I have misgivings about gluing plastic to a new computer...
I did away with the cradle, and now put the LT right on the platform, stuck with velcro
Back in business
Showing posts with label laptop. Show all posts
Showing posts with label laptop. Show all posts
Sunday, June 17, 2007
Laptop mounted in car
I finished the re-make of the laptop mount.
I have misgivings about gluing plastic to a new computer...
I did away with the cradle, and now put the LT right on the platform, stuck with velcro
Back in business
I have misgivings about gluing plastic to a new computer...
I did away with the cradle, and now put the LT right on the platform, stuck with velcro
Back in business
Friday, June 15, 2007
Lazy defined
1. averse or disinclined to work, activity, or exertion; indolent.
2. causing idleness or indolence: a hot, lazy afternoon.
3. slow-moving; sluggish: a lazy stream.
I took three days off this week, Mon, Tues, and today. I've been good for a while, working six days a week, but this week things fell apart. I needed to run some errands today, and my civilian car is dead (as in, deceased, finis, kaput). I'm going to donate it to a charity and take the tax write-off. With the sad state of automotive affairs, and I'm feeling too lazy to jump on the motorcycle, I needed the taxi for personal use today.
Cab related stuff on the day off:
1. Pick up a 90-degree adapter for the headphone jack on the laptop. The new LT has the jack in front, which makes for a mess running the wire to the jack on the car stereo. A 90-degree bend reduces stress on the wire, and it's cleaner.
2. Found a 4GB flash drive for $35 at Radio Shack. I'm using it right now with Vista's ReadyBoost and SuperFetch. Tom's Hardware says it speeds up a system a bit. Microsoft is somewhat more upbeat, naturally. I'm trying it mostly because it's just absolutely cool that I can insert a 4GB flashdrive into a USB slot and Vista will use it as a data cache. Science fiction writers were fantasizing about stuff like this just 15 years ago. I may start calling the laptop Hal. Note that I'd never run these things on my desktop because they interfere with games.
Chances are the $35 sale price for the drive is nationwide. If anyone wants one, get to Radio Shack while the sale lasts.
Tom's Hardware on SuperFetch and ReadyBoost:
3. Fixed a problem with the new laptop's remote control. It stopped working after less than one week. That's a bad sign. I found other people with the same problem in some tech forums, and their solution worked: flash the bios. For non-computer folks, the BIOS is a software layer that boots prior to the operating system. Most people don't mess with a BIOS, but overclockers and tweakers (as opposed to tweekers) occasionally delve into it.
4. I rented the first few discs of Deadwood, Season Three. What a great show. That'll help for the slow times on the streets.
5. Got some plastic sheeting, cut to size, to make the new laptop fit the old mount in the car. Instead of making an elaborate cradle, and then velcroing the cradle to the platform between the front seats, I'm going to put velcro on the bottom of the new laptop. Naturally, that's about as hard as making a fusion reactor. Mustn't cover the cooling vents, and the surface is porous, so the sticky back of the velcro won't adhere. Plus, the rubber feet make the bottom recessed about four mm. My idea is to epoxy some 1" x 1" squares of plastic to the bottom of the laptop, which fixes the recess problem and the porous problem at once. Once the epoxy sets, I can stick the velcro to the plastic pieces. What a pain in the ass. It should be fine once it's finished, though.
I also picked up some coin wrappers and a little plastic thing for helping roll them. I want to deposit my loose change (a couple hundred bucks in dimes, nickels, and pennies), but my bank won't take it unless everything is rolled. See my change post for more info.
2. causing idleness or indolence: a hot, lazy afternoon.
3. slow-moving; sluggish: a lazy stream.
I took three days off this week, Mon, Tues, and today. I've been good for a while, working six days a week, but this week things fell apart. I needed to run some errands today, and my civilian car is dead (as in, deceased, finis, kaput). I'm going to donate it to a charity and take the tax write-off. With the sad state of automotive affairs, and I'm feeling too lazy to jump on the motorcycle, I needed the taxi for personal use today.
Cab related stuff on the day off:
1. Pick up a 90-degree adapter for the headphone jack on the laptop. The new LT has the jack in front, which makes for a mess running the wire to the jack on the car stereo. A 90-degree bend reduces stress on the wire, and it's cleaner.
2. Found a 4GB flash drive for $35 at Radio Shack. I'm using it right now with Vista's ReadyBoost and SuperFetch. Tom's Hardware says it speeds up a system a bit. Microsoft is somewhat more upbeat, naturally. I'm trying it mostly because it's just absolutely cool that I can insert a 4GB flashdrive into a USB slot and Vista will use it as a data cache. Science fiction writers were fantasizing about stuff like this just 15 years ago. I may start calling the laptop Hal. Note that I'd never run these things on my desktop because they interfere with games.
Chances are the $35 sale price for the drive is nationwide. If anyone wants one, get to Radio Shack while the sale lasts.
Tom's Hardware on SuperFetch and ReadyBoost:
Simply spoke, SuperFetch tries to relocate application data from the slow hard drive into all available memory. It utilizes the available capacity to create a so-called warm memory state for the single purpose of making applications available almost instantaneously. However, SuperFetch needs a certain amount of main memory. At only 512 MB RAM size, the feature won't be very efficient, as Windows plus 2-3 applications will already eat up the total memory capacity. There won't be main memory space left to pre-cache application data. If you don't work with multiple applications at a time, 1 GB should be enough to see a positive impact of SuperFetch when compared to Windows XP. However, we experienced the best results at a main memory capacity of 2 GB - more won't hurt either.
[...]
The results are impressive: Using both features, Windows Vista shows off how it can effectively reduce application launch times to provide a better performance experience with your everyday software. At only 512 MB RAM, application launch times decrease from 9 seconds (OpenOffice Writer 2.1) and 10 seconds (Outlook 2007) to 2-4 seconds only. Adding our 1 GB USB 2.0 Flash stick helped to shorten launch times for these applications to 2-3 seconds only. The next conclusion is that Windows Vista with only 512 MB RAM is no fun at all, because applications start much faster only by having 1 GB of RAM. In fact, both Outlook 2007 and OpenOffice Writer 2.1 start even faster on a fresh Windows Vista installation than on our SuperFetch-trained and ReadyBoost-enabled system at only 512 MB.
3. Fixed a problem with the new laptop's remote control. It stopped working after less than one week. That's a bad sign. I found other people with the same problem in some tech forums, and their solution worked: flash the bios. For non-computer folks, the BIOS is a software layer that boots prior to the operating system. Most people don't mess with a BIOS, but overclockers and tweakers (as opposed to tweekers) occasionally delve into it.
4. I rented the first few discs of Deadwood, Season Three. What a great show. That'll help for the slow times on the streets.
5. Got some plastic sheeting, cut to size, to make the new laptop fit the old mount in the car. Instead of making an elaborate cradle, and then velcroing the cradle to the platform between the front seats, I'm going to put velcro on the bottom of the new laptop. Naturally, that's about as hard as making a fusion reactor. Mustn't cover the cooling vents, and the surface is porous, so the sticky back of the velcro won't adhere. Plus, the rubber feet make the bottom recessed about four mm. My idea is to epoxy some 1" x 1" squares of plastic to the bottom of the laptop, which fixes the recess problem and the porous problem at once. Once the epoxy sets, I can stick the velcro to the plastic pieces. What a pain in the ass. It should be fine once it's finished, though.
I also picked up some coin wrappers and a little plastic thing for helping roll them. I want to deposit my loose change (a couple hundred bucks in dimes, nickels, and pennies), but my bank won't take it unless everything is rolled. See my change post for more info.
Tuesday, June 5, 2007
New laptop
My first order of business when I get the car will be to transfer my change into bills. I desperately need a new laptop, and I'm too cheap to use my savings account, so I'm going to cash in a year's worth of coins. I got really curious the other night and counted the quarters (leaving the dimes, nickels and pennies), and I have $625. It took a long time to count those suckers, but once I began, I didn't want to stop. And there should be another hundred or two with the smaller denomination coins.
Naturally, there's a problem. My bank claims not to have a coin counting machine. The only non-bank machines I know of in San Diego are the ones located in Von's grocery stores. But, they charge 10%. I'd hate to lose $70 or more dollars. The other options are to exchange the coins for Von's credit -- they don't charge a percentage that way. And I wouldn't need to "buy" groceries for a long, long time with nearly $1000 in grocery store credit. But, then I'd have to dip into savings to get a laptop. Hmmmm. What do do...
I can buy rolling papers and roll all the coins manually, then deposit them at my bank, but that's a huge amount of work. How does such a simple operation become so complicated? I guess it's like everything else in life: it will be as difficult as it can possibly be.
Anyway, my laptop has a bad light source in the display. Every time I open or close the lid, it goes dark. The data is still there -- in bright sunlight I can still read the screen, or when I put a flashlight on it. The only way I can get it back is to press the power button, putting it into Standby mode, then move the touchpad to bring it back to life. Huge hassle, and sometimes the machine shuts down instead of going into standby. The fix is $500, which doesn't make sense considering the whole machine was $660. I may keep using the current laptop at home, with the external monitor feature (I have a spare 19" CRT). I'd like to try Linux on a laptop.
I've been out of the PC-buying loop for more than two years, and things change quickly. So I went to the one place that can get current on everything in a half hour: Tom's Hardware. After carefully reviewing dual core, laptop processors, I plan to get the Intel chip rather than an AMD Turion 64 x2. I based this decision mostly on the L2 cache. It seems Intel has 2MB, where AMD only has 1, and this makes for a noticeable performance difference. And the prices are comparable.
The laptops I'm looking at range from $800 to $1100, which gets me an Intel Core Duo in the 5000 range (midgrade processor), with 2GB RAM, 120GB HD, and the other usual stuff, like TV out, DVD burner, and built-in WiFi. I also want an SD card reader.
Two Gigs of RAM is important to me because Vista is reported to be slow with 1, and it's fairly expensive to upgrade from 1 to 2 later. That's because the 1GB laptops have two sticks of RAM, at 512MB each, which is stupid. If it had a single, 1GB stick, you could just buy a second stick. As it is, you have to buy two 1GB sticks to replace the 512s, which can then be thrown in the trash. This is a con if I ever saw one.
I'll get Vista, although not without some reservations. It's big and slightly slower than XP, but most of the reviews I've read say Vista is worth it. I've been using Microsoft operating systems since Dos 3.x (that's a long, long time), and I've never known a new OS to not be a vast improvement over the old (except Me, which I refused to mess with). My only gripe with XP is networking, but I can always get it to work. Still, I'm anxious to try Vista.
I checked the usual places for pricing, and was surprised that Circuit City has the best prices. Maybe I shouldn't be surprised. Two years ago when I bought my current Compaq, I found the same thing.
Newegg.com
Fry's
Best Buy
Circuit City
CompUSA
Office Depot
The only laptops I've ruled out are: Lenovo, because I won't buy a Chinese computer until Google.cn shows the massacre when "tiananmen square" is searched (PC activism!) and Mac, because I have too much software for Windows and I don't wish to spend 25% more money for the same performance and capability. I plan to buy a 3-year warranty this time, considering the abuse of using it in the car -- and my Compaq died after 2 years. Nothing against Compaq; I think any laptop would have given up the ghost with the hard use.
Naturally, there's a problem. My bank claims not to have a coin counting machine. The only non-bank machines I know of in San Diego are the ones located in Von's grocery stores. But, they charge 10%. I'd hate to lose $70 or more dollars. The other options are to exchange the coins for Von's credit -- they don't charge a percentage that way. And I wouldn't need to "buy" groceries for a long, long time with nearly $1000 in grocery store credit. But, then I'd have to dip into savings to get a laptop. Hmmmm. What do do...
I can buy rolling papers and roll all the coins manually, then deposit them at my bank, but that's a huge amount of work. How does such a simple operation become so complicated? I guess it's like everything else in life: it will be as difficult as it can possibly be.
Anyway, my laptop has a bad light source in the display. Every time I open or close the lid, it goes dark. The data is still there -- in bright sunlight I can still read the screen, or when I put a flashlight on it. The only way I can get it back is to press the power button, putting it into Standby mode, then move the touchpad to bring it back to life. Huge hassle, and sometimes the machine shuts down instead of going into standby. The fix is $500, which doesn't make sense considering the whole machine was $660. I may keep using the current laptop at home, with the external monitor feature (I have a spare 19" CRT). I'd like to try Linux on a laptop.
I've been out of the PC-buying loop for more than two years, and things change quickly. So I went to the one place that can get current on everything in a half hour: Tom's Hardware. After carefully reviewing dual core, laptop processors, I plan to get the Intel chip rather than an AMD Turion 64 x2. I based this decision mostly on the L2 cache. It seems Intel has 2MB, where AMD only has 1, and this makes for a noticeable performance difference. And the prices are comparable.
The laptops I'm looking at range from $800 to $1100, which gets me an Intel Core Duo in the 5000 range (midgrade processor), with 2GB RAM, 120GB HD, and the other usual stuff, like TV out, DVD burner, and built-in WiFi. I also want an SD card reader.
Two Gigs of RAM is important to me because Vista is reported to be slow with 1, and it's fairly expensive to upgrade from 1 to 2 later. That's because the 1GB laptops have two sticks of RAM, at 512MB each, which is stupid. If it had a single, 1GB stick, you could just buy a second stick. As it is, you have to buy two 1GB sticks to replace the 512s, which can then be thrown in the trash. This is a con if I ever saw one.
I'll get Vista, although not without some reservations. It's big and slightly slower than XP, but most of the reviews I've read say Vista is worth it. I've been using Microsoft operating systems since Dos 3.x (that's a long, long time), and I've never known a new OS to not be a vast improvement over the old (except Me, which I refused to mess with). My only gripe with XP is networking, but I can always get it to work. Still, I'm anxious to try Vista.
I checked the usual places for pricing, and was surprised that Circuit City has the best prices. Maybe I shouldn't be surprised. Two years ago when I bought my current Compaq, I found the same thing.
Newegg.com
Fry's
Best Buy
Circuit City
CompUSA
Office Depot
The only laptops I've ruled out are: Lenovo, because I won't buy a Chinese computer until Google.cn shows the massacre when "tiananmen square" is searched (PC activism!) and Mac, because I have too much software for Windows and I don't wish to spend 25% more money for the same performance and capability. I plan to buy a 3-year warranty this time, considering the abuse of using it in the car -- and my Compaq died after 2 years. Nothing against Compaq; I think any laptop would have given up the ghost with the hard use.
Thursday, March 29, 2007
First DVR transfers successful
Things are looking up. Today I have two new MPEGs to watch during slow times, thanks to the first successful transfers from DVR to laptop. All those trips to Radio Shack paid off. I have the latest A1GP race and the movie, The Brothers MacMullen.
I thought this was the Wireless Age!!
I thought this was the Wireless Age!!
Thursday, March 15, 2007
Technology in the car
UPDATE 9-9-2007: The old car, 95 (the Falcon) is retired, and so is my laptop mount. I'm riding without much technology in the new car right now.
Note: my laptop screen is always closed while driving unless I'm using GPS.
Since the beginning (April 2005) I have used a Compaq Presario 2200 with a 1.3 GHz mobile processor and 512MB RAM in the car. I made a mount for it with a $40 center console and another $40 in plastic sheeting and miscellaneous hardware.
UPDATE 6-17-2007: I now have an HP dv6365 laptop, 1.85GHz Intel Core Duo T5600 with 2GB RAM and Vista. More info on the new setup can be found here.
Access
Access database that tracks all fares with to/from, date, time, fare, and whether it was a flag or bell. It was my first time using Access, and considering there is only one table, it was easy. I wrote a few basic queries, like daily income, monthly income, annual income, etc. Many more are in the works.
GPS
GPS navigation with Microsoft Streets & Trips. I purchased S&T as a package with the GPS receiver, which plugs into the laptop via USB. It was about $110 at Best Buy. It acts like an in-dash GPS system, with a car icon on the map, and voice directions. Every address in the U.S. and Canada is included, and there is a library of hotels and places of interest. The S&T interface includes a compass and speedometer.
GPS receiver sits on dash
Internet
Internet with cellular (EVDO) service. I use a PC card for a dedicated, unlimited internet connection anywhere I go -- service is $60 per month. It's the perfect complement to GPS. For instance, if a customer inquires about a sushi restaurant in a certain area, I can check the web, and if there is one, click on "map", or dump the address into Streets & Trips. I also use my cell phone to make reservations for customers. This is a customer service business, after all. Not all cabbies are surly bastards who learned to drive in Cairo and prefer grunting to the Queen's English.
I also surf the web for entertainment during slow times, including updating this blog. Like a lot of people, I touch on dozens of newspapers and news sources, worldwide, every week. The main ones I hit every day are BBC, Google News, Yahoo News, and the San Diego Union-Tribune. I also enjoy reading blogs, magazines and tech sites.
Games, like Sim City IV
Music
A laptop is the ultimate iPod. I connect the audio-out jack to the auxiliary jack on the front of a recently purchased Kenwood deck. This is vastly superior to an FM transmitter, which I used for a while. I have a lot of MP3s sitting on an external hard drive at home, and I transfer files to the laptop via USB. Also, I have a flash drive for transfers. Flash is good to swap music and video files among drivers, too -- several other drivers got laptops after seeing my setup.
Card reader and flash drive -- uses SD cards from my camera
Movies
DVDs and downloaded movies, and recorded TV shows. I rent DVDs, and check them out from libraries, and I use a movie download service, Movielink, for renting movies directly onto the hard drive. At home I have a USB TV-in box, which lets me record cable TV shows to the HD; I watch them the following day while sitting on cab stands. Audio runs through the car stereo, just like the music.
Photography
I keep a 5mp, 12x opti-zoom digital camera with me in the car. I transfer photos directly to the laptop, and use Photoshop to edit.
Note: my laptop screen is always closed while driving unless I'm using GPS.
Since the beginning (April 2005) I have used a Compaq Presario 2200 with a 1.3 GHz mobile processor and 512MB RAM in the car. I made a mount for it with a $40 center console and another $40 in plastic sheeting and miscellaneous hardware.
UPDATE 6-17-2007: I now have an HP dv6365 laptop, 1.85GHz Intel Core Duo T5600 with 2GB RAM and Vista. More info on the new setup can be found here.
Access
Access database that tracks all fares with to/from, date, time, fare, and whether it was a flag or bell. It was my first time using Access, and considering there is only one table, it was easy. I wrote a few basic queries, like daily income, monthly income, annual income, etc. Many more are in the works.
GPS
GPS navigation with Microsoft Streets & Trips. I purchased S&T as a package with the GPS receiver, which plugs into the laptop via USB. It was about $110 at Best Buy. It acts like an in-dash GPS system, with a car icon on the map, and voice directions. Every address in the U.S. and Canada is included, and there is a library of hotels and places of interest. The S&T interface includes a compass and speedometer.
GPS receiver sits on dash
Internet
Internet with cellular (EVDO) service. I use a PC card for a dedicated, unlimited internet connection anywhere I go -- service is $60 per month. It's the perfect complement to GPS. For instance, if a customer inquires about a sushi restaurant in a certain area, I can check the web, and if there is one, click on "map", or dump the address into Streets & Trips. I also use my cell phone to make reservations for customers. This is a customer service business, after all. Not all cabbies are surly bastards who learned to drive in Cairo and prefer grunting to the Queen's English.
I also surf the web for entertainment during slow times, including updating this blog. Like a lot of people, I touch on dozens of newspapers and news sources, worldwide, every week. The main ones I hit every day are BBC, Google News, Yahoo News, and the San Diego Union-Tribune. I also enjoy reading blogs, magazines and tech sites.
Games, like Sim City IV
Music
A laptop is the ultimate iPod. I connect the audio-out jack to the auxiliary jack on the front of a recently purchased Kenwood deck. This is vastly superior to an FM transmitter, which I used for a while. I have a lot of MP3s sitting on an external hard drive at home, and I transfer files to the laptop via USB. Also, I have a flash drive for transfers. Flash is good to swap music and video files among drivers, too -- several other drivers got laptops after seeing my setup.
Card reader and flash drive -- uses SD cards from my camera
Movies
DVDs and downloaded movies, and recorded TV shows. I rent DVDs, and check them out from libraries, and I use a movie download service, Movielink, for renting movies directly onto the hard drive. At home I have a USB TV-in box, which lets me record cable TV shows to the HD; I watch them the following day while sitting on cab stands. Audio runs through the car stereo, just like the music.
Photography
I keep a 5mp, 12x opti-zoom digital camera with me in the car. I transfer photos directly to the laptop, and use Photoshop to edit.
