First off I want to say that the Palm Pre is a huge leap in smartphone tech.  The interface is clean and crisp and the synergy functions of WebOS make it a great phone to organize and update contacts, calendars, notes and tasks across a range of services and social networking sites.  The integration with google is only shadowed by Android obviously.  The services that Sprint offer in their plans arent to shabby either.  The price plans are by far the best bang for your buck in term of what you get.  The fact that you can have navigation, unlimited sms, mms, im and data is awesome.  Even the unlimited everything plan is only 99 bucks compared to Verizon or ATT which would run well over that.  The app store is starting to grow which is another welcomed addition.  Overall the Palm Pre WebOS is what i would classify as a good starting point for Palm to regain some ground but there is more work to do.

I went and purchased a Palm Pre exactly 42 days ago expecting to upgrade my wireless capabilities to a new level and now I am chewing on blood pressure medication like they are tic tacs.  I grabbed the Palm Pre with the expectations of being able to replace a few of my daily gadgets with an all in one device.  My TomTom, iPod, Phone and PDA could all be in one handy little device.  For the most part I acheived my goal except there is that “for the most part” issue.  The Palm Pre is an expensive smartphone at the price of 200 bucks with a 2 year contract on Sprint  and now there are issues with the Pre.

First off, I had no problems for 30 days except the OS lacked some basic functionality that PALM really dropped the ball on.  Things like selecting text for cut, copy and paste is a pain and in calendar event view i can’t scroll to see the entire entry for an event location.  The Blue-tooth capabilities are seriously flawed and don’t work with most blue-tooth car kits or aftermarket devices. Now I am running into hardware issues.  The contact in the 3.5mm headphone jack sticks and disables the audio to the phone’s earpiece making the phone app unusable.  To fix this you have to exercise the headphone jack a few times to unstick the contact.  This is unacceptable for a piece of hardware i spent 200 bucks on. There are other issues that I have read about in other posts such as the slider breaking (mine is getting kinda loose) , screen pixel issues ( 1 is stuck and I’m sure more to follow) and wifi problems that I am sure i will have the privilege of experiencing in the near future.  Those issues are not the worst part though.

Sprint is the 3rd biggest cell provider in the country and their policies and customer service reflect that.  My experience with Sprint customer service is once you bought it and got past the 30 day period YOUR SCREWED!  I am 12 days over my 30 day return period and they are completely unwilling to work with me to resolve the issues.  The Sprint repair center I visited today said they could replace the phone under warranty ONLY if they were to receive a non functioning phone.  Well of course when i got to the store the contact in the 3.5 mm jack became unstuck and the phone worked again so they wouldn’t do anything.  But lets say it didn’t work for them either, they still would only replace it with another Palm Pre that would have had the same known hardware issue.  What am I paying the insurance for if they are gonna give me another phone that has a 99.9% chance of breaking too!  That’s like a Ford recall for exploding gas tanks only to replace it with a gas tank that could EXPLODE!  I can understand not taking a return on a phone that is 2 or 3 months past the return time but 12 days, Really?

Sprint is really on the ball with their plan options and included services but their customer service as the 3rd in the market needs some attention.  My love affair with the Palm Pre was was fiery at the start but is quickly over much like the ability to use the headphone jack for fear it might break my phone.  It was a nice try and a good start to rebuild the Palm name but the bar has been set pretty high by things like the iPhone and the Android OS.  Palm needs to hit those marks before i will buy a Palm device again.  Maybe the HTC Hero can save me?

Requirements:

• A USB drive of any size.  (I used 1 gig)
• A computer with a BIOS that allows booting from a USB port.
• A Bootable floppy disk or CD. (you can use an old Windows 98 bootable CD or floppy disk for this.
• Any Utility that allows you to create partitions, set active partitions, create a master boot record, and transfer the boot files to the active partition. (I used FORMAT and DOS FDISK that are on the Window 98 CD)

Directions:

Part I:

In your systems BIOS, make the USB drive the first in the drive sequence.

Why?  In this case, fdisk does not allow for a partition to be set as ACTIVE (bootable) unless it is the first drive.  In order for your computer to boot to your OS, your harddrive is set to be the first drive.  This needs to be temporarily changed.

How?  There are three ways to do this.  You only need to do one of the three ways, whichever one works for you.  All of them require that the USB drive be plugged into the PC before you turn the PC on. Also take note of the options you are going to be changing, so when you are done, you can set the system back to the way it was originally.

1. Bios** drive sequence: Depending on your BIOS, there may be a way to change which device the computer looks at first.  If there is, select the USB flash drive as the first in the list.
2. Disable the other drives: In the BIOS, turn your harddrive, to the off or none setting.  Your harddrive might be labeled “Primary Drive 0″  “Auto” or “On” Change it to “off” or “none”
3. Unplugg the hard drive(s): Use this option if your BIOS doesn’t have an option to change the drive sequence or to turn off the hard drive.  Please make sure you know what you are doing here.  If you are not sure exactly how to do this, look it up in google.  Be Aware: Opening your computer case may result in voiding your computer warranty or damaging your hardware.

**  Please note that many BIOSes are different and the wording will vary from one to another.

Part II:

1. Boot the PC from the boot floppy/CD (Windows 98 floppy/CD) into the command prompt with the USB drive plugged in.
2. Once in the command prompt, run fdisk
3. If a primary partition  already exists on the USB Drive, Goto step 4 below.  If it doesn’t or you don’t know, use fdisk to create one.  If for some reason you aren’t able to, make sure that the USB drive is set to be the first in the drive sequence in the BIOS.
4. Use fdisk’s “Set Active Partition” (option 2) to set the primary partition on the USB Drive to Active.
5. Exit fdisk
6. Reboot the PC from the boot floppy/CD (Windows 98 floppy/CD) into the command prompt with the USB flash drive plugged in.
7. At the command prompt enter the following command: dir c: This step is to verify that the C: drive is actually the primary partition on the USB Drive.  Regardless of the result that the command generates, the important thing to note is to make sure that the size of the primary partition on the USB drive is roughly equal to the sum of the empty space and the used space.  Refer to Part I
8. Format and copy the boot files to the primary partition.  At the command prompt, from the directory (on the Windows 98 CD/floppy) where FORMAT.COM is located, enter: format /s c:
9. Run fdisk /mbr This writes the master boot record to the USB drive without altering the partition table information.
10. Restart the PC and choose booting from the USB drive.  If all goes well, you should see a C:> command prompt.
11. Now your flash drive is bootable, however please remember to reset your PC settings back to their original settings.

On December 24th 1906, the world heard its first extended voice radio broadcast.  It was from Massachusetts and the broadcast was received by “sparks”, otherwise known as the communications officers on merchant ships in the Atlantic.  Since then it seems that radio has made a few technology advances in how we receive their product but since the onset of FM has been stuck in a technology black hole and refuses to accept that the world around them is changing.  Technology is changing and the method to deliver their broadcasts is going to change.  I will admit that the radio industry has made a few attempts to leap forward with the times but have been run over with a truck much like Frogger.  These are my views on some of the mistakes that have been made and where radio needs to advance too.

I have been a Broadcast Engineer for 12 years.  I started when i was 20 years old and just recently have left the industry to pursue bigger and better things in the IT sector.  In my career I have worked for 2 different radio companies that shall remain nameless but are quite large .  In the time that I slaved over 50,000 watt transmitters and rodent infested transmitter sites in the middle of no where, I got to play with some pretty cool stuff.  Systems to digitize the music library, automation systems, RDS (Radio Data Systems), transmitter remote controls, instant news services, broadcast consoles that were fully routeable and HD Radio.  I watched all of these systems evolve quite a bit in the last 12 years to the point where they function reliably and efficiently with the exception of HD Radio.  I will get to that in a min.  All of the companies that produce these systems have embraced the new technologies, the Internet and the idea that everything is going to computers.  Radio has tried to go another route with the deployment of HD Radio.

HD Radio is the industries answer to improved quality and delivery to you the listener.  CD quality music with the option to hear more stations with the inclusion of HD2  over-the-air to your radio ( If you spend 200 bucks to buy an HD radio).  Has anyone heard HD Radio.  Does anyone even own an HD Radio.  More importantly, is anyone planning on going to buy one.  I think the answer is an overwhelming NO.  If you think about it for a second, you would realize that the average commuter has a 20 min drive to work each day.  In that time they are on the phone or drinking their coffee and  thinking about the work they have to do that day.  With that said lets knock the listening time down to 15 min each way.  There are plenty of radio stations and other devices such as CD’s and MP3 players that will deliver exactly what you want to hear with out spending the money on a new radio. The overwhelming majority doesn’t  listen to the radio at home. They have the TV on or are on the computer.  Does that really justify spending 200+ dollars on a new radio.  The improvement in audio quality isn’t to bad but definitely not enough to prompt me to buy a new radio.  They do sell an add on device to receive HD on your existing radio but who wants to deal with the extra display unit sticking out from your dash tethered to a cable.  I have one of those by the way and it sucks.  The only reason I have it is because I got it for free. So HD Radio was a move towards doing something new (sort of) but in my mind is going to fail horribly.  Good job guys on investing hordes of money into it.   If your still reading, the key sentence in all of this was “They are on the computer”.

So, where do I think radio needs to go now.  It is pretty obvious in my mind.  THE INTERNET!!!!!!!!!  Everything is going to the Internet and why should radio be any different.  The advances that programmers and developers have made in just the last few years on Web 2.0 have basically started the ball hurdling down the hill aimed at broadcast services along with many other things.  Now i know what a lot of people are going to say at this point, ” I listen to my local stations on the web while I am at work”.  This is true, many radio stations do have online web streams.  The stream you hear on your computer is the same as the one you hear on the radio.  Its just a rebroadcast. They need to start developing original content for the web-streams and start promoting them the same as their over the air channels.  Create web-streams with different music formats, talk content and data services.  Start pushing the technology to their advertisers in order to get them to spend money advertising on the web-streams.  Basically abandon the HD Radio medium and focus the same efforts and ideas on the Web.  The need to drive your listeners to the computer is now.  This is where the business is going to end up in less than 10 years. How and why you ask?

Radio companies are not the most efficient operations to run.  The costs involved to pay for and maintain facilities, transmitters, towers and staff are quite high.  Just think about the electric bill that it takes to run a 50,000 watt transmitter site when your transmitter is running at 60% efficiency.  Add this to repair and maintenance costs of buildings and equipment and it gets pretty high.  Now think about what you could do with the Web.   Centrally locate your facility in a large market and be able to broadcast via the internet to the entire world.  This means fewer facilities and less cost.  The inefficient transmitters would be no more. The possibility of an unlimited amount of programming and the only constraint would be available bandwidth.  Use geotagging in your commercials to sell and play local content to specific markets.  The most important reason would be the ability to have your content heard through devices such as cell phones, computers, Internet Tablets and anything else that can access the Internet today and future devices such as in car computers and Internet enabled car stereos.  Most of these devices people already have in their pockets and they already have the capabilities.  This eliminates the requirement of the listener  to spend anymore money in order to recieve your content.  You get better Radio and the broadcast companies get their listeners to drive their sales.  Sounds good!

This is where radio is going.  Most of the technology to make it possible is already provided to you through your computer or cellphone.  The missing pieces such as city-wide or nationwide Internet access is being worked on as I type.  Computers are already being installed in cars to bring you advanced data services such as the Microsoft SYNC system in Fords.  The SYNC system is an early idea that will be expanded in the very near future to include added functionality such as Internet access while you drive.  You will also start seeing competitors to the SYNC system being installed or offered by the major automobile makers.  Combine this with the technology already available to us and its not hard to see where the future of radio is.  The first broadcasting company to partner with a technology provider such as Verizon, Nokia, Apple, RIM, Sprint, ATT or Google to be a part of further developing this new delivery method is going to be the winner. Radio that costs less to produce, reaches more listeners, and provides better service.  Its not hard to see that this is where radio is going.

I received the Hava Platinum HD in the mail a couple weeks ago and quickly ripped it out of the package (Christmas Morning Style).  The contents included the Hava Platinum HD, Ethernet cable, 2 Component HD cables, 2 AV cables, powers supply and CD.  The Component and AV cables are standard RCA connectors on one end and 1/8th inch 4 contact phono connectors to interface with the Hava box.  The Hava Box is capable of streaming HD channels across your network and has HD pass through so you can place your Hava Box in-between your cable box and TV, hence the two HD cables.  Audio is only standard stereo unfortunately and is handled by the AV cables minus the video plug.  Hell, if you wanted 5.1 surround, go sit in front of your 72 inch plasma with your 3000 dollar surround system with your 18 speakers.  That’s what you bought it for.

Heres the rundown:

Hava Platinum HD- HD and Standard Definition, IR blasters for cable or Sat box control,wired Ethernet only, recording or time shift capabilty to a PC and NO built in tuner.

Hava Wireless HD – HD and standard Definition, Standard Definition tuner built in, IR blasters for cable or Sat box control, wireless bridge built in, recording or time shift capability to a PC.

Hava Titanium HD – HD and  standard definition, IR blasters for cable or sat box control, wireless USB dongle with future support for N networks, recording or time shift capability to a PC.  This unit also has an internal hard drive or 2 USB ports to plug in an external drive for recording.  This function is in beta now. No built in tuner.

As of today, Hava only supports Windows based software for the player.  The software has a nice interface and is easy to set-up and use but the real advantage these units have over the Slingbox is that they are developing the client for the N800 and Linux support.  Thanks for showing the penguin a little respect.  More on this later when I get my copy of the Internet Tablet software.

The user interface appears to work just fine but, there are some issues with video and audio coding.  Check out the thread on Internettablettalk.

Read The Thread

Here’s the simple nuts and bolts to make this work with your system.  The Software is simply an application for your N800 or 810 and a server application to be installed on your mythfrontend. 

Mythetomer N800/810 app: 

To install the Internet tablet program, navigate to this page from your Tablet and click the download link below.  Follow the prompts.  Easy.

Download Mythetomer app

Server App:

On your frontend machine open a terminal window and type in

sudo wget http://netti.nic.fi/~icewood/mythetomer/file.php?file=mythetomer_0.2-1_i386.deb

After the file downloads to your machine type in a terminal window

sudo dpkg -i mythetomer_0.2-1_i386.deb

Done!

You will now need to shutdown your frontend if you haven’t already and start the mythetomer server.  To do this simply open a terminal window and type “mythetomer” and press enter.  Add a & sign at the end to run it in the background otherwise don’t close the terminal window or the server will stop.

I set mine up last night using the WLAN in my home and it works great.  The software gives you a remote control surface on you IT with number pad, direction arrows, menu and esc buttons, volume and channel up/down, and player controls such as play, pause, skip forward and back.  I have not tried the bluetooth connection as of yet cause I really have no need too but I might play with it a little later to see what happens.  The performance of the software is top notch, easy interface , no lag on button push and pretty steady connection.  I did have an issue once where the server croaked and the N800 lost its connection.  This required me to shutdown the frontend and restart the mythetomer server which to say the least very frustrating.  I am currently working on a Cron job to monitor the status of the mythetomer server. 

Overall its a good piece of tech gadgetry available for download.  I like it and it works much better than my Lirc based machine remote.  Give it a whirl.

Mythetomer Website

The current online price is around $192.00 plus shipping. Based on earlier reviews of similar products, the performance should be top notch.

Read more

Intel has tweaked its processor price list, cutting up to 50 per cent off what it charges for desktop CPUs.

The big reduction came to the 2.66GHz Core 2 Quad Q6700, which now costs $266, down from $530. The 2.4GHz Q6600 is also cheaper now: down 16 per cent to $224. For those of you not in the know, the Q6700 part is an overclocking monster thanks to its 10x multiplier.

The other big reduction was applied to the 3GHz Core 2 Duo E6850, which had 31 per cent taken off its price, bringing it from $266 to $183.

I guess it’s time to hit newegg.

Well, fastest hard drive that isn’t SCSI anyway. Western Digital has taken their Raptor hard drive which is a 10,000 RPM drive and cleaned out the cob webs and added some synthetic turning fluid. Now called the VelociRaptor, with a maximum capacity of 300 gigabytes, the drive is smaller, weighing in at 2.5 inches. (how do you weigh an inch again?) Anywho, even though the drive is smaller, thermal power loss and high drive temperatures are less of an issue with decreasing physical dimensions and they typically offer much improved access time with excellent transfer rates. The drive still utilizes SATA, because SAS would increase the cost to the user, but don’t fret… The interface supports SATA at 3 Gb/s link speed (300 MB/s) instead of the previous 150 MB/s. Throw a few of these in a RAID and you will be the most wanted geek on your block.

Check out the full article here.