This Old Blog

The Apple iPhone has finally arrived. And boy, does it every look good. The interface is gorgeous, it plays audio and video, it makes phone calls, it surfs the web with a standards-compliant web browser (Safari)... here, let me list what I've found so far. Wireless: quad-band GSM, Cingular’s EDGE network, 802.11b/g Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR. Accelerometer: detects when you rotate the device from portrait to landscape, then automatically changes the contents of the display, so you immediately see the entire width of a web page or a photo in its proper landscape aspect ratio. Proximity sensor: detects when you lift iPhone to your ear and immediately turns off the display to save power and prevent inadvertent touches until iPhone is moved away. Ambient light sensor: automatically adjusts the display’s brightness to the appropriate level for the current ambient light, thereby enhancing the user experience and saving power at the same time. OS X: a fully multi-tasking embedded ...

I run Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop (SLED) 10 on my system at work. That system is a Boxx system built around an AMD Athlon 64 FX-55 (2.6 GHz socket 939) and an ASUS motherboard. When I first got my hands on it the machine was loaded with Suse 9.3 for AMD64. I proceeded to load Open Suse 10.1 and then SLED 10. The SLED 10 installation was very smooth and uneventful. I "enhanced" the installation by following the directions on the Jem Report, " Hacking SUSE Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 ." I was able to pick up Java 5 as well as add development tools such as gcc that are not included in the base distribution from Novell. It should be noted I downloaded the SLED 10 DVD ISO from Novell, and installed from that. After installing the bits via the new repositories, I downloaded and installed the nVidia graphic driver from . SLED 10 worked flawlessy until right before I left for Christmas holiday. I installed some new kernel updates that must have wiped out the older kernel...

Update: The N800 is selling on the Nokia site , selling along side with the Nokia 770. The price is US$399. There are more photos of the N800 out, this time courtesy of C|Net. I'm still waiting for the official Nokia announcement at CES .

There is an actual physical next-generation Nokia web tablet out in the world tonight; it's the N800. I read about it first on OSNews , then followed the link to Linux Devices . There's a collection of photos of the N800 taken at a store in Chicago where the N800 is being sold, posted on Flickr . There's very little to go on at this point. No technical specifications what-so-ever. Nokia hasn't published anything about the N800, nor has it even announced its availability. My questions: Is this the so-called 870/880, or is this the low-end version of an 800 series of devices? Will Nokia allow a trade-in (or trade-up) from the N770 to the N800? What are the technical specifications of the device? Does it have more memory and a faster processor than the N770? Maybe this time the N800 will be more of a real device instead of the hacker come-on of the N770. And if it is a real device (with sufficient resources and processor power) then maybe it'll attract serious main-str...

The youngest is going off to college as an incoming freshman in just a few days. She got a new iMac for Christmas as her college PC. We'd picked it up at a local Circuit City, along with a Canon printer/copier/scanner, a copy of Microsoft Office Student for OS X, and a year's subscription to .mac. We also picked up a 50-disk spindle of blank DVDs and a 50-disk spindle of blank CDROMs. She was going to back up her collection of MP3s and images she's collected and created over the past two years to the iMac. The Windows box had developed a problem with its burner, and she didn't want any more money spent to make the Windows system work. Over time she's grown to despise Windows, and the iMac was her big switch. Turns out that in spite of the superiority of the iMac and OS X over Wintel (and yes, they are superior), she still needed Dad and his Linux box to actually back up her Windows box and then burn that to DVD. Seems that there's a small learning curve to OS X...