7 on netbooks.

Windows 7 has also been working smoothly on my HP tablet. But I haven't installed Windows 7 on my Vista desktop, primarily for one reason: the HP software for my Officejet 7590 refused to install on Windows 7, claiming it was an incompatible operating system. Windows 7 would recognize the machine as a printer, but not as a scanner.

And then I discovered a tip while browsing around on the net: run the setup program in Vista compatibilty mode. Specifically, once the installer file is on the Windows 7 system, right-click, choose "Properties," then "Compatibility," and select Vista (probably SP2).

The HP software installed without a problem on both the netbook and the tablet, and Adobe Acrobat Professional sees the 7590 scanner just fine. So I think I'm going to take the plunge on the desktop.

And why, having professed that I'm the process of switching to Macs -- in fact, I'm writing this on the MacBook -- do I need all that Windows 7? Well, in addition to not yet knowing how to manipulate video sufficiently on a Mac, I also have a Windows Home Server with about 4 terabytes of storage. And you need a Windows machine connected to it to make it work well. And my wife has not intention of switching to Mac.

So I won't be abandoning Windows. Far from it, if my upgrade pre-orders are any indication.

Although I've been blogging regularly over at Patell and Waterman's History of New York over the past few months, I've been on hiatus here. But now that the year has officially begun its second half and my summer graduate class on the American novel after 1940 has come to its end, it's time to start up this blog again.


During the hiatus, I've done what I predicted in my last post: I'm writing this entry on the 13"  aluminum MacBook that I asked NYU to get for me. I was due a new computer in the fall, but our computing chief managed to provide the Mac early so that I could use the summer to get used to the new platform. I used some of my research funds to upgrade the specs to a larger hard drive and faster processor. Here the important numbers:

Model Name:    MacBook
Model Identifier:    MacBook5,1
Processor Name:    Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed:    2.4 GHz
Memory:    4 GB
Bus Speed:    1.07 GHz
Hard Drive Capacity:    232.89 G

It's basically equivalent to the new 13" MacBook Pro that Apple announced last month. The new model adds the possibility of a faster processor, and it adds a Firewire port and an SD slot to the side, while subtracting the dedicated line-in jack. A bigger difference is that the new model has no removable battery, though Apple claims that its built-in battery last significantly longer on a single charger. I'm a fan of removable batteries, though, and I'll be buying a backup battery for my trip to London later in the month.

I'll admit that one of the first things I did to the machine when it arrived in May was to create a Boot Camp partition and install a copy of the Windows 7 Release Candidate software that Microsoft has made available.  The tech guys told me that they thought that was a waste of hard disk space and that I'd be better off installing virtualization software to run Windows from my MacDesk top. As it turns, out they may have been right: I've had little reason to boot up the Windows partition, especially now that I've installed Mac versions of Adobe Acrobat Professional and Photoshop Elements. The Windows partition does sport the full Adobe CS3 Master Collection, but I'm thinking that I should learn the Mac video tools that my older son has begun to learn at his school.

For now, it's video that keeps me linked to the Windows world, because I haven't yet figured out how to do all the things on the Mac that I know how to do with in Windows to create video clips for my classes. That's a project for August. I have, however, demoted my Vista desktop to second-tier status, hooking it up to my secondary monitor and moving the Hackintosh that I built around an EFI-X dongle to the primary. In other words, I'm mostly Mac these days.

The NYU tech support folks did warn me that I'd need Windows to run some of the administrative software that NYU uses: in my case, its the accounting software that lets me monitor various research funds that I have. So I've installed Parallels software in order to run Windows XP in a virtual window. It works like a charm. Meanwhile, the NYU accounting software doesn't work well with Windows 7 thus far, so it's looking increasingly likely that I'll be deleting that Boot Camp partition from my MacBook in the near future.

Have I become an Apple fanboy? No, I'm afraid I like tinkering with my computers too much to be fond of Apple's don't-open-it-up ideology. (For example, I've discovered that the Intel Quad Core processor that I used for the Hackintosh, a Q8200, doesn't support virtualization and therefore can't run parallels. So chances are good I'll be upgrading it before long.)

But I've found a lot of things to like about the Macintosh, which I'll be discussing in the coming days.

Computer bilingualism is here to stay.

I acquired a Dell Mini 9 netbook very soon after it was released last fall. My HP Tablet was feeling heavy, and I wanted something that I could carry around more easily. I'd been checking out the various ASUS Eee PCs, but I decided to go with the Dell because of its reportedly roomier keyboard. I was hoping that I'd be able to use the Mini 9 to run my PowerPoint presentations in lecture.

When the unit arrived, I wasn't disappointed. I immediately upgraded the memory to 2 GB (Dell would only sell me 1GB due to restrictions imposed by Microsoft; in retrospect, I should only have ordered 512 MB). I didn't mind the lack of dedicated function keys, but I found myself wishing that instead of placing the quotation/apostrophe key on the bottom row to save space, Dell had put the colon/semicolon key there instead. I suppose Dell thought that more people would use the Mini to surf the web rather than to do extended typing: ostensibly you need the colon after your "http" more than you need apostrophes or quotations marks. (Most browsers, however, allow you to do without the "http://" these days, so I'm still not sure it was the right choice even with net-users foresmost in mind.)

Oddly, I found the lack of hard drive noise and the absence of a hard drive activity light a little disconcerting too, but with the SSD, the system was pretty snappy to boot up, and, yes, it did a great job with my PowerPoint presentations. It became my standard classroom machine.

I ran into a problem when I tried to upgrade my firmware to the version A04 in late December. The firmware updater was a Windows program, and it hung up in the middle of the update -- bricking the poor little Mini! So I didn't have it with me when I went to the MLA in December: it was at the Dell service depot being unbricked. It was, however, back before the new year.

And then I heard about the RunCore SSD upgrades, demonstrated on the jkkmobile blog, a site devoted to testing, upgrading, and hacking netbooks. So I ordered a 64GB SSD from mydigitaldiscount.com. It was backordered (as it is again today), but once it arrived, the installation process was easy. I followed jkkmobile's instructions below:

was enhanced in our household by the fact that we'd acquired two bettas last fall, one of which bore a striking resemblance to Microsoft's.

I'm told that the betta will disappear when the public Release Candidate version appears in May.

And then I learned that the Dell Mini 9 made a wonderful Hackintosh because all of the hardware is supported natively by Apple's OS X Leopard operating system.

Now I'm a big fan of iPods (I've owned 5 different models so far), and I love my iPhone 3G, but I've always found Macs a little off-putting. It started back in the day when the first models were released and you needed to eject CDs using the software. The software-eject became the embodiment for me of the way I reacted to the Mac difference: what was supposed to be easier for most people was actually harder for me. Then again it'd taken me a while to get used to the whole graphical user interface thing, because I'd spent my summers in college programming for IBM on mainframes: I was used to the command line and I liked it!

I actually own a first-gen (pre-Intel) Mac Mini. I bought it when my older son was entering Kindergarten, because I'd heard that his classroom would have a Mac. It did, but it was an older Mac running OS 9, and the programs that the kids used -- the Bailey's Bookhouse series from Edmark -- didn't run very well on OS X Tiger, which came with the Mac Mini. The Windows versions ran fine, however, so we used those at home. The Mac Mini currently resides in my office, where one of my Macophile colleagues uses it.

Now, however, he is a third-grader, and his school has an up-to-date Mac-based computer lab and all the Macs in the school are networked together. He's been learning PowerPoint and Keynote and lately iMovie in his technology class. So I figured it was time for me to start to learn to speak Mac more fluently. I'd always felt in the Mac environment the way I feel in Paris linguistically: not quite up to speed.

I'd had it in mind to build a new computer to run Windows XP, and then I learned about the marvelous EFI-X USB dongle, a bootloader that allows you to load any major operating system (Windows Vista, Windows XP, Mac OS X, Linux) so long as you have compatible hardware (and it's OS X that imposes the has the most restricted compatibility). So I acquired an EFI-X, bought hardware from their compatability list, and put together a triple-booting machine over the Christmas break: XP, OS X, and eventually the Windows 7 Beta. And I started my Mac lessons.

So when I read this guide to loading OS X onto the Mini 9 from Gizmodo, I couldn't resist. Like the author of the guide, I had to create a bootable USB drive and transfer the files from my OS X disc to it. I diverged from the instructions near the end, continuing to use the USB drive where the author reverted to a USB DVD drive. As a result, in step 15, I had to enter "81" instead of "82" to get to the Mini's SSD (if you read the guide, you'll see what I mean).

And it worked. It just plain worked. The larger SSD meant that I didn't have to strip down Leopard, and I've loaded iLife '09, iWork '09, and Microsoft Office 2008 with plenty of room to spare. The only thing that doesn't work well for me so far is Garageband, in part because the program needs greater screen resolution than the Mini 9's 1024x600, but mostly because the Atom processor in the Mini 9 can't handle the processing required to enable plugging in an electric guitar. (That works fine on my Hackintosh by the way.)

If you want proof of how well the Dell Mini 9 handles OS X, check out this video by Andy Inahtko of the Chicago Sun-Times:




Inahtko's also written a column about this project for the Sun-Times online.

Technically, I've violated the user agreement that came with my copy of Leopard when I installed it on non-Apple hardware. But should Apple really be upset that I'm currently running a purchased copy of OS X on a Dell Mini 9. I don't think so, and here's why: First, as Inahtko points out in his column, creating a Hackintosh is not for the faint of heart (even with a relatively compliant piece of hardware like the Mini 9), and it will only ever be an enthusiast or hobbyist project. Bottom line: it won't cut significantly into Apple's sales. And it might just get Windows people like me in the Apple door.

Creating the Hackintosh Mini 9 got me to buy a copy of iWork '09, and I'm going to be testing out Keynote in class later in the month. What's more, it's now likely that the next notebook that we buy (sometime before this fall) will be a MacBook. Or even a MacBook Pro. I'm now committed to computer bilingualism.

So here's a place where two of my interests -- technology and politics -- come together: David Bergman's Gigapan image of President Obama's inaugural address. It's a 1.47 gigapixel shot -- yes, that's gigapixel not megapixel -- created using Gigapan's Epic photo mount, which enables you to shoot a series of multiple overlapping pictures that can later be fused into one helluva panoramic print. Bergman set it to shoot a grid that was 20 photos wide by 11 photos down. The whole process took about 15 minutes to complete.You can read Bergman's account of how he came to make the picture on his blog.

If you click on the image below, you'll be taken to a fullscreen viewer that you can explore, zooming in, out, and all around, using your mouse.

I've been using my Hewlett-Packard tx2500z Tablet for a little over two months now. I haven't found the time to learn how to make best use of the tablet features, but I'm happy with the machine -- especially now that I've solved an annoying problem with the audio, which would often stutter when I was playing music with PowerPoint slides or streaming audio from the web. One review of the machine noted the problem and hoped that a "more mature sound driver" would solve the problem. I would check periodically, but no new driver has appeared.

And then I found another review, from studentbuyingguide.com, whcih offered a solution that has worked for me:

Some people have reported issues with stuttering during DVD and MP3 playback, I also got a little of this.  There is a simple fix though, it turns out to be a conflict with the wireless card and to resolve just do the following: Wi-Fi. In device manager, go to Control Panel > System > System Properties > Hardware > Device Manager > Network adapters -> Broadcom adapter -> Advanced -> Disable Bands -> Disable 802.11a.

I don't use 802.11a wireless, so disabling it posed no problem. And my audio hasn't stuttered since.

[Image source: tabletpcreview.com]

With the help of Bill over at the LivingDot helpdesk, I have managed to fix the problem with the feed from ahistoryofnewyork.com.

Bill reported that when he tried to access the feed, he received an error message: "An invalid character was found in text content."

At first, I didn't know how to reproduce the error, so I scanned the entries since August 8 for anything that might look like an invalid character. I made a few changes, but nothing helped. Then I tried to recreate the feed widget with Feeds.App Lite, and the process failed. I was sent over to feedvalidator.org, which identified the word in the entry "FringeNYC" that was causing the problem. It turned out to be the word "Tuesday," which must have contained some kind of hidden character that wasn't showing up on my screen. So I deleted "Tuesday," rewrote "Tuesday," saved the post and -- voila! -- everything is working again.

So if you're having trouble with illegal content in your feeds, use feedvalidator.org to isolate the problem. Thanks again, Bill!

For reasons that remain mysterious, the listing of recent posts from "Patell and Waterman's History of New York" (ahistoryofnewyork.com) disappeared from my sidebar after I republished some pages last night. The listing was created using the plugin Feeds.App Lite, which comes with installations of Movable Type 4. I'd been thinking of upgrading to a paid version of Feeds.App so that I can list the authors of each post, but I don't think I'll do that until I figure out what's wrong with the widget I created.

With luck or perhaps a flash of insight, I'll be able to get it working again soon. In the meantime, I'll just note that the last post concerned Herman Melville and his father's description of him as "n honest hearted double-rooted Knickerbocker."

Here is a project that brings together two of my hobbies: building computers and assembling Lego creations. Well, Lego assembly is really my sons' interest, but I seem to spend an awful lot of time doing it with my older son and for my younger son. I found the project via Engadget.com. It's a mini-ITX computer with a case built exclusively of Lego parts!

This Lego Computer is the brainchild of Luke Anderson, a computer science major at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He has thoughtfully provided both an account of the project and complete instructions under a Creative Commons license on his blog. He used the MLCAD program to design the case and order the parts from various sellers at Bricklink.com.

Here's a YouTube video of Luke assembling the case. It's fun to watch even if you have no interest in either building computers or building with Legos.