Weekly Rant #2: Standardized laptops... I wish...

So I'm sure a lot of you out there have laptops. And I'm sure a lot of the people reading this have been more than mildly annoyed by the fact that it cost more to "build" one yourself than to buy one that almost meets your needs. Build is of course in quotations because 80% comes in the bare bones kits out there for them. Or maybe you just want to upgrade your graphics card? Good luck. While a standard's existed for laptop GPU's for some time, very few manufacturers have implemented them. Or hey, your screen just broke. But there are about 100 different kinds for the size screen your laptop uses. So you have to pay extra to get the one that's specifically made to work with your model.

So what do I want? I WANT STANDARDIZATION!!! Pretty much everyones desires could be covered by 5 versions of the same part. The keyboard for example. Need one version for 13" notebooks, then a standard one such as those on 14-16" notebooks, and a final full keyboard with keypad for 17"+ notebooks. 3 standard keyboards could cover the entire range of laptops. But does it exist? No.

My question is, why the hell not? There aren't even design issues caused by the keyboard and it's still not standardized. It's simply stupid. Oddly enough, a lot more complicated parts ARE STANDARDIZED! Ram, HDD, CD/DVD/BRay, and even the CPU in your laptop can be changed out with little to no hassle. All I really purpose is that we do this with every other internal part and the custom laptop cases for system building will follow. And don't give me that crap about heat dissipation because if everything is standardized, so are heatsinks and fans to the point where they can be matched appropriately.

Specific steps needed.

• TWO LCD type connectors to fit all regardless of size shape or resolution. One for fixed LCD and another for swivel tablet styles
• 3-5 touch pad sizes and mount standards (Buttons included).
• 3 Keyboard sizes / shapes... Just think of all the cool versions that fit the standard people will immediately come out with. Colors, lights, artsy stuff on them, you name it.
• 2 Standard connectors for Media / Application / Power buttons, one at back and one at front.
• Standard CPU / GPU placement so they can share the fan / heatsink.

This leaves only the motherboard, heatsink / fan, and laptop body having to be made for each other.

A New Found Respect For Yahoo!

As I explained in my first post, I am a Google fan boy. But really I've only seen it from a user's point of view. If there's one thing I've learned in the five days as the webmaster of this site it's that making websites discoverable by search engine's web crawlers is a pain in the butt. There's the META tags, and the site-maps, and the registering of the accounts on the major search players. It can be one of the most frustrating parts of building a website.

Each of the three major search providers (Google, Bing and Yahoo!) offer a webmaster toolkit to help webmasters get their site shown higher up when a user searches for certain key words. After fiddling with each of the sites, submitting site-maps, adding html meta tags to verify the accounts, etc. and trying to get everything the way I wanted, I realized Yahoo was absolutely incredible with their webmaster support. Their setup process is quick and painless. All I had to do was verify my ownership, upload my site map and boom within an hour I was on top of a Yahoo! search for "FaradTech" and "Farad Tech". Now, I may have just gotten lucky and that was just when the crawler was heading to my site, but hey, I was still impressed.

Google's setup wasn't quite as easy. There were a few more clicks involved and some debugging I had to do. Once I finally got everything in order it took a day or two of pleading, begging and crying to even get Google to show my site even in a search for my domain. But alas, when it finally happened and I saw my website on the top of that search list, there was all but tears of joy streaming from my face.

That brings me to Bing. I don't really have much to say other than that its still not seeing my site 5 days later. Their tools, while they may seem useful at first, really don't offer enough feedback to troubleshoot any problems that may have come about or even why the wannabe search engine's crawler hasn't even touched my site....IN 5 DAYS!!!! I guess that's why Microsoft has resorted to monkey labor to get their search algorithm better.

All in all in this section of the search wars I give Yahoo! two thumbs up for their web master support, Google one thumb up and Bing a wrinkled certificate for participating.

How To: Move Your Data to the Cloud

One of the hottest topics in computing these days is the "cloud". The cloud refers to off-site applications and data that may be accessed from anywhere you get an internet connection. Today, I'm going to show you how to move all of your basic personal data onto the cloud for worry free, stress free backup and recovery.

Step 1: Get your data to a computer


This is very easy if you are using a smartphone such as an iPhone, Windows Phone, Android Phone, Blackberry, Nokia, Palm OS phone, or WebOS phone. The software and cables needed to move your data into a program like Microsoft Outlook usually comes with your phone. However, if you are not using a smartphone, you may need to pick up an additional cable and some software. Most manufacturer's will offer the cable on their website and some even offer some proprietary software. PC Studio seems to be the most popular but you're going to have to do some research. Once all of your data is pulled into a program like Outlook, Windows Mail, Address Book, or some other equivalent we can work on moving it to the cloud.


Step 2: Pick A Cloud Service

There are a host of different online backup options. I'll discuss a few of the most popular do give you a better idea of which solutions meets your needs. The first option is for users of Windows Mobile. Microsoft will be launching its MyPhone service around the same time as the release of WIndows Phone 6.5. This service backs up everything, from pictures to text messages to phone numbers. The downside is that this information is only available either on your Windows Mobile device, or through a special web portal. This service is accessed through the web browser on your Windows Mobile device.

The second popular service is going to be Blackberry Enterprise Server. This is a service that only works with Blackberries and comes with a few downsides. The biggest downside is that all of this information will only be available through your Blackberry device or through your company's computers. Some companies won't allow you to move any of this data over to a new server or take it with you when you end employment with them. BES may be powered by either Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes. In most cases, your comapny's IT department will help you set this up.

The third popular option is Microsoft Exchange. Microsoft Exchange is an all encompassing service that pushes email, contact information, calendar events, and tasks across any device you have connected to it within seconds of changes being made. Most companies will offer Exchange services however it may also be provided by some schools. You may also purchase your own private exchange server for around $7 a month. The benefit of this is that there is no desktop syncing required. Most smartphones offer support for Exchange with a few simple set up options. If you don't have a smartphone, but you've moved all of your data to Outlook or Entourage, you can set up exchange with the desktop clients. Emails are automatically pushed to your phone within seconds of the email being sent. Other members on the same exchange server may push calendar event invitations to you to accept or deny. Once accepted, the event is automatically pushed to your calendar across all devices and computers. This is my favorite option, and I depend on Exchange on a daily basis.

Since most of the options I've discusssed are business or corporate based, I want to talk about one really great option for everyone else called Google Sync. Google Sync is a free service provided by Google that is based on Microsoft Exchange. Best of all, it's free to all GMail users. Now, you don't get some of the benefits of a full blown Exchange server. Google Sync only syncs your Calendar and Contacts, but at least it's free. Set up is very easy. For smartphones, just set up Google sync as you would an Exchange account. If you need help, Google offers some step by step guides on the Sync website. For non-smartphones, sync all of your data to a program like Outlook or Entourage and then follow Google's instructions for setting up the Google exchange server using your desktop client. Once changes are made, either through the phone, desktop client, or Google's web portal, all three points of entry are updated instantly.

Step 3: Sync, and Sync Often


Obviously cloud backups are only really useful if they are current. So remember to follow all the steps and sync at least once a week or more. In the case of Exchange and Google Sync, the backup is done literally the second data changes which is why they are the optimum solution.

I've been a little vague in this how-to but only because there are so many different options. Try and do a little research on your particular situation. I highly recommend either Exchange or Google Sync as these are the easiest for those of us not in the corporate world. Do some searching and see what other users of your device are doing for backup. There are some third party applications that will save all PIM data to a file and you can upload that file onto and off-site backup service. This isn't true cloud backup, but it's better than losing 200 contacts over Memorial Day weekend when you drop your phone in the lake.

80+ is the Only Way to Go.

Here in TN we have pretty inexpensive electricity at about 9 1/2 cents per kWh. And while investigating the monetary advantage of buying 80+ certified PSU's over el'cheapo power supplies I've come to this conclusion. The manufacturing and sale of power supplies that don't meet at least the minimum 80+ certification should be illegal...

Reason why? On a 300 watt machine, a nice desktop machine with a decent video card, the cost of running it for a single year on a 75% efficient power supply, typical of $15-25 power supplies costs about $331 / year if left on all the time. On an 80+ power supply, $35-40, it cost about $310. So assuming you replace your computer every 3 years, it will actually save you $40 to build the PC with an 80+ certified PSU.

And those aren't even the best. I know a lot of people out there put high end quad cores with 2-4 GPU's in their computers which can easily pull 6-7 hundred watts. At the 600 watt level an 80+ Bronze still only cost $40 more than the cheap unit and could save you $80 a year running your machine.

So the verdict, el'cheapo can cost significantly more in the long run and in a world where energy is getting more and more precious, they waste an awful lot. so.....

DON"T BUY ANY PC WITHOUT AN 80+ CERTIFIED POWER SUPPLY!!!

Weekly Rant #1: Apple / Mac / Machintosh... Whatever they're called.

A lot of us remember the good old days, or at least the remnants of the days when computers weren't standardized, Windows didn't exist, and a multitude of different "PC's" that ran on different architectures existed. Tandy, Commodore, IBM, and Apple as well as others fought for their share of this amazing new market of personal computing. Tandy eventually fell to making IBM compatible computers before dying off. Commodore produced the number one selling computer of all time, the commodore 64, but later had power struggles that led the company to it's death despite having hardware 2-3 years ahead of it's time. IBM opened their standard, so that anyone could make an IBM compatible computer without paying royalties creating what we today call the PC.

Then there's Apple. They were as proprietary as you could get and pricey. They suffered power struggles as well to the extent of firing Steve Jobs. But they're still here? Not only are they still here, they're doing quite well for themselves. But why?

As for how they survived the early years devoted users and lawsuits over the GUI mostly. In the mid 90's Microsoft saved them by buying $150 Million in nonvoting stock from their company and not revoking Office for Mac as they had threatened. This of course was just to end the legal battles over the GUI. But more recently, being trendy seems to be the only thing that they had going for them till the Iphone / Ipod touch. ( The one device concept that actually impresses me and isn't ridiculously overpriced )

During my time as a help desk tech I've noticed two groups of people who buy Macs PC's. People who do it to be trendy, and those who couldn't know less about computers that will pay nearly any amount of money to ensure even the slightest bit of perceived usability gain. I use perceived because I've met as many people that absolutely hate the way OSx is setup as those who like it. I find it no better, no worse in usability than windows other than the Mac keyboard layout makes no sense to me. (Command key placement sucks...)

My problems with Mac starts here... Elitist. Gah I hate them so much. Regardless of what they're following. When a person puts logical arguments aside, makes judgments based purely on personal feelings, and then insists that they're right, it just drives me up the wall. Like the first fact. A Mac is a PC. Since they switched to x86 they are identical hardware except for an EFI chip instead of a BIOS, which makes a difference in the functionality of the machine for oh, say the first 4-5 seconds after bootup. So, if they're the same, why does a Mac cost so much more?It's not OSx, which sells for a little less than $100 online.

Some may say, "They're more stable". I'd like to point out a few things.

A. If Windows only ran on 10% of the devices made, it may be that stable too.

B. If stability matters enough to where 2-3 weeks of continuously being on and used, as I've done on multiple occasions with multiple machines running XP, isn't stable enough, then you probably should be running Linux without a GUI.

"They don't get viruses.", Well of course they don't, they're 10% market share. If I'm trying to rip people off I'm gonna go for the biggest piece of the pie. Secondly, they're BSD, Mach, and GNU based. And if my understanding is correct, Mach doesn't really exist outside of OSX, and BSD has less of a user base than Linux leaving only GNU and their UI's vulnerabilities. Also, I'd like to point out that if you're careful, Windows doesn't get viruses either. I ran my laptop for more than 3 years using it every day without a virus or spyware scanner and never got either. But if you want to pay more so that you can do questionable things on the internet, by all means. Or you could use free Avira and Spybot.

I would say maybe I'm missing something, but the more I use Macs the less difference I really see. It's still a PC, running a PC operating system, using the same internet and at an increasing percentage, the same software.

And what's worse, is that they really are making a boat load of profit off each machine sold because while they may spend 10-20% more building them out of high quality parts than that OEM machine the majority of us use, they turn around and charge 50-100% more depending on how high end the machine is. Don't believe me? Dell does the same thing with their XPS lineup. And if you want, lookup the parts used in a Mac and then compare the prices. They're overpriced for the same cursed thing. And when people pay $2k for a $600 machine, children starve. $408 = Child going to school, having meals every day, and making a life for them and their families for an entire year. So that Mac just took more than 3 years of a better life for some kid that'll never have a chance. Think about that.

10 Things You Should Know About Me - Eric's Turn

1. Background: I'm a 5th year electrical engineering student from the University of Tennessee.
2. I love gadgets. Currently on my night stand there are 5 different smart phones that I interchange on a random basis. I love the fact that I never have to have a full fledged computer around to keep up on news and communicate with my friends
3. I'm very opinionated. I will rant, constantly. It WILL piss you off at least once. Deal with it.
4. I hate Blackberries
5. I HATE Blackberries
6. I don't drink the Google Kool-Aid. I don't like the fact that one company knows who my friends are, what sites I visit, can read my email, has access to my call history, controls access to my documents, can see my calendar, and knows where I live. I separate my information across several providers.
7. I DO drink the Microsoft Kool-Aid. I like Bing. Windows Mobile is tops. Xbox 360 is amazing. I use Hotmail. I love using Office and Outlook. Windows 7 cured me of Mac Envy. I haven't tried a Zune but only because the Zune store has not integrated itself with Windows Mobile or Xbox Live. Seriously, Microsoft, if you could blend all of your services together across multiple platforms, you could kill Apple. I should be able to see who's on Xbox Live from my Windows Mobile phone and play tracks from my Zune over Wifi on my Xbox 360.
8. I drive fast. If you're going slower than 80 in the left hand lane, I will ride your tail. I will cut you off, I will flip you the bird. Get out of my way, seriously.
9. I enjoy the finer things. I like a good scotch, expensive cigarettes, expensive phones, expensive hotels. Yet there's always a soft spot in my heart for bargain brand beer.
10. I will do anything for a good time. I self medicate but only because my ADD is so bad, I have to do something to keep my mind from racing at 120 MPH.

Look forward to some of my future posts as I will be doing some recurring mini-columns. Each week I will post at least one if not many mobile tech posts titled This Week in Mobile. Once a week I will also try to do an editorial piece about something that's pissing me off in Technology. I also hope to do some app and software reviews for both mobile platforms, and desktop platforms dealing with mobile technologies.

Twitter Down (Update)

Twitter is back up. CNN and Twitter's blog are reporting that they were hit with a Denial of Service attack. This is the second time in the past week a major web entity got DDOS'ed. Last weekend blog conglomerate Gawker Media was hit as well. This is becoming an annoying trend that is stopping my flow of information. Two words for these hackers:"Stop it!"

Spotify-The Best Darn Internet Music Player

If you haven't heard of Spotify yet be glad I'm telling you now. Spotify is what Pandora and Last.fm wish they were. It essentially allows you to play any song they have on their servers for free as many times as you want. You can save these songs to a playlists and sync them with iPhones. Unfortunately if you don't live in Europe you wont be able to access it on spotify.com. If you do live state side it stinks that you cant get the app for your iPhone and that you can't use this link to try it out on your computer. But they are working on getting it across the pond as soon as the RIAA takes the stick out of their you know what.

Twitter Down

Not sure if it's just me but around 11:40 today twitter has been frustratingly down. What to do when the social client goes down? Blog about it!

Google to Standardize Web Video

If you're one of those few who gets a funny feeling about web pages that use proprietary standards or you just dislike flash, then we've got some good news for you.

Google, who's recently been pushing HTML 5, their open 3d platform for web pages o3d, and basically anything that opens up the web, has just spent a rather large $106.5 million to come to some neutral ground between browser makers on replacing flash with a standardized video codec by buying a little known company On2. Speculation is that they'll turn around and open source the VP8 video codec with a license that will hopefully calm some worries between Apple and Mozilla. If their codec is as good as it's shown here, I'm excited to see this go through. Now let's cross our fingers and hope the ever quiet, standards defying, IE supports this in the future.

Possibly the best movie ever

Combine Memoirs of a Geisha, Power Rangers, and Kill Bill what do you get?

ROBOGEISHA!!!

Old Dead Guy of the Week: Michael Faraday [ODGotW]

This will be the first in a series of weekly articles about the famous scientists and "natural philosophers" that gave us the building blocks of the computers, iPhones, and general gadgetry we have come to know and love.

For our inaugural article we have chosen our namesake, Michael Faraday (1791-1867). The man for whom the unit for capacitance, was named, was one of the earliest investigators into electricity and magnetism, among other things. The experiment/invention that put him on the map (and got him in some trouble from lack of citing sources) is a direct predecessor to the electric motor and was the first person to demonstrate a continuous mechanical rotation due to the effects of electricity by spinning a magnet in some mercury. Some other E&M discoveries he made were the voltaic pile (an early capacitor), mutual inductance (the electromagnetic property that allows the transformer in that power brick tethered to your laptop to do its job), which lead to his description of the interactions between electric and magnetic fields (which drove James Maxwell to develop a series of equations that would later become the bane of physics and electrical engineering students everywhere) and most of all, he laid the foundations for the outlining a description of electricity with the ideas of voltage and current.

That is why Michael Faraday is our first Old Dead Guy of the Week!

Lunchtime Links

Here's some links to pour over during your afternoon meal

• OMFG Robots!
• A lovely Cracked article on video game controllers
• The PS3 is losing some weight and looking great!
• Gawker Media gets DDoS'ed
• Eric Schmidt leaves Apple board of directors (yes, each link is a different story about the same thing)
  

10 Things Tech You Should Know About Anti-Pirate

1. Background: I am also a 4th year Electrical Engineering student at the University of Tennessee.
   
2. I'm a human being... Unlike copjon... Though I would have always imagined a computer being better at circuits than him...
   
3. THE ONLY THING APPLE DID RIGHT WAS THE IPHONE AND LYING TO PEOPLE... That said, the iphone's pretty cool. And I guess all in all they're really no more evil than Microsoft, they just pocket more of your money per computer.
4. Microsoft made windows XP and windows 7... If that's all they ever made, maybe they wouldn't suck so much.
5. Copjon likes to paint himself as a computer nerd... Why does he always ask me for help with his linux problems? :P
6. I like Google, they're kinda like Sully from Monsters INC. There this big massive corporate monster that's really just fluffy and gentle. Unlike Microsoft and Mac... Microsoft is more like dwarves in a mountain sitting on their gold and not really doing much with it. And Apple, is kinda like a Succubus, they lure you in with trendy and sexy and then steal everything you have leaving you naked and shamed on the floor.
7. I firmly believe the Ipod is the creation of good advertising, not good device making. I've yet to be impressed with the durability or sound quallity of one when compared to Sony or Creative.
   
8. Lol, the Zii's processor is better than my laptops... :(
9. COPJON IS A HORRIBLE PERSON WHO HATES BABY SEALS!!! I like green. It's a pretty color. But I prefer being tanish... oh. Yeah, being good to the enviroment = awesomeness.
10. 10 years away isn't as bad as that 2 years off that comes 20 years later... or never... JUST RELEASE THE DANG PRODUCT ALREADY!!!

MRI Hungry, Noms Gurney

Sometimes I see something and it just makes me laugh. This is one of those things. Thank you FAILblog for brightening my day!

10 Things Tech You Should Know About Me

Just to get to know me a bit, here are 10 things you should know about me and where I stand on pertinent tech issues.

1. Background: I am 4th year Electrical Engineering student at the University of Tennessee, so I generally look at hardware from a nuts and bolts standpoint. I guess you can take that for what its worth.
   
2. I am not a mac, I am not a PC, I am not a Linux, I am a Yes. (Though technically everyone is a PC).
   
3. I am not overly fond of the Apple organization for how they treat developers and how little they trust their consumers with understanding technical knowledge. However, I do think OSX is a good idea and think their mobile devices are quite revolutionary if not over priced.
4. I like Microsoft for what they are good at. Operating Systems (debatable) and Office Suites (also debatable). I do not however like when Microsoft attempts to go out of their comfort zone in mobile devices, internet search and of course internet life. WinMo, Bing, and live deserve a big red stamp with the letters F-A-I-L put across it. A word of advice to the guys in Redmond...leave that stuff to Google, Apple, Palm, Blackberry, Yahoo...you get the idea. To end on a positive note for MSFT, I give a hearty two thumbs up to Windows 7, It's the best OS they've made in a long while.
5. I am a bit of a fanboy when it comes to Linux. I've run several distros including Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, gOS, and Fedora, with Ubuntu being my favorite. If there weren't so many software compatibility issues I would use it full time. However, there are, so I continue to dual boot.
6. In Google I trust. My life is highly embedded in the Google-sphere, I don't think there is a web app of theirs I haven't touched and at times I find myself on a mission to convert all and bring them to the Church of Google. On Google tech: I love the "cloud" and nearly everything in it, meh on Android (it's nice but doesn't make me scream "HOLY FREAKING SH*T!!!"), and I am extremely excited about seeing what they do with Chrome OS.
7. I don't use an iPod. It's not that they're bad devices, in fact as I stated before, they have become drivers of the mobile tech industry. Its just that for what you get, competitors like Creative consistently put out better products for much much less cash.
   
8. Speaking of Creative...if you haven't heard about Zii, I suggest you take a look. In short its a processor that can adapt to the task at hand. Its much smaller and uses less power than an x86, yet [allegedly] competes with it when it comes to FLOPS. Needless to say, it kicks the crap out of ARM and is perfectly suited for the mobile device market.
   
9. I'm a fan of green living, but don't always practice what I preach... sometimes there just isn't a recycling bin within 50 ft and it's unfortunate, but that baby seal will just have to deal with choking on my plastic Coke bottle.
10. One thing that always "grinds my gears" is the phrase "10 years away." Every so often a really revolutionary piece of technology will come out and someone will label it as "10 years away" and that's when I know that piece of tech has an optimistic 50/50 shot at getting into main stream use. [see superecapacitors and memristors]

I hope this gives you an incite into how I look at the technology industry. I'm sure many of you will disagree with me on some issues and that's why I chose blogger to make this site, so that you can comment and argue your points. Starting tomorrow I should start posting and commenting on the top topics of the day. If that's too far away, feel free follow me on Twitter.

Welcome!

Welcome to the FaradTech blog! We will be posting commentary, sharing links tips and tricks about new and old technology and the modern tech lifestyle. Stay tuned and feel free to add us to your favorite RSS reader!