Posts Tagged Windows

Recent software trials — Camino, Shuffler, GIT, Wisestamp, Microsoft Windows Live Sync

  • Firefox is feeling increasingly bloated, maybe because I’ve got a bunch of plugins jammed in. But trying out Camino(TidBITS%3A+Mac+News+for+the+Rest+of+Us)&utm_content=Google+Reader on the Mac, seems cleaner and lighter.
  • Shuffler.FM. Eh, streaming music just doesn’t work for me. My primary listening time is while driving and I need music that I can put on an ipod or cd. When I am at an actual computer I am too busy doing other things. But I like music discovery tools and guides, I just don’t want them bound into streaming.
  • GIT for the lazy. Perfect for me.
  • Terminal tips and tricks for OSX and in general SuperUser seems helpful.
  • I want to love WiseStamp but I don’t get email addins that assume you are only sending email from a browser. iPhone? iPad? OSX Mail? How can I commit to this thing if I can’t use it consistently? Sigh.
  • I’m super late to Windows Live Sync but it is very useful. I do have a quibble with the naming, once upon a time MSFT was confident enough in its products to give them simple iconic names — Word, Excel, Windows. The company seems to have lost its confidence in products and jams these crazy names on them to try to ride on the coattails of other products. Mistake.

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Recent utility software of note

My MacBook is entering middle age and as my intensity of use has grown over the last 6 months (due to coursework at UW) I’m finding I need to start focusing on productivity a little. Some tools that seem helpful:

  • Popchar provides much better special character insertion than the standard OSX tool. Helpful for entering math symbols, etc. I love this. The basic OSX system tool is weak.
  • Keycue from the same guys, cheat sheet of keyboard shortcuts. Better than it sounds. I cannot remember all these keyboard shortcuts and this is way way way better than help/manual/online search.
  • Hazel for automagically managing files. My use case is dealing with downloads from various UW course sites and automagically handling. Keeps my downloads folder in order. Handy tho not absolutely mandatory.
  • Path Finder as a replacement for Finder. Definitely more handy for moving files between folders.
  • Growl — not sure why I installed but all the cool kids seem to use.

Also on my new Windows 7 setup I am starting to play with some things:

  • Win7 multimonitor taskbars — haven’t tried these but probably should try one.
  • Feedroller — well I wanted to love this, and it looks great, but seems to have problems updating its content.

And across both machines:

  • Helvitical and its friends Helvetimail and Helvetireader certainly improve the looks of google apps. A little buggy tho.

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Holiday PC Builds

Time for our biennial system build exercise. We built two systems over the last two weeks. While I still use my MacBook Pro for 95% of my productivity work, the Mac game market is moribund, and there is some joy in building a machine from components. So for the fun of building, and for gaming use as well as other general use, we built out two different systems:

  • Cases. Very different choices. Air cooling for both, we’ve had 3-4 liquid-cooled systems. Liquid cooling looks awesome with the right fluids and lights, but — another maintenance hassle; sometimes catastrophic failures; and they just aren’t any quieter really.
    • First system is an Antec 1200. Classic full tower case, tons of drive bays, tons of fans, full complement of front panel ports. Nice clear sides, some cool interior lighting. Nice looking final system, but a little time consuming to pull together — particularly all the cable connections for fans and front panel connectors. But looks nice complete.
    • Second system is built around a High Speed PC Tech Station. An open, “caseless” system, super easy and quick to assemble, and gives nice open access to all elements of the system. The finished product looks messy but that is part of the appeal. No protection from the elements either. Massively faster to assemble tho.
  • Motherboards. The Antec has an ASUS P6X58D and this is a great board — USB3, SATA3, designed for overclockers. Probably should have gotten this board for both systems. The second has an ASRock X58 which is fine and a little cheaper but lacks the USB3 and SATA3 support. For the price-difference, probably should have goen with the more future-proof board. Both boards seem pretty equivalent otherwise.
  • Processors. Intel i7-920 2.66Ghz quad-core on both. Not the most expensive but overclockable. On the first PC with the Antec case, we installed a higher capacity cooler for overclocking support — a noname generic cooler but something like this one that we picked up at a the local parts store.
  • RAM. 6GB of Corsair Dominator Triple Channel ram (3×2GIG) on both systems. Pretty easy to install, tho absolutely no documentation on the fan, but there was really only one way to try to install it and it seemed to work.
  • Power supplies. The Antec has an OCZ 1000W. This is a solid supply with tons of connectors, certainly good enough for nearly any system. But the Enermax Galaxy 1250W is super nice because of the modular cable system — you only attach the power connectors you actually need. Cuts down massively on cable clutter, particularly helpful for the caseless system. I’d go with modular supplies every time in the future.
  • Hard drives. Both machines have 2 1.5TB WD Caviar drives, 7200 RPM. Nothing fancy, amazing how cheap drives have become. Considered faster drives but they contribute to noise and, based on past experience with 10K rpm drives, not clear they add that much performance.
  • DVD/Blue Ray drives. Not having strong opinions on drive vendors (partly because I’ve had bad drives from every vendor in the past), we scattered out purchases around here. Both systems have the same bluray drive — an LG drive. One system then has a Samsung DVD burner, the other a Pioneer.
  • Removeable media. Both systems have a 17-in-1 Sony memory card reader. Neither has a floppy, thank goodness Windows install doesn’t need that anymore.
  • Video cards. OK we really wanted Radeon 5970s but these are mythical. The 5870s are near-mythical, almost like unicorns. But they are findable on ebay for near MSRP and that is the route we went. Expect to pay $500 or so. Standard ebay warnings apply — look for vendors with long selling histories, flawless reputations, US-based, etc. We had no problems. The caseless system also has a second card, a 5770, the goal is to be able to run directx games on one display while running other apps on the other card, I’m not convinced this is actually possible.
  • Software. Win7 ultimate, from MS Company Store for $50. Worth renewing my alumni membership for this. Installed easily, 64bit on both. Unlike vista, this version really seems to work and driver software seems plentiful. The experience isn’t flawless — IE hung when downloading the latest ATI drivers and we had to use opera/chrome/firefox; and the homegroup network UI is ill-considered at best, the networking UI is basically awful. Inventing funky abstractions like homegroups and libraries isn’t that helpful, lipstick on a pig. I just want to see the machines and devices on my network as a first step, is that so hard?
  • Other software. Opera, Chrome, Firefox, Acrobat, Steam (with COD4, L4D2), Zune, Office10Beta, FileZilla, Tunebite all installed fairly quickly.

Machines both running well and seem to be happy so far. What do we still want?

  • SSD drives. Also near mythical, impossible to find. Will have to add these post holidays.
  • 5970 video cards.
  • A desktop power switch for the caseless system. With no case, there is no obvious power and reset button, just little switches on the motherboard. One idea is to switch to a PS2 keyboard and enable powerup from keyboard in the BIOS.

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Mac vs PC anecdote

My Macbook had a motherboard failure two weeks ago. Both USB ports on left side blown, wifi chipset blown. (Blame Tekkcharge but that is another discussion). Discovered this at about 4pm on a Wednesday, went to Apple.com and scheduled a genius bar appointment at 830pm same day.

At 830 I roll into the Bellevue Square Apple store, in 30 seconds someone approaches me and logs me in for my appointment. In a few minutes I am at the desk describing my problem. The genius asked me if I had Applecare, I sheepishly admitted not. Crap, I am going to have to pay for this. Wait says the genius, perhaps your MacBook Pro has the faulty NVidia chipset, in which case it is a free warranty motherboard replacement! And indeed, my machine fails the NVidia stress test, so free motherboard for me! The genius says this will in all likelihood fix my problem — but if not, not to worry, once Apple has cracked the case and messed with the motherboard, if the system is still failing, it is now their responsibility!!! Awesomeness.

Two days later they called and said the motherboard had been replaced but one of my RAM sticks was faulty, and so they were going to replace that as well. For free.

Within a week I got the machine back. New motherboard. New RAM stick. My hard disk and software safely untouched. Total cost to me: $0. The only complication was discovering that Aperture would not run, the activation logic ties the product guid to the processor guid, and so Aperture felt it was not a licensed install. Apple.com again, scheduled a callback, in one minute an Apple rep called and we were finally able to resolve (they were going to get me a new activation once we established my proof of ownership, but I eventually found the original install media).

OK so the MacBook Pro is way more expensive than a PC but I just got hundreds of dollars of parts and service out of warranty for free. And, despite a tragic hardware error, I lost no data, and had the machine fixed locally in under a week. Basically the extra costs for the Mac represent prepaid parts, prepaid service, and retail store staffing to make the lifetime experience of owning a Mac painless.

I don’t even know how to replicate this in the PC world. BestBuy is the remaining significant retailer of PCs. And the service levels are dramatically different. You can’t get much in the way of service there, when we had a broken PC purchased through BestBuy it got shipped away for repair, and took weeks. And just the simplest store experience in BestBuy is worlds different. I was in BestBuy this morning to buy a microSD card reader. I found what I wanted easily enough and went to the checkout. There were two checkers working, each busy. 4 of us in line waiting to checkout. One checker finished with her customer, and apparently decided it was breaktime, and left her station and wandered away. 4 of us in line waiting with money in hand, just needing someone to give it to. The other checker was involved in some complicated transaction so we wait and wait. Meanwhile there are 10s of BestBuy employees walking through the store all doing super important things. I finally spot one and yell across 30 feet of floorspace “Hey, can we get some checkout help here, 4 of us are waiting?” She looks around for someone to help us and goes back to what she was doing. !!!!  Finally she comes over and starts to help check us out.

If I was running a retail business, I think I would instruct my employees that job 1 is taking money from people who want to give it to us. Apparently that is not the BestBuy priority. I really can’t fathom this, what does BestBuy tell its employees to do all day??

It is not that PC hardware is necessarily terrible (some of it is but some is just fine), or that the software on it is awful (though again some of it is), but the entire experience from purchase through support over the lifetime of the PC is dramatically worse than the experience available from Apple. As a smart guy said to me recently, “PCs are now throwaway”, when they quit working, you really have no choice but to just chuck it in the trash.

Enough ranting. Glad my MacBook is back humming.

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PogoPlug Buggy With Drive Letters: Pogoplugged

PogoPlug Buggy With Drive Letters: Pogoplugged. Trying out pogoplug, key note here — you can’t control which drive letter pogoplug will grab easily.

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Recent app trials

  • Scanaroo. The idea of something to manage all my cards is cool — one place to see account numbers, 1800 customer service numbers, etc etc etc. But this isn’t it. The shortcoming is the dependency on the iphone camera. If it worked more like snaptell (use the photo to ID the card in a dbase and get all the detailed info and image from a dbase) it would be better.
  • Statplot. Interesting idea, charts for sports junkies. Not a lot of community around my teams yet but will be fun to watch
  • Card.ly. Microsites. If 140 chars is good enough for a message, why should a website need much more? I guess. Ultimately I don’t know what I’d use this for.
  • TuneWiki. Rich loves it, I am not sure I get it yet.
  • Linear Programming using Google Spreadsheets. Is this really what is keeping people tied to Excel?
  • Notepad++ and plugins. Not sure I will stick with, the app is busy
  • SuperUser. This could turn out to be super helpful

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Software recently adopted

  • Tweetdeck. Duh.
  • ECMerge. I complained to Scooter Software about the lack of a mac version of BeyondCompare, they kindly suggested ECMerge or Araxis Merge. Araxis is way too expensive. ECMerge is solid but I still pine for BeyondCompare.
  • Toast Titanium. I want a way to watch my Tivo shows on my mac and Toast seems to be the way to go. Seems to work well.
  • MATLAB. I’m a sucker for math software. Only reasonable if you are an active student or your employer buys it for you.
  • VLC. Another duh. THE way to watch wmvs on a mac (and UW lectures are all delivered in wmv format).

Oh and on the PC I am so in love with Steam. I don’t even think about CD-based games anymore. Why isn’t all Windows software delivered this way? Why hasn’t Microsoft purchased Valve?

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Recent software trials — Fences, Disk Analyzer, Ubiquity

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Software/Services of recent note

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Charles on the stupidly overpriced Sony Netbook

“They seem to have built the PS3 of netbooks” via Platformonomics – Sony and the Joy of Overpriced Netbooks.

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Microsoft Service Week — Part 3

Installed the Win7 Beta1. I think MSFT will sell a ton of this. It just seems faster and cleaner than Vista. I haven’t played with new features yet — early NYT review seems positive — but glad that it seems crisp and uncluttered.

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EA to release games on Valve’s Steam completely free of DRM

EA to release games on Valve’s Steam completely free of DRM. – Steam is increasingly impressive. shocked msft hasn’t purchased.

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Grab bag of software tips

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Rich's photo tools recos

Photo Tools: FDR Tool, PortraitProfessional, Lumapix, Digi-labs | Tongfamily.com — lots of great tips here. I am currently using Aperture and Noise Ninja, with an occasional dip in Adobe Elements — I can’t bring myself to spring for Photoshop but may this fall when I have access to academic pricing. For a self-proclaimed Mac convert, Rich sure uses a lot of Windows software…

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Software I am meaning to try

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Ethernet to Coax adapter

CrunchGear » Archive » D-Link’s ethernet-to-coaxial adapter kit: useful but expensive — ha, you can buy old ethernet coax cards for pennies on various websites. of course they need ISA slots. I think my partners Jon and Rich may still have windows for workgroups net cards in their basements…

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Charles attacks craplets

Platformonomics – Sony and the Joy of Craplets — nice rant. The PC industry is so wrongheaded on this point.

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Architecture astronauts take over – Joel on Software

Architecture astronauts take over – Joel on Software — “It’s Groove, rewritten from scratch, one more time. Ray Ozzie just can’t stop rewriting this damn app, again and again and again, and taking 5-7 years each time.” Ouch.

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Software notes — bloatware alternatives

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File System Mounting Tricks

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