Zune HD – And Drool All Over my Keyboard

As the release date for the new Zune HD (September 15th, in case you’ve been living under a rock) closes in, I thought I’d provide a link to Engadget’s Zune HD Hub. It’s full of videos, articles, and all sorts of Zune eye candy. Enjoy!

Robot Hands Will Rule the World

This is the most amazing video I've ever seen in my life. I'm not even going to write about it, except to say that it perfectly illustrates exactly how our robot overlords are going to grasp the whips some day. Seriously, though, check this out. It's incredible.

High-Speed Robot Hand Demonstrates Dexterity and Skillful Manipulation

How to Buy a PC

I recently wrote my cousin a little how-to on buying a PC laptop.  She’s getting ready for her first year in college and needs a computer.  Not to sound like those PC commercials, I do think that you can get exactly what you need out of a computer without paying extra for the Apple name (now now, I’m a HUGE Apple supporter, so please extinguish your flames).  Here’s what I told my cousin:

Shopping for a PC (Macs are WAY easier) can be pretty daunting. There are so many choices, it's tough to figure out exactly what to look for. It took me a couple of months to settle on the machine I bought, and it was only after learning some of the nomenclature that I finally figured out what I wanted... so to cut to the chase, here's a quick guide to buying PC laptops:

1. More memory... this one's obvious. Memory is the single best upgrade for a computer. Buy one with as much as you can. 4GB is about right.

2. Dedicated Video... if you can afford it, dedicated video is the way to go. Basically what this means is that there is a seperate bank of memory for the video card, as opposed to "integrated" where the video shares memory with the rest of the computer. If you see "Intel GMA 45000MHD" or something similar, it's integrated video. If you see "NVidia" or "ATI", it's dedicated. If you don't play videos games much, and don't see yourself doing so, this is less of a concern.

3. CPU... Here's where it gets tricky. There are so many different CPU's out there (we're going to stick to Intel stuff, just to simplify. You don't want to get into the comparison between Intel and AMD) it's tough to know you're making a good choice. In order to make things simple, here's a tip: CPU's are categorized using a letter then a four-digit number. Only worry about the number. The higher the number, the better the CPU. You'll see clock speeds... GHz speeds... don't sweat that, as there's a lot more that goes into performance than the speed. Shoot for the highest number you can (anything 6400 or over).

www.newegg.com should be your best friend. If you go to their homepage, in the PCs & Laptops area, you'll see a link for "Laptops / Notebooks". Go there, and you'll find along the left side of the page, a search system. This is how I found the laptops I'm going to link to you. I searched under CPU Type for "Intel Core 2 Duo", Memory for "4GB", and various different screen sizes. I looked mostly at HP (my personal preference, feel free to check out others). Here are the ones that I thought were decent...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834147916
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834147989
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834115592

The first one (the HP DV6-1050) definitely has the most horsepower for the $$$, but is a touch large. The other two would be very good machines as well. I would suggest playing around with the search on newegg, and reading the reviews.

 

Dell Vostro 1220 Images Leak - Clean but Boring

There's nothing thrilling about Dell's latest budget offering, the Vostro 1220. Engadget has the scoop on images of a crimson version coming to a Walmart near you. With a Core 2 Duo T6750 processor, 4GB of RAM, a 320GB hard drive, an ExpressCard slot and even a fingerprint reader, it's actually pretty solidly spec'd. For those who value function over form, this little number might be right up your ally.

Click to check out Engadget's images of the new Dell Vostro 1220.

What's Your PC History?

The current generation entering the workforce today can't remember a time when they didn't have access to a personal computer. Whether it was at school playing "Oregon Trail" or at home playing "Maniac Mansion", computers were, in the late 80's and early 90's, starting to become as ubiquitous as televisions and telephones. I'm feeling a bit nostalgic today, so I thought I'd ask everyone out there: What's your PC history?

Here's mine:

It all started with a combination of the Apple II+ and Apple IIe. My father was, and still is, quite the computer hobbyist, programming in assembly language, C, C++, Visual Basic, and HTML/CSS. He's been his university departments webmaster for years, and continues to tinker and learn. His first machine was an Apple IIe, which he learned everything he possibly could about, and passed that knowledge on to me in the form of my first computer, the Apple II+, and manuals and technical articles. I got my start on that machine, programming in BASIC and assembly language. Those were the crazy, pioneering days of personal computer technology, when programmers were akin to magicians, and I was five years old.

I rocked that machine well into high school, both programming on it and writing school papers. By the time I was finished with it, we'd attached a 20 MEGABYTE hard drive to it as well as a mouse, and I'd started trying to write a graphical user interface (ala Macintosh or Apple IIgs... remember GSOS?) for it. About mid-high school, my parents invested in their first Macintosh (circa 1996), the Performa 450. This what around the time Apple had released a myriad of confusing configurations. No one knew what any of the names or numbers meant. That computer lasted my parents until sometime when I was in college, when they upgraded to a second-generation iMac.

As for me, when I entered college, I entered the world of the PC. I'd avoided it as long as I could, hearing horror stories of blue-screens-of-death and lost data. Fortunately for me, I purchased my first PC just before Microsoft released Windows ME, so I avoided a lot of the issues that my friends who bought computers saw later. My machine was a highly customized Gateway PC, with an 800Mhz Pentium II processor and 128 megabytes of memory, a 20 gigabyte hard drive, and a 15-inch CRT monitor. Looking back on it, it seems like such an underpowered machine, but it was state-of-the-art at the time.

That machine carried me through college in pretty decent fashion. After graduation, I decided I'd also graduated to a laptop, which took the form of a Dell Inspiron 1100. With a 2.4GHz Celeron, 256 megabytes of memory, and a 40 gigabyte hard drive, it was a definite upgrade. I actually still use this box, rocking Fedora 9 Linux. It's been upgraded to 1 gigabyte of memory and a 80 gigabyte hard drive, but all the other parts are still original. My wife has the same laptop, and it still works great for her.

A few years ago I tried my hand at system building, and ended up with a custom-built desktop designed around an Asus M2N-E SLI motherboard with an AMD Athlon 64 5400+ processor. It's loaded with 2 gigabytes of memory and over 1 terabyte of total hard drive space. It's a great machine, runs anything I throw at it, and stores and backs up all of my photos and music.

My last purchase came in the form of a new laptop. It's an HP Pavilion DV7-1270us. It's got an Intel Core 2 Duo 8600 in it, rocking at 2.4Ghz, 4 gigabytes of memory, and a 320 gigabyte hard drive. It's a really nice machine, my main recording machine, and plays all the games and runs all the software I want it to.

So, as you can see, I've owned and used quite a cross-section of machines in my time. What does your PC history look like? I'd like to see what you've owned/used over the years.

GADGET: Is the Palm Pre an iPhone Killer?

Digg.com is a-buzz with articles and blog entries about the new Palm Pre, but is it the iPhone killer that lots of people think it's going to be? It looks sharp, has a killer interface with webOS, and has all the tricks that the iPhone packs. I'm not sure I'm sold, though.

I read through PCMag.com's full review of the Pre, and was pretty impressed. They've got all the bells and whistles you can think of: web access, integration with Facebook and other social websites, email... the list goes on. However, one thing stood out to me as a huge con, and something that bothers me about a lot of modern "smart phones": it doesn't sound like it's a very good PHONE.

I'm wondering if perhaps designers have strayed a bit too far from the original concept of a cellular phone: to be a phone. These things are packed so full of extras that it seems sometimes the phone functionality is secondary to the rest. But that's just one man's opinion.

Click here to check out the PCMag.com article, or just go to Digg.com to read a myriad of other articles about the Palm Pre.

TOY: M-Audio KeyStation 49 Review

As well as being a rock-solid computer geek, I am also a pretty well-seasoned music geek. A few years ago, I joined a band that was itching to record, but didn't have any sort of budget to blow on studio time. Being the geek that I am, I decided to investigate setting up a little software-based recording studio in my apartment to allow us to record at our leisure. I looked into several different packages, all of which were entirely too expensive. I also investigated some free options, all of which were either too buggy or too complicated to really be used effectively.

Then one day, I was at Best Buy, and I happened across this little gem: the M-Audio Session KeyStudio 49. I had been thinking of buying a keyboard for a little while, and knew that I didn't need an 88-key monstrosity. I just needed something that could play some chords and give me the abillity to test-drive musical ideas quickly. After some consideration and quick research (I didn't want to waste money on a lemon, after all), I made my purchase.

Features

Before I get to my thoughts on the KeyStudio, let me give you an outline of what you get with it. Of course, there is the keyboard itself, which is a 49-key, velocity-sensitive, synth-style (unweighted) keyboard. It's got pitch-bend and volume dials, octave select buttons, and an "edit" button. It's also got an on/off switch, in case you want to leave it plugged in to your computer but don't want it taking up USB bus bandwidth. It's powered off your computer's USB bus, so there's no wall-wart power supply.

It also comes with M-Audio's Session recording software, which is actually pretty good software. Don't get the wrong idea, ProTool it's not, but you can do some decent editing with it. The software also comes with loads of samples, a solid synth library, including all the standard patches for drums, piano, guitar, brass, and strings, and some really cool odd-ball sounds. The loop library is not bad either, including drum loops that work pretty well to back up your recorded sounds.

Which leads me to the M-Audio Micro USB audio interface. At first I dismissed this thing as being a cheesy little dongle I didn't need. Don't make the same mistake I did... USE IT. It's a USB-powered audio interface which allows Session to record low-latency audio tracks. You can plug a microphone or your guitar directly into the Micro and record to your heart's content. Just make sure you use the Micro for monitoring as well, as the audio card in your computer will probably add latency to your sound.

Review

It took me a while to warm up to the M-Audio Session KeyStudio 49. I've spent some time in recording studios, so I think I was biased toward the more "professional" software, and didn't think I could get a good recorded sound out of something that only cost $99 total. Boy was I wrong. When I finally got around to using the whole system, I was blown away. As I said before, this isn't "professional" hardware and software, but for home recording, it's really very good. I used it last weekend to record a couple of tracks for one of my friends, and the whole thing sounded excellent after a little tweaking.

Yes, there are some quirks, but you can expect that out of any audio software. When you're pushing around that much data in what has to feel like real-time, there are going to be some small issues. Fortunately, there were all solved by stopping and restarting playback or recording. No reboots, no lockups.

If you're in the market for a good quality, inexpensive home recording system, this really might be the way to go.

Is the E-Book Reader Becoming the New iPhone?

In a world that seems to be ruled by the niche market, Samsung will be releasing their latest hand-held gadget, called “Papyrus”.  Starting in June of this year, the Papyrus will be released to readers in Korea, becoming available to the US and UK markets sometime within the months after that.

For those who are still very much attached to their dog-eared copies of Moby Dick, these new devices seem like silly little toys with not much functionality.  I mean, what could be more portable that your trusty old paperbacks, right?  But for the tech-savvy who still enjoy a good story, these things are being a must-have.  So let the competition begin!

Amazon still has the killer device in the Kindle 2, but I have a feeling more device manufacturers are going to be getting on the bandwagon.  Devices such as the Kindle 2 from Amazon and the Samsung Papyrus might just make it hip to be a bookworm.