Technology

From Unlimited to 900 Minutes a Month

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Back in August I wrote about how I was saving by using Skype instaed of my mobile phone when at home.

I also finally canceled my Broadvoice account over the summer. It wasn’t because I was unhappy with the service. I was, in fact they were always great. I would recomend them to friends looking for a VOIP phone. I just didn’t use the service that much so it wasn’t worth spending the $8 or so a month that it cost to have the cheapest plan. I also was using Skype more and Skype was cheaper and provided more options for me. It wasn’t an easy choice but eventually Skype won out and I dropped Broadvoice.

Up until August I had switched to an unlimited Mobile phone plan so I could use my Mobile as my only phone and not have to worry about number of minutes used. This was nice and easy but also about $40 more expensive per month than I was previously paying for Mobile voice service.

Now I am using Skype out for my calls when I am at home, and I am routing most of my work calls through GrandCentral so I can select what phone I want them to ring at. This has decreased my Mobile minutes used by allot. I probably could get by with only 450 minutes a month but I have yet taken the plunge and switched to that cheap of a plan. I am sticking with the 900 minutes I have had but I use less and less each month. It is weird since I have relied on my mobile as basically my only phone for years. I have been thinking about going back to the unlimited mobile service because it is just easier to deal with, but for now I am enjoying cheaper service with Skype!

A New Blackberry Curve

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When I got home from the taping of the Daily Show last night I returned to a box containing my new Blackberry Curve 8310. Since I started my new job in September I have been lazy in researching how to order one. Over the holidays I finally broke down and realized I needed one to stay up to date with the contestant barrage of mail I get. So now I once again have to carry two phones, since I won’t give up my personal number. It has been almost 8 months since I had a Blackberry I used every day. I almost didn’t miss it.

I have a slightly newer model Curve from what I used at Redcats. The only major difference I see is that this new one has GPS built in, and is a titanium color. I am still trying to figure out what applications I want for it.

Its a Netbook

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I tried out an Asus eee 10000H back in August. I wasn’t a huge fan. The keyboard was too small and the battery layout was a bit awkward. Those reasons and the fact that at the time my main use for it was minimal I ended up selling the eee PC to Jayson. He loves it and uses it every day on the train to and from work.

With my new job I have had more of a need to have a really small computer that I can throw in my bag for chat and emails when I am out and about. The Thinkpad T61 from work is great (for a windows machine) but it isn’t so great to carry around unless I am going to and from work. For that reason I went back to looking at Netbooks. I looked at the Dell Mini 12, and the HP Mini 1000. The Dell wasn’t available to ship until January (come on dell) and I wasn’t sure if the 12″ netbook would be too big. That was my dilemma. I want a small machine, thus looking at a netbook in the first place, but I also have bad eyes. I want the biggest screen i can get. I think the Dell 12″ would be borderline too big. The keyboard on the HP Mini 1000 also got fantastic reviews for how good it was. I also looked at the Macbook Air. It was still light even though it was physically bigger than the other netbooks I was looking at. The Air did have a 13″ screen. The final deciding factor not to get the Air was price. It cost more than my regular laptop.

I opted for an HP Mini 1000 with a 60 gig hard drive and bluetooth from Amazon.com. Amazon Prime is great. I ordered the computer on Friday and for $3.99 it was at my house on Monday. Along with the Netbook I also picked up a Verizon Aircard for internet anywhere. I opted for the USB dongle device. I could have gotten a built in card for the mini but I wanted the option of using the device on my Macbook or Thinkpad also. So far the combo has worked out. I took the HP to work yesterday and got great signal on the Verizon Broadband.

I have yet to try out office or any real intense applications on the computer yet. One of the guys on my team did try loading videos from YouTube yesterday and said it worked great.

I am giving the computer a run for its money this week when I take it as my only computer to Jayson & Gretchen’s for a few days.

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How Some Hardware Companies Can Confuse Their Customers

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I wonder sometimes what Technology companies are thinking sometimes. A few months ago I bought a Microsoft Bluetooth Notebook Mouse 5000 to use when traveling with my Macbook. It is a good portable mouse. I had no real complaints about it. That is why when I needed to use a portable mouse with my Thinkpad T61 I wanted to configure the mouse for use with it. The Thinkpad has bluetooth. That is when my problems started.

It turns out that the Thinkpad does not have the control panel option for Bluetooth even though the driver is installed and working. Some forum searches later and I discovered that this is unfortunately common for SP-2 + installs of Windows XP. I can’t really setup a bluetooth mouse without that control panel applet. I then figured I could download the latest Microsoft drivers and mouse software for the Notebook Mouse 5000. I was hoping that maybe I could configure the mouse using the Microsoft Mouse software. This is when things got interesting. When I went to Microsoft’s Hardware site to download the drivers I couldn’t find the mouse I own in the list. I verified that I have the right mouse type and I still couldn’t find it anywhere on the Drivers & Download page.

I then decided to search the internet for references to drivers for this model mouse. After about 15 minutes searching I found several references to the same problem I was having of not finding the drivers. One of the posts was actually on a Microsoft Forum. The answer blew me away. Yeah, there aren’t any drivers to download. According to someone who seems to be working at Microsoft said that since it is a generic Bluetooth Mouse there is not specific driver set for this model. My response to that is, oh I am sorry that I the end user didn’t know that. How can you expect a consumer to figure that out? You sell someone a product but when you can’t find that product listed on support and download lists it is kind of frustrating. I can understand that I don’t need a driver or special software for the mouse. Wouldn’t it have been a good idea to have this model in the list of models to choose from on the support site and when you select it you get a notice about not needing to download anything special for it? Come on Microsoft you can do better than this.

In the end my problem is still not solved since I don’t have any way to pair the mouse to the Thinkpad. Lenovo hasn’t been very helpful either. I am still working on the issue but I thought my little story was odd enough to take a few minutes and write about it

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My New Monitor

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After searching far and wide for a good deal on a monitor I ended up ordering a Dell 23″ LCD. I got a nice discount and it was the right size for me. It also offered DVI & VGA inputs. I got it yesterday and it looks great on my new computer table add on. I am finally using Outlook the way it was intended (full screen with a nice big 3 pane setup so I can see everything).

Now all I need for the perfect computer setup is a better mouse and keyboard for my Thinkpad. I just got a Microsoft Wireless Laser mouse for my Macbook and it is really nice. Moves really smooth. I might get another one for the Thinkpad, but I can’t figure out what kind of keyboard to get. I love the Apple Wireless Keyboard I use on my Macbook, but I don’t think it will work with a Windows machine.

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Twitter

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About a month or two ago I signed up for Twitter. I thought it was a cool idea, but as usual most of my friends aren’t using the system so I didn’t do anything with it. About two weeks ago I had second thoughts about the system and started Tweeting anyway. I plugged in Twitter to Facebook so now whenever I Tweet my Facebook status is updated. I thought that was a cool idea. Last week I added a Twitter plugin to Typepad so my latest Tweets are now in one of the colums on my blog.

I find it cool that I can blast out a quick Twitter message from my iPhone when I am bored somewhere!

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Black Friday

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Yesterday I was really stupid and did what everyone else did the day after Thanksgiving. I went shopping. I know, I always say I avoid all stores between Thanksgiving & New Years. Especially on Black Friday, but I wanted a deal on a computer monitor. Since I have been working remotely from home periodically I wanted a nicer monitor for my work laptop. Going from my 23″ Cinema Display on my mac to a 19″ boxy monitor on my Thinkpad just wasn’t cutting it. I went to Best Buy to look at a 22″ or 24″ HP LCD. Turned out I thought the 22″ was too small, and the 24″ was too expensive. After some quick price comparison on my iPhone I realized that I could get a better deal online so I passed on buying anything.

After my failed attempt at shopping I meet up with Danny and we headed over to Stout for a few drinks and dinner. It was cold walking to Stout but it was a nice to get out!

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iPhone 2.2

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I upgraded today to the iPhone latest version of the iPhone software, 2.2. On the off chance that the problem I had last week with my iphone not syncing with my computer was related to the phone and not the computer I am updating the software right away. So far I don’t see any major features stand out. I am happier that my Apple TV has a new OS version on it so I can control the volume of the Apple TV using my remote software on the iPhone! Now that is functional!

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The Weirdest Technial Problem

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On 2nd I wrote about a weird issue regarding my iPhone resetting. Unfortunately since then the issue happened on two other occasions. By the 3rd issue I decided to call Apple and open a ticket on my problem. They couldn’t help me much on the phone so they wanted me to bring the phone in and see someone at a local Apple Store. This is when things get interesting.

A few days before the 3rd incident with my iPhone I noticed that one of the external USB drives I have threw an error when I booted up the Macbook. I was bad and kind of ignored the error since I could see the drive mount and didn’t appear to have any issues. After a few reboots with the sam error I actually read the error and noticed it was warning about a corrput file system. Since this drive was a backup drive and only used as an archived copy of data I didn’t need the data I decided to pull the drive and use a spare I had. The next time I rebooted my computer Sunday night I got the same error, but this time it was on another 750 gig USB drive I had plugged into my Macbook. This time the error was on a drive that I do use and have critical data on. I was not hugely worried since I could still read the data on the drive. I decided to copy the critical data off onto another 750 gig drive that I decided to use as a mirrored copy of the data on the first drive.

Once I moved all the data off of the damaged drive, I formatted it and prepared to mirror all the data on the 2nd drive back over to it. I started off a replication of the good drive using Synk and then went to bed. This was the same night I called in the iPhone for support. I woke up the next morning to find that my Mac had crashed and never copied very much data. Once I rebooted my Macbook I noticed that the one good drive I had was now not visible in OSX. I checked the disk utility and I saw the drive but it was not available. A verify failed telling me the file system was messed up. I began to panic a bit. All my efforts to create a good backup process ruined by some weird fluke issue. At this point I had to take my Macbook and goto work.

After work I went to the Apple Store on 5th Ave and told the Genius Bar guy my woes. He looked over my iPhone and then my Macbook. After explaining what happened to my USB drives they decided that I can hold onto my iPhone but that they want to take my Macbook in to run some tests on.

Now I am without my Macbook, my iPhone works but has no media on it. I was instructed to reset it again, but not restore it. I am waiting to do that when I get my Macbook back. I can’t install anything without all the data on it. After a bit more panicking about the lost data on my hard drives I am feeling a bit more optimistic. I am using Data Rescue II to pull the data off my bad drive. It is taking ages to copy but so far I have been successful. I am about 70% done with my restore. I think the most critical data is already restored onto my good drive. Once I am done I will format the bad drive and mirror the data back over to it. I will then do what Jayson does and physically unplug the backup drive and sync it every week or every other week. Longer term I am looking to get another Drobo or some sort of other solution that does some sort of RAID.

While I wait for my Macbook to return I am not off the Grid. I am using my iMac I typically use for TV, and I have my work Thinkpad.

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Google To Zimbra Update

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So far I am liking Zimbra, but I do have a few features that I miss from Google Apps. I miss the ability to search and apply tags to everything that is already in my account. Zimbra cannot do that, but version 6 should be able to fix that. I miss the linking of messages to one thread in Google, but on the other hand I don't miss it sometimes. That was a controversial function for me.

I miss the extra drive space. My current Zimbra account only gives me 2 gigs. When I am done uploading all my mail I will need closer to 4gig, and Google apps gave me around 7. I knew this going into the Zimbra, but more space would be nice!

I am liking the syncing to my iPhone. The only quirk is that the photo caller id pictures I have on my Mac address book won't sync with the iPhone anymore but they will sync with the Zimbra server. Weird. I am also having issues with getting the calendar on my mac to sync with Zimbra. I was able to do a one way import to the server but getting it back down to my iCal has been a problem. It hasn't bothered me yet since I don't really use iCal as much as I used to now that my work world lives in Exchange.

I have had a few other odd issues with mail not replicating to Outlook using the Zimbra plug in, but I haven't gone crazy over it yet. Overall Google Apps was a good solid web app, so change is difficult. That being said I am happier that I have a bit more control over my most sensitive data. Sorry Google, I love you in many ways but I am still a bit skeptical about your privacy and data retention policies. And in a nutshell that is the final reason I moved to Zimbra. I still use my Gmail account as a backup, but I haven't logged into my Google Apps account all week.

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