I too was waiting for the iPad to come and after hearing it was basically the iPhone OS with more power, much bigger display and the classic iPhone walled garden iTunes store I decided against it. It just wasn’t for me.  I wanted something with a little more “umph”, power, something I could get down and dirty with.  This was not that device, at least not for me.

Then I stopped and thought, who is this for?

This is the device like the iPhone that will bring people into the tablet arena.  The iPhone brought the masses kicking and screaming into the smart phone world.  Like that, the iPad will fit the need people (the masses) didn’t know they have.  People like commuters and students will find this device among their required gadgets.  Here is a device that in it’s initial release will allow:

• Portable Music
• Portable Movies / TV
• Book Reader
• Game device
• Web Browsing
• Email
• Applications
• Less Pain

That last item is the most important.  This device is made from the ground up as a tablet device OS. The applications are made for touch screen use from the start, something that on Windows, Linux or OSX isn’t the case.  The Walled Garden approach means all software has been at least checked once for malicious intent, something you can’t say for most software you can download from the internet.  Yeah you pay a premium for this type of service, but this is the crowd that will be serviced by this unit.  They will want it just to work, may complain about the cost here and there.  In the end they will pay cause they will know if they want a movie, song or book, it’s as simple as click/download. Internet will be peppy because it’ll be the lightweight browser you get on the iPhone plus a few power tweaks for the new form factor.

In the end, I know this unit will succeed.  It won’t be the last in this arena and many will try to improve on it, some able to, other not so much.  The lack of difficulty to do the basic things will be the major selling point.  Something even us geeks complain about it things that don’t just work.  Difference is we tend to dig in and make it work if it doesn’t.

• HP TouchSmart TM2T (Convertable Tablet PC)
• HP CQ10 (Netbook)

I should have reviews coming soon.

As a person who follows no less than 8 series on my downtime commute, having this data in one place is the stuff of gods.  Still, having to search each out is a pain, and if you register for an account, you can ‘favorite’ each to make a neat little list on the home page when you login, but you will still be required to click on each link and drill down to the details.

That said, TheTVDB is a use run site, so with an account, you can assist with the import of show information.  Take Invader Zim, as of the last time I checked, only the first two seasons of the four that exist actually have been posted.  Older shows tend to need the most assistance, barring most popular shows.

That aside, it’s database is extensive.  Also, if you use programs like XBMC or Boxee, this service is the default source for their information on TV shows. 

Well, then the day before the release I got a knock on my door with the Fedex guy, here he was with my very own copy of Beatles Rock Band for review.  Now this review is a little late out the door, but if you share the life I do, you’ll understand why.  But we did get to play the game and I tell you, it was understandable why this needed it’s own title. 

Well, I invited my kids, and my brothers over for a night and we put this bad boy in the 360.  The unified comment for the night was “Wait, that song was theirs?”  During the week comings up I was listening to Major Nelson’s podcast and he saw a similar phenomenon.  With the Beatles being such an older band, all of us in the room had never been apart of the Beatlemania that swept the nation.  Over time you loose who sang what as newer bands do covers.  Heck, first time I heard “Come Together,” it was a cover in a different style so as hearing the original surprised me.

Now the kit was a bare bones one as I already had my ION Drum Rocker, two wireless guitars and a microphone.  They sent me a pair of microphones and the game disk.  The kids were happy to grab a microphone each, something they fought over in past games of Rock Band 1/2.  I took on the task of Drums, something I wonder if I’ll ever master.  Finally I had two brothers taking the Bass/Guitar.  With the band in position, we started to play.

The first thing we did was hit the calibration screen after telling it the Hard Disk was a good place to store our data.  Calibration was hard only because your usual in-house calibrator was MIA for this, after a few tries I managed to get the numbers to something closer to what I expected for Rock Band 2 (turned out fine).  I tell you, for someone who wants to play drums here, I suck at following the metronome, although I feel somewhat vindicated that my oldest daughter was far worse.  The screen itself is just a revamp of Rock Band 2, not like there was much room for improvement.

The main menu started with ‘Quick Play’ which led us to ‘local’ or ‘xbox live’.  we chose local which combined both solo and multiplayer in one.  During every screen where to vocalist has to either join in or select a difficulty level, you are greeted with a level indicator for each microphone.  The first plugged in is the first mic and so on.  So, if you don’t want to start the biggest wire tangle in history, you can just plug them in the order you want at any time  (Or you can pick up a set of the wireless mics).

Game play is very similar to Rock Band 1/2 if that’s what you’re used to.  Overdrive has been renamed to Beatlemania and reduced to a single note.  You don’t get to ‘rock out’ at that point, but I have hit the foot pedal on that note with the green pad (extra note) with no penalty, so I gather it’s a little forgiving on the drums.  As for guitar/bass, it’s identical.  My band mates made the transition painlessly.  Vocals are the same too with the exception that the second and third microphones were able to trigger the over-er, ah Beatlemania.

The biggest change to the game play is the second and third singers.  This is harmony baby, and with that, different levels.  The third singer is the highest note-wise, with the seconds pretty much dead middle between the two.  This proved to be a novel but not ungraspable concept for the kids.  With the oldest in charge, the other two were quickly put in line.  As for quality, well, that suffered a little with our brave group of inexperienced harmonizers.  Gone are the three level controllers for the vocals, but replaced with the three different microphone volume levels. The band’s vocals and the mic sensitivity are now in the options on the main menu and the ‘start’ menu respectively.

Quickplay is great for parties and getting people playing, but if you have a handful of band mates you might want to try out the story mode.  This mode allows you to play songs, unlocking up to two photos per song.  Getting three stars will get you the first photo, and five will score you both.  Complete a ‘chapter’ of songs and you gain more additional content.  The photos they show on the page are cropped thumbs so it’s worth looking at each on the menus when you can. 

So in the end, this is a very playable variant to the Rock Band line.  To do the things they have in here they had to create a different ‘title’.  Without it, it would not be the same.  Should they port the extra functionality over to the main Rock Band line?  Yes.  If Rock Band 3 comes with any less, I as a avid Rock Band fan would be disappointed.  This title will appeal to even the casual Beatle fans, of which there are many.  Should they let you port the game content to RB2 or the future RB3?  Probably not.  It’s the whole experience that makes the game here.

After getting whisked straight from Custards Last Stand, to 300 years in the future, you find out that somehow, the outcome of the wars are changing.  It becomes your job to go back in time through the different wars to ensure certain people make it out alive, and maintain the history books.  What makes that even more difficult then it sounds is that not only do you need to make sure people on your side don’t get killed, there are certain people on the other side you have to make sure survive as well.  That’s right, you are getting shot at by people who you can’t kill, well you can but it will only cause problems for you in the future.  These NPCs, notated by their blue auras, can be taken out by the use of chasers, little balls that act like mini personal homing concussion grenades, harmlessly knocking out the opponent soldier that needs to survive.

While the games story really drew me in, I immediately noticed a few blaring problems with the game that made it very hard to work with.  First off is the lack of “hero complex”, i.e. you play someone from the civil war era, who is transported to the future, and he isn’t freaking out?  Today we have TV, Movies, and SCI-FI programing to tell us, hey maybe it can happen.  Back then they had no such thing and I find it hard to believe our hero would be able to adjust as quickly as he does in the game.

Secondly is the long list of game play problems I had with the game.  The guns accuracy definitely has kids gloves on.  At a long distance, intentionally shooting over the shoulder of the enemy we were still scoring one hit kills. Graphics at many times was blocky, and the refresh rate was very poor. Many of the sounds in the game were repetitive, including a very loud and annoying Indian war call that sounded like kid was just hitting a button as many times as he could to make the one sound clip keep playing over and over again.  The music was just as bad, I never really heard it change, it was the same few notes over and over.  Controls were sluggish but I think I can chalk that one up to game mechanics.  If it was my first time using all these new-fangled weapons I’d be a bit slow too.

With the all those little hiccups it made it hard for me to play the game.  If you can get past those little hiccups there is a great story to be had in this game, and the more you play, the more the story becomes apparent.  This is one of those games that you can choose the simple path to get to the end but if you want to get full enjoyment out of the game you have to play as many levels as possible.  

Final Rating: 7/10 – Graphics and below average gameplay, scar a great story line, but the story line still shines through

till next time…

The standard card allows for:

• Free (select) syrups and expanded milk options (like soy)
• Free Refills on same visit for brewed coffee.
• Free drink with Whole Bean purchase.
• and My Favorite, free Wi-fi for 2 hours per day

All require you to signup your card online, so a card off the shelf won’t do it until you activate it online.  You can read more on their programs at: https://www.starbucks.com/card/programs

As of today, they support the following services:

• Twitter
• Digg
• Facebook
• Youtube
• Flickr
• MySpace
• LinkedIn
• Blog (takes a generic URL)
• FriendFeed
• GitHub
• 12Seconds
• Seesmic
• Brightkite
• Vimeo

You also get to title your page and include a small blurb about yourself (250 characters).  The page also attempts to pull feed information from some services onto your page, most notably your past few twitters, videos from YouTube, and photos from flickr.

The site is new, and I’m sure is still growing.  There are quite a few other sites I’d like to see added before it fits all my needs.  But as a launchpad to other sites that you can give to people right off, this will fit the bill, assuming your social lineup is within the list of sites they support.

To be fair, they do offer a ‘blog’ entry, but this does not allow you to edit a link name so if you have more than one, they all say ‘blog’.

Link: http://hi.im

Two weeks ago I went down to the local Sprint store to check out the new Palm Pre.  I had already spent the past few days looking up info on the unit and the morning reading the in depth Engadget’s in depth review.  I held the tethered unit in my hands and aside from the pull of the cable, it felt really nice, looked really nice, I had to get one.

I have just come off using a HTC Touch Pro running Windows Mobile 6.1 Pro.  Before that I have a Motorola Q, running Windows Mobile 5.0, a non-touch screen device.  So my last two phones had been Windows based and well, as much as I ever tried to get excited about them, they have more or less left me feeling like it just wasn’t working right.  I won’t go into details as I‘m not here today to bash an OS. in fact, just the opposite.  But I will say being a long time Sprint slave, I would have a much different post more or less about the iPhone 3G had I been on AT&T.

Enter the Palm Pre running WebOS.  Exclusive on Sprint in the US as a CDMA phone running at 3G speeds.  This by my opinion (and I gather others) is the first real contender to the iPhone.  Running at about $300.00 with a $100 mail in rebate leaves you walking out the door with one (plus taxes and other surcharges, duh).  I walked out with mine and it became a hard experience to put it down.  I immediately put the instruction manual away as if this are hard enough I needed a manual, I would have been disappointed.

Out of the box the unit has you get a Palm Pre, a USB micro cable for sync and charging, a wall charger with a USB port for the cable, and a nifty suede pocket to put the unit in when it’s cohabitating in a purse, bag or pocket.  The wall charger alone to me looks like a perfect travel charger for all your USB charging devices.  The cable is also made for travel with it’s own cord wrap, not something you usually see.  Unfortunately that nifty Touchstone wireless charger is in a separate box with it’s own price tag.  CNETtv has a nice unboxing video if you want to check it out.

Playing with the OS was a dream.  The capacitive touch screen has made me look at the touch on my Archos 5 and my past HTC touch pro with disdain.  It’s feather sensitive yet in my pocket had a much less tendency to ‘butt dial’.  The unit is slick, and made to store most of your data in the ‘cloud’.  It comes with a sync to Google for mail, calendar, and contacts.  Contacts and calendar can also be synced from Facebook (would have been a nice touch to add Facebook mail and chat too.  Synergy on the Palm Pre has done something only Windows Mobile fan boys can dream of, letting you sync with multiple Exchange Servers, letting you have your work connection, home connection, and what not.  It keeps your contacts separate, but if it finds enough similarities, it merges them visually on the contacts screen.  Because if you have Joe Smith from work, and he’s a friend from Facebook and even your buddy so you have his mobile and email info in Gmail, you still only see him once in all your apps.  How slick is that?

Unlike past PalmOS units, you are not greeted with a Launcher, but whatever last app you had open.  The Launcher can be accessed at any time by selecting it when you minimize your current app or from the ‘wave’ menu, a menu you can activate over the current app by slowly dragging a finger from off the screen at the bottom middle up onto the screen.  Each app is called a ‘card’, and an app can have more than one card visible.  Switching cards is as simple as pressing the little button at the bottom and scrolling left/right to find the card you want.  Card can be reordered by tapping below a minimized card and then dragging the card out of the pile and putting it at another position.

The App Catalog is a little disappointing compared to the monster on the iPhone, but being only around for a few months, it’s understandable.  A few must have apps for me now are Evernote, Tweed, Pandora, Linkedin, and Fandango.  Another is ‘fileCoaster’, the homebrew App Catalog from PreCentral.net, more on that later.  Of the ‘must have’ list, I believe I’ve used Pandora the most.  Having an unlimited access to Pandora along with unlimited bandwidth has left my Archos 5 idle during my work day.

So far, every day with this phone is that much better.  Time will be the true test.  I know when I got my Moto Q I was a little excited, but battery life left me quickly disgruntled.  Also lack of basic MMS support has been very common amongst Sprint Smart Phones.  This persisted on my HTC Touch Pro which had an extension to allow MMS as a separate mailbox.  The mailbox was unusably slow which led to me almost never using it.  The Pre, solved all that.  Finally I had a useable way to quickly send images to others. 

PreCentral.net has created a hub for home brew apps.  Their installation instructions are pretty straightforward, and I had their fileCoaster app installed in about 15 minutes.  From there we have access to download and install anything from their catalog is as simple as the Palm Pre App Catalog.  I have installed already a Google Voice dialer (gDial Pro), drPodder, Music (remix), Shoutcast and FriendsFlow (facebook app). 

All in all, this phone has been my answer to most of my frustrations in the past.  Maybe in the n3ext 3 months I may change my tune, but right now, ‘I love my phone.’  iPhone, maybe I’d have given you a chance, but with it being locked onto AT&T and not CDMA, there wasn’t much of a chance of us meeting.

More images:

While looking to load up a spare PC with an OS, I decided to give the new Ubuntu a try…

Downloading the ISO was a snap using bit torrent.  You can use the usual http downloads from their site [http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download].  The size is about 600-700 meg depending on the iso you ask for.  I downloaded the standard i386 desktop version.  If I was looking to put this on my normal desktop, I’d have opted for the x64 (64 bit) so I can make use of my 8gb of ram.  4gb or less is fine with the i386 build.

The first thing I noticed was the install looked a little more polished.  I had jumped from 8.04 to 8.10 with a ’system update’ so I never saw the 8.10 installer.  Selecting the disk I wished to overwrite was easy and the rest went pretty fast.

The bootloader replaced my installed WinXP loader but still kept an option to load it.  If this was more than a test machine, I’d quickly want to remove that delay to select the Kernel/OS just to get things moving fast.  On the note of fast, the OS loaded and was ready for use in under a minute.  Reading on Matts Blog he managed to trim this down to just under 18 seconds.

Ubuntu left me in the familiar Gnome interface and immediately I started tweaking.  Restricted drivers for the video were the first to add, Nvidia’s drivers provide much better use of their card than the default.  I’d recommend the same if you have Nvidia or ATI for your video card.  Most older and newer hardware is supported.

The desktop looked the same somewhat, but the font rendering looked much nicer.  Tweaking the aliasing from anti-aliasing to sub-pixel resulted in even better fonts.  This, visually was always a nag at me in the windows/linux conversion.  Now it looks like Linux (or X11) has finally caught up.

All the usual software was around, Open Office, Firefox, Pidgin (IM), Evolution (email), CD/DVD burning, imaging editing, and audio/video editing.  Anyone familiar with Ubuntu can find anything they want right out of the box.  Everything is here for the light user and the power user with an interface that is a reasonable layout.  Adding new software from the online application database is as easy as a few clicks.  All the software is packaged to install without issue.

As I get to use it more, I’ll make comments on it’s usability as a desktop.  Linux has made many strides from the command line to the desktop, but so has the competition.  XP increased over Windows 98 and OSX increased over MacOS. Right now, I’d still place Ubuntu’s Gnome interface as a step closer to WinXP.  The interface is cleaner, tighter than it has been in the past.  That was a large complaint that I have had with the few Windows managers I have had the experience with, too much wasted space.  Take Win7, this is arguably a step in the wrong direction in some places.  The directory listing is not as tight in explorer as it was in WinXP.  Little things like this can make tasks that normally were 1-2 steps and make them 3-4 once scrolling is added.

For now, I’ll play with this version and wait for 9.10 in a month or so.  By then it should be a few steps closer to the competition.  Here’s some more screen shots:

My name is Pete.  My interests are varied and specific all at the same time.  They range from Computers, Networking, Cars, Sci-Fi movies, Sci-Fi TV Shows, Music, Videography, Photography, and well anything else that needs MORE POWER.

In a few words I would best describe myself as “A jack of all trades, and a master of some.” I have done jobs from video rental retail, steamfitter (commercial fire sprinklers) apprentice, senior repair tech, warehouse logistics manager, to an IT systems integration engineer.

I have been into electronics and computers since the commodore 64 was the hot thing.  I have been taking PC’s apart and putting them together for about 18 years now.  Over the years I have worked in the IT field for tech repair shops, data centers, and currently for an IT systems integration company.  With a company like the one I work for I was able to start out in the cabling department.  I learned the industry cable color codes (or here) and how to properly terminate everything from a 1 pair cross connect to a 300pair feed run.  After that department I went into the PBX /VOIP phone department.  There I was able to learn the inner workings of a few major phone systems. This included Inter-Tel, Mitel, NEC, and of course Cisco.  My next and current step in the company is the IT department. My core role in the IT Team has evolved from a general tech, into a more well rounded tech with having a few specializations.  These specializations are a VMware practice manager, disaster recovery specialist, storage specialist (NetApp as a core vendor), backup and recovery specialist (Symantec focused), and finally IT systems integration engineer.

Well enough about the tech stuff. I will do my best to get my 2c about new tech and stuff that is coming out when I can, but about 7 weeks ago I have the first addition to my family. This makes writing tech articles a bit lower on “the list”.  I am sure that anyone with kids, or younger cousins, or siblings can understand.   This first article was solely typed out on my work blackberry (except the insert of the HTML links) on the train to and from the city when I wasn’t passed out sleeping.

I hope to be writing an article on virtualization, including server and workstation environments.  Any comments, questions, or suggestions for topics please you can e-mail me here pete at lifergeek dot com.

Best Regards,

Pete