The Dumping Ground

I upgraded to Vista SP1 this weekend. There really is no reason not to try, especially since the version I have has a disk-imaging backup tool. So I could lobotomize my machine and re-insert the old image if something went horribly wrong. Heck, anybody with a Linux boot disc and dd could do the same. Everything went smoothly, unlike Thud, who seems to constantly have problems with the thing.

Personally, I don't find Vista to be the steaming pile of crap that is so commonly reported on Slashdot and the like - well, any more steaming than a Microsoft operating system usually is. I mean, sure there have been some minor hiccups with certain driver upgrades, but it's never blue-screened on me. I've even had some updates go awry, but it recovered nicely when I did a hard power-cycle. Sure, it's not a break-through tower of innovation like OS X, but it's a relatively solid next-version operating system.

I don't even mind the UAC security pop-ups that are so widely panned. Actually, I can't see how they would be at all annoying unless your daily job involves opening and closing administrative and system maintenance tools all day. And in that case: What, exactly, do you do for a living? Though playing Mother-May-I with my computer is neither the best nor final move in the security game, it is a reasonable response to certain classes of maliciousness and mistakes that are quite common in the current landscape. I appreciate UAC in the same way I appreciate needing to sudo when using Linux.

This is my first foray into this argument, and I'm pulling out my toe after this brief dip into the chilly waters of the Vista-sucks sub-genre. (Being baited just isn't as fun as it used to be.) It seems to me that most of the people howling about how much Vista sucks are just the usual slash-trolls, squirming in pleasure at the orgy of "Vista Sucks; Mac/Linux/BeOS/Whatever Rules" articles and posts, just because they can. That's cool; whatever gets your rocks off. But all-in-all, Vista is pretty good. Sure, there are problems with it, but they're being fixed as fast as a megalithic monopoly can move. And how quickly we've forgotten that the same rhetoric was spewed about the now-venerable Windows XP when it was released. It's the same people who swore they'd stick with Windows 98 until 2098.

So, to summarize: Vista is OK. Service Pack 1 installed with no problems. And my mission of lowering the signal-to-noise ratio in the internets, even if ever-so-slightly, has been successful. Back to work for me.

"Scoop Your Poop" created from makes a great desktop; icons to the left by Rob!, used under a CC-BY 2.0 license. "Vista of Flowers" created from Carlsbad Flower Field March 2007-DSC_3575 by akaporn, used under a CC-BY 2.0 license. Vista logo (a trademark of Microsoft) taken from the web, and used fairly in good faith for parody and description.

With the release of Vista SP1, I decided it would be a good time to back up my computer - in case something went horribly wrong. Better safe than sorry, or somesuch. But when I tried to run a backup this morning, I was rebuffed with this inscrutable message.

It got it right - I was running on battery power. But, really? This is the best you can do? I mean, I'm sure there's some really good Raymond Chen reason for why I can't or shouldn't or Microsoft-knows-best reason I haven't thought of as to why this is. I can come up with several on my own, in my head.

At least tell me why I can't start a backup on battery power. As it is, I feel like I need to jump through a hoop for no reason at all.

I spent most of Saturday trying to put a new hard drive in my Kurobox. The Kuro, named Lulu, has really become quite central to our life here at home since I got it, which is coming up on two years now (I think). It acts as a print server, a scanner server, a file server, and a TiVo media server (via Galleon), all on a minuscule 266MHz PPC processor and a paltry 128MB of memory. It has a very small profile, is super-quiet, and uses a tiny amount of power. Basically, it just sort of sits there doing its thing. (Before yesterday, I had over 400 days of uptime! It doesn't hurt being on the same power grid as the White House...)

But when I bought it, I wasn't sure it would actually do what I wanted it to do, so rather than drop another couple hundred bucks for a hard drive that might prove useless in the event I bricked the Kuro, I conned a good friend of mine into letting me borrow an old 40GB drive to just throw in it.

Well, after complaining about the lack of space for some time now, yesterday Lulu got an upgrade from 40GB to 500GB. While I had her on the floor in pieces, I realized with some delight that the Chumby has significantly more CPU power and twice as much RAM as the Kuro. Crazy!

The era of the general-purpose personal computer really is over, isn't it? Not because we're going to stop using them, but because specialized appliance-like devices are taking over. There are six devices listed in the device table of my router right now, and only two of them are computers. The rest are: the TiVo, the Wii, the Chumby, and the Kurobox. There'd be seven, but the DS isn't on right now. Each of them is quite specialized to its task, and each has its own purpose for being on the network. In some cases, like the Kuro and the TiVo, they interact in powerful ways. In others, like the Wii and the DS, they are quite seperate.

Also interesting is the selection of operating systems. None of the appliances in our home runs anything from Microsoft. Rather, they are either custom firmware, or Linux. If specialized appliances really are taking over the home, it seems clear to me that Microsoft has already been shown the door in the arena of embedded operating systems. I don't even think the XBox or XBox 360 counts as a win for them; my understanding is that it runs custom code, and shares very little with Microsoft's other operating systems.

I was so busy, I only had time to unbox the Chumby after it arrived yesterday. Late last night, when my brain finally fried and I had no energy left for work and such, I finally plugged the little bugger in. The short version is: So far, it's pretty slick.

It's smaller than I thought it would be, but not ridiculously so. I was imagining something cantaloupe-sized, but it's really more soft-ball-sized. In retrospect, the smaller size is probably better than the larger; if it were larger, it might overwhelm the place where it's sitting, but the smaller size just sort of snuggles in with everything around it.

Aside from the painful experience of tapping out my WPA2 pass-phrase on the Chumby's touch-screen, it connected to our home network with no trouble at all. That's a really good thing, because it's just a paperweight without a wireless network. Widget configuration is handled almost entirely on the Chumby web site, and the Chumby itself will auto-update itself fairly quickly after you make the changes online.

The widgets themselves range from the mundane (weather and sports scores), to the enjoyable (photos from Flickr, horoscopes, and the Pandacam), to the just plain odd (screen cleaner and hypnotoad). Widgets are grouped into channels, and the Chumby will cycle through the various widgets in a channel indefinitely. If something catches your eye, you can pick up the Chumby and interact with the widget to get more information or change what's going on. When you set it back down, it goes back to cycling through the widgets.

I admit I was confused by the terminology at first. It took me a while to figure out that widgets are not channels, but rather channels contain a sequence of widgets. Once I realized that, everything suddenly made sense. You could have a "Morning News" channel, for while you're getting dressed, and then a "Company's Over" channel that just displays your photographs.

The Chumby can also play music, and this morning I had it streaming Groove Salad while I was getting dressed. It plays the music in the background, while cycling through the widgets in the current channel. It also has an alarm clock, although I haven't tried it.

So - and this is the big question - what's the point of this thing? I was wondering that myself, even as I ordered it, and many of my friends and co-workers had asked the same question. The short answer is that there really is no point. If you try and find a purpose to the Chumby, you'll convince yourself they're stupid. Maybe they are. But the Chumby is really more like a piece of furniture - a piece of info-furniture. It just sort of sits there, doing its thing, broadcasting information into the room. It also makes a good modern clock-radio replacement, since it's very easy to play internet radio or MP3s on it. At bare minimum, the thing is a steal as a wireless digital picture frame.

The Chumby that I ordered arrived today. I've been so busy, I haven't had time to even plug it in. I did, however, find time to snap a short series of Chumby unboxing photos. And then I put it back in its little bag-home and set it aside.

Oh, and Hedda has informed me its name is "Curtis". When I asked how she knew it was a boy, I was informed that she "checked". I'm not really sure certain I don't want to know.

David mentioned the Chumby in channel the other day, and thought it seemed somewhat interesting, I wondered who would buy it. Then I happened to show it to Hedda.

Our Chumby will be here in four days.

Or at least that's how I'm telling it.

Everybody is talking about the new iPod Nano. I mean everybody. I can't refresh my RSS reader without stumbling across yet another review of the thing, like this one from Ars. However, not a single one of them is telling you why the new iPod Nano sucks. But I will.

The new iPod Nano sucks because the Meizu Miniplayer M6 is smaller, has a bigger screen, costs less, and has already been out for over a year. Don't believe me? Let's review, with a similar table to the one I put together last time. I'll be comparing the 4GB models here, but there are also 8GB models available for each.

Overall winner: Meizu Miniplayer, by a long shot. Unless 0.2 ounces and 3.5 millimeters are worth a 17% smaller screen and paying $50 more. Oh, I guess I forgot that you get to be an Apple drone, too.

Don't give in to the marketing hype: The new iPod Nano sucks. Buy a Meizu Miniplayer instead.

All technical specs obtained from the official Meizu Miniplayer M6 specs and the offical iPod Nano specs. Prices taken from the Apple store and a Google product search.