I put out a Twitter plus Facebook post, telling the world I was looking for a podcast partner. I received quite a few responses, which made me realize that I need to be more specific about what I want to cover in a podcast and the kind of person I’d want to share a Skype connection with.
Here’s what I’m currently thinking about goals and structure.
Microsoft. Apple. Google.
Three companies staring at each other over the barrel of a gun. Sounds a little like a Tarantino movie, eh?
Okay, so that’s a little hyperbolic. Still, these three companies compete against each other in more than one market. Each is more successful than the other in some key niche. Despite their successes in those niches, they all want a larger piece of those other pies.
What I’m trying to figure out is why these three companies get the lion’s share of attention from the technology press.
I’ve been reviewing quite a few laptops for PC World. Recently, I brought home a laptop from a manufacturer I won’t name here, because the brand isn’t relevant to the problem I encountered.
It started out as a simple laptop review, and quickly devolved into an exercise in frustration. And as it turned out, it was all because of overly aggressive security imposed by an outside application.
I’ve been anguishing over lenses lately.
Right now, my kit consists of a Nikon D300s plus the following lenses, all Nikon-made Nikkor lenses:
What’s missing from this picture?
I don’t know if this is a sign that I have to turn in my PC geek badge or not, but I now own a Macbook. True, it’s the latest entry level Macbook. And I did take a screwdriver to it first thing. And it is running Windows 7 Professional x64 in addition to MacOS.
It pains me to think that I’ve contributed to Apple’s stellar quarter not once, not twice, but three times. I picked up an iPad (just a Wi-Fi version, but 64GB), bought the Macbook and recently upgraded to an iPhone 4.
Once a year or so, I get the crazy idea that I want to build a small form factor PC.
It’s not the actual small form factor system that’s crazy. It’s what I want it to do. What I typically want is to build a high performance gaming system using a micro ATX motherboard, building it into a micro ATX chassis. I’m typically lured in by some cool looking micro ATX case. That happened to me with a couple of Silverstone SUGO models (SG01 and SG03). Most recently, it was the NZXT Vulcan, which I reviewed for Maximum PC. The Vulcan is actually a good looking case with an attractive feature set that makes it sound like a badass, high end case.
I’ve been heads down on a number of freelance writing projects, many of which are finally reaching fruition.
I had fun writing an article on new graphics technology as it affects games. That ran in the August issue of Maximum PC, and is online now at MaximumPC.com. The real bummer is that I had lots of cool screen shots, most of which the magazine ran. But the need to reduce size for both print and online makes them less effective. Still, I think DirectX 11 will have the biggest impact on PC gaming since DX8.
Also up on Maximum PC is a review of Bigfoot’s Killer 2100 network interface card for gamers. It’s an interesting product, in that it works as advertised, reducing lag and ping times… but most people won’t notice any benefit. I’d class it as a luxury product, maybe useful to the 0.5% of gamers who compete online, care about winning and have the insanely fast reflexes to notice the small differences.
More stuff after the jump.
So we’re having new carpets installed.
I live in a dual split-level house. My office and lab are in the daylight basement. The lower half of the house, including the basement, are on a concrete slab. When we bought the house back in 1997, the house needed some pretty serious renovations, so a lot of stuff was done hastily — including choosing the original carpets. The current carpet is made of olefin, but what’s really wrong is that the underlying pad is crap. In the past several years, permanent stains have begun to appear. We’ve tried many different carpet cleaning solutions with no success.
So this time around, we bought nylon carpets (Stainmaster), but more importantly, the pads are the best we could find — a special, dense foam that doesn’t outgas and acts as a vapor barrier. The carpet itself is static-resistant, too, which alleviates most of my concerns about opening up PCs in the basement. (Most of my major system building takes place in the garage, where I have a photo studio set up.)
But having new carpets installed is a lot like moving.
I just ordered a new router, a Netgear WNDR3700.
While this latest Netgear dual-radio router has been winning positive reviews, I really wasn’t in the market for a router. I’d been using a perfectly functional Dlink DiR-655. Then I updated the firmware to version 1.33NA and all hell broke loose.
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Not long ago, I wrote about upgrading a laptop to an SSD. I’ve been using the OCZ SSD in that Acer Ferrari for several months now, and it’s all been working well.
But SSDs make me nervous.
I’ve been reading some of the articles on SSDs at Anandtech recently, and what I’ve read hasn’t exactly filled me with confidence. Anand’s experience with Crucial’s C300 is a pretty good example of what makes me nervous: firmware updates that brick drives.
Then there’s OCZ, who has a deservedly good reputation for reliability. Yet buggy drives can still slip through their QA process.
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