Tom's Two Cents

Barnes & Noble’s Nook e-book reader runs Android! (gotta love the name… “Nook e-book” is every bit as good as the Wii for puns and jokes!) I’m not surprised to see that Nook is powered by Android, especially after running across a dual boot Android/XP netbook and a “dualbook” (part e-reader, part Android netbook) called the enTourage eDGe. The Android operating system is definitely designed for more than just cellphones. It’s an OS for mobile devices.

So while I understand there are limitations with the refresh rate of the E-Ink display, it’s hard not to get carried away thinking about the possibilities. I’ll be honest, I was not really interested in the Nook until I heard it will run Android. That changed everything. So while some complain that Nook would be great if it only had text-to-speech or a web browser, I don’t really care about the current features anymore. (Yes, their e-books are overpriced.) Someone is going to hack this thing, and that will be the point at which it becomes amazing and irresistible. Let me put it this way: 10-inch screen+wifi+micro-sd slot+color touchscreen+Android+root=Awesomeness!

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Android, Gadgets, Openness, Rants Android, e-book reader, e-reader, nook

This is another one of those long comments that turns into a blog post of it’s own. I am responding to my brother Bob’s blog, New Microsoft Ad: Macs are “so sexy” but… This is about the new laptop hunting ads where someone gets $1500 to go find a sweet laptop, which of course rules out Macbook Pros… unless you are me

I agree that the new Macbook Pros look really good, but the best thing about the new macs for me is that they caused a major price drop of the “old” Macbook Pros on Amazon back in December 2008. I picked up a 15″ 2.5 GHz Macbook Pro with 512 MB NVidia video RAM for $1500 on Amazon after rebate. Don’t get me wrong, $1500 still seems like a TON of money to spend on a laptop, but I dare you to match those specs for less — on whatever OS. Of course I wasn’t about to spend $700 more for the new version of MBP with the same specs either (plus I had to have a matte screen — just personal preference).

I like macs and pcs for different reasons. They both have their strong points, and the truth is that I can do what I need to do on either one. So while it looks like there is a huge price difference between the two, if you shop around you’ll find that it’s not as big as you think. I say that, but the deal I got is gone. The same laptop I bought is now back up around $1700 — which is just out of range for the $1500 spending cap in the ad. If you want to look at extremes, the new 17″ Macbook Pro is “insanely” priced at a cool $2700. The laptop hunters should have fun with that one. (Apple, what are you thinking?!?)

Ultimately, I think Windows 7 will even things out quite a bit. I’m already running the beta in a VM on my MBP, and I think Microsoft is headed in the right direction. (If only they would get rid of the whole hide-everything-in-the-registry idea and go with a more stable Unix-based architecture. Just think what all those programmers could come up with if stability was more important than DRM!) Maybe I’m just too practical to really engage in this mac vs. pc thing. It seems to be a lot about personal preference. I like the hardware I chose because it’s fast, light, thin, and has a decent (3 hr) battery. If someone else finds a better deal on something else, good for them. At this point I am a little partial to macs — mainly out of habit and ease of migration. That said, I am seriously considering a PC for a media center.

I know I haven’t done a good job separating hardware and software here, and part of this is because pcs and macs have such different approaches here. With pcs, you have lots of hardware choices, and with macs… well, you don’t. I think it would be really interesting to separate the operating system from the hardware on the mac side of things, and it’s starting to happen. I would like to see more “hackintosh” desktops in the future — non-Apple desktops capable of running OSX. I don’t see a clear winner in the mac vs. pc race, but it’s great to see the user experience improving on both sides. For that reason alone let’s keep the competition going! In the end I hope the winner will be the customer.

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Rants mac, microsoft, pc

(This is an older blog post I finally decided to publish. Perhaps T-mobile’s VOIP @home system works now that it’s 6 months later. I guess this is the price you pay for being an early adopter — or at least with T-mo.)

OK, so I made the certification thing up. But I really think that anyone who has enough technical skill to set up T-mobile @home service successfully should earn a Certificate in IP Telephony Repair from ITT Tech. Here’s what you need to know to get your router working properly with Comcast (By the way, I am now an official, card-carrying member of the Linksys Support Forums):

The trick that fixed it for me was opening port 5060.
SIP uses UDP (and sometimes TCP) on port 5060. I believe SIP is needed for any VOIP calls. So the way to open port 5060 is to make sure that that port is not being forwarded to any IP. For example in Application and Gaming
Regards,
MrBinum

Hmm… UDP, SIP, TCP… Got all that? Good. So here is what you actually need to know in order to open port 5060: Assuming you have the standard WRTU54G-TM router, go to Applications & Gaming –> Port Range Forwarding. Then enter whatever under Application (I put “VOIP” but I don’t think it matters). Next enter “5060″ under Start and “5060″ for End. This is the port you want to open. Then put “both” for Protocol (both means TCP and UDP). Now enter your router’s IP Address. It should be 192.168.0.1. Finally, check “Enable.” This seems to be working for me now, but please correct me if my instructions are wrong. Hopefully this will help others to figure out how to get their VOIP working consistently. Tom

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Random Thoughts, Rants, Reviews tmobile @home

I don’t really have time to blog this, but I had to post it anyway. Jim Cramer is the whipping boy, but really this is a message meant for CNBC. I would add that the same shout out should go to our financial regulators. Be warned that Jon Stewart drops a couple F-bombs in the clip, but just like the ones used by the US military, these babies are laser guided and hit their targets with amazing precision. Read more…

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Economy, Rants big media, Economy, jim cramer, regulators

Thin client compared to full size PC tower

This is another one of those comments that turned into it’s own blog post. The gist of the article on themacsucks.com is that macs are overpriced and education dollars could be better spent on other solutions. It got me thinking about an age-old debate: Which computer is best for education? Here is my response:

First of all, congratulations on a very clever way to set up your blog. Hitting the mac love/hate nerve should help your pagerank as thousands of mac fanboys go one the defensive and still others take the opposite side. I won’t take either side, but as a former High School Computer Science teacher I have to offer my 2 cents…

Focusing on ratios such as kids/computer and dollars/computer ignores the more central issue: What do you want to do with the computers? Simply creating more “computer time” does not improve learning. Throwing more computer hardware at teachers and kids doesn’t improve learning either. We found this out the hard way in California. It’s amazing to me how little thought goes into spending 100’s of millions of dollars on technology.

There is also setup and maintenance to consider. This is rarely ever included in the cost of new systems. Installing and maintaining software is often left to the classroom teacher, which is a major reason why so many school computers end up sitting idle, collecting dust. I am a former Computer Science teacher in Southern California, I designed my own computer lab, set up and managed my own software, etc, etc. I chose to buy Dells, but I also spent hundreds of hours of my own time setting up and imaging computer after computer. If I had to do it again, I would probably go with a solution better suited to a classroom environment. Something like Edubuntu running on a thin client system would be a great way to cut down on maintenance issues and dramatically lower costs. All you need is a single thin client server and a bunch of thin clients with screens, keyboards, and mice. And by the way, thin clients don’t need to be upgraded every few years like stand-alone computers. Their life-cycle is more like 10-15 years.

Let’s face it, for most of what we do these days, all you need is a browser, a PDF viewer, and OpenOffice. But I wouldn’t rule out buying macs for something like video editing, even if it means buying fewer machines. It really depends on what you are trying to help people learn. If Edubuntu can’t do it, then I have to go elsewhere until it can. I only wish we could take some of the money we plan to spend on school technology and put it towards projects like Edubuntu. Then we’d get a decent video editor and much, much more! And while I am wishing, I wish my school district had listened to Kevin Haugh. He advocated for thin clients back in 2001 and no one listened.

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Random Thoughts, Rants, open source

My friend Marion and I are both interested in working with GPS/location-based games. Next semester Brett Shelton is doing another instructional games course here at Utah State University, so we are thinking of working with the class to design two versions of a single game — one to be played at the American West Heritage Center using the WhereIGo tool and another as a PC-based game using a game engine called Visionaire. Marion plans to study the impact of presence on long-term recall of facts. (i.e. do people remember more when they are actually there vs. in a simulation.) I’m not really sure what my part will focus on. Initially, I was going to look at piggybacking on the same game and adapting it for the blind. But the devil is always in the details, and I don’t think I could find enough blind subjects to do a meaningful study. It might also be interesting to do research along the lines of depth of learning. In other words, do you learn more deeply if you are actually there vs. being there virtually? Secondary schools tend to focus on hitting a broad range of learning objectives, so I’m not sure if anyone really cares about deep learning these days.

I am also interested in studying the growth of OpenCourseWare through Facebook, but I’m starting to wonder if it would be enough to build on for a dissertation. The guys who created the CourseFeed Facebook app are in the process of updating CourseFeed so it will include OpenCourseWare courses. I can think of tons of features to go along with this, but at the end of the day I’m not a programmer so I can only hope that CourseFeed developers at TopClass take advantage of all that OCW has to offer. This OCW + Facebook mashup could be the start of a great Personal Learning Environment.

At the end of it all, I also want to make it through this Instructional Technology PhD. Unfortunately, it seems that most of the people I know who are interesed in Personal Learning Environments are down at BYU. So maybe the whole Facebook, OCW, PLE thing just doesn’t have enough traction up here at USU. That’s what interests me, but it seems like you have to pick a topic that also interests your committee chair or you won’t get much support. The whole thing is getting kind of frustrating.

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Rants

This is in response to my brother’s post, My $.02 on Apple’s Response to Microsoft’s Response.
Even though I use a MacBook Pro these days, I consider myself as much of an Apple critic as a Microsoft critic. The fact that I have used macs a lot lately has actually led to even more mac criticisms, but part of that is just because I’m hard on whatever I use. The other part is that I think Apple is following in Microsoft’s footsteps — but somehow is in denial about it all. While it makes for a funny ad, Apple has no room to talk about Microsoft’s advertising budget when Apple is even more concerned about image. I’m talking about everything from Apple’s highly theatrical upgrade announcements to the black turtlenecks worn by Steve Jobs and all his faithful followers — I mean employees. It’s downright creepy. Maybe you have to be this obsessed to have really good hardware design… I don’t know. But the real question we should ask is simple: who is really delivering what the customer wants? Let’s see…

• Vista license servers… because entering that 25-character Windows XP product key wasn’t fun enough
• iTunes’ proprietary .aac (and coincidentally incompatible with anything else) music file format
• The new and “improved” (and coincidentally incompatible with anything else) .docx document file format

No, thanks. None of that helps me. In a lot of ways it feels like a race to the bottom. And, just like the presidential race, I find myself trying to pick the platform I feel will be less awful… but not really what I want. In this regard Apple is giving Microsoft a real run for its money. And while everyone has been asking Apple for a cheaper mac laptop, when Steve Jobs unveiled the new lineup of new MacBooks this month, the closest Apple came to that request was lowering the price of the old white MacBooks to $999… until those run out of stock. Beyond that the price of the next cheapest MacBook jumps to about $1300. Um… did I mention that it has a fancy new metal case? *sigh*

So don’t let the cute “I’m a mac” ads fool you. Microsoft and Apple are both spending plenty of money on advertising (and fancy new metal cases, if you’re Apple.) They even run ads about the other guy’s ads. Does this sound familiar? In some ways I wish the networks would suspend Microsoft and Apple ad campaigns — at least until the presidential election is over. I can’t deal with both software and political ad campaigns at the same time. Too much of the same useless stuff. And if there is anyone else out there that thinks they can build a reliable computer AND listen to customers at the same time, I’m ready to hear from you.

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Random Thoughts, Rants, Software

I have been a resident of Utah for 3 years now, and I am FINALLY being allowed to apply for resident tuition. The form I had to fill out asks for details about every aspect of my life. Let me tell you, the Department of Homeland Security has nothing on the Utah State University residency folks. They want to know where I have lived, worked, and traveled in the past three years. Every trip greater than 15 days has to be documented. They want copies of my taxes, my vehicle and voter registrations, my mortgage statements, as well as information about my wife and my parents. While I am grateful to pay less tuition starting next semester, I am amazed by how much information is required to establish residency. So I wrote my own version of an employment verification letter to make life easier on my supervisor:

To whom it may concern,

Tom Caswell has been an employee of Utah State University since September 2005. He has put up with your tuition residency requirements for 3 years now. He has paid the higher out-of-state tuition rates during this time — even though he has been paying Utah property, income, and sales taxes since the first day he set foot in Utah back in August 2005. Please stop being a bunch of freaking morons and realize that he is now eligible for in-state tuition. Thank you.

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Random Thoughts, Rants