The Future is Now

I can't get over how often I feel like I'm living in the future. There are two major components: portable computing and public transportation. Let me explain.

I'm currently sitting on a platform waiting for a suburban train to take me back to Paris from an English lesson in the suburbs. (Now I'm on the train.) I had to wait ten minutes, and how the entire trip (train, metro, a bit of walking) back to the house in Paris will take about 45 minutes more. If I had a car, I probably could have done the entire trip in 25 minute.

At first glance, it sounds like a car might be a better deal, but we have to consider the costs. I'd have to pay not only for the gas that I'd use during the trip but also the assurance and any interest on a car loan that I would pay regardless of my use of the vehicle. That starts to get expensive. Then we can add in the external costs which include environmental degradation, contribution to global warming, noise pollution along the streets, ect... It starts to look like less of a good deal.

Now we add in the game changer: mobile computing. I'm typing on my Dell Mini 12, a lightweigt, relatively low-powered notebook that you can get for about $400. Before I started typing this post, I was reading and responding to my email, consulting my calendar, and reading my favorite news sites and blogs. All of this without any connection to the internet thanks to the offline features that Google has added to Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Reader. Since I can turn off my wireless radios battery capacity isn't a problem, even with the lightweight 3-cell battery.

The result of this combination is that, although the trip with the clean (environmentally that is, there is a nasty stain on the floor at my feet) and efficient public transportation takes longer, I come out ahead time-wise because only about 15 minutes (when I'm walking) is true down time when I can't work (though I am getting a bit of exercise).

Now, there are certainly some caveats. A lot of people live in places without public transit, rendering this plan impossible. You could contact your elected officials and campaign for better transit systems, but many areas simply lack the necessary density to make the systems workable. Also, it's not as if I could do this every time I take the metro or the train. On some lines at some times of the day, it's simply too crowded to sit and I'm not about to be that guy balancing his laptop on one hand, navigating with the other (though I apparently have no qualms about being that guy with the computer on his lap in the metro).

But, given the right conditions and the right material, pretty nifty things can be done with existing technology. Don't wait for the future, live it now!

Life Update

Just a quick post to let everyone know that things are going well here, despite the lack of posts recently. There have been several projects that have been keeping me busy recently and which have distracted me from my bloggerly duties.

For one, my faithful ThinkPad finally died on me. You'll remember it from the screen replacement post in October, unfortunately I didn't get the life out of the screen that I was hoping for. It's final undoing was some undiagnosed hardware problem, if you moved the computer it would just shut down. Given its age, this doesn't come as much of a surprise. I've only just now replaced it with a relatively powerful desktop and a light and highly portable laptop. It's a good combination (even if my attempt to install Xubuntu Linux on the laptop failed, apparently it has one of the few unsupported Intel graphics cards) and I'm quite happy with the result (not to mention that the total price was far less than my ThinkPad was four years ago). I've got Lightroom installed on the desktop with all of my photos transferred over so you should see some pictures soon.

There have been some other projects that I'm not quite at liberty to talk about yet, but you'll be hearing about them in the coming weeks.

Hope all is well for all of you, wherever you may be.

Inside the Belly of the Beast

A while ago the screen on my trusty laptop, an IBM T42 that has served me well for the past four years, started to go pink. Research showed that it was the result of argon gas depletion (or some other inert gas that I can't quite recall right now) in the compact fluorescent bulb that serves as a backlight for the LCD screen. That bulb costs about $15 but requires soldering and opening tape that says "DO NOT OPEN!!!!" Instead, given the scratches and general abuse that the screen has taken over the years, I decided to replace the entire LCD. That would cost about $100 from a Malaysian guy on eBay, but would require me to totally dismantle the computer, including opening the screen housing itself. I had never been that far inside of my computer so I decided that it would be a good educational experience. And if anything really went wrong, there could only be one result, new computer!

I printed about 40 pages out of the T42 service manual, borrowed a set of small (but not small enough) screwdrivers from Ilan, and got to work. All in all it took about five hours to complete with only relatively minor frustrations along the way. Those frustrations were surprisingly similar to those that you run into when fixing a car (stripped screw heads, real life situations that don't match the manual, a manufacturer that loved thread locker a little too much, etc...)

The end result is that I now have a fully functioning, perfectly clear screen. And, this is the important part, the pride of having gone into the belly of the beast and made it out the other side.

Here are some gory pictures:

New Feature: Labels!

If you have a look over at the left side of your page you'll see a new section called "Labels" with a bunch of words under it. I've gone back and labeled all of my posts with appropriate terms such that if you want to see all of my posts about France, or all of my posts with pictures, you simply click on the appropriate label on the left. Give it a try, I'd appreciate feedback if you think that it could be improved (more accurate labels, fewer labels, more labels, etc...).

Why Gmail?

Here's an introductory video about Gmail, produced by Google and starring various office products. If you use Gmail already you won't learn much but if you are not yet a user it could be interesting.

Now Easier to Leave Comments!

I changed some overly-restrictive settings to make it easier to leave comments to my posts. With this I hope that people begin to comment a bit more, it makes the whole experience more fun. I have this incredible fear that I will write these posts and they will just float around, frozen in a big series of tubes.

Why post comments, you ask? Because it's fun! A blog shouldn't be about me preaching to you, telling you my opinions about everything. Blogging changes the traditional dynamic of publication, instead of there being a reader and a publisher, now everyone is a reader and publisher. If you comment, I promise I'll respond. That's the great thing about these "inter-webs", it's all about communication.

In any event, thanks for reading my blog at all, I really do appreciate it!

The Linux Attempt Pt. III

It works! In fact, this is being written on the old NEC PowerMate, running Ubuntu 6.10, known as "Edgy Eft". The ultimate solution was to buy a 256MB module of PC133, though, due to limitations of the motherboard, only 128MB is recognized at it is running at the speed of PC100. Given that it is impossible to find 128MB modules of PC100 SDRAM, I would say that we are lucky to have anything that works.

But it works! That's what counts. In fact, it works much better and much more reliably than the old, corrupted version of Windows ever worked. So I can check one thing off of my To Do list ("Successfully install Linux on a computer") and move onto bigger and better things.

More importantly for those of you reading this blog, I can get back to writing about interesting, non-technical subjects. So, more to come shortly, I have to do some homework before I go to my French class.

Linux-ed!

The Linux Attempt Pt. II

[Caution: Technical post follows, ignore if not interested!]

Well, it turns out the old NEC PowerMate has only 96MB of RAM and that's short of the 128 required to run the Live CD and Installer for Ubuntu. Also, it takes old PC100 RAM which is kind of hard to find. Esther and I went to the "Silicon Valley" of Paris, the street with all of the computer hardware sellers and found a 256MB module of PC100 for 35 euros. It was more expensive than I was hoping, but given how few systems run PC100, it makes sense that it is more expensive per MB. Anyway, got home, snapped it in and ran the MemTest86 that comes with the Ubuntu CD and it started generating all sorts of errors.

So, it's possible that the stick of memory itself is faulty (it was stored loose in a drawer for who knows how long) or that the system can't properly deal with a single module of more than 64 or 128MB. The solution will most likely be taking the whole computer into the store and having them try out a few different memory modules of different sizes and see if it works.

Once the RAM gets sorted out, everything should go relatively smoothly (probably not now that I've said that) though Ubuntu will take up 3GB of our 5GB HDD. Oh well, .odt files typically aren't that big.

The Linux Attempt

When we moved into the apartment, Esther's dad found an old computer at work that was going to be discarded. We took it to our house, plugged it in and it has kind of worked. It can't connect to the internet, it is mind-bogglingly slow, it randomly crashes, and Windows Explorer doesn't seem to be properly functioning. That said, the hardware seems to be in good condition, it's just the operating system (Windows 2000) that doesn't seem to be doing anything productive.

Thus, it is time for an experiment. Will I be able to put Linux on the computer? Will it work? Will it be stable? As I told Esther, I am 95% sure that it will work better than before, 3% worried that it will be about the same, and 2% afraid that it will be even worse.

I've burned the latest release of the Ubuntu distribution (6.10) onto a CD, rearranged the BIOS to make system bootable from CD-ROM and now I'm waiting for the installer to begin. Let's hope this works...

If you read the New York Times online...

... you might like this, the New York Times Reader. It's a stand-alone program that downloads the entire paper and then presents it on your screen in a way that is a very convincing facsimile of the print version. I've found it to work very well, even though it is in a very early beta release. Using the Times Reader instead of your web browser, the text is much easier to read and there is much less scrolling involved. Needless to say, I like it a lot. It makes one of my favorite hobbies, reading the Times, much easier and more comfortable. It is rather bandwidth and processor intensive, though my laptop has no trouble running it. Here are the system requirements:

• Windows XP SP2 or Windows Vista
• 1Ghz processor
• Minimum: 384 MB RAM
• Recommended: 500 MB RAM

Bottom line, if you read the Times online frequently, this may be a useful application to check out.

And you thought Comcast was bad...

The only way that I am able to post this now is courtesy of some unsecured wireless network from which I can get a 'Low' or 'Very Low' signal (thank you Apple Network 9a9027). We are supposed to be connecting through our own conncection, provided by a French ISP named Free. They have a really good deal that for 29.90 euros per month you get a high speed ADSL connection, unlimited telephone calls throughout Europe and North America, and a few television channels. Almost too good to be true!

Esther signed a contract with them in early September to connect with the line here. In mid-September the France Telecom telephone landline was disconnected since we were planning on having the Free line available to us. Here it is early October and they have yet to connect our line.

Another interesting quirk about France is that most phone numbers for companies are the equivalient of 900 numbers in the US. If you want to order something from a cataloge you pay 15 cents/minute. Similarly, if you want to call customer service because they didn't connect your line like they were supposed to, you pay 34 cents/minute. That is, if you are calling from a landline. Calling from a cellphone results in a whole different set of charges.

So imagine that you are trying to connect your brand new internet/telephone/TV service and you encounter a problem. Since you have disconnected your old telephone you have to use a cell phone. What happens? You spend over 6 euros for a call that lasts less than 7 minutes where the only information you get is, "Try it again tomorrow, you may or may not get a confirmation email when we have connected your line."

I guess in France the saying, "The customer is king" is accurate, but being a king in France hasn't always been the most comfortable position.