…brought it to the Apple store and they restored it for me. That’s one _very_ nice thing about buying apple, you can go to the store and play with the products before buying, and bring the stuff back to get fixed when needed.
Dell has been _very_, VERY, good to me and I’d recommend them in a second. But buying $2,000 laptops sight unseen is a bit unnerving.
It’ll break your iphone. I’ve got a new iPhone and new MacBook Pro with little on them and the update failed leaving the device useless, and you’ll likely lose your data. It’s clear the second stringers put together this release and passed on any testing. Do NOT upgrade.
Two years ago I picked up a Palm TX for the wife to keep track of contacts and schedule. I went with the TX as it was the ‘Cadillac’ model at the time with all the features. Also, I thought it’d be fun to copy movies to it for the kids to watch in a pinch. Two years on I finally got around to this task.
Unfortunately, I just discovered that the WiFi is broken on the unit. It’s a bummer because that was a fun feature, but not terribly useful as the included browser ‘Blazer’ sucked. The symptoms were strange: everytime I turned on the Wifi radio, the TX would immediately reset. I’m sure it was a software problem so after hard reseting and clearing data a couple times, even with Palm tech support, I gave up. I even tried loading a new ROM from here with no luck.
Back on topic… I keep all the movies I have in their original VOB format off the DVD. That means we can watch them on the TV at the same quality in which they came off the disk, and transcoding for projects like this becomes a bit easier and higher quality. Space wise it’s not a problem now that we have 1.5TB disks…
To start, download and install the Handbrake GUI (it includes the command line tool) from here http://handbrake.fr/?article=download to your PC.
Then download tcpmp.palmos.0.72RC1.zip from here:
http://picard.exceed.hu/tcpmp/test/
…extract the files and install these to your Palm TX
You can install these others, but the free xvid video and mp3 audio codecs above work well enough. I’d recommend these for flexibility as they support the DVD video and audio formats:
After getting the above software installed and collect the VOBs or AVIs of the movies you’d like to transfer, open handbrake and configure these options (click to see the full size image):
1) Select file
2) Browse for the VOB you’d like to convert
3) Enter an output name with an .avi extension
4) Select the XVID video encoder
5) Select the MP3 audio encoder
6) Set the size to 480×320 the maximum dimensions of the TX display.
7) Optionally de-interlace the video. This is very technical, but if the source is interlaced (likely) and you don’t de-interlace, the output on the TX will look terrible. If the source is not Interlaced, you don’t need this. I don’t think de-interlacing a non-interlaced source will hurt so you may want to always set this.
Then select the video tab (8)
9) Set the bit rate to 400. This looks reasonably good. You may want to set it higher (5 or 6 hundred) for a higher quality movie.
Click ‘Start’ and wait. One hour of video takes about an hour to transcode on a 2.4GHz Core 2 Duo.
Copy the new avi file to the Palm TX via an SD card and enjoy. Be sure to rotate the display and view in ‘full screen’ mode.
Note, for those who prefer the command line, here’s the above settings for the Handbrake command line too:
“c:\Program Files\Handbrake\HandBrakeCLI.exe” -i <SOURCE_FILE> -o <OUTPUT_FILE> -w 480 -l 320 -d -E lame -e xvid
It came with a working install of NextStep 3.3 and I was able to guess the root password. The best part is that it included some fun software and a hidden directory with some 1990s adult pictures. They’re pretty nice if you squint and stand a couple meters away from the monitor 
Of course, the real reason I wanted this system was for the N4000A monitor. I can now get my cube working.
Official Instructions can be found here:
Some tips can be found here:
My wife’s always had good computers, but always got the short end of the stick compared to what I had. If I had a dual 500MHz, she had a single CPU. If I had a 21″ monitor, she had the 19″. After one of my MythTV projects went south I had a spare 2.4 GHz Celeron system that was better than that 500MHz mentioned above so I traded it out. But with only 512MBs RAM and a REALLY memory leaky FireFox installation it was really slow. Then she got a nice 20″ panel display that the Intel chipset couldn’t drive properly. Finally the thing was noisier than a bat out of hell in her tiny office. She uses the computer heavily and for real work so I thought it was the time to get her a new, top of the line machine that’ll last some time.
We were going to buy a laptop and I’ve bought two through Dell recently and have been very happy. She’s a petit gal so I wanted a small machine like the XPS 1330 so it could be moved around but it was way out of my price range. Other requirements were and nVidia graphics card, Core 2 Duo > 2GHz, 2GB RAM, and a 7200 RPM drive. Anything short of that was a deal breaker.
This is the part I hate about Dell. You can’t build a good machine at a good price. It’s all about haggling. You spec the perfect machine and it comes in at $1800, then you see a slightly different machine on sale for $600 off, but it’s missing the nVidia card. Deal breaker. The XPS 1330 was always way out of reach. After going around in circles for a couple days I finally called. With little haggling I speced the perfect XPS 1330 for only a couple hundred more than I wanted to spend, but close enough due to it being an exclusive machine with the ever important Midnight Blue finish.
I ordered on Wednesday and it arrived Tuesday the next week. Not bad at all.
Here’s the box it came in:
Here’s the case it came with, remote control, and restore disks:
The Midnight Blue XPS 1330:
Sitting in Scrap Book Central:
The only thing I don’t like about the machine is that it only has two USB ports and the standard LCD display is unevenly lit from top to bottom, but not so bad that it’s unusable.
Otherwise it’s a great little machine. Very fast, light, looks good. All the extra that came in the case, the premium XPS three year warranty (US based support,) and knowing you have a premium product made the purchase worth it.
In a day and age when you go to Frys and all the cases look like this:
…us old timers (mid thirties) yearn for a decent server case that doesn’t have neon lights and can hold a substantial number of hard drives. Sure, neon fans were cool when we were 18 and looking for a mate, but when you’ve got a couple terrabytes of “Baby Einstein” and “Wiggles” videos to serve on demand to a 15 month old, you need good case design and capactity.
When selecting the new server case for my MythTV/home server solution, my primary requirements were low cost and lots of hard drive space. This server would not have a CDROM or floppy, just hard drives as it would sit in the shed, spinning away, recording TV shows and serving content.
Several strategic newegg.com queries later I found the Antec Titan650 and purchased it.
It’s a reasonable size. A bit smaller than a mid-tower case, but longer (deeper.) If you’re like me, occasionally you come across some Extended ATX (EATX) motherboards and this case can handle them. Most cases can’t.
Here’s the back. It’s got the one big fan in back that I like.
I really liked the rubber grommits they placed on the drive rails. If you have a bunch of drives they should quiet things down a bit. They also shipped special screws for the rails.
The front door assembly was nice too. Here you can see the drive cage with the two fan mounts below. The front door cleanly swings away from the chassis.
The front drive access door had a cool hinge that allowed it to swing completely out of the way.
The inside, as shipped.
All the great stuff you get including different drive rails for all the 5 1/4 and 3 1/2 drive bays.
Here’s the drive cage with two 750GB drives mounted in it. Note the fan mount swings away and off to allow access to the drives. This case now has four 750GB drives and four 400 GB drives. Six drives in the cage, two more in the 5 1/4 bays.
This is a fantastic case for the money. If you need a server case, buy this without hesitation.
The service is going in and out now. I’ve reset the router and problems persist. I’ll go out for 10 minutes then back again. Out for 2 minutes and back… We’ve lost service a couple other times this week too but either I didn’t witness them or waiting a couple minutes resolved the problem.
Very fast response on a Saturday morning from the Broadstripe VPs. They confirmed the Internet outage and are looking into the support outage.
