RickyCadden.com

Fujitsu P1610 Up For Sale On Ebay

// May 8th, 2009 // No Comments » // toys

As excited as I was to get the Fujitsu P1610, the Dell Mini 9 has completely replaced it, so I’ve finally gotten around to putting the Fujitsu P1610 up on Ebay. Yes, I realize Ebay is a horrid, horrid place to sell things, but it’s also a bit easier to deal with than Craigslist. In fact, the P1610 has been on Craigslist twice now, with no success.

You can check out the listing here. I splurged a bit on the ‘extras’, but hopefully that will help push things along, as well. I’m taking quite a hit on the sale price, but I need to get rid of it. Also, please ignore the username – as you can see, I’ve had that account since 2000, a time when I was less concerned about my username and what people would think of it.

The P1610 is a fantastic little machine, don’t get me wrong. I wish the Dell Mini 9 had the P1610′s keyboard and display, but I just can’t handle that stupid nubbin – I need me a touchpad, even if it’s as tiny as the one on the Dell is.

If you’d like to trade an EeePC 1008HE straight up for my P1610, email me, I’m definitely game.

Ebooks Suck

// April 21st, 2009 // 10 Comments » // annoying, technology

I’m trying to improve on my PHP skills this week, and decided to pick up a few ebooks, as opposed to running up to Half Price Books to snag them. They ended up being in PDF format, which I figured was no big deal, and would likely make it easier to read them on different devices in the future. I’ve got both the Nokia N800 and my old P1610 (which is for sale) and figured between the two, surely I could come up with a great PDF ebook reader.

Sadly, I didn’t. I expected to be able to fit the ‘book’ fullscreen in portrait mode, which is supported on both devices. The N800 (using Evince) doesn’t stretch it to fit, though the P1610 with Adobe Reader 9 does. The other thing I wanted to be able to do was write in the book, just like I would a real one. All I need is a ‘draw’ toolbar with a pencil and eraser, so that I can underline things, circle them, or make other notations for future reference. Ideally, this information would be saved to the PDF, so that if I make the edits on the P1610 and then later open it on the N800, they’d be visible.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t seem to be possible without shelling out even more money to strip the restrictions off the PDF. This is extremely frustrating. I don’t want to have to convert the PDFs into some other format, nor am I all that interested in paying for the ‘privilege’ of writing in my own books.

DRM, once again, has gotten in the way, and is a great example of technology NOT enriching or enabling my real life. What a letdown. Anyone got any suggestions?

Holy Battery Life Batman!

// January 23rd, 2009 // 2 Comments » // cool, Mobile, technology

I’ve never really thought too much about my laptop’s battery life. The XPS gets better length than my old Gateway MX6956, but it’s still limited to the ~3hour time frame, which isn’t anything impressive. When I got the Fujitsu P1610, I thought for sure I could go a bit longer without a charge, but the full HDD and touchscreen display decided otherwise. I can maybe squeeze some extra time if I dial the display brightness down, but what’s the point in that?

Imagine my surprise last night, when I pulled the Dell Mini 9 into the livingroom to assist while I tinkered with other laptops (more on that later). I didn’t bother to bring the plug, and had the display cranked up to full brightness. 4 hours later, when Mrs. Guru finally got home from work, I glanced over at the Dell, whose battery indicator showed that it was only 3/4 of the way drained. Seriously? Holy crap!

I’m now obsessed with this no-cord thing. It’s truly impressive, and as far as I can tell, it’s mainly due to the SSD inside the Mini 9 (and the fact that it’s not a touchscreen). It’s very cool to be able to just use the thing, and not have to fret over whether there’s a plug nearby.

Today, I”m ordering the internal Bluetooth module, and probably a skin from Decal Girl or 3ACP. Hopefully, in camo.

Dell Mini 9 Netbook Lands At Casa Guru

// January 22nd, 2009 // No Comments » // cool, technology

My friends like to make fun of me, asking frequently, ‘How many computers do you need? I thought you were a cell phone guy?’ It’s true, I am a cell phone guy, but at the moment, there are 6 computers in Casa Guru, 5 of which are laptops. The media center doesn’t really count, it’s just an old eMachines tower with a new 500GB hard drive that sits in the livingroom, storing all of our video and photos. Nothing to see there.

Three of the remaining 4 laptops are Dells, which wasn’t really planned. Mrs. Guru has an old Inspiron something-or-other that I’ve been trying to let her let me replace, but no avail. My work machine is a Dell XPS M1330, and I have an old Gateway MX6956 that’s still rocking. The 2 netbooks are the Fujitsu P1610 and the new arrival – a Dell Mini 9.

As you can see, the Dell and the Fujitsu are roughly the same size, both having an 8.9″ display. However, they’re vastly different machines. The P1610 is a tablet-pc, with a swiveling touchscreen display, PC Card slot, and a few other niceties. It’s also rather ugly, and very industrial-looking. The Dell, on the other hand, is very….cute, with consumer-friendly design cues, but in a regular laptop form factor and a minimum level of extras.

Within a few minutes, both machines will be running Windows 7, though the Dell is slated to get hackintosh’d this weekend, hopefully. My initial reaction is that the Dell’s keyboard is going to take *alot* of getting used to. As you can see in the photos, the P1610′s keyboard stretches from edge-to-edge, with no room on either side, and includes a 6th row of F-keys, which are actually incredibly necessary on a computer with such a small display. You’ll also notice that while the Dell’s main keys are full sized, the flanking keys on either side of the keyboard have been shrunk, and some of them even rearranged. This is going to irritate the junk out of me, for sure.

Dell Mini 9 Keyboard

P1610 Keyboard

However, I like that the Dell has a regular touchpad, vs. the ‘nub’ on the P1610. A major downpoint, for me, on the Dell is the 16GB SSD inside, vs the 60GB HDD on the P1610. Sure, SSD means far better battery life, quieter operation, and all that, but hey, space is space. I’m considering upgrading to a 64GB aftermarket SSD, but haven’t decided yet.

The other main draw of the Dell Mini 9 is the vibrant community of folks who like to tinker. MyDellMini.com has a great and active Forum, with separate subforums on Windows 7 (which is 98% installed, as I’m typing this), OSX (which will hopefully be this weekend), and even hardware modifications, if that’s your bag. I like having support.

Below are more comparison pics of the Fujitsu P1610 beside the Dell Mini 9. I’ll definitely be posting more thoughts on it, including documenting the hackintosh procedure for you.

Top Five Must-Have FireFox Addons

// December 31st, 2008 // 2 Comments » // cool, Mobile

I’ve recently joined the touch-friendly Tablet-PC crowd, with the Fujitsu P1610. It looks like a regular laptop, but you can swivel the display around and use it like a tablet – this is great for casual web browsing, especially with FireFox. However, it’s not perfect, and I’ve come across a handful of FireFox addons that I would call must-haves. These addons either make it alot more touch-friendly to use Firefox, or they add some other really useful benefit, and I’ve found it tough to do without them.

1. Foxmarks – If you have multiple computers, and you’re not using Foxmarks, you should be. It’s easy, it’s fast, and it works behind the scenes. Three traits of a great technology. Basically, Foxmarks keeps all your bookmarks/links/usernames/passwords in sync between multiple Firefox installations (and you can access all that from your phone, too!). It’s just plain brilliant, and allows me to easily mark something on my main laptop to go check out on the tablet later on.

2. Grab and Drag – This is the real killer – it lets you grab anywhere on a webpage, and drag it up or down. It basically makes the entire browser window a scrollbar. However, it doesn’t get in the way of work, as you can still click on links easily, and also still highlight and copy text. Grab and Drag also supports kinetic scrolling, so you can give it a little flick on a long webpage and it’ll keep on scrolling.

3. IE Tab – This is more of a general-use addon, and only works on Windows machines, but it basically lets you open an Internet Explorer window as a tab in Firefox. This is useful for sites like Netflix, which require you to use Internet Explorer to use the online streaming feature. You can setup filters, too, so that certain domains always open in an IE tab, which is really handy.

4. Adblock Plus – Given that I make my living mostly off online advertising, I don’t normally condone this plugin, or others like it. However, with the limited resources of a netbook, and with sites like IMDB, whose advertising could likely crawl out of the screen and eat you alive, it’s certainly handy.

5. TinyURL Creator – This plugin will automatically create a TinyURL for any website or weblink that you come across. Just right-click on the page or the link, and choose ‘Create TinyURL’. You’ll soon get a little popup letting you know that the URL is copied automatically to your clipboard. Brilliant for sharing uber-long URLs in a more user-friendly manner.

This is obviously a small list of the addons I use, but they’re ones that I really find to be vital for productive surfing, specifically on a netbook or TabletPC.