Filed under: Technology
I’m typing on it right now, because it’s AWESOME. The silver chicklet-style keys of the Toshiba NB205 netbook. My latest acquisition and go-to business traveller.
Don’t get me wrong, I liked my gen 2 Asus Eee PC. Praised it in a blog entry last year. But I need my space. Hard drive space. And I need my keys to be, well, comfortable to type on.
So I did my homework and opted for the Toshiba. Took it on a road trip just two days after taking it out of the box. And it held up real good. Here’s the dish:
A 4-day excursion to sunny San Diego for a conference and to get work done on the side. I needed to connect to the ‘Net, type (a LOT), and carry the netbook everywhere because I really didn’t want to leave the little guy in my room while I was out sipping margaritas – er – billing extra time. Yeah.
The Toshiba satisfied most of my needs. I was limited only by WiFi reception (abysmal in the lobby and conference rooms, excellent in my hotel room). Portability was a dream. I toted the Toshiba, seminar papers, my sunglasses case, BlackBerry, three pens, a bottle of Vitamin Water, and one envelope in the 12×10x1 inch cloth messenger bag they distributed to us convention attendees. And it didn’t kill my shoulder.
The best part was the keyboard. I looked at a lot of netbook models. Tried each one with a test sentence* “the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs,” and found the Toshiba’s keyboard quick, responsive, durable, and spacious. Both Shift keys are big and accessible. The Tab key, though small, was easy to distinguish from the letter Q right next to it. And there are ridges on the F and J keys to help you place your fingers when you’re typing in low light.
The Toshiba’s touchpad is large and sensitive enough for moving the mouse pointer along. It also defaults to a left-click when you tap on it. But I found the up/down scrolling feature a bit testy. You have to drag your finger along the right edge of the touchpad to scroll up or down, but only after applying some serious pressure on the top right corner. It’s not as sensitive to that action as, say, the MacBook’s two-finger up/down scrolling.
The speaker is puny and the screen could use more real estate and less bezel. There’s also a feature that will temporarily stop the hard drive from spinning if vibration is detected. Great for bumpy roads, not so great when you’re typing heavily while lying atop your bed like I’m doing right now.
But the battery life is killer. Toshiba claims up to 9 hours on battery and I tested that statement. It’s just about right. Throughout the convention, I kept putting it on standby and restarting it less than an hour later. I was also typing copious notes into Microsoft Word, checking webmail, and doing all of this while boldly and intentionally leaving the power cord in my hotel room. I was also accessing my firm’s server via Citrix (also known as You’re Never Really Away From Work Y’Know) to run a database loaded with lots of TIFF images and Excel spreadsheets. I did a lot of mousing around an clicking then. And the Toshiba’s battery held up. Took five hours to drop from 95 to 51% capacity. Not bad!
So, from a strict business traveller standpoint, I’m happy with the Toshiba NB205. It’s got enough storage and juice to run Office, stream a couple YouTube clips, and bill like crazy on the ActiveX-based Citrix remote server. Plus it’s stylin’ Everyone else at the conference had blah black laptops. Snore!
…
* This test sentence, btw, uses every letter of the alphabet at least once. It’s a cool way to test keyboards.
Filed under: Technology
That is the freaky 2D world of And Yet It Moves. I can’t even begin to describe this game to you. I accidentally downloaded it off of the Mac Games Arcade while I was surfing new releases to try. I thought I was getting another game demo but it so happens that my little mis-click resulted in a gem of a find.
My favorite computer games are RTS and simulators. Anything that takes hours to play. Recently I downloaded the Mac Games Arcade for free from the Apple web site. It’s like iTunes for video games on your Mac, with the option to demo any game for free for one hour before you decide whether or not to purchase it. Most of the games cost under $40. The full version of And Yet It Moves cost me $9.95. That was a steal.
This game is so challenging and addictive that if it weren’t for my drooping eyelids I would have played it all night. The premise is simple: get your paper cutout self through this “course” filled with jumps, drops, moving boulders, crevices and the like to your destination: a piece of bond paper bearing your outline. A series of checkpoints in the form of shadowlike guides point you in the right direction. Oh, and while you’re at it, mind the falling rocks and deadly creatures.
My hats off to the developers of this game. They’ve managed to create something quite innovative without going crazy with the bells and whistles. Simplicity speaks loudly here. Once I get through all the courses in the game I’m going to try my luck with time trials and (maybe) compete against other AYIM players. I’m curious to see how well I can fare.
Last month I caved in and bought an Asus Eee PC 900 sub-notebook, my first Microsoft-related purchase in over five years. I needed to access the company’s server to do some work “Green Living” style (that’s my new term for “telecommute”) but I just couldn’t do it on my Macs. Not even with open source software. I also knew that I really didn’t want the burden of another computer. Especially since my two Macs take care of 99.9999999% of my computing needs … barring of course that one agonizingly important detail: cross-platform incompatibility with the business software that pays all of my bills and leaves me with money to spare for superfluous purchases like a talking Clone Trooper helmet.
The Eee PC filled a niche for me and did it quite well. With its small form factor and basic setup, I could connect remotely and work virtually at a fraction of the cost of a loaded Windows PC. I was fully aware of its shortcomings before I purchased it, namely the teeny tiny keyboard (which I’m getting used to), the sparse hard drive space, and minimalist multimedia processor. But I’ve figured out some workarounds and have since been computing away in the after hours like the workaholic I have evolved into. Here are some of my tweaks:
- Inserted an 8GB SD card to store all of the files I will create
- Bought a 4GB thumb drive as a secondary file backup
- Downloaded AVG Free virus scan for added protection
- Subscribed to an extra service from my cell carrier so that I can use my CrackBerry as a broadband modem tethered to the Asus whenever I’m out of range of free public WiFi
- Video-mirrored my desktop onto an external monitor while working at home
- Dug up an old keyboard and mouse to use while working at home
- Dug up an old external DVD player so that I can run stuff from any optical disc
- Loaded all non-native programs onto the “larger” D: drive, leaving boot drive C: free to run the OS
- Periodically ran the Disk Cleanup Utility to free up hard drive space
Finally, I should emphasize that I only use this sub-notebook for two things: Internet (incluing virtual desktop access) and word processing. Those of you out there interested in doing much more tasks should look elsewhere. That’s my honest opinion.
I’ve had a lot of things on my mind lately and I promised one of my regular readers an update, but I’ve not much to report because the past three and a half weeks have pretty much been the same as the previous seven. I’m still working on that same big project, I’ve still not written enough new poems to fill out my latest proposed collection (which is now dead in the water) and I’m still juiced on the frenetic pace of crowded subway platforms and power lunches.
So this entry could go the blah way, the overly romanticized way, or the nothing to report way. I’m making it up as I type.
I made Blog of the Moment sometime last week. I don’t remember the actual date, but I thought that WordPress was trying to humour me with the capsule appearing right after I had logged in to the site. Here’s the screen capture … actually just a snippet of the entire screen cap. I Photoshopped a lot out of the actual screen cap. Pardon the cropping.
In other news, I’ve spent this entire Easter weekend ogling over my new MacBook. The good folks at the Apple Store transferred all of my music and photo files from my old desktop PC to the MacBook, free of charge. For some weird reason I had thought that the transfer would cost me $65 but it didn’t. So I went out and indulged in Mac OS X Tiger Edition: The Missing Manual by David Pogue and began an intense self-study in the realm of user-friendly and ridiculously simple computing. I love Apple.
I wish my weekends were a bit longer so that I could have more time to put the new laptop to work. Two weekends ago I promised myself a foray around the city with some impromptu digital photography, but if I can recall properly I spent that time catching up on laundry and ironing. I’m still quite the clutter-bomb right now. Not to mention the fact that I’m behind schedule in my reading list.
I think I was behind schedule even before this work project started. Darn it.
