Category: photos

Dell Mini love

We finally replaced my fiancée’s ancient PC with a shiny new Dell laptop. While ordering, I couldn’t help myself and tossed in a Inspiron Mini 9 for myself:

This little cutie weighs in at just 2.26 pounds, less than half of my MacBook’s hefty 5 pounds. I’ve found that the Mini is much more back-friendly than my MacBook; I can painlessly lug it to the office with my laptop bag slung over my shoulder (easier for getting on and off the subway) instead of nerding it up in backpack mode.

The top-end model I picked packs 16GB storage and 1GB RAM running on a 1.6 GHz Atom processor — far more powerful than the computer I took with me to college in 1997. Admittedly, my iPhone also beats that computer at 8GB/128MB/300MHz vs 6.4GB/64MB/266MHz. :P

The compact form factor does have some impact on usability, though. The 1024×600 screen sometimes feels too tight for vertical space, but they include a handy full-screen zoom hotkey for the window manager which opens things up.

The keyboard feels a bit cramped, and some of the keys are in surprising places (the apostrophe and hyphen are frequent offenders), but it’s still a lot easier to type serious notes or emails on than the iPhone. I had to disable the trackpad’s click and scrolling options to keep from accidentally pasting random text with my palms while typing…

The machine shipped with a customized Ubuntu distribution which is fully functional; they include a “friendly” launcher app which can be easily disabled, and even the launcher doesn’t interfere too badly. The desktop launch bar that’s crept into Gnome nicely handles my “I need Spotlight to launch stuff with the keyboard” fix. :) Firefox works fine (after uninstalling lots of Yahoo! extensions), Thunderbird installed easily enough, and I even got Skype to work with my USB headset! (AT&T’s international roaming charges can bite me…)

The biggest obstacle for me to use this machine every day is my Yojimbo addiction. I use Yojimbo for darn near everything — random notes, travel plans, budgeting, grocery lists, recipes, encrypted password stores, saving articles and documentation for future references. It’s insanely easy to use, the search works, I don’t have to remember where I saved anything, and it syncs across all my Macs. But… it’s Mac-only. :(

I’m trying out WebJimbo, which provides an AJAX-y web interface for remotely accessing your Yojimbo notes. It’s very impressive for what it does, but I’m hitting some nasty brick walls: editing a note with formatting drops all the formatting, but I use embedded screen shots and coloring extensively in my notes.

I’ve seen some reports of people hacking Mac OS X onto the Dell Mini — very tempting to avoid OS switching overhead. :) But I think if I really want that, eventually I should just suck it up and buy a MacBook Air. The form factor is the same as my MacBook (full keyboard, roomier 1280×800 screen), but at 3 pounds it’s much closer to the Mini than to my regular MacBook in weight, so should be about as back-friendly for the subway commute and air travel.

Of course, the Air costs $1799 and I got my tricked-out Mini for about $400, so… I’ll save my pennies and see. ;)

R.I.P. Casio Exilim

So I’m smack in the middle of moving cross-country, packing up all our stuff to load on a truck, never to be seen again which will arrive in a few days at our new home. Time to take pictures of everything for reference and to compare potential damage.

Naturally this is the perfect time for my camera to die… Especially since *two days previously* I’d sold our barely-used spare camera on EBay.

Well, I guess I’ve got a new camera fund from the proceeds. :D

The old girl had served me well for two and a half years, through Los Angeles, Frankfurt, Berlin, Boston, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Tampa, Taipei and San Francisco.

Perhaps the temperature and humidity extremes finally took their toll; the LCD screen just gave up the ghost and displays shiny colors instead of something useful like… a screen… which makes it a bit hard to aim, select options in the menu, etc.

P.S. The Golden Compass is awesome!

Update: Replaced the old cam with a Canon PowerShot SD870 IS… about the same size as the old one, but fixing most of my issues with the old Exilim:

  • Auto-rotation — the camera detects its orientation and marks the photos as rotated accordingly. I used to spend lots of time with my old one going through and rotating half of my pics after a shoot.
  • Better in low light shooting (eg indoor or evening) — higher sensitivity (ISO 1600 vs 400), image stabilization, and a mode to auto-adjust the ISO a bit higher
  • Continuous shooting mode — if I invest in new memory cards, it’ll take high-speed ones which should allow a better frame rate for those “I hope that cool thing happens while the shutter’s open” moments.
  • Better video quality — video mode shoots up to 640×480 30fps (vs 320×240 15fps). Like my old cam it’s saved as Motion-JPEG, which is very space inefficient, but I can recode for archival if I start using video mode more.
  • Time-lapse mode on the video! Neat. :D
  • Doesn’t need a dock to connect to the computer or charge.
  • More megapixels (8 vs 5) — yawn. I’m rarely going to *need* that many pixels. ;)

The menu and controls are a bit different but I’ll get the hang of it.

One minor nit is that it doesn’t look like it’ll charge the battery through USB; that would be *very* nice when traveling. The default kit includes a separate battery charger rather than an AC adaptor for the camera itself, but it’s blissfully compact and according to the specs it should work on 220 Hz volts, so traveling in Europe should be ok.

Cardee’s Jr

I grew up in California and have lived pretty much all my life there. The Carl’s Jr. burger chain, itself born in Southern California, has always been a cultural fixture for me in the western United States. Knowing that they didn’t have Carl’s back east was one of those sad little things about moving to Florida that I was going to have to get used to.

Driving down I-10 in the middle of the South somewhere, though, I started seeing a familiar logo on the Gas-Food-Lodging signs. Perhaps fatigue from the long drive had made me hallucinate? But no, I got a good up-close look at one next to a gas station in northern Florida:

Oh look, a Carl'... wha?

Even the web sites are the same… Carl’s vs Hardee’s

Well, a quick peek through the company history pages indicates that Carl Karcher Enterprises bought out the Hardee’s chain in the 1990s, and started rebranding it in the 2000s with the “new look” (apparently the Carl’s logo) and new menu items. It’s kind of… creepy nonetheless. I guess they didn’t want to lose local brand recognition by changing the name, but adopting a different logo seems kind of weird.

Combining the maps from the store locators, it seems there’s no territorial overlap between the Carl’s and Hardee’s chains:

Carls and Hardees maps combined

Only Oklahoma has both; there’s one Hardee’s way out East, but it’s miles away from the nearest Carl’s. Both chains are missing in the Northeast, which is probably why I haven’t stumbled on any Hardee’s back east before…

Looks like there is a Hardee’s in town here in St. Pete, I’ll have to track it down and see if the inside is as eerily familiar as the outside.

Denied

Every once in a while we get a rash of complaints about how Wikipedia renders on somebody’s mobile phone or PDA web browser.

Unfortunately we don’t seem to have a lot of such devices ourselves to test with, and they all behave differently, so we haven’t really had the resources to seriously work on testing tweaks for better phone/handheld support.

My crappy little phone just has some kind of WAP browser, I think, which I’ve never really been able to get to do anything productive. For kicks I took a peek to see if Opera Mini would run on my phone, since I *think* it has some kind of Java… alas, once I finally got connected to the site it claimed my phone isn’t supported.

Opera Mini actually handles Wikipedia pretty decently. The really cool thing is that since the client side is Java, they have an applet version so you can test the actual Opera Mini rendering in any desktop web browser. I LOVE YOU OPERA! YOU MAKE IT POSSIBLE TO TEST MY WEB SITE IN YOUR PRODUCT!!!! IIII LLLLLOOOOVVEEE YYOOOUUUUU!!!!!!!ONE

Of course currently our fundraising drive notice covers the entire screen, but… hey… ;)

Update 2007-01-07: I’m collecting links to mobile testing resources at [[mw:Mobile browser testing]].