January 2007 Archives

After running about four different kinds of Linux, and also having run OS X 10.3.9 and 10.4.6 (albeit sparingly for the latter), I've come to the conclusion that Windows and MS Office are a lot zippier than they get credit for.

If what you need to do is get work done, Windows (and I'm mainly talking about 2000 and XP here) is a workhorse. And there are free apps from today till tomorrow and into the next millennium. And so far, my screen looks better in Windows than it does in any flavor of Linux. Best I've seen so far is the Gnome GUI that comes with Ubuntu. KDE, available for Knoppix or Ubuntu is slower. Too slow, I think.

One thing I'm gonna tell you right now: The whole thing about Linux being able to "save" an old PC from obsolesence. I don't buy it at this point. But if you want to set up a PC to run modern browsers and working e-mail programs, along with Office-compatible free apps, and you don't have a Microsoft Windows OS disc, Linux can provide a very credible working environment. Is it a better one than Windows? No, just different.

What Linux does have going for it, especially the big distributions, is free upgrades forever. And the smug satisfaction that you're not running Windows or OS X. If that kind of smugness is your thing.

Now that I can download and make my own bootable CDs of ISO images, I'm collecting and sampling all the CD-bootable Linux flavors out there.

So far I've got:

Knoppix
Ubuntu
Xubuntu
Fluxbuntu
DSL (Damn Small Linux)
DSN-n (Damn Small Linux, but a little bigger)

I've managed to make CDs of about half of them. I tried to make a bootable USB stick with DSL, but it didn't work. It can be done, say geeks.

DSL runs great, although it sometimes leaves the mouse behind on the Dell, depending on if/where the USB drive is plugged in. It won't recognize the Ethernet card either. But it's wicked fast. Maybe DSL-n, bigger as it is, will do better.

And Xubuntu is supposedly lighter in resources, which I need for This Old PC, with Fluxbuntu even lighter still (with DSL the absolute lightest). But if I can't get wired Internet or wireless going, it's all terribly academic and not at all useful.

In other news, I downloaded Abisoft for PC to get a feel for it. It's a very light Word-compatible word processor that also runs under Linux and is being included in more and more distributions.

What I like about these Unix distributions: The ones that are meant to be run from a hard drive (the Ubuntu family) allow for easy updating and equally easy search and downloading of new, compatible applications. Huzzah!

I went on a mission. Call it CES - Woodland Hills. I wanted to see all there was to see in pocket-size computing. I wanted to try the latest Palm models as well as compare them with Windows Mobile devices.

Would the Microsoft-powered portables work as quickly and intuitively as the Palm? Would Windows Mobile's version of Word solve my "smart" quote and em dash problems?

And what about the latest from Palm? The E2, T/X and Lifedrive beckoned. I've only been using Ilene's Tungsten E hardcore for about three weeks, so it's my infancy/honeymoon with the whole Palm concept. The fact that I'm composing entire blog posts in Palm's Graffiti 2 script language with the E's metal stylus means I've either gone crazy or discovered the missing link in my own writing workflow.

How hard could it be to see all that is new in Palms, iPAQs and the like?And since Woodland Hills is a hotbed of electronics retail, I assumed my task would be an easy one.

Little did I know that the state of PDA retail would range from borderline adequate (Frys) through wholly deplorable (Best Buy) to suspiciously absent (Circuit City). Some of this could be due to the general withering of the PDA category, but much of it must be due to basic neglect by the manufacturers of their products' position and very presence in the retail arena.

HP, maker of the iPaq, could be focusing on desktop and laptop PCs, while Palm is moving toward becoming a cell-phone-only player.

Or it could be sheer incompetence and business-category suicide.

On my first trip to Frys, neither Windows Mobile-equipped iPaq was in working condition. All the Palms worked. That's when I discovered the LifeDrive's lag due to its reliance on a disk drive as opposed to memory to load applications. None of the Palms had a working Wi-Fi connection, something I very much wanted to test.

The cheapest Palm, the Zire, at $99, was dismaying after my weeks with the Tungsten E. No e-mail, a low-res, smallish screen, no Documents to Go -- what exactly was the Zire good for? The extra $100 for the Tungsten E2 is mandatory. The next $100 for the TX is strongly suggested. But the final extra $100 for the LifeDrive is ill-advised. The TX is the sweetest of spots in the Palm PDA line, though the E2 will do very well.

Briefly, because even I'm tiring of this entry, here's the rest of my search.

Circuit City: No PDAs at all.

CompUSA: The TX, Zire and E2 are all running. No PC-based PDAs are available for demo.

Staples: TX is running. Others not. No PC-based PDAs running.

Best Buy: Two Palms (TX and maybe LifeDrive) are behind plastic, barely seen. Not avaliable for demo. Prices ABOVE retail. No PC-based PDAs Smartphones have plastic "fake" screen and can't be demoed.

Second visit to Fry's: Two IPaq's are now running. Is there any provision for stylus-based writing? If not, there's not even a keyboard. What gives?

In the famous "smart quote" search, it appears the Word-like app on Windows Mobile devices does not do smart quotes. Since you can get them in any Palm application if you put them in a Shortcut (or use the Targus wireless keyboard), Palm wins the smart-quotes battle, hands (or Palms) down.

I spent a little time trying to boot Ubuntu Linux on the Pentium II MMX 333 MHz. I couldn't force a boot from CD with the F keys, so I went into the BIOS and changed the boot order to CD first, then HD. That worked.

The Linux boot from CD was taking forever. I haven't timed my newish PC's boots of Linux, but on the older one, it was taking forever. At least 7 minutes. I wanted to see if I could get wireless running under Ubuntu, but I hadn't a clue.

Knoppix has a visible wireless configuration utility -- I'll have to try it. Ubuntu might have something. A look at the help pages might shed some light.

But the long boot time is troublesome. Maybe a hard-disk installation will speed things up. All I know is that taking a major performance hit is not what Linux is supposed to be about.

Update: Knoppix was faster on This Old PC.

There are two ways to look at my technological laundry list over the past many months. Old PC rehab, old Mac rehab (everything from new OS to wireless), through the Palm (the search not for Spock but for smart quotes, the importance of which is ... not so much, now that I've found them) and now Linux.

If Palm Desktop ran on Linux, this "progression" would be that much more natural. Ah, if things were only that easy.

Update: There are ways for Palm and Linux to talk to each other. Evolution on Ubuntu Linux seems to be able to do it, and this page has a bunch of other apps that claim to do it, too.

With all the trumpets and fanfare over nonvolatile flash memory getting cheaper as chip capacities rise and use of the product widens, remember that as a replacement for traditional electronic components, results may vary.

Simply put, when flash replaces a hard drive, access times could very well improve. But when flash replaces traditional random access memory, be prepared for a slowdown.

One of the novel features of the new Windows Vista is the ability to add to available system RAM by plugging in a flash drive. Not a bad idea, since Vista reportedly needs 2 GB of RAM to be comfortable. But as early Vista users are learning, only the newest, fastest flash cards and drives will even work at all.

New and recent Palm handhelds illustrates this point well. The newish LifeDrive, which deviates from traditional Palm devices in that it is built around a 4 GB hard drlve (hence the name -- LifeDRIVE), is markedly slower to start applications than other Palms. Once started, the apps stay in RAM, so speed improves, but the LifeDrive does appear quite sluggish in comparison to its cheaper Palm cousins.

The Palm TX and Tungsten E2 models are the company's first handhelds to use flash memory instead of battery-backed RAM. I was surprised that both handhelds were slower to start applications than my older Tungsten E with its 32 MB of traditional RAM.

The tradeoff: The Palms with flash memory enjoy increased battery life, and you'll never lose the content of your Palm to a dead battery. However, users of older Palms say that even a handheld that won't power on will retain its data in RAM for some time and can still be backed up with a HotSync if it's done in a somewhat timely manner.

Still, the speed differential between more modern flash and RAM is not a total deal-breaker in some devices, but for now, flash is a better substitute for disk-drive-like storage than it is for heavily accessed system memory.

To further complicate it all, some flash is slower than the average hard disk. And since disk speed is typically measured in milliseconds of access time, while flash memory is measured in megabytes transferred per second, nothing is easy.

Ubuntu includes Evolution, which is billed as a "PIM client." Maybe it'll work with my Palm handheld. If I can get the Palm and Linux talking ... my life, from a technological standpoint, will be complete.

It turns out that Evolution is, indeed a mail client, and it does handle PIM syncing for Palm. Hmmmm...

Knoppix has so many things to choose from. Multiple text editors, both in the KDE GUI and in terminal windows. A bunch of browsers, including Firefox, and Konquerer.

There aren't so many choices in Ubuntu, although I expect everything you need is available for free download.

One thing: I couldn't get Knoppix to recognize my thumb drive, but I can get to it easily in Ubuntu to save my work when booting off the CD.

Neither version of Linux has Abisoft, an open-source word processor I've been wanting to try, although Ubuntu says somewhere that it includes it. Maybe it's in 6.1.0. I'm running 6.0.6.

Another thing, I was able to up the screen resolution, and Ubuntu looks even better at 1280 by 1024.

(Note: This is being posted from Ubuntu with Firefox)

I came across this very cool and helpful Web site, Palm Heads: Cool Palm, Tandy and Linux Stuff We Actually Use. There's information on how to make the Palm handheld computer play with Linux, including pointers to the J-Pilot desktop PIM, Pilot mailsync for Linux and more.

Also, check out PalmHeads' Tandy 102 page, on the first great portable computer, which, believe it or not, some sportswriters at the Daily News still use:

This computer shared alot of the similarities with the PalmPilot now. It has an Address Book, a built-in Text Editor, an Appointment Book. What it had that a PalmPilot doesn't is a built-in modem (at a frightning speed of 300 baud), & a full travel keyboard. It also only had 24K (expandable to 32K) & an 8-bit processor! Chuck in 20 hours battery life on 4 AA batteries & you can start to see its advantages over modern laptops.

Go to Club 100 to find out more from the users group for Tandy 100, 102 and 200 owners.

I heard Bill Gates talking about Windows Vista on NPR this morning, along with a tech writer from PC Magazine saying that we'll all be using Windows Vista eventually if we're using Windows today. Even Gates said being compared to Mac's OS X isn't a bad thing, because you have to be compared to something, and that's the only other thing out there.

What they didn't talk about was whether or not most of the hardware out there could even handle Vista's memory, processor and graphics requirements. For the most part, the answer is no, and I predict a good year ahead for memory manufacturers, as well as the entire PC sector in general. Expect everybody from Dell on down to move a whole lot more gray, tan and black boxes over the next couple of years.

For my money, of which I'm not spending any, I've found Windows XP to be a very stable, well-appointed operating system. I even like things like Windows Media Player, the My Documents and My Pictures folders and the way XP handles photos and files. Nothing earth-shaking, just a solid environment in which to work. And the right-clicking? I'm a big fan of right-clicking, and I think Mac OS X would benefit from a two-button mouse with a similiar philosophy in regard to right-clicking.

One thing that changed with XP is that you have to be a registered user to install it -- no passing around a CD and installing on multiple computers without paying ... not that I'd ever do such a thing (I really wouldn't, but that's another bucket of brine).

Photo: Bill Gates back in the day, from a blog post titled "Bill Gates: Nerd Stud."

The PowerPC version of Ubuntu will run on a G3-equipped Macintosh, but If you have a pre-G3 Mac and want to try Unix, this page will help you find a system that will work on both the 603 and 604 PowerPC chips and the 680x0 family.

It turns out mkLinux will run on my old Powerbook 1400, but without Ethernet, SCSI or a working modem. Not worth it.

It's because Ubuntu uses the Gnome desktop
environment, and Knoppix uses KDE. If you like KDE and
want to use Ubuntu, there's Kubuntu, which offers both
desktop environments.

And then there's Edbuntu, which brings this friendly Linux OS to schools with a "customized school environment." I, for one, can see of no better place to use Linux than the schools, where the cost of an up-to-date commercial OS for each and every workstation is prohibitive. With Ubuntu, things can be up to date all the time, with free apps for everybody, too. And for those kids into computer technology, there's no better OS to learn from and about than an open-source Linux.

What if you have a really old computer? Try Xubuntu, a thinner version of Ubuntu without the Gnome or KDE graphical user interfaces. It requires 192 MB of memory to install but can then run on as little as 64 MB of RAM (128 MB recommended). And best of all, it takes up only 1.5 GB of hard-disc space.

And all of the Ubuntu versions are capable of dual-booting, meaning that Linux and Windows can co-exist on a single PC.

Ubuntu in action

I downloaded both the latest Ubuntu 6.1.0 and the
"stable" 6.0.6 iso images and made a CD of the
latter. (I'm getting used to this -- making my own OS
CDs for free).

I popped the thing into the Dell, and after a couple
of minutes (it is loading from CD, after all), Ubuntu
Linux was running.

The only funny thing I noticed is that the screen is
slightly shifted to the left. Nothing that couldn't be
fixed with a slight adjustment in the monitor menu (and after awhile, the screen seemed to "auto adjust" itself during a screen-saver operation).

The workspace on screen in Ubuntu is purposefully clear. Nothing
crowding it up. Setting up network services is even
easier than in Knoppix. It doesn't prompt you to
write to a "terminal"-like window, as in Knoppix.
Instead, you go under System at the top of the screen,
mouse to Administration, then to Networking and set
the parameters for your Ethernet card. At least you
can see everything at once. It configures like any PC
would.

I got it right on the second try. I didn't need any
"broadcast" address, but I did need to click over to
the DNS tab and add my DNS server names to make it
work. Total time spent: about 1 minute.

The best thing about Ubuntu so far: Fonts on the
screen look terrific. Firefox runs great, and
everything in it looks great as well. Better than
Knoppix. It turns out that the difference between the Ubuntu and Knoppix varieties of Linux is that Ubuntu uses the Gnome graphical user interface, while Knoppix uses KDE. And there's a version of Ubuntu called Kubuntu that allows you to switch between the two GUIs. I am going to try it, but I need to get some more blank CD-Rs first.

Another great thing. With this very same CD, it's
possible to install Ubuntu to the hard drive.

Let's see ... I've tried two Linux distributions in
one day. Give me my Geek Merit Badge already.

What if you have a Mac? Try Ubuntu, which runs on PowerPC and also features a single-bootable-CD configuration but which can also be easily installed on the hard drive. It reportedly works on G3, G4 and G5 computers. I imagine that leaves out This Old Mac, the Powerbook 1400 that has a 117 MHZ PowerPC processor and predates all of these, but I do plan to try it, the only problem being that the 1400 supposedly doesn't read burned CDs, only the commercially produced variety.

Ubuntu runs on both the Mac and PC platforms. Go to the attractive Ubuntu home page to begin your journey.

The 6.10 release is the newest, but 6.06 is considered the "stable" rendition, and support is pledged for 3 years on the desktop and five years on servers. Plenty of time, I figure.

You can even get a free Ubuntu CD. Yes, they will send you a free CD, with free shipping.

Even for PC users, I strongly suggest making a Ubuntu Linux CD and running it. What differentiates it from Knoppix is the ability to easily install Ubuntu on your hard drive after testing it out on CD.

For Mac users considering Ubuntu, check out this Low End Mac article.

I've now tried Iceweasel/Firefox, and while the fonts
aren't quite as crisp as the Windows equivalent in
some cases, in others there's really no difference at
all. And I suspect that tweaking the monitor settings will take care of all of this. (For those of you know or care about such things, Knoppix used the KDE graphical interface.)

And let me tell you, the speed of this system, even
running off of a CD, is amazing. I'm imagining now how
fast this would be if everything was installed on the
hard drive.

And it's all so ... free ... and Microsoft and Apple
have absolutely nothing to do with it. All upgrades
are free. There are tons of applications. Security is
excellent (it's Unix, for God's sake).

Go back a few posts and TRY THIS YOURSELF. It's the
easiest bit of geek nirvana I've experienced in the
past year, and if that isn't a ringing endorsement, I
sure as f'n hell don't know what is.

Getting Knoppix up and running on a Dell PC was easy
as pie, cake or soda. I'm not quite sure how to get
files into the system from my hard drive so I can
actually work on something and save it for later, but
I did manage to start up Open Office and the GIMP, two
applications with which I'm very, very familiar, as I
use them on Windows.

Even though Knoppix loads from CD and is able to
detect much about the hardware on which it's running,
that didn't extend to configuring network services.

I went under the "penguin" menu and finally managed to
get it working. As part of the process, I had to learn
what a "broadcast address" was -- something I've not
had to configure previously when setting up computers.

Needless to say, setting up for DHCP should be much
easier. But for those who do need to know what their
broadcast address is, I did some research, and it is
usually the regular IP address with the final set of numbers removed and .255 added in their place. Worked for me.

This page helps:

An Ethernet network is type of broadcast network. In a broadcast network any system can send information and all systems receive every message, although they discard messages that are not addressed to them. Broadcasting is accomplished via the broadcast address. This is the address to use for reaching all other addresses on a network. Any address with the host octet set to all 1's, or 255, is by default interpreted as a broadcast address. So the broadcast address is the address of the subnet, plus 255. If a hosts IP address is 129.79.149.145, its subnet address is 129.79.149 and its broadcast address would be 129.79.149.255.

I'm currently doing this post as an e-mail via Yahoo!
Mail in the Konquerer browser, the main browser/file
finder and manager for Knoppix. The disc also includes
Iceweasel, which is another name for Firefox, but for
the moment, Konquerer is working just fine.

Next: I've downloaded images of Ubuntu, and I plan to
try that as a CD-booting Linux in the near future.

The online documentation for Knoppix is scant, but from the Knoppix home page I found a list of books that can help with both Knoppix and Linux in general. Three of those books are Knoppix-specific. They're supposed to be available online -- and are freakin' cheap in that format -- but I haven't been able to find them for sale exactly that way. But they are for sale in plain old paper.

First, there's "Knoppix Pocket Reference," an O'Reilly Media book for a mere $3.90 electronically (but WHERE??).

From the same publisher, "Knoppix Hacks" for $4.79.

And from Extreme Tech, "Hacking Knoppix" for $12.64 online. The print version comes with a Knoppix CD, but it's an older one. And as I said before, if you either can't or don't want to burn your own Knoppix CD (or any other Linux CD, for that matter), cheapiso.com and osdisc.com both sell them really cheap.

If you love "Dummies," there's "Knoppix for Dummies," $15.39 online.

Hey, maybe I should get in on the "Dummies" bandwagon. What can I teach the "Dummies" of the world?

Remember, I couldn't find any of these books in downloadable format, but Amazon is happy to sell you the paperback versions ... for more money, of course.

Not that any of you have noticed, but I seem to be doing on geek project a month. First it was This Old PC, then This Old Mac. After that, it was the Palm handheld. And now I'm moving on to Knoppix, the Linux you can run from the CD-ROM drive.

I start with a problem/project, get to the level where it's working as well as it can, and then ... I move on.

For the moment, I'm geeking it up with Linux. I've always wanted to do it but never had a spare PC whose hard drive I could wipe or partition for the free, open-source OS. But Knoppix gets around that, since you boot from CD and continue running in that fashion. It's a great way to get your feet wet in Linux. And that CD also runs applications, including Open Office, Firefox (renamed Iceweasel, for reasons that elude me), the Gimp (which I'm already using on Windows to replace the Photoshop program I don't have) and much more. And there's even more available on the Knoppix DVD, should you have a DVD burner and the bandwidth to download a 4 GB file.

My download of Knoppix happened without a hitch. After installing ISO Recorder, I was also able to make the Knoppix CD, also without a hitch.

To boot from the CD, in my Dell PC at least, you reboot and hit F12 during the boot sequence, then choose the CD-ROM as the boot device. In a few minutes, you are running Knoppix, with Open Office right on the bottom of the screen, as well as the Iceweasel browser, which is Firefox, and for some reason has been renamed.

It looks great, and did I forget to mention that it's completely free. I didn't spend anything (except for the cost of the blank CD-R disk).

Next step: configuring the network preferences so I can get online with Knoppix. I'm using the Knoppix FAQ as my guide.

To make my very own Knoppix CD, and have a version of Linux to run entirely from the CD drive, I first got ISO Recorder so I could make the proper disc image in XP (since plain XP won't do it). I also printed out the how-to page and both the Version 1 and Version 2 pages, even though I'm running XP SP2 -- each seems to have some potentially relevant information for somebody who, until now, didn't know (and is still a little shaky) on what an .iso file is.

Then I started the Knoppix download. Since it's meant to fill an entire CD, it's a 696 MB download, which will take about an hour at Daily News speeds.

More later on the burn ...

The server that handles the Daily News blogs was ailing yesterday. The blogs themselves were up, but all processes required to actually post to those blogs were not running.

The point: Server reliability, robustness and security is paramount. All that is made harder when the server is involved in Web-intensive applications that require the running of CGI and ASP scripts -- basically small programs -- in addition to the basic feed of data over the Internet. I sound like I know what I'm talking about, but really I'm just stabbing in the dark and working from the experience I have.

The next point: You learn by doing. Getting your hands dirty with technology, Trying to make it work and do what you want it to do is the best way -- and for me the only way -- to get a handle on computers, gadgets and how to keep them ticking.

That's why ... wait for it ... the next 10 blog entries (all backed up from yesterday), including this one, are all being made with Firefox on Ubuntu Linux, running from the CD drive in a Dell Optiplex GX 520. It's running like a ... clock. Just ticking away. I've got the entries saved on a USB thumb drive (a freebie in the mail -- thanks Hyatt Hotels & Resorts for 128 MB of storage).

I've always wanted to try Linux. But I've never had the luxury of an extra PC with which I could wipe out the hard drive, the making of drive partitions makes me nervous (I confess, I have killed at least one PC with boneheaded use of fdisk), and I want to try before I buy myself a heap of free trouble.

Here comes Knoppix to save the day. It's yet another free Linux distrubition, but what makes it different is that it can boot and run from a CD-ROM drive. And while it's available cheaply if you don't want to burn your own, I am going to attempt my own download and burn (even though Windows is crippled -- probably by design -- from allowing you to burn the disc images, lest you be tempted to leave Microsoft behind, I imagine).

There is an XP helper application to burn what's called an .iso image, and I will try it, but the image can also be made on a Mac, even though the software itself is for a PC (funny, that).

While I do have some experience with command-line UNIX from my days as a PC-less student at UC Santa Cruz in the mid- to late '80s (when only the few and the moneyed had a PC of any kind in their rooms), I welcome a UNIX-derivative with a graphical user interface and a whole host of free applications. I'm already using Open Office for writing, the GIMP for photo editing and Firefox (sparingly). All that and more is on the Knoppix CD, and there's even more if you burn a DVD.

There are so many technology blogs in so many different places that it's dizzying just to keep track of them, let alone read all the ones you find interesting. And for the person who isn't reading blogs all day, every day, honing in on the best can be trying.

I haven't thought about ZDNet in years, but I followed a link over to its great Mobile Gadgeteer blog, written by Matthew Miller, and subsequently discovered ZDNet's main blog page, which features more blogs than I can count -- and blogs that are way, way geeky.

My favorites so far (besides Mobile Gadgeteer, of course) are George Ou's Real World IT, which told me more about the 802.11n standard than I'd ever thought I'd know, and Garrett Rogers' Googling Google, just because of its name, and who today blogs on the "enhancements" to Google's Image Search that have already been annoying me (because I don't like anything to ever change, and because I like to know the size of the photos in the search WITHOUT having to mouse over them, as I must now). At least we're in agreement:

The way it looked previously was a lot cleaner, and honestly I don't see why it needed to be changed at all. If I was at Google, the search algorithm for images would be getting a facelift rather than the interface results are displayed on.

There's also tech pioneer Esther Dyson's Release 0.9, which I have yet to dip into, but she's an IT-journalism legend if there ever was one.

It gets geekier, with specialty blogs for Microsoft, Apple, Linux, law (yes, as in legal law), digital identity, threat chaos (I don't even know what that means), and, as I'm always saying, much, much, much more.

Great. Another fat, gushing hose of blog data ... but it's good hose water, people. And if that's all not enough, the main ZDNet page has the latest tech news.

I've made no secret of the fact that Los Angeles attorney Andrew Fishkin, who writes the Best Tools for the Job column for Low End Mac, is one of my favorite tech writers, and today he provides a very helpful guide to choosing the best -- and usually used -- computer for everybody from "the technophobe," to "the office worker," "the road warrior" and even "the family."

Although previously a Mac partisan, Andrew has recently swung further into the IBM camp -- He really does want and need the best tool for the job, and in this column, he recommends everything from the IBM Thinkpad X22 laptop (both he and his young daughter have one) to an older Power Mac G4, and old-but-fast Pentium 4, even a 400 MHz Pentium II running Windows 2000 (which is suspiciously close to This Old PC, my home machine that has a 333 MHz processor and that same OS).

He even puts in a plug for the new and recent big-screen iMacs, especially the 20-inch model.

There's much good advice on both what to buy and how to keep it running:

For the office worker, cheap PCs are a great way to go for the simple reason that they are really cheap. I have a $300 PC from last March and a $250 PC from December, and either one of them can blow the doors off of the highest-end workstation of four-years-ago. They really are that fast - and upgradable, too!

Don't forget the older computers you already have.Don't forget the older computers you already have. Any Mac or PC from the last five years or so remains a very powerful and capable computer.

Good advice all around -- and listen to his advice on using a router with a firewall; also the wisdom of a clean install on an old PC, which is guaranteed to de-crud and speed up any OS.

Photo: A Power Mac G4, the likes of which are still being used at the Daily News.

Has your favorite radio station boasted about its "HD radio" capability? Well, since none of us actually has an HD radio -- them costing about $200 when we're conditioned to pay next to nothing for a radio -- to take the stations' word for it.

I am prepared to do just that. HD radio -- with CD-quality sound on FM and FM-quality sound on AM, the ability to broadcast multiple channels in the space previously reserved for a single channel, and the promise of specialized content -- can do what satellite radio can't: NOT CHARGE A MONTHLY FEE ... OR ANY FEE.

See, that's the way to reach the huddled masses, not with $70-a-month cable (30 percent of us still don't get it, and by "don't get it," I mean don't get it), and while Sirius paid Howard Stern a big ol' bonus, you can bet that he's falling off the national radar because his lisnenership is way smaller than it was in the days of "terrestrial radio."

Of course with podcasts, anybody can assemble an audio program -- if ASCAP and BMI don't come and hold a pillow over your face in the dead of night for "stealing" the works of those musical "artists" you're actually promoting, but the audience for podcasts is a niche of a niche.

Radio, whether digital or analog, is always there, in your car, in that little portable, even streamed over the Internet. It offers the promise of discovery, of music, people, points of view.

Podcasting, like blogging, begs the question: Is there anybody out there listening/reading? Or am I just ranting to ... no one?

Anyway, here's my prediction. Sirius and XM, the two competing satellite radio providers, will merge within the next year. The two systems will remain separate technological entities so receivers won't need to be replaced, but programming will be the same across both systems.

The world will then wait for HD radio receivers, especially for in-car use, and if the nation's radio broadcasters know what's good for them, they'll partner with electronics manufacturers and automakers to get those radios into new cars as cheaply and quickly as possible.

Then satellite will be competing with terrestrial radio on a more level digital playing field. It'll all come down to coverage area, programming (familiarity breeds more familiarity), promotion and price. And free just about always wins the tortoise-hare race to the finish.

If I've begun one of these posts once with the words, "When I was at Electronic Media," referencing the two years and change I spent gettlng a small-screen education at the trade publication that has since rechristened (or, in this business, "rejewished") itself TV Week, I've done it a dozen times, giving me at most three more times before it becomes that much more tiresome ...

Anyway, what I mean to say is that what was the non-promise that was high-density television in 2001-02 is now coming into consumer-embraced bloom.

I previously thought a $500 cathode-ray-tube HD set would usher in the "revolution," but I didn't count on the suddenly affordable LCD screen as the medium for the message that pore-exposing digital is in -- and old, fuzzy analog "living color" is as dead as ... vinyl albums, cars without air-conditioning in California, and MSG in your moo goo gai pan.

The conditions on the ground -- at Best Buy, Circuit City and the like -- are that people want big-screen TVs. And they want them with plasma or LCD screens. And if they're spending THAT KIND of money, they'd better have HD included.

Also not hurting are the HD packages available from cable and satellite providers. Lost in all of this is the over-the-air HD signals from broadcast stations. Given a strong station and a proper rooftop antenna (remember those, Philistines? I even installed one once), I imagine free HD signals are their for the taking. I'd love to get ABC's digital-only news station, but then again, I'm so old-school I have neither cable nor a TV with vertical size bigger than 23 inches.

But I really and truly digress, because a few years hence, the CRT TV will probably be relegated to the dustbin of electronic history, with LCD flat screens the only way to project televised images -- and very likely HD compatible as a matter of course.

Now I don't have my ear to the ground, or in the air, as closely as I did in my trade-publication days, but I can see 10 years from now the end of analog television and cable broadcasting, with a cheap HD-converter box available for those who cling to their old analog NTSC TV sets, but the rest of us will be watching digital on screens large, small and eventually not at all, as the networks pipe video into special glasses, or directly into our ad-lovin' brains.

The big guns are lining up for the inevitable battle between Microsoft's new Windows Vista operating system and the upcoming rendition of Apple's OS X, version 10.5, code-named Leopard. Valleywag shows how big-time tech writers David Pogue of the New York Times (and the great "Missing Manual" book series) and Walter Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal -- both seemingly partial to the Mac -- see the two systems.

Pogue:

Windows Vista is beautiful. Microsoft has never taken elegance so seriously before. Discreet eye candy is partly responsible. Windows and menus cast subtle shadows. A new typeface gives the whole affair a fresh, modern feeling. Subtle animations liven up the proceedings.

If the description so far makes Vista sound a lot like the Macintosh, well, you’re right. You get the feeling that Microsoft’s managers put Mac OS X on an easel and told the programmers, “Copy that.�

Cool and innovative:

If you have a spare U.S.B. flash drive, your PC can use it as extra main memory for a tiny speed boost.

A warning:

Of course, none of this factors in the price of the new PC you’ll probably need. Vista requires a fairly modern PC, and unless you have a powerful graphics card, some of its most useful new features turn themselves off. You can download the free Vista Upgrade Advisor from Microsoft’s Web site to see if your PC will be able to handle Vista.

According to a SoftChoice survey, in fact, only 6 percent of existing corporate PCs have enough muscle to run all of Vista’s goodies. No wonder Microsoft expects that only about 5 percent of PC users will upgrade their existing computers to Vista.

Mossberg:

After months of testing Vista on multiple computers, new and old, I believe it is the best version of Windows that Microsoft has produced. However, while navigation has been improved, Vista isn't a breakthrough in ease of use. Overall, it works pretty much the same way as Windows XP. Windows hasn't been given nearly as radical an overhaul as Microsoft just applied to its other big product, Office.

Nearly all of the major, visible new features in Vista are already available in Apple's operating system, called Mac OS X, which came out in 2001 and received its last major upgrade in 2005. And Apple is about to leap ahead again with a new version of OS X, called Leopard, due this spring.

On performance:

I tested Vista on three computers. On a new, top-of-the-line Hewlett-Packard laptop, with Vista preinstalled, it worked smoothly and quickly. It was a pleasure.

On a three-year-old H-P desktop, a Vista upgrade installed itself fine. But even though this computer had a full gigabyte of memory and what was once a high-end graphics card, Vista Ultimate reverted to the Basic user interface. And even then, it ran so slowly and unsteadily as to make the PC essentially unusable.

The third machine was a new, small Dell XPS M1210 laptop. In general, Vista ran smoothly and well on this Dell, but some operations were annoyingly slow, including creating a new message in the built-in Windows Mail program. This surprised me, because the Dell had two gigabytes of memory and a fast processor.

Goodbye, WordPad's Word compatibility (both writers note this):

The familiar WordPad program can no longer open Microsoft Word files (ironically, Apple's free built-in word processor does).

If you can prep a turkey ... and have a liquid nitrogen freezer, you can HARVEST YOUR OWN STEM CELLS. Oh yeah, you need a placenta. So if you or yours are pregnant, convice the doc to save the placenta and ensure that you have stem cells saved, should any lifesaving therapies become available in the near future.

And yes, yes, yes, you can do this at home. Self-proclaimed "biotech geek blogger" Pimm shows you how, in 22 easy steps:

Here I would like to show, although I do not provide any warranty and can not give any guarantee, that isolating stem cells from the placenta is not more difficult than making a steak and with proper preparation, investment and timing you can do it even at home or in a rent lab. The process is ethically non-controversial since the placenta is usually discarded away after birth. Today, stem cell therapy is just a promising possibility, but in the not so distant future, self-aware citizens may manage their own stem cells, grow them in the garage, and store them in the fridge. If so, it could be a form of autonomous medical self-insurance. We are at the dawn of the biodiy movement backed by open source science, for the people.

This gem is making its way all across the Internets, and I found it via Boing Boing by way of the truly great Make, one of the very best new magazines out there, by the way.

Kids, this would be one helluva science project -- it'd get your butt straight into Harvard/Stanford/Cornell.

Dirtier than the bottom of your shoe. Dirtier than your toilet. This via Wired and according to a study commissioned by Dial-a-Phone:

Mobile phones, like many everyday objects such a telephones and computer keyboards, harbor bacteria. However, being 'mobile', they are stored in bags or pockets, are handled frequently, and held close to the face. In other words, they come into contact with more parts of our body and a wider range of bacteria than toilet seats!

"The phones contained more skin bacteria than the any other object; this could be due to the fact that this type of bacteria increases in high temperatures and our phones are perfect for breeding these germs as they're kept warm and cozy in our pockets, handbags and brief cases. These bacteria are toxic to humans, and can cause infections if they have the opportunity to enter the body."

The solution: Clean and disinfect the thing regularly with an antibacterial wipe!

All six readers of this blog probably know I've been obsessed with PDAs of late, but the standalone PDA without cell-phone capabilities is obsolete, according to PDA247:

--------------------------------

When you start to use a Smart Phone it is difficult to imagine going back to a standlone PDA because there are so many things you can no longer do. Obviously there is the PDA and mobile phone combination and many people say this is a good way to go- I used to connect that way but never found it intuitive enough for regular use. I want it all in one device without the hassle of Bluetooth connections and all of the fiddling around.

---------------------------------

Click over and keep reading for the comments.

The only problem I see is that pulling data over cellular networks costs a lot of money. The new cellular modems for laptops do have monthly prices (somewhere between $40 and $90, I believe), but for regular cell-phone users, getting e-mail and Web content into the phone incurs a per-byte cost. It's like the days when everybody had AOL for $9.95 a month, and they gave you only a few "free" hours, charging by the minute for the rest. The whole AOL thing -- and the "online thing" as well -- didn't really blow up until unlimited plans came into the picture. It's the same with Wi-Fi today. If the only Wi-Fi available was the per-hour (or per month) kind at Starbucks, there'd be no incentive to get Wi-Fi cards, and the networks would languish. But the promise of free Wi-Fi, either through your own router or via public hotspots that don't charge is what made wireless connectivity really take off.

And as far as PDAs go, for me it's all about doing the most while spending the least. If I hot-sync the e-mail off my Palm, I'm not paying for an extra connection. The same for wireless -- I'd love to be able to send e-mail without hot-syncing, get Web content and even sync over wireless ... but I'm not crazy about paying for it. So for me, the PDA remains central to my whole technology mojo.

DataViz's Documents to Go, the Office-friendly office suite that comes with all Palm handhelds, will soon be available for Windows Mobile devices, according to Brighthand. As Brighthand has already reported, Docs to Go already does a better job on Microsoft Office files than Microsoft's own applications, so its availability -- currently offered as a preview from DataViz -- should be of great help to those who have a Windows Mobile PDA or smartphone.

I've been using Documents to Go on the Palm for a few weeks now, and I'm very, very happy with the way it generates and modifies Word files (I really don't care about Excel and Powerpoint, but Docs to Go handles them, too). Now with the suite ported over to Windows devices, it can only mean better things down the road for this exceptional DataViz product.

It just goes to show that a non-MS company can enter the office-suite space and, if offering MS compatability, do a better job than MS itself.

Rumors are afoot that Apple (as in formerly Computer, now Inc.) and Apple (as in Corps) will put their differences over corporate naming aside for the true glory that is raking in the cash, and the music of the Beatles will finally make it to the digital world of iTunes.

According to the Toronto Sun, it could happen in June to commemorate the 40th anniversary of the "Sgt. Pepper" album.

Ars Technica Jacqui Cheng offers the following:

Apple is expected to make some sort of "special announcement" on February 4, which falls squarely on the US Super Bowl. What could it be? Everyone seems to think that it will at least somehow reference the rumored Beatles deal. I say it's a good possibility, but I'm not necessarily putting money on it. ...

Amid all the blather over the iPhone, Google is rumored to be working on its own phone, the Google Switch. Check out The Google Switch: an iPhone Killer?

From Endgadget:

What's pictured in that all too familiar blur (Photoshopped?) is the phone's contact program said to be an extended version of Gtalk combining Gmail, text and instant messaging. According to our tipster, the device doesn't have any on-board storage. That's right, all your applications are served up over the network with new apps "attached" to your account via a web interface. So what is it... the real deal or engorged fanboy fantasy?

You know you need a bigger Secure Digital card, and now Transcend has an 8GB version of the tiny memory wafers that go into digital cameras and other portable devices. The best price I found (via PriceGrabber)
is $87.50 from Amazon.

Here are the specs:

------------------------------

Fully compatible with the SD 2.0 Standard
Class 2 specification
Original NAND Flash Chip
Supports Error Correcting Code (ECC) to detect and correct errors
Mechanical Write Protection Switch
Lifetime Warranty
Technical

Size : 32mm x 24mm x 2.1mm (L x W x H)
Op. Voltage : 2.7V~3.6V
Op. Temperature : -25°C (-13°F) to 85°C (185°F)
Durability : 10,000 insertion/removal cycles
Weight : 2g

----------------------------------

But will it work in your device? I guess you've just gotta get one and find out. It's not like you couldn't turn it around on eBay for pretty much what you paid for it ... or more, because people on eBay are crazy.

Look for my post on the Palm Addict blog about my experience with the Tungsten E, How to Lose 9 Pounds and Keep It Off. They're running a contest over there, and the way to enter is to send an e-mail with your Palm experience, which they subsequently publish on the blog. It's a great way to get posts from a wide variety of people.

If you do click over, I apologize for the grammatical lapses -- it was late in the day ... and, well, that's my excuse. Anyway, here's a sample:

Now can I write anywhere at just about any time -- using Palm's Memos program and Documents to Go -- and sync it to my PC at work or my Mac at home, or send it direct with VersaMail from the PC via the sync cable. The best part: It's so small, I don't need the keyboard (although I'm getting one anyway) and it is instantly available -- no waiting to boot or shut down. Great for writing in short bursts ...

Nothing revolutionary here -- but the Palm is a great tool for writers and bloggers. It's certainly easy on the arms.

The busiest mobile-computing blog out there is Palm Addict, which is a blizzard of posts and links. If you're just dipping a toe into the Palm or Windows Mobile world, it's a great way to get acclimated to what's happening -- and that goes for Treo users, too. For those in the latter group -- probably the only growing concern in Palm land -- check out these extended-life batteries for $35.95.

One of my very favorite Low End Mac writers is Andrew J. Fishkin, a Los Angeles attorney whose Best Tools for the Job column is a must-read. He has swung between using Macs and PCs for both business and personal use, and he recently went more solidly to the PC camp, since the use of Microsoft Exchange Server enables him to maintain a shared Outlook calendar across many PCs -- something you can't do on the Mac. And he loves his new tablet PC -- judges are intrigued by them, too, rather than annoyed, as they are with laptops in court.

At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, SanDisk announced a 32 MB flash drive designed to drop into notebook computers as a replacement for the traditional hard disk drive. No moving parts, 2 million hours mean time between failures and MORE THAN 100 TIMES FASTER THAN MOST HARD DISK DRIVES.

It will boot Windows Vista in as little as 35 seconds, with an average file access rate of 0.12 milliseconds. A regular disk drive boots Vista in 55 seconds, and accesses a file in 19 milliseconds, according to the brochure.

The primary user of such large flash drives to boot PCs is the military, which uses its junk in extreme conditions. Now for an extra $600 per laptop, as SanDisk calculates, you, too, can have a flash-drive laptop.

They also use less power, meaning more battery life.

Expect these to get bigger and cheaper.

I've been meaning to blog about my favorite new portable-computing blog, Pocket Factory, which is a standout among the many blogs covering Palm, Pocket PC and Windows Mobile devices. Some of the pocket-computing blogs just inundate their would-be readers with happy-talk posts, sometimes up to 20 a day. As a blogger, you think, "More posts, better," but as a reader, it's just clutter.

In contrast, Kent Pribbernow does a great job with Pocket Factory, and now he's starting a new blog, the iPhone Blog. While it's going pretty well just with Kent, he reports that he's looking for contributing bloggers.

As far as my current interests in mobile computing, Kent's opinions and knowledge are right on. He's one of the best at actually revealing how developers feel about the state of the Palm OS, which really needs some updating if it's going to remain relevant (or regain relevance, depending on your opinion).

I love the title of this post: Apple Unveils iPhone, Sparking Global Nerdgasm.

Ars Technica's go-to Mac blogger, Jacqui Cheng, meets the big daddy of Apple, Steve Wozniak -- he on a Segway, by and by. Above is the pix of them together. According to the post, Woz's Prius (what else would he drive?) had three more Segs packed inside.

All I'm saying, and I don't mean to get all Trump-ish on the man whose book I enjoyed tremendously, is that it wouldn't hurt Woz to, you know, walk a bit.

Back to Apple ... Woz loves the iPhone and thinks it's CHEAP (guess that's how you think when you're a MULTIMILLIONAIRE):

He is absolutely crazy about the iPhone and says that it will revolutionize cell phones, the way people communicate, and "everybody's lives!"

The price point (which made many of us hurt during the keynote), Woz said, was "extremely low." Lower than he expected. He told the quickly-growing crowd that there was "no choice but to switch" to the iPhone from whatever other totally inferior service that he, or you, or anybody already has. Obviously, Woz likes the iPhone.

Woz says he enjoys playing "Segway polo." Bloody hell.

I defer to Ars Technica for the bones of Steve Jobs' keynote speech at Macworld, at which the iPhone and Apple TV were announced.

Already the iPhone -- which combines the functionality of an iPod with that of an advanced cell phone and PDA running OS X -- is the talk of our newsroom's Mac fans.

Cool stats from the speech (my comments follow in parentheses):

-- iTunes sells 58 songs a second, 5 million a day. (If there's any doubt that Apple totally owns the digital music business ... wait, there is no doubt.)

-- iTunes has sold 500 million TV episodes, 1.3 million movies. (For those who enjoy watching things on really small screens.)

-- Apple TV brings that video content to ... your TV with ... Apple TV (This is an iffy prospect. How is this video going to look on a "real" TV?)

-- Apple TV will cost $299. (Some say this is too expensive, but it could be the must-have device of 2007 -- see my emotional mood swings about Apple products? I probably should see somebody about it.)

-- Apple's iPhone will have a giant touchscreen, all "buttons" will be displayed on that screen

-- Free IMAP mail from Yahoo! for all iPhone users (yay!!!)

-- With Google search and Google Maps (also ... yay!!!)

-- $499 for 4GB of storage, $599 for 8GB (Say what? That's expensive. When it gets to $299, call me ... or bang out your message on a rock ... or use smoke signals ... or ... whatever)

-- Apple has changed its name. Now Apple Computer will be known as Apple Inc. (Expect Apple Corps to re-sue).

My comment on the iPhone:

While the Treo (integrating cell phone and PDA) was a step in the right direction, I've thought for awhile that moving the iPod into the general computing category was the wave of the near future. Instead of making "laptops" smaller, putting more functionality into something with the iPod design is a great way to take computing power and telecommunications functionality with you, all the while keeping it backed up through syncing with a host PC. If this thing works, expect Apple to RAKE IN THE MARKET SHARE AND MONEY.

You'd think the New York Times would stink at blogging. You'd be wrong. The paper's tech writers are at CES and sending these short and informative posts about what they're seeing.

What interests me most is the OQO 1-pound PC, which also merited a full story. Mentioned in the blog: The small PC, made by a San Francisco company (yes, it could be the next Apple, the article implies strongly), makes an audible "scream" if you drop it. That noise is the sound of the OQO preparing to protect its hard drive.

My obsession has been portable, powerful (and preferably instantly booting) computers that communicate with anything, anywhere. Here's the pitch on the OQO from the NYT (check out the picture on the NYT site-- they're grungy enough to be real San Franciscans):

Developed in a San Francisco warehouse office by a small team of portable-computer designers who have previously worked for Apple and I.B.M., the device is a complete Windows Vista computer that fits comfortably in the palm of a hand.

With a slide-out keyboard as well as the ability to connect to both Wi-Fi networks and high-speed cellular service, its selling price will start at $1,499. Those who wish to use it as a phone can add a Bluetooth headset and use an Internet phone service like Skype.

“Our main goal is to reinvent the PC in a pocketable form,� said Jory Bell, a computer designer who is one of the Oqo’s founders.

The stopper for me is the $1,499 price tag, but it all depends on how good the device is.

Photo: Jim Wilson/The New York Times

It turns out that you CAN do what I proposed to get smart quotes and em dashes into the Palm. I copied the relevant characters in Documents to Go and made Palm Shortcuts out of them in the Preferences application. You access them by doing the "shortcut" squiggly in Graffiti 2 (not like the letter "e," but close enough that I need to improve my Graffiti 2 skills).

So now I have shortcuts for single and double smart quotes and the em dash. Hot freakin' damn. In case you thought I figured this all out on my own, I learned about the Shortcuts here, and learned that people used them in Documents to Go in the comments below here.

I figured out how to do the Shortcut squiggly in the Palm manual (I'd generated it about a hundred times by accident, not knowing what it was).

P.S. Do you know what a "kludge" is?

My Palm handheld experiment continues. What I like is the ability to turn the thing on instantly and begin writing, then turn off equally quickly. Syncing works great -- everything is always backed up.

E-mail has been a little tricky. So far I've only been able to get DSL Extreme's e-mail to work with a direct POP or IMAP connection. Daily News mail only works via Outlook, meaning I have to sync at the office for it to work. Gmail doesn't work (though Gmail compatibility is touted in the VersaMail application on newer Palms than the Tungsten E i'm using.)

All I really want to do is produce Microsoft Word-compatible files with all the "special" characters used by just about every writer out there. By that I mean the em dash (aka a long dash) and single and double smart quotes. They don't even have to be "smart," i.e. turn in the proper direction when you type them. The standard Palm applications ignore this feature entirely. Documents to Go, the office-suite application that comes with every Palm imports all of these characters from an existing Word document, but when it comes to generating those characters on the Palm itself, only the double smart quotes are available. There's every kind of accented foreign character known to man, but no single smart quotes? The euro symbol but no long dash? What are these people smoking?

If there was a way to make "macros" like in regular Word, the problem would be solved. I already have a file on the Palm with all the special characters (I synched it over from the PC). All I'd have to do is pick them up and turn them into macros. But it doesn't look like that feature is available. If I could remap the keyboard, that would work too. Can't do that either.

It turns out that there is a free Palm application, tejpwriter, that does generate all of these special characters on the Palm. But this program needs an SD memory card to be plugged into the Palm to work at all. And I'm not sure whether or not the resulting files sync with the main PC, or whether they play well with MS Word. They sure will produce HTML, the documentation reveals, and they will do text files.

My dilemma: Do I find an SD card for the Palm, download this program and see if it will do what I require? Since Documents to Go requires its very own application to sync, I'm doubtful that tejpWriter will have that same level of syncing.

I've really gotten to like the portability, instant booting and easy syncing of the Palm. But it's really unfriendly to writers who want to produce publication-ready copy.

... if you read the comic "For Better or For Worse," that is. It's from the Comics Curmudgeon, an always reliable source of funny-pages-inspired hilarity. Therein are the odds of various plot points transpiring when the Mike Patterson household appears to be burning to the ground. My favorite (the last one, of course):

The house isn’t on fire at all; the smoke is from the massive bong hits Deanna needs to keep from murdering her husband and children: 100 to 1 (but it would be awesome.)

And in the unlikely event that you care, that's Mike, above, and Deanna, right, in one of her earth-mother outfits.

The official "For Better or Worse" site, if you understand neither irony nor satire. But if you want to see how "FBOFW" has developed over the years, start with the Travel Back in Time archive, where I found this:

Sorry I didn't make it fit the page, but any attempts to shrink it make the type unreadable.