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I promised a post about my Dell Mini months ago, but didn’t write it up. OK, my bad, here you go!

Back in July I posted about my Asus netbook, and how great that had worked out on a roadtrip I took in March. Although the Asus was great, Windows XP wasn’t. I’ve used Windows machines for work, but occasionally, not on a day-to-day basis as my primary machine, having mostly used Macs and Linux machines. As a day-to-day OS, I found XP clunky, and frankly not very visually appealing.

I tried Windows 7 and I quite liked it. Between it’s visual and functional workover, and the free Virus protection from Microsoft, Windows 7 addressed all my day-to-day complaints, but although it worked great on my Asus,  it wasn’t technically supported, and I had to decide if I was going to shell out 1/2 the price of the Netbook for a new OS. The Asus had a feature to restore back to a fresh version of XP, I didn’t want to loose that. So, I decided the Asus was best left an XP machine, if I wanted to keep it the cheap functional tool that it was.

But, I wasn’t going to use it daily if I had to use XP, and Windows 7 wasn’t shipping on any other netbooks yet. What to do. Well, I’d read an article on how to get MacOS running on a Dell Mini 9. Apparently, all the devices in the Mini were supported under MacOS, although Apple doesn’t really approve of installing MacOS onto non-Apple devices, but I was going to make sure everyone was paid for their work, and that I accepted I’d be on my own support-wise.

Dell had just stopped making the Mini 9, replacing it with very nice netbooks, but that used components MacOS didn’t support. I picked up a very reasonably priced refurb for $199, with wireless and bluetooth, bought a RunCore 64GB SSD which reviews said was very fast, and a new shrink-wrapped copy of MacOS Leopard.

I followed the easy online instructions (Note that this method has been replaced with a new, universal method of creating a bootable OSX for netbooks) and in short order had a Dell Mini 9 running MacOS. I quite understand why Apple isn’t making a netbook. They’re a big compromise in many ways, and Apple wants all their products to have a minimum amount of compromise vs. functionality. The Air was as much as they were willing to compromise. I had an air for a while at a prior job, and really did love it, but it was frankly too expensive to carry with me as a "rough and ready" personal device.

They Dell keyboard on the Mini 9 is a huge compromise. It’s not nearly as nice as the Asus. The biggest mistake, they not only squeezed a bunch of keys to be very, very small, they moved some. In a huge tactical error, they messed with the "home row" on they keyboard, and they did it by moving the apostrophe key down in a group of keys by the right of the space bar, and left the semi-colon. Think about this for a second. When did you last use an apostrophe or quote? OK, now when’s the last time you used a semi-colon? Yes, exactly. In the world of quick notes and 140 character micro-blogging, you use an apostrophe over and over and over again. Then, to make it worse, the return key is nice and big. And you hit it every single time you are going for an apostrophe. Toss touch typing out the window. I used Ukelele to remap the apostrophe/semicolon keys, and that helped a little, but you’re not going to be typing full speed on this keyboard, where I could get a pretty good clip going on the Asus.

The touchpad isn’t perfect either. Although the touchpad can handle multitouch, it just doesn’t work well with the Mini9 in my setup. No scrolling with the touchpad, which is a bit of a pain. I sometimes use a wireless mouse just to have a scroll wheel if I’m going to be doing a lot of browsing.

The verdict? This is a GREAT little machine! Even with the issues with touch typing, if you go in knowing you’ll have to type slowly, or use an external keyboard, its small and light, battery lasts for at least 3 hours with wireless on, has an SD card slot for importing photos/videos without cables. I use this as a portable blogging machine, a way to archive/post photos on the road, a great microblogging platform, and a great web browser and email machine, and a way to follow my recipes on kencooking in the kitchen without taking up all the counter space! It can also be used to play movies, and works passably there. With the SD card slot, you can load up movies on a card, and bring them with you, not sucking up precious SSD space. I also have a copy of my iTunes library on an external drive, so I can use this netbook, or my big MacBook to play anything in the library. And the 64GB SSD is a lot more space than I had on my 40GB 12" MacBook! Also, the SSD is FAST. Disk operations usually take much less time than on my big Intel MacBook Pro with its spinning rust.

The compromises aren’t for everyone. If you’re a power-blogger or a writer, the keyboard is a deal breaker. Carrying the netbook AND an external keyboard destroys any portability you gained. But, if you’re looking for a tiny, silent, rugged occasional use machine, especially if you’re out and about, it’s worth a look.

References:

mydellmini
OSX | mechdrew

Geotagging photos, putting the GPS position information where the photo was taken in the EXIF metadata, has been around for years. Until recently, it was a process reserved for geeks who found some way to grab and store GPS location (a laptop hooked to a GPS or a GPS data logger), then take that information, generally run it through a software program that would match time information from the GPS and from the photo, and put the GPS info into the metadata.

Recently, some cameras have come with the ability to attach a GPS, and even have built in GPS’s, but not very many people are buying a camera just to geotag photos. However, a very large number of people are using their phone’s camera to take and share pictures now. For instance, the iPhone.

What many may not know, all iPhone photos are geotagged. You can turn that off, but it’s not something you’d do ordinarily. To turn it off, you need to go into settings, and turn off "Location Services". That’ll turn off the GPS and the mobile triangulation, but otherwise, every photo you take will have the last known GPS coordinates stamped on it.

This came to light again today when one of my favorite gadget stores, thinkgeek, posted a Top Secret photo of their new office. Just a simple interior shot. But, they posted it directly to Flickr, and it had the location right there in the photo. Oops, so much for that Top Secret new location!

Why would you care? Well, you’re taking pictures at your house, or your friends house, and posting them to Flickr. Do you really want everyone knowing where you live, or where your friends live? Within 20 feet? For some people, it’s no big deal, but for others, well, some amount of privacy is a good thing.

I’d been thinking about this for a while. I take a lot of pictures at my house, but don’t generally want people knowing where I live, you just never know who’ll use that information, or just "come visit". I try hard to remember to turn off location services before taking pictures with my phone at home, but I’m likely to slip up eventually. That’s when another service comes in handy. When posting to Flickr or other public sites, I user services like TwitPic or Posterous, (and even the cool iPhone app ShakeItPhoto) where your EXIF is stripped before posting. Some might find that annoying, but it has the side benefit of removing the photos location. It might be nice to have that as an option eventually, but right now it’s a great way to go for me. I don’t send photos directly to Flickr from my iPhone, only through one of these services. Of course, Flickr just announced a new feature to tweet about uploaded photos. That’s great, but be careful out there if you want your location information private!

Now another bit of party etiquette I’ll need to have to work on with guests, if you want to take pictures with your phone, that’s fine but please turn off location services first.

Thinking about upgrading to 3.0 for the iPhone, but being concerned about app compatability, I went on a hunt to see what I could see about the apps I use, then decided to post it so I’d have a reference. Here’s what I’ve found so far from my top used apps (I’ll update as I find more, and if I upgrade, I’ll update based on personal testing). Feel free to contact me via twitter (@kaydub) if you have any specific info.

• Evernote: OK
• TweetDeck: OK
• Peggle: OK
• Yelp: OK
• ShakeItPhoto: OK, with minor issues
• Brightkite: Unknown
• Doodlejump: Unknown
• HP41CX+: Unknown
• Darkroom: broken

UPDATE: Only Darkroom failed to work on 3.0, the update was remarkably uneventful (in a good way), and everything just worked.

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Tried publishing as an edit, didn’t work, so, now it’s a new post. Oh well.

Now that the furor has turned into a low growl, a few thoughts. I’d “hacked” my phone with iFuntastic. Mostly because I missed the ringtones on my E61, where I could pick any media file on my phone to play. So, I tossed in a few of those ringtones.

Yeah, I get that the RIAA figured out there was big money in ringtones, so they came up with special licensing to extract money for that too. However, because of the RIAA’s heavy handed tactics, and actively attacking customers, informing us that paying for music doesn’t mean we actually own how we use it, I have to admit, I, like it appears the majority of their customers, aren’t big fans of the RIAA. Just a hint, when you actively, and even more, proactively alienate your customers, you will eventually go out of business. And, you cannot regulate and intimidate behavior change with your customers. All the more so when the “competition”, i.e. unsigned artists, are better, by and large, than the “product” you’re peddling. Nya.

So, most of my ringtones are from non-RIAA sources. I have several friends who are musical artists, I have their “personal label” CD’s, and their express permission to use their music however I want, short of reselling it. And, some are from old recordings for which no ringtone rights have been negotiated. So, if the music isn’t popular enough to license as a ringtone, does that means it’s explicitly not licensed as a ringtone? I don’t think so. I don’t see any EULA in my CD packet here for my Mozart symphonies dictating what I can and cannot do with snippets of the music I bought. But, Apple needs to placate the mesozoic media companies, so I guess it had to make deals with the devil to agree to disallow any random ringtone creation.

Anywho, so I did that. Then folks figured less arduous ways of putting ringtones on the phone. That was cool, but I already had mine set up, so I didn’t mess with that. Then the infamous 1.1.1 came out. Now I was a little nervous. I knew I’d eventually want to upgrade, but now I might have a pending brick.

Now, I think it was a poor marketing choice for Apple to go this route, but I don’t see anything inherently evil. They came out with an update, they knew it would and in some cases would brick phones, so they warned you before you updated. Threw in a special “Danger, Will Robinson!” dialog and everything. At that point you could a) say to yourself “self, I modified this phone, do I really want to risk updating”, or b) take your chances.

When I bought the phone, I got a device, and a set of software with it. That’s all I got. Folks found a way to hack that version of the software, great, if I wanted to use it, that’s my choice. I don’t have any illusion that I bought that and the right to tweek it, and the right to free updates from Apple. If I want to use a device, with the restrictions that were made clear to me when I bought it, that’s my choice, and if I choose to disregard those restrictions, which I often do, well, you break it, you lost it.

The train of thought that you bought the phone, so not only can you hack it, but that Apple owes you compatibility, and owes you not to unhack it? Sony has been battling back and forth with the PSP for a very long time, and DirecTV had a similar battle with people unlocking all the channels for a long time, until that got pretty difficult to pull off as well. Not everything you buy is a general purpose computing device. A Palm, mostly a general purpose device, other smartphones? Kinda similar. The iPhone, well, not so much. And, if it wasn’t so absolutely brilliant at doing what it does do, then we wouldn’t really care, now would we?

So, how about this, if you want to hack it, fine, hack away, but don’t update until the hackers catch up with Apple, and if Apple does something that makes future updates just not work, well, enjoy what you’ve got. Works for the PSP folks, should work for the iPhone too.

Now, does this cause Apple some headaches? Well, sure, when there’s some real hardware/software competition to the iPhone, and it’s open and developer/hacker friendly, then there will be some migration.

But, remember, Apple didn’t build and market the phone to developers/hackers. Just like the iPod wasn’t opened up, and yet became the largest selling music player, they’re betting that same thing will work with the iPhone. And, for non-power users, that want power a different way, they may be right.

I’m gonna enjoy the heck out of it, just like I did my E61, until the NEXT killer device/platform comes along! I’m just excited that Apple kicked the mobile industry in the butt with a platform that could be built today, if only other providers had thought out of the box enough to do it. The iPhone is, as a friend told me, “The Mac on a phone”, it’s kinda like Frontpage. Apple’s got a way they want to interact with Consumers, and a lot of it is in limiting the customization. That’s got a similarity to my day job, looking at ways to make general purpose hardware and OS’s more like an “Appliance”, once you know what you want the device to do.

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I finally got around to trying this, and swapping back and forth a bunch of times, and this does work, with caveats, and I did only try the one mode I was interested in, heck, it took me this long to try that! OK, so I wanted to sync my music/photos/podcasts/video from my home machine, where all that stuff is sitting on, as you might remember, a Ready NAS hooked up to the PowerMac. Just an aside, my new work laptop, a MacBook Pro feels to be about 2x faster than my dual 1.8Ghz PowerPC based deskside. My PowerMac is feeling inadequate now, but I’m not willing to plunk down $8k for a hot new Mac Pro system. This’ll just have to do, I’ll probably end up moving some video conversion to the laptop though.

Anywho. I first tried to just syncronize my calendar from my laptop, but sync my address book, etc, from my desktop. No go. You can do a sync specifically of that data from multiple machines, and have it merge it, but when I hooked the iPhone back and forth between machines, both machines turned off all the other “info” items turned off. So, for regular syncing, you have to do email, contacts, calendars, and bookmarks from the same machine. I also noticed when I turned off auto-sync on my laptop, when I next hooked it up to my desktop, auto-sync was disabled there too. I’m thinking that’s kinda OK, we’ll see if I keep it that way or turn auto-sync back on for both.

The media portion of our iPhone can come from the other machine though, and there’s no problem with having it get wiped when hooking it to the laptop. The first time I did do the sync, I got the frightening “do you want to overwrite…” message, but it only overwrote the section I’d checked. There is also, as you might have noticed, an Advanced section in the Info tab in iTunes that allows you to merge, rather than overwrite info on your iPhone.

So, this is working for me for now. That’s good, since I can update my calendar on the go to my corporate calendar with the laptop, then sync my phone. Would love for Apple to get an over the air sync for the iPhone in a future update though.

Next question, why after 2 months of billing cycles can I STILL not check out or change iPhone rate plans on the AT&T site? I’ve gotta call a representitive if I want to change my plan. I might need to bump my minutes, since I’m now only using my iPhone, and never a desk phone anymore. With all my prior phones, I’d switch to a landline if one was available. Of course, I’ve got a great deal on a legacy plan, $39.99 for 450 anytime minutes with 5k night and weekends with rollover. But, I’ve now eaten through a bunch of rollover minutes

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I ran across a cool features on the iPhone last night that I found one of those happy Apple UI details.

I have one of my home phone numbers assigned to two contacts, me, and “home”. A call came in from that number, and the display said “Ken or Home”. Took a second for that to register, since I’d never have expected the phone to scan my whole phonebook, have a list of contacts with the same number, and then present that when a call was coming in! It doesn’t appear that way in the received call list, however, only on the incoming call screen, but still, it was an unexpected “wow”.

Just to balance it, I’m a fan, but not a fanboy after all, other unexpected things: my voicemail just reset. I went to check voicemail, and it took me through the setup again. Oh, and all my old voicemail? Gone. Weird.

I can’t click on phone numbers in calendar appointments, what’s up with that? Since I can’t cut and paste either, it’s annoying. I can click on phone numbers in SMS messages, so it’s especially odd.

Still, it’s one elegantly nice device.

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Decided not to write a lengthy “me to” blog entry evaluating my iPhone. But, figured I’d drop a note. Like everyone else says, and as I expected, it’s a really amazing device, looks great, interaction is groundbreaking and amazing, some of it’s features are quirky or incomplete, and some functionality of other phones just isn’t there. I don’t miss MMS (never sent one), would like real IM, and features I didn’t have on my E61 like video would be cool someday.

The fact that setting an alarm is actually fun, and I  use it to read and compose mail, or look at the web when I have a laptop nearby, reflect it’s really different than other devices with similar capabilities.

I’m comparing mostly with my E61, which is a really nice device, and does more than the iPhone, but doesn’t do any of it as elegantly. An unexpected find for me was that I can type much faster, with far more accuracy, and less fatigue than the E61. My thumbs would occasionally ache after a day on the road with the E61, I now noticed after a couple weeks with the iPhone that my thumbs have become ache free. I think the E61 is heading for eBay.

Integration with the Mac is virtually flawless, compared to any prior device, so as one who manages all my massive email and contacts and calendars on the Mac, having a mobile phone that stays accurately synced, reflecting the actual data, is a jewel.

One thing I hadn’t seen folks talk about is how easy it is to use for people who aren’t gadget geeks to pick up and use the iPhone. I’ve had the opportunity to just hand the phone to a bunch of non-tech people, many of whom see no reason for a phone with anything more than a dialpad. They were zipping around the interface, and resizing photos in no time! It was far more intuitive to non-tech folks than I’d expected.

A fun story, I was visiting friends in Atlanta last week. A group of us went to a restaurant, and I was taking a picture of folks to assign to their numbers in my phonebook. A 20-something waitress comes over, excitedly and said “is that an iPhone?” I asked if she’d like to take a picture of us with it, and she got really excited. Then ran off to tell the other waitresses she’d just touched an iPhone. Through the meal, waitresses kept stopping by, wanting to see it. Two of them wanted me to take their picture. My friends then commented for the rest of the weekend “Ken, whip out your iPhone” since it turned the group into instant celebrities, depending on the venue. The single coolest feature non-tech people get giddy over seems to be the photo album, how you navigate it, and how you zoom. That makes sense, since that’s an “instant gratification” capsule of the slick direct touch interface and multi-touch.

So, those other celebrities out there, enjoy your 15 minutes. In a couple years, most mobile devices will have a similar interface. I’m looking forward to multi-touch and direct manipulation on my laptop (although I’ll want a fingerprint resistant screen .

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I was very excited when I saw that Nokia was going to have free mapping software, with a “pay as you go” option for voice navigation. I use a TomTom for mobile nav, and absolutely love it, but if I’m going to a city, and gonna walk around, it’s not a great choice (I’ve got a 510, not really pocketable). OK, so I don’t have a built-in GPS, but I do have an external bluetooth GPS, and figured that’d be a great way to get started.

My summary, the maps software is pretty darned cool. The for-fee features, however, leave a lot to be desired, in fact, in my experience, they leave everything to be desired, and actually don’t work. I wouldn’t use it for free in that mode, much less pay. OK, off to the details…

I figured I’d try it out on my trip to Moab. I’d have the TomTom in the car with John Cleese narrating my journey, but for in-town stuff, I’d be able to set up landmarks, and just carry the phone and my little bluetooth GPS. Figured since I was trying it out, I should try voice nav too. So, I bought a 30 day voice nav subscription, and gave it a shot.

Let me slightly digress, and give a general hint to folks who write navigation software. The big players have figured this out, and I know it may seem like a subtlety, but if you’re blasting along at 60mph right near a major highway, and the GPS coordinates you’re getting indicate, because of typical innacuracies, that you are closer to a frontage road, you’re probably NOT on the frontage road. Especially when every time you hit a sharp left, the object that’s being tracked keeps going straight. Let’s put that object on, oh, a bigger interstate, like Highway 5 in California, with NO frontage roads. Just rolling hills. I think then, you can safely assume that the object going 75mph is a car, not a low-flying plane. If you’re in a plane, you probably aren’t using your phone to do navigation. You could even make it a selectable option, but not the default. So “not on a road” is probably not the best choice. That road that’s 10 feet to the right? You can safely guess that’s where the physical location really is. For an example, um, try a TomTom, or a Garmin, they can give you a pretty good idea what the end result is suppose to look like.

From San Jose to Moab, the Nokia software spent most of it’s time recalculating, because it thought I was on a side road, or somehow hurling offroad at dangerous speeds, but seldom on the major highway I was actually on. Even in the middle of absolutely nowhere in Utah, with no side roads, or frontage roads, or any other roads except the one I was on for many, many miles, the software would work fine for a while, then display “not on road”, and “recalculate”. In the rare instances when it did figure I was on a road, the voice navigation was OK, but since it got lost so often, it was usually either giving me wrong information, or recalculating, and unable to speak. Compare this to the TomTom, which never once put me on a road I was not. I checked, the GPS coordinates being transmitted from the Garmin Bluetooth GPS were identical to the ones being reported from the TomTom, so it’s not a GPS miscalibration problem.

Oh, and since it downloads it’s maps in real time as it needs them, when you’re REALLY in the middle of nowhere, take that Utah example again, when it does think it knows where it is, it doesn’t have any map information, and can’t get it, so you’re then just looking at a blank screen, with no navigation information at all. You’ll need to get back into cell range, AND get a good GPS fix. So, this isn’t a solution for anyone who travels the less populated, and therebye mobile signal-less parts of the world.

And, given the powerdrain the Bluetooth being on and active all the time causes, better keep yourself close to a power supply. My E61 totally drained in just a couple hours. And, if you have the “keep display on when navigating” option set too, well, ’nuff said. Obviously less of a problem with Nokia’s “GPS built-in”  mobiles.

Now, the free features, finding POI’s, navigating between points, all that worked great, and the GUI was nicer to work with than Google’s in-phone app, with the same features. Only issue I have there is, once you’ve used it with a GPS, it’ll assume your current position when you start the software is the last position it saw from the GPS. When I got back from Moab, I had to re-sync it with the GPS to tell it where home was. The addition of having an approximate location when I brought the GPS with me was nice too. So, I’d still recommend getting the free download and playing with all it can do, but the “premium” voice navigation? Give that a bit more time to get baked, and the position prediction algorithms reworked for it to be a usable alternative to the other options (like the TomTom software for Symbian phones).

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Still love the twitter, don’t know if I’ll be switching, or just trying it out, but followed Leo Laporte over to Jaiku, like hundreds thousands of others. He needed to switch ’cause of confusion with This Week in Tech (aka TWiT). There are differences, but the overall concept is the same. Jaiku has a Nokia S60 phone client, that’s cool, and it can put feeds into the comment stream (so this post, for instance, should show up there).

Like so many things, content is king, so we’ll see how multiple “train of thought” messaging systems compete. I know I can’t handle more than one place to say “eating pizza now”.

OK, well, still kinda sick after my petri dish flight this week, so back to my lemon tea with rum.

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And having linked the two, it’s two great tastes in one. Both have the concept of “quick blurbs”, not long rambling blog posts. Interesting distinction, and not sure if tumblr has a distinct place outside a normal blog, or photoblog. Although some folks do indeed make every blog post into an actual article, most seem content to mix those, “look what I found”, and “look what I did” all into one big place.

Twitter, on the other hand, seems more like “group IM”, and if you get actual friends connected to you there, a way for people you want, to know what you’re up to. Kinda needs “groups of group” though, so you can have a) Your beer drinking buddy group b) your work colleagues, c) Your “virtual friends” who you might have interest in what they’re doing, or not. You don’t necessarily want to broadcast the same information from (a) to (b) and or (c) (i.e. brewskies at 7 at the Goose). The current modes are (d) public and (c), which somewhat limits the interest. But, an interesting concept.

Oh, and to make me more giddy, and feeling “in the shadow of cool”, I saw Cali Lewis (of Geekbrief TV) and Drew Domkus (of the Dawn and Drew Show), from my two absolute favorite new-media shows, had also signed up for tumblr today, right after I’d gotten my twitter to tumblr link set up (twitter posts automatically show up on tumblr). And, I saw that ’cause of their twitter comments. Ahh, and now to ramble a bit, since it’s been a while since I posted, did I ever mention, right after stumbling upon Daily Source Code back in November of 2004, the next podcast I couldn’t stop listening to was Dawn and Drew? Well, there you go, now I’ve mentioned it.

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And, speaking of not posting, I just started a new Gig, so I’ve been kinda swamped coming up to speed on that. Looks like it’s gonna be a lot of fun, a wild ride, and all that good stuff. More on that later, although I’ll probably just point to my work blogonce I’ve got more than a pittance to say there. Seems a good idea to me to keep those separate, when you’re working in
corporate America, even when it’s all available for everyone to see. At least for me, I wouldn’t expect my family and many of my friends to check out my work blog more than once, but here, they’ll see stuff that’s more generally interesting occasionally.

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