iPad First Impressions

A perk of being a mobile developer is that I often get new "toys". This week I was lucky to see "on vehicle for delivery" both an iPhone 4, and an iPad.

This is my impressions.
Impressive. I have to say that the iPad is by far the most elegent piece of electroncs I have ever seen. Its an exillerating joy to hold, look at, touch and interact with. It truely feels like "magic". Ever so gentle feather light touches animate the device and open magical doors into ... what ?

Thats my conundrum. What is this device ? I'll tell you what its *not*. It isnt a phone. So the fact that it looks like a big iPhone is misleading. Its not a phone ! So ok, is it a laptop ? No. Its not a laptop. Even with the generous (about 80% full size) onscreen keypad which is vastly easier to use then the iphone, its still not touch-typing. I cant imagine typing this blog for example. I did type a few sentances, and I'm getting better, but for text entry, its not a laptop replacement. Plus the apps are not the same as a laptop or desktop.

So what is it. Its not an iphone, its not a laptop, its not a desktop. Here's a few things it can *morph* into.

A really expensive and huge iPod.
A digital photo frame.
A hand held web browser that actually browsers the "Real Web" (not the mobile web).
An artistic device. I did this last night in bed playing with the "Brushes" app





An HD Movie player. Yes. Its *incredible* looking as a movie player, by far the best screen I've seen on ANY TV. Movies can be bought from iTunes for about $5 for HD and $4 for SD. So far a dismal selection but more is comming I'm sure.
Also works with Netflix (for $10/month which I already have a service fee).

An Email reader. Great builtin email app like the iphone but better.
A document viewer, previews .doc and .xls files as well as pictures etc.

A gaming device (what 100,000 games available.

But really is there one tangible term for what the iPad is and is it worth the money ?

I honestly dont know. I wont be throwing out my laptop. I wont lug it around as my ipod. I certianly cant replace my iphone. And dont even touch my desktop dual-21" HD monitors with 4-CPU*2 hyperthreading 8GB monster.

What is it ? thats the question. Apple has created something that previously didn't exist and is now in the process to create a market and desire for it.

I can say this, its a "Game Changer". Kudo's to Apple. Even more then the iPhone they've pulled a rabbit out of their hat and created magically something from nothing and *SOLD IT*. I think this will be the Harbinger of things to come. The device to copy, mimic, attempt (and fail) to improve. Apple is in the lead yet again.


But what is it ? And is it worth the $500 ? I cant say.
But you wont pry it from my dead cold hands.

Love those targeted Ads

I'm a slashdot junkie, I even have a Google Widget for Slashdot.
Almost fell out of my chair when I saw this one. Nice targeted advertising !

Trains Part II

My "experimental" small shelf train layout is about complete. I'm pretty impressed.

Tonight I have the 'pool table guy' coming over to move the pool table to the other half of the basement freeing up a large section to start on the 'Real Thing'.

Considering this 6x1' "experimental" layout took me about 4 months, I predict a good 10 years of fun ahead of me !

Ignorance

Ignorance is a blessed shadow that follows me though life. No matter how much light I put on it, it gets stronger.

My first "hand laid" train switch

Today I completed my first major accomplishment in my reincarnated hobby. A fully hand-made "hand laid" HO train switch. These are hand-cut rails soldered to a PC form then attached to wood ties

Here's what the full switch looks like (to scale with fingers)

In the bottom pix Notice the closeup of the "Frog". Once this is attached to the roadbed and painted over you wont see the shiny PC boards or solder joints .

Along with this I've also completed my first set of "hand laid" rail track, its really amazing experience. You glue down the ties then cut rail and actually spike them in with tiny tiny microscopic railroad spikes and thats how the rail stays put. Needs to be very accurate (like the switches but not quite so tollerence sensitive).

See the details with the "Points" (the parts that turn left and right

Special thanks to Fast Tracks for their incredible high quality tools and resources

A new soul for my IBM X40

I recently bit the bullet and dived into the SSD game. My trusty IBM X40 is 5 years old, still running strong but slow as a dog. Even though I only use it for occasional travel, and to RDP to my main box while sitting on my Lazyboy ... the laptop has always been annoyingly slow.

While I wait to decide to plunge into a new desktop system with SSD (Probably the Intel X25), with Windows 7 and 64 bit etc ... I lazily poked around and discovered that recently there have been aftermarket sales of SSD drives for the X40. The X40 is a strange laptop in that it has a special and very uncommon slot for hard drives, a 1.8 inch IDE slot. Until recently you could *ONLY* get the 30GB drive from IBM and nothing else.

Well now thats changed, you can get SSD drives from KingSpec and Levano ! The 60GB Levano drives list at $1200+ (eikes) but you can get them on ebay for $200. The Kingspec comes in 32G and 64G for $150-$200. There's a lot on the net about these and which works best etc. I went with the Kingspec for its slightly better ratings. (I suggest for an X41 you go with Levano to avoid an annoying boot time beep).

I knew that I'd have problems re-installing the OS because the X40 doesnt come with installation media, instead it has a seceret partition used to re-install. You have to talk IBM into selling you a reinstall CD set for $50. I found a company on the net selling these for $20 so I bought them. I also needed an external CD drive (X40 is CD-less). I swear I had one lying around but couldnt find it ... so thanks to ebay a $30 el-cheapo USB CD drive. Plus I used TrueImage to do an image backup of my HD to an USB Drive. And at worse, I still have my original drive if all else fails I can put it back in ...

Packages all came within a week and I brought out the screw driver, watched the "how to remove your hard drive" video from Levano, worried because there were horror stories about how these SSD drives dont fit right sometimes ... but nope. 10 minutes later and 5 screws I had the SSD drive installed. (1 screw on the case, then the drive itself is in a little caddy that is screwed on, you need to move the caddy to the SSD drive). It booted up in BIOS fine , although I cant find a single place in the X40 BIOS that refers to the HD or IDE ports. Weird.

My first goal was to do a re-install from my TrueImage Backup. I read some people were successful at this (using some other backup program). Not me. TrueImage recognized the drive fine and the backup device, but about 1/2 way through setting up the From and Too parameters it went into "beep beep beep" mode. Totally hung. Retried 3 times same deal.

Ok try #2. Use the Recovery CD's from Levano. They take FOREVER. There are 7 CD's. The first one takes 20 minutes to launch the recovery panel, then you put in CD after CD about 30 minutes a piece (really!). #Fail. 2 of the CDs' reported CRC errors. I even tried duplicating on my desktop (they Dup fine, and the files read fine). But nope. Reading on the net many people have this problem and noone reports success, even after having the CD's replaced 4 times.

And worse ... it takes HOURS ... I mean like 4 hours to get to the point where it dies.

Screw that.

Ok last resort. I have an XP Pro bare-bones (non-OEM) CD.

Voila ! It installs in under 15 minutes !

Bare bones though, it barely recognized my hardware but it was enough to bootstrap.
Then update with an XP/SP3 CD (45 mintes). Then I had to start digging on Levano site for drivers as not even my hardwired ethernet driver was working. Thankfully my USB port was, and the Thumb drives worked great to download the network drivers from Levano.

Boing ! couple drivers later I had networking, from there on it was a breeze.
I picked and chose which drivers to download, and avoided the crapware (like Access IBM Connections) ... took a couple more hours but mostly idle time.

I now have a fully driver installed XP running. There are a few glitches. For some reason the Trackpoint driver took several installs before it worked, my InnoculateIT isnt getting up to date signatures (goes to 1% and says "done" leaving 2001 signature files in place). But other then that, once I got things going it works great !

Now for the fun.,

Speed.

BEFORE:

Power On to Login Prompt: 1 min 24 sec

Login to Desktop with no wait cursors: 1 minute

No wait cursor to no more disk light flashing: 5 minutes

AFTER

Power on to Login Prompt: 20 sec

Login to Desktop with no wait: 20 sec

No wait to no more disk flashing: 10 sec

It FEELS like its about 100x faster ... but even the #'s are good. I can now do a hard reboot without going for 2 cups of coffee. and it feels like its a new modern machine.

In fact it feels faster then a LOT of modern machines. even though its only a 1.6 Ghz, single processor machine. It feels born again. Now if only I can scrounge some keyboard parts for my pointer key that's wearing out.

I Love DELL - FREE Overnight shipping

I know people love to hate the big companies but I personally love DELL. If only I could find my way around their web site I'd give them an A+ but today I give them an A++ for pricing (but a C for the web site - cant have everything !)

Monday My system crashed again with ECC errors. I think I have a systematic design problem with my system as I've replaced the MB, the RAM the PS and I still get ECC errors occasionally and they get worse in time. ( btw all were replaced under warentee for free with no complaints). But after 4 years I decided to not buy into a year's more warentee (for $175) ... of course 1 month later I get ECC errors again. SO this time I'm looking for just replacing my ECC memory with NON-ECC memory so it will shut up .. (debate about if thats a good idea outstanding).

Login to DELL web site and I find some killer deals. $39 gets me 2 x 1G DDR2's of non-ECC 800mhz memory. Great deal. AND guarenteed to work with my particular model (Precision 380). Sweet. Try that at joes-cheep-memory.com.
So ok I'm doing the checkout thing wondering how I will get reamed for shipping (or worse "S&H"). Figure I'd pay atleast $20 do get 2nd day air.
But NO !

$0 for "standard"
$0 for "2nd day"
$0 for "Overnight"

What ?
Where's the catch ?
I cautiously click through to the final confirm page fully expecting a red warning to pop up that says "OH we didnt MEAN that ... " but nope.

Checkout. $0 for overnight shipping. Tax cost more !
Hot damn.

Thank you DELL.

Now waiting to see if my memory arrives today so I can try it. Atleast I'm running on 3/4 G OK in the mean time.

I still don't know if this is intentional or accidental. And I don't care.
But it would be nice if it wasn't an accident. I'll certainly visit dell.com as my first try next time I need parts.