Ikea Laptop Workstation
We just love the look of this thing the Unclutterer turned us onto. It is available in white or red and is perfect for places like a guest room or a kitchen. Current list price at IKEA is $59.99. Link to Product Page.
There are so many tech and gadget blogs out there, We’ve spent many a night contemplating how we might distinguish ourselves from other blogs and are going to be relaunching with a slightly new format. Unlike other such blogs, which report on every new piece of technology, we’re going to shift into frugal mode.
You can expect the following from us with our new editorial shift.
And, of course, much much more.
We haven’t had much to say in a while…something we intend to rectify soon. But we saw this recently, and thought it might be of some help. Venturebeat reports that Retrevo, a search engine for gadgets, is attempting to simplify the information overload that comes when you try to make a gadget purchase.
When you make a search, each resulting device/gadget is ranked by a combination of “value” (the number of desirable features at the price point) and community sentiment (the combined wisdom of experts and consumers). The results pages offer the product’s model number, a picture of the product, its price range and two cartoon thumbs. One thumb represents value, the other represents community sentiment. They can point up, sideways, or down. The top ten results contain a reasonable mix of high value, low cost products with good buzz around them and medium and high-cost products that deliver what you would hope to get at those price points.
The site lets you choose between the expert and consumer opinions.
The company says its product index doesn’t contain out-of-date products or those that aren’t widely available in stores. This compares favorably with CNET, where I often find myself reading positive reviews for last year’s technology. It’s also more simple and elegant than Buzzillions, which requires more input to find devices you might like.
So check out Retrevo at www.retrevo.com. We did some random searches, and intend to try this product a bit more.
After 11 years, the Federal Communications Commission order mandating Cablecards took effect on Sunday, July 1st.
It requires all major cable operators to give up cable boxes that they lease to subscribers at a significant profit and replace them with ones that will accept a CableCard…an decoder that plugs into their box or any other equipment that will accept it. Customers will be able to use the CableCard, which they must provide, into equipment from any company. Cable companies have delayed on this decision because most subscribers have paid the cost of their box many times over.
Currently, the options for hardware are limited. Few televisions include CableCard slots…no computer cards sold commercially do…and the only company that has supported it and promises to support the new generation of cards is Tivo.
Once the technology is more mainstreamed…consumers could purchase cable-ready devices that could do much more than a box from the local cable provider. Features could include the integration of internet data onto the screen with the television signal, boxes that also act as media servers for media stored on computers, etc.
The accusation of companies like Comcast is that the requirement amounts to a tax…as they will not absorb the cost, but pass it along to use as the consumers…Conversely, since this mandate has been delayed so long….cable companies had plenty of time to phase in the technology over time and devote proper resources to it.
Our issue is this…you go out and buy a television. It includes a tuner you can’t use because you have to rent a $10 a month box from the cable company. What is the point of a tuner in the TV anymore?
Dell will be offering systems with Linux, based on a customer demand. Three systems will be offering it to start…the XPS 410N(Starting price $849) and E520N(Starting price $599) desktop machines, and the E1505n(Starting price $599) notebook.
Initially, Dell will offer a subset of the component options they support on the three systems and will continue to work with vendors to improve the stability of the associated Linux drivers in order to offer more options as part of a longer-term goal to increase the number of drivers that work at the kernel level.
They have a video available about Linux from StudioDell entitled Linux 101: What’s all the Fuss?.
Ubuntu Linux is available free of charge for download for your existing systems at the Ubuntu Website. Ubuntu is divided into desktop and server editions released every six months. For those of you interested in switching to Linux for daily use…you might want to give it a try. We use Fedora Linux ourselves…but we are creatures of habit.
We use Fedora Core Linux for many of our systems…especially the servers. Today, Fedora(which has dropped the Core from their distributions), released Fedora 7, codenamed Moonshine. We are downloading it for upgrade of our systems as we speak.
OS Upgrade time is always a happy time in our household. We use it as an excuse to dust our system interiors(you should do this regularly) and review our systems for possible hardware upgrades. This year, we’re gutting the interior of our main server. The old pieces will be reallocated to other functions.
For those of you considering jumping on the Linux bandwagon, Fedora 7 incorporates some exciting new features. You can take your Fedora installation disc(usually a full DVD) and customize it…adding or removing packages and software to install…thus you could create a distribution that only installs what you need it to…or that substitutes packages not included in the standard distribution…You can also create a LiveCD that will boot Fedora without needing a hard drive, and customize this as well.
Here are the release notes…Wait a few days to download it…it is going to be overloaded for a bit. We’re hoping it will improve some of the weaker areas of previous distributions…the release notes seem to indicate they’ve worked on those areas.
U3, as we said…is gone. Sandisk, which owns the product…has decided to discontinue the product. We always had a problem with it. It tended to take too long to load…was much too slow.
We had recommended the menu launcher and accompanying open-source software from www.portableapps.com. The menu takes very little in terms of system resources and it is optional…the programs there can run without it.
Sandisk, however, has announced it will replace U3 with a new software and hardware solution. For this, they have joined forces with Microsoft. The new offering is expected to be commercially available in the second half of 2008. It will include TrustedFlash security technology. TrustedFlash embeds digital rights management software on the card instead of the player. We are not about to embark on another diatribe against the inconvenience of DRM…but having it on the media instead of the player can be an advantage.
GigaOm directed us to another product…MojoPac…which we hadn’t previously noticed. MojoPac allows you to install almost any application to a USB 2.0 compliant storage device, including iPods, USB hard drives, USB flash memory drives, etc. One downside is that the current version requires administrative privileges on the Host PC. U3 did not, nor do the PortableApps menu launcher. MojoPac is working on the issue for future versions though…although most solutions require the cooperation of the administrator.
We’ve been experimenting with bootable USB drives that can either act using the PortableApps series of open source portable applications or boot a complete Linux or Windows based operating system…We’ll have more on this later.
Our colleagues at Flight Wisdom have switched to a mostly roundup-based format in order to report on more news that isn’t worthy of a full article…so we decided to give it a try over here.
We support ala carte cable…the idea that you can only buy the channels you want, rather than being forced to buy dozens of channels you otherwise wouldn’t watch. Well…FCC chairman Kevin Martin said it testimony he’d support legislation to force cable operators to allow them to purchase more programming on that basis.
Our current cable provider, Time Warner…with which we’ve had many problems…offers two digital packages…the Value Pack and the Standard Pack. On top of that, you can get sports extras, premium channels, and an HD package. Ideally, we’d prefer some more finely tuned options.
The cable companies insist that ala carte will increase the costs…as channels are often sold to them in blocks. However, they could sell them in much smaller blocks than they do now.
The Consumerist suggests you write John Kerry and have him write a letter to Martin.
