My New Tablet ... At A Price I Can Swallow.

I just picked up an Asus MeMo Pad HD 7.  It is my first tablet and I thought I'd give one a try.  It cost me just $130 on sale from the Futureshop online store.  It's an Android OS and I find myself carrying it everywhere.

Since it's a lower end Asus tablet you can only connect to the internet with Wifi. (or tethered to a pc with internet, but what's the point there)  I've already rooted it and am in the process of getting USB devices (keyboard, mouse and flash drives) to work with it.  To do the aforementioned, I have purchased a USB OTG (On The Go) adapter, a small USB hub, Male to Male USB cable and a small MonoPrice power pack.  The wiring for this to work is a little tricky, but I'll figure it out and make a diagram.  I did have a USB mouse working once, but haven't tried again.  There are a couple Youtube videos showing how to do it.

I've been watching videos, playing games and reading e-books with it.  I have also been using it at work to carry with me to check WiFi status and network printer status.

It's been a great tool / toy and I wonder how long it will be before I upgrade to a 10 inch tablet.

Once you go BlacX ...

I just purchased a Thermaltake BlacX hard drive dock from TigerDirect.  I wanted a way to quickly back up data and access data from other SATA drives I have sitting around the office.

Included is a USB and eSATA cable.  I wanted to use the eSATA cable for faster transfers, but my older motherboard didn't have an eSATA port, so I had to buy an interface card as well.  Before I bought it, I looked around for reviews and and the only negative things about the drive dock is that sometimes the power button on the back breaks.  I keep mine plugged into my 20 year old Curtis command centre and I use the power button on there to turn it on and off. (NOTE: I stole the pics from the Thermaltake site and another site as marked on the pic)

BTW, I don't trust a 20 year old surge protector to keep my equipment safe, so I have a newer APC surge protector power centre that the Curtis command centre is plugged into.

The BlacX will take both 2.5 and 3 inch SATA hard drives.  The button on the front is to eject the drive, but I find you also need to give it a gentle tug at the same time.  The LED light glows when the unit is turned on and will flash red when data is being transferred.

I just need a storage case for my hard drives while they are not in use.  An idea for Thermaltake might be a horizontal docking station with multiple bays where you can select which drive you want to read and the other bays are for storage.

Printer consumables or Consumable Printers?

In my last post about a year ago, I mentioned that I had purchased a colour laser for my home office. It seemed like the cheaper route than an inkjet.

Well now the toner is getting low and I was looking at a $320 bill to replace all cartridges in the laser. The toner cartridges that came with the printer are a 'starter' set that are half full. Some say you might get up to 1000 pages versus the rated 2000 for a new set of cartridges. I saw the same printer was on sale at my local Staples office supply store for $99.

So, I can either spend $320 on new cartridges and get about 2,000 sheets, or spend $99 and get 1,000 sheets and a backup printer. Now I sit here in my office with two laser printers wondering how something like a colour laser printer is more or less given away so companies get make their money on toner and ink. I guess I answered my own question, but it's still ridiculous and far from being 'green'.

Colour Printer Woes

So, I'm at home wanting to print something when the ink indicator light flashes on my inkjet printer. "What? I thought I just replaced that." For me to replace the black and colour cartridges in the printer costs upwards of $70. (I have an Epson scanner/printer) The cartridges are tiny and I can't believe that I get more than 30 or 40 sheets out of a cartridge. (That's about $2 a page!) I decided to bite the bullet and get a colour laser printer. The one I chose was the Brother HL-3040CN. It had decent reviews and it was on sale for $169 at Staples.ca.

The printer came the next business day with free shipping. The cartridges are about $80 each, but we'll see how far I get before I have to buy one. I forgot to look to see if they were 'starter' cartridges. (I assume so) I had the printer up and running on the home network in about 20 minutes. The printer came with 32MB RAM, so I bumped it up another 256MB with a SDRAM I just happened to have around that was compatible. I haven't done any large print jobs yet, but the test pages look good. The only knock about the printer that I have read was that it doesn't handle manually feed sheets well, especially heavier stock paper.

I'll be keeping a close eye on the page count and what it's costing me to run it. To replace all the cartridges will be over $300, but hopefully they won't all go at once. The Brother data says the black will print 2200 pages. That would be about 5 cents a sheet which would be great.

XFX Radeon 4770 Fan replacment

I recently purchased a XFX Radeon 4770 video card which happened to be on sale. It seemed to perform pretty well, but the fan was way too loud. After some digging on the internet, I found a replacement fan that would do the job. (So much for me saving money on the sale price.)

I purchased an Arctic Cooling Accelero L2 Pro fan.

It comes with minimal packaging as you can see.

Here is what you get inside. There are 16 small video RAM heatsinks, small washers and spacers, a few screws (I got 3, when I should have gotten 4), and a power adapter.

The first step was to remove the existing fan and its housing from the video card. No problem, only 4 screws on the back of the card and a gentle twist releases it from the grip of the thermal paste.

The new fan is screwed on from the back of the card. When I first replaced the fan, the computer video refused to come on. The problem was found to be that the plastic spacers supplied were preventing the heatsink from properly contacting the graphics chip. The screws should go through the spacers on the back of the card and directly into the screw holes on the fan's mounting bracket. Once this was resolved, the card was very quiet. The card was on sale at NCIX.com for $90 and the fan was $20.

I mainly bought the new card to speed up Flight Simulator X which I have been getting back into. The card helps quite a bit, but FSX also relies heavily on the CPU which is a 3 ghz AMD. I'm not able to max out the graphics settings quite yet, but maybe by my next system upgrade.

Gone Digital

Last year, I managed to scrape up enough money to buy a new camera. I bought a Canon Rebel XSi digital camera. We had a small Fuji digital camera for about 7 years which my wife still uses. The Canon Rebel XSi is a great camera in my opinion, although, I am far from being a professional, or even a skilled amateur photographer. This week I purchased a used Tamron 28-300 zoom lens for the camera. Any professional wouldn't touch a lens with such a large range. There will obviously be compromises. Will I notice any of it's short comings? Probably not. Usually, I'm lucky if I remember to remove the lens cap before I start shooting.

I have fully embraced digital photography and its many benefits. The main benefit for me was cost. Digital cameras come in all ranges of prices and the cost of taking and printing pictures is only a fraction of film. You can take as many pictures as your memory or battery will allow and keep only the good ones. You can see instantly on the display if you picture turned out, although it can be hard to tell if you have a small screen on your camera, so I always take two shot just in case. If you have a computer nearby, you can see almost instantly your photo on screen. You can easily manipulate the image on your computer using an imaging program without having to scan a printed photo.

I had previously owned a Canon Rebel G SLR film camera that was about 15 years old. I didn't use that camera as much as I wanted to. The cost of film, and developing, being part of the issue. While checked eBay to try and sell it, most were going for less than 30 dollars. Pretty depressing, when I paid over $500 for it new. I decided to give it to a friend of mine who is a great amateur photographer who still uses film. So there's no turning back for me now. I'm totally digital.

Does this exist?

I've been looking all over the internet for something which probably doesn't even exist for my laptop.

I have two hard disk drives for it. One has Windows 7 that I am using as a client connected to a test Windows Server 2008 machine. The other hard drive has Windows XP Pro and it is more or less my daily driver and tester. I've reformatted both of these drives a number of times to try different things, but ideally I would like an easy way to boot from either of these two drives.

Dual boot you say. Well I thought about it at first, and may still go that way, but I do have two separate 320gb drives at my disposal.

How about a dummy hard drive sleeve, the same size as a hard drive with SATA connector with a SATA connector on a short cable. That way I can plug it into my laptop's hard drive slot and easily switch between different bootable hard drives. Oh yes, and a handle of some sort to pull it out of the hard drive bay. It sounds a little makeshift, but this is for my work office and not for portability as I seldom take it on the road.

Right now I pull the hard drive, swap the caddy that covers the end of the drive, so I can grip the drive to remove it, then put in the other drive. If anybody invents this gizmo, let me know.

Gigabit, more or less

I just recently bought a Trendnet 5 port gigabit switch for the house. My goal was to speed up file transfers from my main office computer to the home theatre PC.

The switch itself had good reviews from a couple different websites. It has metal case and seems to be well built. It supposed to be 'green' by using less power to the unused ports. It comes in a 5 and 8 port version. It's unmanaged which isn't a problem.

So far, after a few tests I'm not getting true gigabit speeds from it. I really didn't expect to since there are many factors to take into account such as hard drive speed, size of files and overhead associated with all network traffic. I'll be trying out a utility called iperf which is supposed to give good information regarding network speeds.

Screw UPS

I must say I was quite surprised when I finally got my package that had been lost by UPS. Not sure where it went, but everything was intact. It took a week and a half to find it and a few more days for me to get it due to a work closure for the holidays, but its here.

Again, I'll say, UPS handles millions of parcels a day, and we have gotten a lot of stuff delivered by them, but it seems the few times we've had problems, it has been with UPS. Just bad luck I guess. The bad part is that I paid a couple bucks extra to have the package shipped by UPS air to have it before the Christmas break. I guess I wasted some time and money there.

UPS Courier (UPS, they did it again)

I am currently waiting for the results of a UPS trace investigation after an NCIX.com order went missing. (I am waiting for a new 320gb 7200rpm hard drive for my laptop) Apparently, it was delivered to the wrong address. When I first checked the UPS tracking info link provided by NCIX, it said the package had been delivered and signed by somebody I had never heard of at this office. (I have most of my packages delivered to me at work.)

They said it was delivered to a different address and they would have the driver pick it up and deliver it here. The next day there was still no package. I called UPS again and they said the shipper would have to initiate a trace to find the package. I called NCIX and they said they would contact UPS to do a trace.

Personally I don't think it will ever show up because 1) the address UPS claimed the package was delivered to doesn't exist as far as I can tell and B) it was delivered to the wrong address as well.

I do understand that UPS, Purolator, FedEx etc, ship millions of packages a day and drivers deliver hundreds of packages a day, but it still sucks. The way I understand it, is that the drivers don't even look at the address on the box, there is a number on the shipping label that tells them the destination, which makes some sense. You don't want to rely on a dozen different people who handle the parcel on it's journey to be able to properly read a shipping address, so it is done once when the package is first received and then on it is identified as a number.

I was hoping to have this for the Christmas break which starts tomorrow, but traces take between 2 and 8 days. We'll see if anything turns up.