Brian Jarvis, UMPC Geek

I am married to an absolutely amazing woman but truth be told, she isn’t the world’s best passenger on road trips. If she has a good book to read she does great, but if not, “Are we there yet?” comes more from my wife in the passenger seat than from my the kids in the back seat.

This weekend, we drove from Portland to eastern Idaho for a family reunion: 10 hours of driving nightmare bliss each way. My wife brought two books along for the drive, but she finished the second about 4 hours before we got home. After chatting for about an hour, she confessed that she was going crazy and asked me if I had anything to read on my BlackBerry. With a tear in my eye, I pulled to the side of the road and revealed to her the wonder of Ereader.com.

Within a few minutes, we had Sense and Sensibility up on the screen and she was contently reading from its virtual pages. That is pretty cool in my book, but the real shock came when we got home and she told me that she preferred reading the digital version! She read from my BlackBerry until almost midnight. I don’t know that there was a prouder geek in all of Oregon.

At work, one of the mobile product managers has had an unopened MSI Wind in his cubicle for about a week now. Today I shamelessly asked if I could steal it for a while since it was obvious he was in no hurry to evaluate it. Now I have something new to play around with for a few days. I’ll do some side-by-side comparisons of the Aspire One and the Wind. If there is anything that you would like to see, let me know.

Over the holiday, I came across this amazing deal from the Home Shopping Network:

It’s hard to notice much besides the woman who looks like she’s looking forward to taking a bite of her tasty Aspire One, but try to look at the “Retail Value” of the netbook:  $847.60 - ON WHAT PLANET???

Good thing they’re offering it for the amazing value of just $499.90 (plus $27.95 for shipping and handling).  What they’re really doing is preying on the uniformed because the almost 50% markup they are charging is ridiculous.  For people who want one that bad, I’d be willing to part with mine for a mere $475 (with free shipping)!  :)

When Google first released its Chrome browser, I used it quite a bit.  Over time, I found myself using Firefox more and more largely because it plays nicely with small screens.  The screen on my netbook and my UMPC just don’t have enough screen real estate to waste it on Chrome’s huge header.  I had really hoped there would be a full screen option for Chrome by now.

Today I accidentally discovered that you can give yourself an “almost” full screen experience.  Check this out:

Here’s how I did it:

1. In Chrome, browse to a good home page (Google’s home page or iGoogle works well as noted below)
2. Click on the page icon to the right of the address bar in Chrome’s toolbar
3. Click on “Create application shortcuts…”
4. Select “Desktop” and click “OK”
5. Go to your desktop and launch the “Application shortcut” that has the name of your new home page
6. Maximize the window and enjoy “near” full screen browsing in Chrome

Tips:

• There are no navigation buttons available to you in this view.  You can use the “Backspace” key to go backwards in your browser history.  Alternatively, you can use the Alt key in combination with the left and right arrow keys to go backwards and forwards (respectively) through the history. 
• You don’t get an address bar this way, but if you use a Google page as suggested above, you can do a Google search for any URL and it will always be the first hit.
• If you want to truly maximize your screen real estate, change your taskbar to not stay on top of other windows.

Most error messages aren’t very helpful, but today when my Lenovo T61 chashed, I witnessed the mother of all useless error messages:

I went to Microsoft’s support page and read the documentation and they suggest you check a half dozen things, but nothing specific.  The error message doesn’t even help them.  

I rushed out this morning to install the latest update from Apple largely for one feature:  on-device podcast downloads.  It is nice that now you can go out and manually pull down single episodes to your iPhone or iPod Touch, but there is one major feature missing that seems like a huge oversight to me.

There is no way to view your list of current subscriptions and do a refresh that grabs the latest episode.  The only reason I regularly attach my iPod to my computer is to update my podcasts.  I purchase new music once every few weeks in batches, but find myself syncing for podcast support every other day or so.  This seems like a great way that Apple could free the iPod from PC’s completely, so I thought for sure it would be a feature.  :^)

I hope that future software updates will provide a way for me to automatically get the latest episode of Mobile Tech Roundup without needing my PC. 

I wrote about killing my Aspire One some time ago, and ever since it died, I have wondered what might have caused it.  I know that Acer replaced the board during the repair, so I figure that something significant must have happened.  Well, I have a pretty good hunch that it was me being careless that killed it. 

The other day, I went to plug something into the USB port and was having a little trouble getting it to go in.  When I started paying attention to what I was doing, I realized that I was trying to put a USB drive into the Ethernet port.  It dawned on me that this would totally explain my previous experience when my Aspire One stopped working.  If I had plugged my drive into the network port before, it wouldn’t have booted (like it didn’t), and it certainly could have shorted the board out (like something did).

I have learned some interesting things:

1. Apparently I don’t look very closely when I plug in USB drives
2. A USB connector and an Ethernet port are very close to the same dimension
3. Warranty at Acer will repair hardware even if mindless behavior caused the problem

Yesterday I installed a new control utility for my Aspire One:  a1ctl.  It is similar to AA1FanControl in that it allows you to control the fan on your netbook, but it also provides additional functionality.  For power savings, the software has the ability to  step the CPU back to 800 Mhz or you can disable the LAN, Wifi, and webcam separately.  It also allows you to downscale the screen so that you can run a 1024 x 768 resolution (I’m hoping I can run Rise of Nations now).  I’ll give a more complete review of the software after I have been using it a few days.

After a couple of weeks without my netbook, I’m back in the saddle! I sent the unit off for repair after a mysterious failure just a bit over two weeks ago. On Monday afternoon, I received my Aspire One back from Acer functioning like nothing ever happened. I was pretty concerned about getting warranty support since I had opened the device to upgrade the RAM (which validates the warranty, I am sure), but they didn’t ask and I didn’t tell.

Many thanks to the people who contacted me offering support suggestions on breathing some life back into my computer. In the end, Acer ended up replacing the motherboard though, so in my case it was a hardware failure. I wish I knew what caused the problem though. If it was something that I did I would like to avoid repeating the mistake (the netbook was plugged into an iGo universal power adapter when it died last time).

By the way, the very first thing I did when I got the unit back was to open it back up and upgrade the RAM again. Am I tempting fate?   :^)

I love the Apple switcher ads, but to tell the truth, they aren’t very fair. The presentation that Mac’s are cool and PC’s are boring is central to their theme but is simply not true. I saw something in the Cleveland airport last week that drove this point home and made me laugh.

I noticed all of the people working on laptops in the terminal and took special notice of one gentleman working on a particularly nice system: A Macbook Air. The thing that made me laugh was that he couldn’t have looked more like PC from the switcher ads if he tried. If it would have been Halloween day, I would have thought he was making a joke since he looked WAY more like Mr. Gates than Mr. Jobs. To drive the point home even further, he was playing some really low-resolution game that looked like it was written for a Commodore 64. I literally laughed out loud when I saw him.

I have spent some time thinking lately about what’s really cool about computers. Even though I am a huge hardware geek, that is not what makes a computer cool - what you do with your computer is what makes it cool! I have more respect for someone stretching the limits of their 3 year old Dell Latitude producing creative content than for someone with a brand new Macbook Pro that does nothing with it.

The reality is that all current generation hardware has the ability to create some really great content. I’m not talking about how easy or difficult it is to do so because that’s where the argument gets heated. I’m just pointing out that the hardware is plenty capable and most of us need to turn up our creative juices and stretch that ability to the limit to do some really cool things!