Category: Tech

Netbook year two

My Acer Aspire One netbook, a now-defunct 9″ screen model, is already a year old. It’s been trouble-free, and I’m glad I bought it. I’m using it now.

The Chumby One that I bought Carol for Christmas was working fine, but then it suffered a failure of some sort when I unintentionally powered it off while checking the Netflix widget. I returned it, and a replacement is on the way. When it gets here I’ll put a pair of Dell AX210 speakers on it that I picked up for next to nothing. For now they’re on the netbook. They sound pretty good!

The mono speaker in the Chumby One is actually pretty good, but Carol wanted something more for listening to Pandora in the kitchen. I was going to buy a multi-outlet power adapter for a pair of computer speakers to plug into the headphone jack; but then, for only a few dollars more, I found the AX210, which doesn’t need an AC adapter because it’s USB-powered, and the Chumby One has a USB port in the back.

Follow-up: The AX210 speakers are not a good match for the Chumby. The USB port is a very noisy power source, resulting in hum and whistling sounds.

78s4FR’s on YouTube

One of my favorite YouTube genres is of turntables playing records. It must be the ex-DJ in me. One of the best examples is from a woman in England named Liz, whose channel is called 78s4FR.

http://www.youtube.com/user/78s4FR

Here’s a sample. Stan Freberg’s superb parody of Harry Belafonte’s ‘Banana Boat Song’, followed by the equally great ‘Tele-Vee-Shun’.

Note for younger readers: Because a shellac 78 could hold only a few minutes of sound, record albums used to be exactly that — multiple discs in an album book. Later, vinyl LP’s could hold up to 30 minutes in mono, yet there were still albums. In a 2-disc LP set, side 1 was backed with side 4, and sides 2 and 3 were on the same disc, so they could be played in sequence on a changer. The arm on the changer held the stack steady. When playing a single record, with the arm in the position shown in the video above, most changers repeated the record.

iPadvantage

tastewar let me play with — excuse me, I mean evaluate — his iPad today. (As you can see, my LG clamshell cellphone doesn’t take great pictures.)

  • iPad touchscreen is very shiny. Makes a good mirror when it’s powered off.
  • 802.11g wifi reception is very good, although there are reports of some people having trouble. Maybe they’re trying to connect to 802.11n?
  • Portrait mode is easier to hold in your lap than landscape position.
  • As expected, there’s no Adobe Flash playback, but Safari browser supports HTML5 video, which comes up automatically on YouTube.

  • Netflix Watch Instantly plays smoothly, but on the 1024×768 screen the aspect ratio for 16:9 video is wrong. This isn’t a problem in Windows on my 1024×600 netbook or my 1280×1024 desktop monitor. How did they miss this?

  • The Marvel Comics app has caused something of a stir in fandom. (Where’s the concept of collecting if there’s nothing physical to hold?) I’m mostly not interested in new stuff, but it would be great if the Silver Age reprints in Marvel’s Omnibus series were available on the iPad.

  • Screen doesn’t clear when you hold it upside down and shake. Needs an Etch-a-Sketch app! 😉

Feelin’ Blue ’bout hosts

I’ve been blissfully ignorant about self-hosted blogging. With over 250,000 hits per month, shared hosting services consider me to be a heavy-hitter. I have a new appreciation for my old service, iPower, for allowing me to use so much storage and bandwidth for so long.

I’m on Bluehost now, which runs a customized version of Linux that does something called CPU throttling. So if my site gets too busy, it’s automatically taken offline for a while. I don’t disagree with this approach, unless the servers have too many sites, and they’re robbing Peter’s site to service Paul’s site.

I have a few months before I have to decide whether or not to renew on Bluehost. It would be a big, and expensive, step to move to a hosting service that offers Virtual Private Servers. Once again, circumstances are forcing me to contemplate why I’m blogging, now that I’ve done everything I set out to do with it.