Category Archives: Desktops and laptops

Setting up the ultimate digital household

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I finally got my Internet connected a couple of days ago! TPG were absolutely hopeless about sending a technician over to sort the connection out. Three calls to their overseas call centre yielded nothing, so I took matters into my own hands and got a private technician to come out. I was able to get one out on the same day, and 10 minutes and $149 later, I was blessed with a working ADSL2+ connection. Sweeeeeet!

I now have an 802.11n network setup in the house, and all of my various computers and devices are hooked up to the Internet wirelessly – namely my iMac, Pure Sensia digital radio, iPad, Samsung Galaxy Tab, iPhone, partner’s iPhone, HTC Desire, Xbox 360. I also setup a VPN connection on my iMac for streaming Netflix. I spent a frustrating 8 hours yesterday trying to get it streaming on my Xbox as well, but to no avail. I set up a US Xbox account, bridged a VPN connection I had on a netbook to the Xbox so it would connect to the Internet over the VPN as well, and downloaded the Netflix app to the Xbox – only to be curtly told by Netflix that I couldn’t connect, and to ‘please try again’. Urgh, I don’t think so! I’m just going to have to be content with just watching it – and Hulu – on my iMac!

I’m also thinking about getting a VGA cable and connecting my netbook (which is streaming Netflix just fine) to the TV, but it’s not a high priority for now. At the moment, I’ve got Netflix streaming on my TEGA v2, and it essentially acts as a ‘TV’ that I watch while I’m working away on my iMac. Go the multitasking! :)

My next step will be setting up a media server to house all of the multimedia on my iMac and two 1TB hard drives. I have a choice between a HP MediaSmart Home Server and Cisco Media Hub – both of them only come with a 1TB hard drive out of the box, but I can add a second 3.5-inch hard drive. Either of these can stream all of the media to my Xbox 360. It’s definitely a weekend project to get this all set up though – I’ve spent too much time this week already fiddling with my tech setup in the study and living room, and really need to focus on work more! In the meantime, however, I’m going to set up a TwonkyServer on my iMac to stream videos to my Xbox so I can watch it on the TV. The trial I was using awhile back has long since expired, so I bought a license and am now just waiting for the registration code to come through in my email!

Next on my wishlist is hooking up a PC to the TV full-time to serve as a media centre/web browsing client – probably one to add to the 6-month plan, as I’ll have to shell out around a grand for something good! Ah, it’s hard being this switched on – but definitely worth it in the end :)

More on tablets versus netbooks; I had a mobile epiphany!

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I’ve been doing a little more thinking about my netbooks vs tablets post from yesterday, and came up with a couple of possible solution. One I got from James Kendrick’s excellent weekly ‘Thoughts from the road‘ column, where he talked about using LogMeIn Ignition for complex editing tasks. This would actually work really well once I finally get my broadband Internet connection installed at home, as I’ll be able to rely on an always-on connection at ‘the mothership’ for connecting to my iMac.

Of course, that only solves the first problem of software, and doesn’t address the difficulty of trying to manipulate paragraphs of text around on a regular basis. For this, I really do need a mouse, which, AFAIK, isn’t supported by iOS or Android. What would support it, however, would be a Windows tablet. I touched on this briefly in my last post, and poo-pooed it on the basis that I would miss the instant-on capability of a mobile platform. But I forgot about dual-boot tablets! I happen to have one, the TEGA v2, which dual boots Windows 7 and Android 1.6. Yeah, I know, Android 1.6! Positively ancient by today’s standards, and it also locks me out of some apps that need Android 2.0 as a minimum.

The TEGA v2, dual boots Windows 7 and Android

Apparently there’s a beta Froyo build floating around, though, so I’ll try and get my hands on it. This could very well be the ultimate machine for me – an 10-inch Android tablet most of the time, but booted into Windows when I need to blog or write, with a mouse and keyboard attached!

Netbooks vs tablets: I’ll have both, thanks

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There’s been a lot of talk lately about netbooks being superseded by tablets. But I’m not convinced. For many tasks, tablets are indeed the superior device. They’re smaller, lighter, and turn on instantly. I bring my Galaxy Tab everywhere I go for this exact reason, and use it for social networking, browsing the web, reading email, reading eBooks, and watching movies and TV shows.

But the few times I’ve tried using it – and the iPad – as a work tool for blogging and writing articles, I absolutely hated the experience. Sure, both work well enough with a Bluetooth keyboard, but that wasn’t really the issue. The issue was the limitations in software and user input. On the software side, I found the WordPress clients for Android and iOS to be too limited (you can only place images at the end of the post, for instance) and I couldn’t find any word processing software that lets me do a word count on a highlighted paragraph of text (the ones I found only do a word count on the entire article). Plus, as a writer, I’m constantly chopping and changing text – cutting it out, moving it around, copying and pasting – and doing this with a finger on a capacitive screen while trying to hold onto my train of thought is just too much of a hassle. Way too imprecise. Give me a netbook with a built-in keyboard, touchpad, Microsoft Word and a desktop browser any day! Obviously, a tablet running Windows would solve this problem, but then I’d lose the instant-on capabilities that I love so much in my Galaxy Tab and iPad.

I’m sure that getting a tablet over a netbook – and even a desktop PC – makes sense to many people. People like my mum, for instance, who only ever use the computer to use Facebook, listen to music, send email, browse the web and play Scrabble. In her case, the iPad I gave to her is perfect, and she mentioned the other day that she loves how easy it is to make the text on a webpage larger so she doesn’t have to take her eye glasses out. She’s not at all tech-savvy, so she also loves how intuitive the iOS interface is to use – no complicated key strokes or commands, she just taps on the screen to launch the program she wants! But I view tablets strictly as a companion to my little Acer netbook and 27-inch iMac, and I’ve found that all three computing devices have a role in my life. The tablet goes with me everywhere and essentially works as a smartphone with a larger screen, the netbook comes out when I want to do some writing at a cafe, while the iMac is what I use for blogging, writing, web browsing while I’m at home, and editing photos.

Goodbye Windows PC, I won’t be missing you!

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I did something liberating this morning, a step that finally frees from having to use a Windows PC ever again (at home, anyway – I’m yet to see an Internet cafe that uses Macs!). Today, I installed Parallels Desktop 6 for Mac on my main workstation, a 27-inch 2.66GHz Intel Core i5 iMac with 4GB of RAM.

I’ve been using the the Mac operating system almost exclusively for the last five years at least, and I’ve never looked back. I won’t get into a Mac vs Windows debate here – to each their own, really. But I just like the way the OS works, with minimal annoying pop-ups, mysterious error messages, crashes or viruses. Personally – with the emphasis on personal – I’ve found it to be so much more reliable than using a PC, and I’ve spent next to zero time over the past few years having to maintain it or troubleshoot any system problems. YMMV

That said, unfortunately in my line of work, I still need access to Windows for keeping all of my gadgets up to date. Firmware upgrading utilities for various mobile devices are usually only available as Windows executables, and it seems every other week I have to dust off my Dell netbook (which runs like a dog, by the way) to flash new firmware.

I received Parallels Desktop 6 for the Mac awhile ago at the launch press event, but never got around to installing it because I’d misplaced my Windows 7 install disc (another thing I received through media channels awhile back), and it really didn’t seem worth it to buy the retail version of Windows 7 Ultimate for nearly $500 for something I only needed to use every now and then! Ah, the benefits of spring (or in my case, summer) cleaning! I found the Windows 7 disc a couple of days ago after an especially rigorous cleaning session, so all the pieces were finally in place for installing Windows on my iMac as a virtualised machine.

It’s now running reasonably well! Took less than an hour to install everything, although I got a weird error message when I first started – might have to do with the fact that I installed a 32-bit version of Windows and I have a 64-bit machine? I’ll post my findings as I use Parallels more, but it’s nice not having to restart my iMac every time I want to switch operating systems, the way I’d need to if I installed Windows using Mac OS X’s Boot Camp feature. Also nice that I can finally get rid of my Dell netbook, and no longer have to revert to this cramped performance-challenged setup just to update firmware on something. Going from the silky smooth 27-inch 2560 x 1440 resolution display on my iMac to the 10-inch 1024 x 600 screen on my Dell sucks! That said, I’ve lately been considering one of the newer dual-core Atom netbooks for writing at cafes – I haven’t had the greatest experience writing copy on my iPad or Galaxy Tab. But that’s fodder for another post – I’ll elaborate on that in a few day’s time :)

There’s a noticeable lag when running Windows as a virtual machine, possibly because I upgraded the default 1GB RAM allocation for Windows to 2GB, and I only have 4GB RAM altogether. Oh, to have 8GB in my iMac – why must finances be such a dominating factor? :P

Guess which option I chose?

I boosted the default RAM allocation to 2GB

Windows 7 installs as a virtual machine exactly the same way it would as a regular install

Windows 7 running as a Mac application. Sweet!

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