Review: Staples BD-6703 Scientific Calculator

Every geek needs a calculator, and not just any calculator will do. A geek’s calculator must be able to handle very large numbers, fractions, trigonometry, and very large trigonometric fractions, among other things. The Staples BD-6703, which my mom picked up for me at Staples Business Depot for $9.99, fits all of the qualifications. Plus, it’s cooler than my brother’s calculator, so I can bug him about it.

I have touched an iPhone

I went to the mall this morning with the intention of buying some clothing. (Yes, nerds shop for clothing.) So after we stopped at Tim Hortons, which is the Canadian equivalent of Dunkin’ Donuts, we walked over towards Sears. On our way, we walked past a Rogers Wireless store.

And there it was, the iPhone, in all its glory, sitting on the counter, practically begging to be handled. (It was protected from theivery, though, by a cable attached to it and by the guy behind the counter who watched my every move.) I only had a few minutes to play around with it, but from what I could tell, the thing is great. A few small observations:

• The device feels great in your hands. Really great.
• Furthermore, it is incredibly thin.
• The screen is amazingly bright, with no glare or reflection whatsoever, and absolutely amazing resolution.
• Multi-touch is cool.
• The GPS works perfectly.
• The camera stinks. The resolution is terrible, and the camera itself is right where you want to put your finger.
• The accelerometer, for some reason, was disabled on the display devices. And no, it was not just broken, because I stopped at a Wireless Wave store later in the same mall and had the same experience.
• The keyboard is really not as bad as you might think. I, however, had a very hard time hitting the “s” key. Because the accelerometer wasn’t working, I couldn’t try the landscape mode.
• The store device came preloaded with a bunch of stock images. (And while I’m on the topic, pinching to zoom is very, very cool. If you haven’t used a multi-touch display before, you should really go down to your nearest iPhone retailer and try the thing out.)
• The lack of physical buttons is not a problem.
• The UI has lots of cool animations and such. For example, the glow on the “Slide to Unlock” text slides from left to right. Also, when you press the home button, the icons zoom into place from the sides.
• The way the icons jiggle when you want to move them is positively nauseating.

I got back in the car with my brother, Arie (who plays Scrabble at a professional level) and had this irritating discussion with him:

ME: The 3G iPhone is so cool.
ARIE: What’s so much better about the new iPhone?
ME: It has, um, welll… it has, uh, three G’s.
ARIE: So? The word gagger has three G’s too. Gagging has four.
ME: Uh…. well…

I’m Back & other news

After a furlough of around two months, I’m back at blogging. I was a bit lazy about it for a while there, but now that I’ve finished school for the year, I’ll have plenty of time to write. I’ll get some Recommended Reading up as soon as possible, as well as some Recommended Listening.

In unrelated news, Steve Jobs announced the 3G (second generation, but three G’s of wireless connectivity) iPhone today at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference. The other big news item was a new service, or rather a rebranding of .Mac: Mobile Me. Before the keynote, this name was rumored and hated by all; now that it’s over, somehow it seems just great. Steve Jobs has this way of making anything seem a lot better, I guess.

How large is a CD?

The real answer is 120 millimeters in diameter, large enough to hold 80 minutes of audio. The fun answer, the answer you really want to know can be found on Wikipedia.

The partners aimed at a playing time of 60 minutes with a disc diameter of 100 mm (Sony) or 115 mm (Philips). Sony vice-president Norio Ohga suggested extending the capacity to 74 minutes to accommodate Wilhelm Furtwängler’s 1951 performance of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony.

The extra 14 minute playing time subsequently required changing to a 120 mm disc. Kees Immink, Philips’ chief engineer, however, denies this. According to a Sunday Tribune interview, the story is slightly more involved. At that time (1979) Philips owned Polygram, one of the world’s largest distributors of music. Polygram had set up a large experimental CD plant in Hanover, Germany, which could produce huge amounts of CDs having, of course, a diameter of 115 mm. Sony did not yet have such a facility. If Sony had agreed on the 115 mm disc, Philips would have had a significant competitive edge in the market. Sony decided that something had to be done. The long playing time of Beethoven’s Ninth imposed by Ohga was used to push Philips to accept 120 mm, so that Philips’ Polygram lost its edge on disc fabrication.

Another Record by Apple

Every Tuesday so far this year, Apple has released a product. Some Tuesdays, more than one. There’s been the new Mac Pros, the MacBook Air, Time Machine, iTunes Movie Rentals, the new Apple TV software, new iPod Touch and new iPhones, and now Aperture 2.

This is a record on the part of Apple; 8 new products in only 7 Tuesdays. If they keep this up, they’ll have introduced more than 60 new products by the end of the year. How long do you think they’ll be able to hold out?

Apple will charge $20 for existing iPod Touch users to upgrade!

I still can’t get over this. I mean, this is a new thing for Apple. Twenty Dollars! (Well, Nineteen Dollars and Ninety Nine Cents.) Apple is going to charge $20 for existing iPod touch users to upgrade to the new firmware, of all things. Please.

Apple’s creatively named “Time Capsule” to complement Airport and Time Machine

Wow! Steve Jobs released a NAS, Wi-Fi, 500GB (or 1TB) backup hard disk called Time Machine at Macworld Expo ‘08. I still don’t believe it. I mean, Wi-Fi? Who needs Wi-Fi in a backup disk, of all places? Oh well, maybe the Apple Logo makes it worth the money.

Apple releases Macbook Air!

Apple released the highly rumored MacBook Air yesterday at the Stevenote at Macworld Conference and Expo 2008! The MacBook Air is a new, ultra-thin, void-of-optical-drive sub-notebook that will ship in two weeks. Whether it’s worth the $1799.99, of course, is still up in the air.

Three Cool Contests

The Code Project Visual Studio 2008 Beta Competition

Criterion: Write a great Visual Studio 2008 Beta article. Post it on CodeProject.com. Wait.
Prize(s): $1,000 cash, a copy of Visual Studio 2008 Professional, and more.
Find out more.

The Code Project Monthly Competitions

Criterion: Write a great .Net/ASP.Net/MFC article. Post it on CodeProject.com. Wait.
Prize(s): Everything from control libraries to software to books.
Find out more.

The DotNetSlackers Forum Posting Challenge

Criterion: Post lots, lots, lots of posts on the DotNetSlackers.com forums.
Prize(s): Telerik RADControls, Xbox 360 Elite, software, books
Find out more.

Is this a weird laptop or what?

Check this out.

Dual-Booting Ubuntu, Part 3: Installing

Sorry this post is so late – I’ve been having too much fun playing around with all the features in Ubuntu Linux 7.10. Installation was uneventful. The installer (live cd application) hung once because I entered a user name with a space in it, but I fixed that and it worked. Ubuntu is great – very fast, lots of cool games, and the graphics are even better than what I’ve seen on Windows Vista. The only drawback is boot time – 1:25, or One Minute and Twenty Five Seconds. Oh well, I always hibernate anyway.

Dual-Booting Ubuntu, Part 2: Partitioning

As I mentioned in Part 1, I needed to shrink my Windows partition before I could install Ubuntu. Before partitioning, I had one 40GB NTFS partition with Windows XP Pro and all my data on it. I wanted to shrink this partition by about 10GB so I could install Ubuntu in the remaining space.

I booted up my Ubuntu Live CD (takes forever and a day to boot from CD) and launched GParted, the GNOME Partition Editor. I chose to shrink the partition by 10GB, leaving slightly more than 10GB free space remaining.

Having already backed up my data, I clicked “Apply.” Gparted worked for a couple of minutes and then gave the ominous message “Could not complete the specified tasks” or something like that, with a big red error logo. But when I checked the disk in Ubuntu’s explorer, whatever it’s called, it said that the partition had worked.

I rebooted into Windows, expecting ChkDsk to launch. But it didn’t. All I saw was ~1/2 second of the Windows boot screen, and then blackness.

But it wasn’t silent blackness. My hard drive was making its noise. (I should really make a recording of it; it would be no harder to do so than to launch Audacity and make a recording with my laptop’s mic.) I waited for about five minutes. The hard drive was still laboring along.

So I went and had supper. When I came back, I saw the Windows welcome screen. I guess the black screen was the typical “Windows User Experience”. Logging on to Windows, I saw that the drive had correctly been resized to 27.25GB.

What to do with an old PC

Have an old PC that you don’t know what to do with? You could…

1. Turn it into a robot.
   With a couple of Phidgets and Visual Studio Express installed, you can build a wonderful crawler. (Works best with laptops and small form factor PCs.)
2. Install Linux.
   It’s always great to know more than one OS. I chose Ubuntu Linux.
3. Use it as a test machine.
   Install, say, Windows 2000 and see if your apps build and run. If they don’t, make them. Plenty of people still use old versions of Windows.
4. Vandalize it for parts.
   Only works if the computer is less than 2-3 years old. (Anybody for a 166 MHz Pentium? 1GB HDD? 64MB of SIMM RAM?)

Dual-Booting Ubuntu, Part 1: Defragmenting

Recently I made the decision to dual-boot Ubuntu Linux 7.10 with Windows XP Pro on my laptop. To do so, I needed to shrink my Windows partition so that I would have enough free space to install Ubuntu. There was plenty of space on my hard drive – it was a 40GB drive less than half full. However, it was extremely fragmented.

Oh well, I thought, I’ll just do a defrag. I launched Windows Disk Defragmenter and defragged the disk. When it was finished, the disk was entirely defragmented; however, there were still lots of files near the end of the disk.

Hm. I tried defragmenting a second, third, fourth, and fifth time, but nothing changed. I searched the help file, but it wasn’t very helpful. What was I to do?

I googled “disk defragmenter” and, to my surprise, there were numerous free defrag utilities available online. I chose JkDefrag. It labored along for a couple of hours and then told me it was finished. I still saw a red dot right near the end of the disk – oops, that’s my dead pixel.

(JkDefrag in action. Screenshot shamelessly robbed from the JkDefrag site.) 

I launched Disk Defragmenter again, which, to my surprise, told me that the disk had a few files with fragments on it. Obviously,  although JkDefrag does a better job of moving files to the front of the disk, Disk Defragmenter defragments them better.

iPhone SDK coming in February!

That’s right. As unbelievable as it might sound, Apple is finally giving in and creating an iPhone Software Development Kit. This was announced on Apple’s “Hot News” feed yesterday – hot news it is, for sure! Seems that from the beginning they really wanted to put third-party apps on the iPhone. Of course, third-party apps may be limited by security features that Steve Jobs wants to implement

Sony Drive remains a mystery product

What could the gadget obscured by the ribbon in the above picture possibly be? It’s showed up on Sony’s web site with no information except “Sony Drive” in the title bar. Engadget thinks it’s an all-in-one PC, but I think it’s ugly, whatever it is.

New Samsung Printers will be offered only through…

…Apple stores.

That’s right. The stylish new Samsung ML-163, and it’s multifunction twin, the SCX-4500, will be offered exclusively through Apple stores, until January 2008.

Both printers are black-and-white laser only; 17ppm print and copy; 600×600dpi prints; USB connection only. They might be good looking, but their specs aren’t all that great.

Microphone Arrays in Windows Vista

Windows Vista includes a new technology called Microphone Array. Basically, it uses more than one microphone to provide a highly directional sound input. This reduces background noise and, apparently, electrical noise. Find out more.

Wireless Power Becomes a Reality

A couple of months ago on this very blog I mentioned that wireless power would be a good idea. Now it’s becoming a reality. First, startup WiPower announced their plan to develop a wireless charging system, and now Seiko Epson and Murata have teamed up to develop their own version. (apparently one company is doing the charger, and the other one’s doing the battery.) The picture above shows WiPower’s prototype, apparently; Epson/Murata will charge devices “in about 10 to 15 minutes in a non-contact manner.”

Virtual GPS – Will it work?

Lately there’s been a bit of hype around Virtual GPS for cell phones. Traditional GPS requires a GPS receiver that communicates with at least two GPS satellites, triangulating to determine where on the surface of the earth you are.

However, software-based GPS solutions, such as those from Navizon, use the signals from cell phone towers, (which are basically everywhere in North America and all over the rest of the world too these days), known WiFi hotspots, and real GPS users to simulate the location-finding capabilities of a real GPS.

If this really works as well as a real GPS, I’ll be surprised; personally, I think it’s more likely that the accuracy of the Virtual GPS will be less than optimal. Oh well, it’s probably a lot more economical.

iPhone 1.1.1 breaks 3rd party apps

Apparently, the iPhone 1.1.1 firmware update removes all third party apps and other hacks from your iPhone. I saw that one coming.

New iPods

Sorry for not blogging in a while. I just came back from vacation and was amazed to see all the hype about the new iPod Nano with video, the iPod Classic with 160 gig!, and the iPod Touch (that deserves italic: iPod Touch!). What they’re doing over at Apple with the iPhone, iPod, and the mac is simply amazing.

(Apple links are really easy to insert, I just noticed. Instead of, say, apple.com/ipod/classic/, it’s just apple.com/ipodclassic.)

Just for Fun by Linus Torvalds

Yesterday I promised I’d post more about a software company entrepenuer who wrote an autobiography. Well… I kind of had a different person in mind. Linus Torvalds, the man who invented Linux. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love Windows. It’s way better than Linux. But this book is just plain great. It tells all about how he got his first computer, and how he installed minix on it, and how he hated minix, and so he created Linux. (Which, incedentally, is pronounced “Lih-nux”. If you’re interested, read the book.

The Road Ahead by Bill Gates

A while ago I read this book, by Bill Gates: The Road Ahead. It was a fun read, considering that it was written in 1995. In the book (which is somewhat an autobiography) Bill Gates tells all about computers, and how he and Paul Allen founded Microsoft, and (this is the best part) he makes predictions about what computers and the internet are going to be like in 2005, ten years from when he wrote the book.

Well, most of his predictions turned out wrong, except for that he predicted that Moore’s Law would continue as it had been. Which turned out right

More about software entrepreneur’s autobiography tomorrow.

Who needs a 1000 GB hard drive?

In the news: Buffalo has just released a 1 TB (terabyte) hard drive.

What? A terabyte? That’s 1000 gig, right? Right. Who needs a 1000 GB hard drive? I mean, my laptop has a 40 GB hard drive, and I only use 10 GB of space. My desktop has a 200 GB hard drive, and, downloads, pictures, and backups included, I only use 50 GB of space. Plus, the thing will probably cost about 500 bucks. What’s next, 1 PB (petabyte) hard drives? What comes after PB? TMB (too many bytes)?

They get old so fast…

A year and a half ago, my dad brought home a new computer. It had a 17″ screen (Yes, that was BIG), 200 GB hard drive, 512 MB of ram, and an Intel Pentium 4 processor, plus, it had the all-new Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005. He got the folks at the store to install Microsoft Office Student & Teacher 2003 and Norton Internet Security 2005. He also got a laser printer that printed at 15 ppm. The whole thing cost him more than $1,200.

Today, for the same amount of money, you could get a new computer with Windows Vista Home Premium, 1 or 2 GB of ram, 300 GB of hard disk space, an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, Office 2007, Norton 360, and a color printer/scanner/copier.