So it's time for a new phone. Not only is my old one not holding a charge and acting strange from time to time, but I've hit my upgrade time for my "New Every 2" plan. Thanks to this discount and my expenses being reduced lately, I can finally step into the 21st century of communication, I can finally get a smartphone!
Specifically, a Blackberry Storm.
It should be here on Friday. I'm totally stoked. I'll report back after I get it and start playing with it.
Really... I wanted an Iphone, but AT&T's network SUCKS in Mount Pleasant, so getting an Iphone would be about the stupidest thing I could do!
Showing posts with label Hardware. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hardware. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Thursday, March 19, 2009
NO MORE THUMB DRIVES!!
Thumb Drives are great. I can't even begin to explain how useful it is for me to have 16GB of storage in such a small form factor. I keep 8+ GB of music on my thumb drive so I've got plenty of fresh tunes to listen to at work, on the road... wherever! I keep a couple hundred meg or so of various documents... beer recipes, food recipes, resumes, handy how-tos, diagrams... lots of random stuff on there. I use it to hold avi files to watch on my laptop on the couch. I use it to hold data while I work on "clients" computers. I use it to share all sorts of media with my non-bittorrent savvy friends, or those with slow internet connections. I can't even fully sum up just how handy it is to have so much space available anywhere I've got a USB port... which is just about anywhere nowadays.
But I should back up... Thumb drives "were" great, I "did" use my thumb drive for all of these uses... until it DIED. My current (dead) drive is an OCZ ATV 16GB flash drive. It worked wonderfully for 9 months... fast, lots of room, water resistant... I had nothing to complain about! When I bought it from Newegg last June, the ratings were pretty good, at least they were good enough for me to buy it and Newegg ratings are a HUGE part of any buying decision I make when I purchase tech equipment of almost any kind. Well when I look at them now... they've taken a serious hit. It seems that my situation with this drive failing after a short to medium length period of time is not at all unique. In fact... if I were considering this thumb drive right now... I would not buy it. It's got an overall three "egg" (star) rating, with only 48% of ratings at 5 stars, including a 2-star rating from me. I try to find products that have an overall 4 or 5 star rating, with preferably 75%+ ratings at 5 star, and that normally provides me with a high quality, highly functional equipment.
Well that provides me with a bit of a problem... OCZ IS going to replace my ATV 16GB drive for me (but I'm responsible for paying for shipment to OCZ, hmmm... that doesn't make me very happy even though it's light and will be cheap.). But that still leaves me with an unreliable thumb drive, one that I don't want to use for anything anywhere NEAR important. I can't even count on this drive to last a few weeks according to all of the reviews on Newegg.
So I've been looking at other thumb drives, preferably at 16GB, to use as my "primary" drive and keep my OCZ as just a music storage device. Well... I'm not exactly liking what I see. When I search for 16GB thumb drives and sort by rating, I find a few drives with 5 star ratings but not enough ratings to count, and then a few drives with 4 star ratings... Taking a look a the Corsair Flash Voyager 16GB we've got an overall rating of 4-stars, ok so far. But when you look at the breakdown only 53% of ratings are at 5-star... not quite as good as I would like, but hey, it does come with a 10-year warranty! The next drive in the list is by OCZ... well that's a no-go, I will not buy another OCZ flash drive! Even though the ratings on this drive are a fair bit better (4-star overall, 61% 5-star)... I just don't trust them, and I don't want to have to pay to ship another drive back if it fails! Next in the list is the Pariot Xporter XT 16GB... I don't have any experience with Patriot RAM or flash devices, but the ratings are getting better, 4-star overall and 67% 5-star, but with less total ratings. Next is another OCZ... And further, not only are the exact numbers not up to my (apparently) high standards... when I get to reading the reviews of any of the thumb drives I've been looking at... I'm not comforted. It seems to be pretty common for thumb drives to die young, to have random incompatibilities with random hardware rendering them anywhere from slow to completely inoperable. It's not at all comforting... Can I not rely on a thumb drive for storage of important data? I had hopes of tinkering with installing a small Linux distro on a drive so I always had a familiar desktop with me no matter where I go...
So what in the hell is one supposed to do for long-term, portable, bootable, important data storage? Print it off? Seriously... this can't be too difficult. I used to have a Lexar 1GB thumb drive that has now lasted for close to 5 years, I know it's still working because one of my friends has it and still uses it. External Hard Drives are not a good solution because platter-based magnetic data storage is physically fragile, I need something I can throw in my backpack and take with me without having to worry about keeping from breaking. I can't afford... much less do I know if I can trust a SSD drive... they're based on Flash RAM too! And I don't know if I can trust Flash RAM anymore... For example, SSDs with USB connectivity start at $96 for a 32GB drive with an average of less than 1 review.
Fwiw... if I relax my limitations a bit on the size of the thumb drive I want, I can find some thumb drives that DO meet my exacting standards. But one of my requirements for a good thumb drive was that I be able to fit an ISO of a complete dual-layer DVD on that drive, with room to spare. That basically means 16GB is the minimum, and it seems that 16GB thumb drives are CRAP.
But I should back up... Thumb drives "were" great, I "did" use my thumb drive for all of these uses... until it DIED. My current (dead) drive is an OCZ ATV 16GB flash drive. It worked wonderfully for 9 months... fast, lots of room, water resistant... I had nothing to complain about! When I bought it from Newegg last June, the ratings were pretty good, at least they were good enough for me to buy it and Newegg ratings are a HUGE part of any buying decision I make when I purchase tech equipment of almost any kind. Well when I look at them now... they've taken a serious hit. It seems that my situation with this drive failing after a short to medium length period of time is not at all unique. In fact... if I were considering this thumb drive right now... I would not buy it. It's got an overall three "egg" (star) rating, with only 48% of ratings at 5 stars, including a 2-star rating from me. I try to find products that have an overall 4 or 5 star rating, with preferably 75%+ ratings at 5 star, and that normally provides me with a high quality, highly functional equipment.
Well that provides me with a bit of a problem... OCZ IS going to replace my ATV 16GB drive for me (but I'm responsible for paying for shipment to OCZ, hmmm... that doesn't make me very happy even though it's light and will be cheap.). But that still leaves me with an unreliable thumb drive, one that I don't want to use for anything anywhere NEAR important. I can't even count on this drive to last a few weeks according to all of the reviews on Newegg.
So I've been looking at other thumb drives, preferably at 16GB, to use as my "primary" drive and keep my OCZ as just a music storage device. Well... I'm not exactly liking what I see. When I search for 16GB thumb drives and sort by rating, I find a few drives with 5 star ratings but not enough ratings to count, and then a few drives with 4 star ratings... Taking a look a the Corsair Flash Voyager 16GB we've got an overall rating of 4-stars, ok so far. But when you look at the breakdown only 53% of ratings are at 5-star... not quite as good as I would like, but hey, it does come with a 10-year warranty! The next drive in the list is by OCZ... well that's a no-go, I will not buy another OCZ flash drive! Even though the ratings on this drive are a fair bit better (4-star overall, 61% 5-star)... I just don't trust them, and I don't want to have to pay to ship another drive back if it fails! Next in the list is the Pariot Xporter XT 16GB... I don't have any experience with Patriot RAM or flash devices, but the ratings are getting better, 4-star overall and 67% 5-star, but with less total ratings. Next is another OCZ... And further, not only are the exact numbers not up to my (apparently) high standards... when I get to reading the reviews of any of the thumb drives I've been looking at... I'm not comforted. It seems to be pretty common for thumb drives to die young, to have random incompatibilities with random hardware rendering them anywhere from slow to completely inoperable. It's not at all comforting... Can I not rely on a thumb drive for storage of important data? I had hopes of tinkering with installing a small Linux distro on a drive so I always had a familiar desktop with me no matter where I go...
So what in the hell is one supposed to do for long-term, portable, bootable, important data storage? Print it off? Seriously... this can't be too difficult. I used to have a Lexar 1GB thumb drive that has now lasted for close to 5 years, I know it's still working because one of my friends has it and still uses it. External Hard Drives are not a good solution because platter-based magnetic data storage is physically fragile, I need something I can throw in my backpack and take with me without having to worry about keeping from breaking. I can't afford... much less do I know if I can trust a SSD drive... they're based on Flash RAM too! And I don't know if I can trust Flash RAM anymore... For example, SSDs with USB connectivity start at $96 for a 32GB drive with an average of less than 1 review.
Fwiw... if I relax my limitations a bit on the size of the thumb drive I want, I can find some thumb drives that DO meet my exacting standards. But one of my requirements for a good thumb drive was that I be able to fit an ISO of a complete dual-layer DVD on that drive, with room to spare. That basically means 16GB is the minimum, and it seems that 16GB thumb drives are CRAP.
Friday, August 22, 2008
An easy way to get Broadcom wireless working in Ubuntu 8.04
First things first, I am by no means a linux guru, in fact I don't even really qualify as a 'Nix geek! The extent of my systems knowledge with Linux is working with the gui in Ubuntu, and the occasional sudo apt-get or something of the sort. I can work my way around a Windows install with little trouble, but I'm still learning the basics when it comes to Linux OSes. So some true 'Nix geeks might even see this and tell me that there are many things which I think I understand that I really don't. I wouldn't be surprised in the least bit! If you're a 'Nix geek and you're reading this, tell me where I'm off track, cause I don't know any better! It's probably my fault for trying to think of everything in terms of their Windows counterparts anyway!
So I inherited this laptop that I'm using right now, it's a HP Compaq nx6110. 1.8ghz Pentium M, 1GB RAM, base model machine but it serves my web-browsing purposes well! I decided to load Ubuntu on it when I got it a few months ago, as an extension of my experimenting with Ubuntu on my desktop, now I have a computer to do networking with! I will make no claims to this working on any other pc or hardware. Running lspci on my machine shows this line for the wireless hardware:
02:04.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4306 802.11b/g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 03)
So anyway, the first time I installed Ubuntu on here, I did lots of reading on how to get the wireless to work, things like ndiswrapper and bc43wcutter and the like. Very little of it made sense to me, and so I just chose a how-to instructional document and started working it. About 1/3 of the way into that documents process Ubuntu suddenly indicated that it could see my wireless, could find the non-free drivers for it, and was ready to install my wireless. Cool! So I, like any good geek would do, said screw TFM and let's see what this does! Sure enough, Ubuntu/Synaptic took care of downloading my wireless drivers, and set them up with no hitch! Sweet. Of course, the problem was, I had no idea what I had done that had suddenly allowed Ubuntu to finish the job for me. All I could remember was that it seemed the last thing I had done was enable the Multiverse repository of non-free Ubuntu/Linux software. But since everything worked right, I didn't worry too much about it!
I inherited this computer with a case of Alzheimer's, it had a "bad" hard drive. Windows/NTFS were reporting all sorts of faulty sectors and the like, and WinXP was not even able to install on it anymore. Funny, Ubuntu and it's file system (which ever it is, I'm not even sure...) seemed to have no problems with it, for a while. It finally but the dust the other day, and so I was in the spot of having to reinstall Ubuntu, and thus re-setup my wireless.
Well I remembered that there seemed to be a connection with the Multiverse repository, so I went about trying to enable that... and it seemed it already was.
This is where I started to get lucky. I got annoyed and grabbed an ethernet cable, as I would need to plug in before I could download the driver anyway, and did some quick browsing. I came across a page that required flash, which I had not yet installed. I clicked on the missing plug indication, which then asks you which flash player you would like to use. I selected 'Gnash' and the next thing Ubuntu did was ask me if I wanted to enable the repository 'Universe'. Well, yes, yes I do. And in fact I also want to enable Multiverse. So I canceled the Gnash installation and went back to the plugin selector to see if Adobe Flash was hosted in the multivers... It was! So after installing Gnash, I rebooted. I don't know if this is necessary, but the first time I installed Ubuntu prompted me to install wireless drivers after I rebooted. This time it did not do that. However when I went into Hardware Drivers, there was now the option to enable the Broadcom wireless driver. It finished the install on it's own like the first time, and I am now tether-free! Woohoo!
Allright, so here it is step-by-step. If on the offchance anybody else out there tries this, post back in the comments whether it worked, and what system you're running. The line from the lspci command that includes your wireless hardware would be most helpful.
1. Connect via Ethernet Cable on fresh install
2. Browse to a site that includes Flash
3. Tell Firefox to install the missing plugins, and the select Adobe Flash
4. Select 'Yes' to enable the Multiverse Repository, finish installing Flash (You might be able to cancel it, I don't see why not)
5. Reboot (I don't know if this is necessary, try it without and let us know!)
6. Select 'Hardware Drivers' on the System>Administration menu
7. Hopefully the driver will appear as available, if so click to enable it
8. B43wcutter should install, follow it's prompts including saying yes to something about accessing firmware
9. Enjoy wireless internet!
So I inherited this laptop that I'm using right now, it's a HP Compaq nx6110. 1.8ghz Pentium M, 1GB RAM, base model machine but it serves my web-browsing purposes well! I decided to load Ubuntu on it when I got it a few months ago, as an extension of my experimenting with Ubuntu on my desktop, now I have a computer to do networking with! I will make no claims to this working on any other pc or hardware. Running lspci on my machine shows this line for the wireless hardware:
02:04.0 Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4306 802.11b/g Wireless LAN Controller (rev 03)
So anyway, the first time I installed Ubuntu on here, I did lots of reading on how to get the wireless to work, things like ndiswrapper and bc43wcutter and the like. Very little of it made sense to me, and so I just chose a how-to instructional document and started working it. About 1/3 of the way into that documents process Ubuntu suddenly indicated that it could see my wireless, could find the non-free drivers for it, and was ready to install my wireless. Cool! So I, like any good geek would do, said screw TFM and let's see what this does! Sure enough, Ubuntu/Synaptic took care of downloading my wireless drivers, and set them up with no hitch! Sweet. Of course, the problem was, I had no idea what I had done that had suddenly allowed Ubuntu to finish the job for me. All I could remember was that it seemed the last thing I had done was enable the Multiverse repository of non-free Ubuntu/Linux software. But since everything worked right, I didn't worry too much about it!
I inherited this computer with a case of Alzheimer's, it had a "bad" hard drive. Windows/NTFS were reporting all sorts of faulty sectors and the like, and WinXP was not even able to install on it anymore. Funny, Ubuntu and it's file system (which ever it is, I'm not even sure...) seemed to have no problems with it, for a while. It finally but the dust the other day, and so I was in the spot of having to reinstall Ubuntu, and thus re-setup my wireless.
Well I remembered that there seemed to be a connection with the Multiverse repository, so I went about trying to enable that... and it seemed it already was.
This is where I started to get lucky. I got annoyed and grabbed an ethernet cable, as I would need to plug in before I could download the driver anyway, and did some quick browsing. I came across a page that required flash, which I had not yet installed. I clicked on the missing plug indication, which then asks you which flash player you would like to use. I selected 'Gnash' and the next thing Ubuntu did was ask me if I wanted to enable the repository 'Universe'. Well, yes, yes I do. And in fact I also want to enable Multiverse. So I canceled the Gnash installation and went back to the plugin selector to see if Adobe Flash was hosted in the multivers... It was! So after installing Gnash, I rebooted. I don't know if this is necessary, but the first time I installed Ubuntu prompted me to install wireless drivers after I rebooted. This time it did not do that. However when I went into Hardware Drivers, there was now the option to enable the Broadcom wireless driver. It finished the install on it's own like the first time, and I am now tether-free! Woohoo!
Allright, so here it is step-by-step. If on the offchance anybody else out there tries this, post back in the comments whether it worked, and what system you're running. The line from the lspci command that includes your wireless hardware would be most helpful.
1. Connect via Ethernet Cable on fresh install
2. Browse to a site that includes Flash
3. Tell Firefox to install the missing plugins, and the select Adobe Flash
4. Select 'Yes' to enable the Multiverse Repository, finish installing Flash (You might be able to cancel it, I don't see why not)
5. Reboot (I don't know if this is necessary, try it without and let us know!)
6. Select 'Hardware Drivers' on the System>Administration menu
7. Hopefully the driver will appear as available, if so click to enable it
8. B43wcutter should install, follow it's prompts including saying yes to something about accessing firmware
9. Enjoy wireless internet!
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