Notbooks

Tue 6 Aug 200204:36 PM

Road Rage

Tue 6 Aug 200201:41 AM

My cable modem was out from Saturday morning through Monday morning. After spending a few hours on the phone with the very polite tech support folks at Time Warner Cable New York’s Road Runner division, I am more convinced than ever that it’s impossible for people at huge organizations to know anything beyond the slim parameters of their own specific job descriptions. It’s depressing.

You Very Own Droid

Tue 30 Jul 200211:51 AM

Open for Business

Wed 26 Jun 200205:26 PM

For kicks, I installed a copy of the Microsoft Office alternative OpenOffice.org 1.0 on my laptop running Windows 2000. The installation process is notably slick for an open source project, and it’s a nice feeling knowing that one can download, install and use this software suite for the price of absolutely zero. The programs performed acceptably, too — my Microsoft Word and PowerPoint documents were passably (though not perfectly) translated by their OpenOffice.org counterparts. With luck, this suite will become a viable alternative to Microsoft’s, but it has a long way to go before it can quit playing catch-up merely to achieve parity with Office’s ever-widening range of bloatware features. I wish them luck.

Fit to Print

Thu 13 Jun 200209:41 PM

To share my Epson Stylus C80 over my home LAN, I bought a D-Link DP-101P+ Pocket Print Server on eBay. Snap it into the parallel port, plug an Ethernet cable into it and plug it into a hub, and you’re ready to go — theoretically. This thing was a pain in the butt to install. It took me hours to decipher the poorly written manual and figure out how to properly configure it. For the benefit of other DP-101P+ buyers, I documented what I learned on Epinions.com. Once I got it working though, it worked like a dream… almost worth the effort.

Fight for Yer Right to Time-Shift

Sat 8 Jun 200212:14 PM

This is encouraging: “ReplayTV customers represented by the [Electronic Frontier Foundation] have filed a lawsuit against the entertainment industry to protect their rights to skip over commercials and record television programs for later viewing using digital video recorders.” I’d like to see a series of publicity-damaging consumer lawsuits against the entertainment industry on all manner of digital fair use issues.

Numerology

Wed 5 Jun 200207:23 PM

Citibank’s credit card division has a potentially great product in Virtual Account Numbers. Rather than use your real Citibank card number for online transactions, customers use a little application to randomly generate a virtual number that can be used instead. The numbers are good for one use only, so once the transaction is complete, they expire and your real card number is still safe. It’s a great security idea.

Pocket XP

Tue 4 Jun 200205:30 PM

Doing Windows

Mon 3 Jun 200207:01 PM

My new custom-built HP Pavilion 701 is great, and I’m very impressed by Windows XP. I had some inscrutable problems with Outlook today, and after scratching my head for a while I decided to try XP’s System Restore feature, which allows users to easily “remove any system changes that were made since the last time you remember your system working correctly.” I hit a couple of buttons, and one restart later, I had reverted my system to its state from this past Saturday, and the Outlook problem was cured. This is brilliant stuff. Of course, it would’ve been more brilliant if my original problems with Outlook hadn’t ever happened.