Hardware

The Commodore 64 is back!

Well, sort of. In the 1980′s the Commodore 64 was the most popular home computer. Commodore sold millions of them, and many of their users became programmers or other technology workers.

While Apple got most of the glory, the Commodore 64 was of the “blue collar” computer.

I wasn’t aware of this, but a company recenly bought the rights to the Commodore name and put up a new web site, http://commodoreusa.net just last month.

The new Commodore 64 is actually a stand-alone computer that looks like the old Commodore 64 on the outside, but inside is a computer from today. It comes with a mini-ITX motherboard and a Dual-Core 525 Atom processor. Not exactly a speed burner, but it’ll get the job done.

The rear of the machine has the usual modern complement of USB ports and DVI video out. A Blu-Ray capable DVD R/W is optional from the side.

The unit comes with a version of Ubuntu Linux, and eventually you will be able to boot into the old Commodore operating system. It looks like that feature is not ready for prime time as yet/

Apparently, you’ll be able to load Windows on this computer, too. When you boot up, you’ll be able to choose which operating system to use.

Related articles

• Commodore 64 Returns as More Powerful Machine (shoppingblog.com)
• The New Commodore 64 (hardware.slashdot.org)
• Commodore64 – The New Hotness! (nerdjunkies.com)

Sprint HTC EVO 4G – My Review

A few weeks ago, I decided to buy a Sprint HTC Evo 4G and leave my venerable Blackberry Tour 9630 behind. It was a tough decision because I’ve been a Blackberry guy since 2004, except for a brief and disastrous flirtation with a Windows Mobile Verizon VX6700. I still shudder to think about it

To the left, you can see the “tub” that the EVO comes in, rather than a box. I bought this online from Radio Shack and the ordering process was smooth and fast. Delivery was also quick, considering that I had bought it just before New Year’s day

A quick inspection of the contents showed everything to be there, and in good shape. No scratches and no dents. Documentation was fairly brief, which is the norm nowadays, as most of the detailed documentation is a PDf file on a CD or online

Size -

After taking it out of the box, it was obvious I was going to have to adjust to the larger size in comparison to my old Tour.

I had held one in the store, but actually owning one now, I was thinking that I might have made a mistake. Writing this now a few weeks later, I can say my fears were quickly overcome. In daily use, it’s size is actually not that noticeable. I don’t use a holster or case, it just goes right in my pocket. That helps keep the size down. I do not have large hands either, yet it is easy to hold.

Performance -

After using the EVO for a few weeks, I can say that the performance blows the Tour away. I was used to the cramped, slow browser of the Tour, so I was amazed at how smooth and fast the EVO’s stocl browser was. And you know what? I rarely use the 4G mode, as I find that browsing under 3G is still considerably faster than the Tour.

I haven’t had to reboot the phone too many times, but the reboot times easily beat the 6-8 minutes of the Tour. Apps from the app store manage to install themselves without having to reboot the device, unlike the Tour.

Lastly, even though both devices are on the Sprint network, the radio in the EVO consistently pulled in a better signal than the Tour. I went to a number of locations where I knew that I had either gotten no signal or a weak signal with the Tour. In each instance of where the EVO got no signal, the EVO pulled at least a fair signal or even a good one.

So, for all you Tour owners out there, Sprint’s network may not be to blame for your weak or no signal problems.

The elephant in the room -

Yes, I’m talking about the battery. Face it, I knew going in that the battery was not going to last me as long as the Tour’s. And I was right. If there is a downside to the EVO, you have to be get used to watching your battery levels.

Shortly after I got the EVO, I purchased a SEIDIO 1750 mAh battery. That made a considerable difference. With quite normal use, the battery lasts me all day. If I have to make a number of calls, I throw it on a charger for a half hour and I’m good to go.

One other feature where it doesn’t outshine the Tour is in handling email. If you’re on an Exchange server, as I am, the stock mail handler doesn’t handle email as seamlessly as a Blackberry. It does do it though. I’m going to be looking at some of the third-party apps to see if I can improve that.

Bottom line – I like the EVO. Its advantages over the Blackberry outweigh the few disadvantages. The transition was a lot easier than I thought it would be. -SM-

Platinum Tools Precision Screwdriver Set

When working on a desktop or notebook computer, it’s alway advisable to use quality tools. There is nothing worse than having to do a screw extraction because you used an inferior screwdriver and managed to strip the screw head. It’s definitely time and money lost.

I’ve been looking for a quality screwdriver set, particularly for working on notebooks. During my search I came across what looked to be the answer, the Platinum Tools screwdriver set – 33 piece.

I bought it at   Cyberguys, and it was reasonably priced at $27.44 with shipping.  Here’s what you get:

Pozi Drive PZ1 and PZ0

Phillips 000, 00, 0, 1

Slotted 1.0, 1.5, 2.0, 2.5, 3.0. 3.5, 4.0

Torx 4.5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 15, 20

Hex 0.7, 0.9, 1.3, 1.5, 2.0, 2.5, 3.0, 4.0

M5 Socket, M6 Socket, M4 Shaft

The screwdriver itself has a soft handle (which I like), and the tail end rotates, so you can hold it there and stabilize it even while turning the screwdriver. As you can see from the pictures, the screwdriver itself can be extended to a 9.5″ length. None of the pieces in this set look or feel cheap and look to last a long time. I’ve already used it during a couple of recent projects and was impressed with the quality.

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• 12 Tools Every Man Must Have (lewrockwell.com)

EZ Upgrade Universal

I like this product and would certainly recommend it to anyone who needs to hook up a notebook drive to an external enclosure.

Roku HD XR Review

(04/03/2011) This is an update to the review I wrote back in February of last year. Things worked well with the Roku until the first week of May. At that point the Roku was about 4 months old. Then, it just flat out failed. It wouldn’t connect at all. Nothing I tried would get it back on line. I called Roku and asked for a replacement unit as it was still under the one year warranty. Things got a little messy at that point.

Roku wanted proof of purchase, and since I bought it from Amazon, I had to fax my Amazon receipt to them. Once that was done, I got my RMA from them and shipped my Roku back to them. They did ship another Roku. To my surprise, it was just shipped in the original Roku box, with just an address sticker slapped on it. I was not impressed. You can see a picture of the type of box I’m talking about in the original review below.

Luckily , the unit was not damaged. Setup again was very easy and since that time I have not experienced the problems the original one had. Now that I’ve used the Roku for sixteen months, I have to say it’s been money well spent. I do use it mostly for viewing Netflix, but there have been a lot of other channels added in the last year.

Do not forget to check the Channel Store on occasion. It would also be a good idea to subscribe to the forums at at Roku – http://forums.roku.com as there is information about using the Roku and things like setting up private channels that don’t show in the Channel Store.

Lastly, the HD XR came with an USB port. In February of this year, Roku activated it. You have to go to the Channel Store to do it (USB Media Player), but it works!

What follows is my original review from 02/10/2010 –

Just before Christmas, I decided to purchase a Roku HD XR. Netflix has been offering online video streaming for some time and I had just gotten interested. I was planning on eliminating my Comcast subscription and then using OTA (Over The Air) viewing to be supplemented with online video streaming. Luckily, I am close enough to get very good HD signals over the air for a large number of stations with an indoor antenna.

*

For those of you unfamiliar with the Roku, it’s a small appliance that you connect to your television in order to receive video streamed over your internet connection. The Roku offers a variety of ways to hook to your television inputs, and you can connect to your network either via an Ethernet cable or wirelessly. The XR model comes with wireless-n built in and also has an USB port, for future expansion.I purchased the Roku unit from Amazon (Super Saver Shipping!) and received it via UPS a few days later. At the end of this post, there are a number of pictures of the “unboxing”. I have a

DSL connection and use a wireless modem, so I wanted to use the wireless connection.

Setting up the Roku was as easy as they claim it to be. I connected the Roku to my television using the component video connectors. It was a good thing that I had the component cables that I used for my Comcast DVR as the component cables supplied by Roku were woefully short, as you can see from one of the photos below. My television is an early HD model that sports DVI, composite, component and S-Video connections, no HDMI. I turned the television on and there was the Roku setup screen.

To set up the Roku, you use the simplistic remote control that comes with unit. I had my doubts, but using the remote to choose the type of connection and input your SSID and security key proved to be easy.

Now comes the not-so-good part. After watching about one half hour of video, the broadcast stopped and I was informed that the Roku had lost connection to my network. I went back into set up and I could no longer see my network to be chosen. To make sure it worked, I ran a 50 foot Ethernet cable from the wireless modem and was able to set that up easily. Video functioned flawless with that set up. Not to be deterred, the next day, I tried again was able to set it up wirelessly, only to have it halt again a short time later. From the set up menu, I returned the Roku to factory default without success.

I went to the Roku forums (http://forums.roku.com/), and saw that some other people were having a

similar problem. One of the suggestions was to use the hardware reset on the unit. I found a tiny hole labeled “reset” on the bottom of the unit and using the obligatory paper clip, I did a reset. That worked for a short while, and then I had the wireless disappear again.

Back to the forums, and I found one person had done the reset, but also reset again while the first reset was occurring. I decided to give this a try, and amazingly, I’ve not had a problem since.

Once I had the unit working, it’s been a pure pleasure to browse and play the Netflix streaming catalog.

 

I have actually watched all five seasons of “The Office” via Netflix, and now I’m a fan.  I have 6 megabit DSL connection, so I have been able to watch movies and television shows without any annoying pauses or reloads. My ancient HD television tops out at 720p resolution, so the video quality of the streaming is just as good as DVD in most cases.

The Roku also offers Amazon Video on Demand, MLB.tv and a number of other web based video web sites. I’m probably going to explore some of those eventually. Once I was sure that the Roku worked properly, I called Comcast and canceled my subscription and returned the Comcast digital DVR box.  Which brings me to my next project. Since I no longer have a DVR, I plan to build an HTPC (Home Theater PC) which will allow me to record shows and rewind and pause television, just like I used to do with Comcast. I’m putting together the parts now, and will report on that when I’m finished.

Blackberry Tour Spring Lock Case

I stopped at a Verizon store today to see if I could pick up a spring lock case for my Tour. I had stopped at two Sprint stores the other day and they did not have any. I don’t like the case that comes with the Tour on either Sprint or Verizon. The Verizon store did have one, and I paid my $19.99 and left without opening the package. When I got back to the office, I was in for a surprise. This was my own fault for not paying attention, by the way.

When I bought my spring lock case for my Verizon Curve back in April of 2008, $19.99 bought me a Seidio spring lock case with a beautiful rubberized outer shell, and a cloth lining inside. It felt solid and the belt clip felt like it wouldn’t break off very easily.

The model they have for the Tour at Verizon is not a Seidio, and is made of a very lightweight translucent plastic, and there is no lining inside ( can you say “scratched screen”).

Worst of all, the belt clip looks and feels like it wouldn’t take much to rip it off. I’ve shot some pictures (below) to try and show the difference. This one will be going back. Looks like I’ll be spending $29.99 to buy the real deal from Seidio.

Sprint Blackberry Tour 9630

I just picked up a Sprint Blackberry Tour 9630. In doing so, I also moved from Verizon. The Tour is a large step up from my Blackberry Curve. The screen is only slightly larger, but the resolution is 480 x 360 in comparison to the Curve’s 320 x 240. The Tour is slightly longer, wider, and heavier than the Curve, but the difference is minimal. The camera in the tour is also 3.2 mega pixels compared to the Curve’s 2 mega pixels. The difference in the resolution is considerable when looking at pictures taken by each camera. I’ll be posting some pix taken with the Tour soon.

Woot! Server Migration

I finished our server migration yesterday. We had been running Small Business Server 2003 Standard (OEM – Grrr, don’t get me started, wasn’t my choice). This was migrated to new hardware running Small Business Server 2003 R2 Standard (Not OEM!)  I used Jeff Middleton’s “Swing Migration” fromsbsmigration.com . Well worth the money and very easy to follow.

There are a lot of settings and permissions that need to be brought over, and it is very time consuming using Microsoft‘s standard methods. Since I am the only IT resource in our agency, this was a life saver. When we migrated from Small Business Server 4.5 to Small Business Server 2003 four and half years ago, we hired a consultant to “help” and it was a 2 day marathon.

I Won!

Last Friday, I attended a BBQ hosted at one of the local FOP (Fraternal Order of Police) Lodges. Lots of good food and there was a “bags” tournament. They also raffled off a few items and I won an Electronic Evidence Field CollectionKit, a first responder kit for seizing electronic evidence. Apparently they are produced by a local firm, E-Kit Training and Supply . Needless to say, I will find this useful in my forensic work and I’ll have to see how it works on the next case.

Blackberry Server Move

As part of my job as network administrator, I installed a Blackberry Professional Server a couple of years ago. Blackberry Professional Server is the lightweight version of RIM’s Blackberry Enterprise Server. Either version of the server allows a business to synchronize their Blackberry devices with an Exchange or Domino server.

In my case, I installed it on our SBS2003 server. SBS2003 is an “all in one” solution for small business that has Exchange server as part of it’s installation. Everything runs on one server. I am planning on moving the SBS2003 to a VMWare server that I am currently running on a new Dell 2950 with 32GB of memory. Lots of room for virtual machines!

In preparation for the move, I had to move the Blackberry Professional Server to it’s own virtual server. The first roadblock I ran into was that the Blackberry Professional Server would not run on the Windows server 64bit virtual machine I had set up. I had to trash that setup and recreate under Windows server 32bit.

I found an excellent writeup in the Crackberry forums for moving a Blackberry Enterprise Server using the “knife-edge” (minimal down time) method:

http://forums.crackberry.com/f50/moving-blackberry-enterprise-server-exchange-new-server-74177/

This guide proved invaluable to me and resulted in a successful move with minimal downtime. The only thing I would change ( and where I had a problem) was instruction number 2 under “Move the database”.

While the instructions were “osql -E”, I had to change it to:

“osql -E -S windowsservername\sqldatabaseinstancename”

in order to get it to work. Other than that, easy-peasy.

Printing Web Pages

If you’re like me, once in a while you may want to print a web page for some reason. What I have found, is that some web pages don’t print very well, and you wind up with a mess, or you spend a lot of time cutting and pasting to create something readable.

I’ve found a tool at http://printwhatyoulike.com that really works well when you want to print those complex pages. You can just enter the link on their page, or you can use their javascript tool on your Firefox bookmarks toolbar. Either way, it works great

Test post from a Blackberry

This picture of a Meerkat was taken with my Blackberry Curve on 5/29/08 at the Peoria Zoo.

(originally published at http://azb.blogspot.com)

Sprint Mobile Broadband

I purchased a Sprint Mobile broadband card not too long ago. I was going on vacation and wanted to have a reliable internet connection while I was on the road. Yeah, I know you can get free Internet at most hotels now, but in my experience either the hotel limits you to a cable in the wall ethernet connection or their wireless connection just plain sucks.

Right off the bat, when I checked into the first motel with “free wireless Internet” (this was a road trip via car), their connection would drop frequently and was excruciatingly slow. I stuck the Sprint PC card in the notebook , and even thought this location didn’t have access to Sprint’s high speed EVdo network, the 1x connection was better than the motel’s wireless. While on the road for 10 days, I only found one location where I used the free Internet connection. The other advantage, is that I didn’t have to worry as much about the security of the connection when I used Remote Web Desktop to remote back to the servers I administer at work. At $69.95 per month +taxes, it’s not cheap, but I’m going to keep it for future road work and as a backup for my home DSL connection.

AT&T Mobility (Cingular) IRDB

A friend of mine called me the other day with a Blackberry 8800 problem that her carrier, AT&T Mobility (formerly Cingular) had been unable to solve. When she was at home, she would lose her data connection, sometimes for hours on end. This meant she was unable to send or receive email. As she was in a position where immediate access to email was critical, this was not acceptable. After suggesting a battery pull and refreshing her network registration didn’t work, I was able to find out while browsing blackberryforums.com (highly recommended!) that there had probably been a new 3G (newer technology) tower install in her area. The forum posting detailed how a Blackberry (particularly the 8800 model) could have trouble deciding whether to connect to the newer 3G tower or the older EDGE technology tower. It seems that at some point, the Blackberry would just give up, thus no data connection. What I found out was that AT&T has a database for its towers called the IRDB (International Roaming Data Base).

What had to be done was for her to call AT&T and request and “over the air” update to the IRDB. This causes the Blackberry to restart and when it comes back up, it has a new copy of the IRDB. In this case, her data connection problems also disappeared. This only applies to AT&T Mobility customers. Other carriers have other (in most cases, simpler) ways to update their tower databases.