Category Archives: Technology

eBooks Readers

I just finished the 12th book in Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden series … Changes.

The book was quite good … very intense … and a shocker of an ending.

I thought this was the last book of the series … but I’ve read somewhere else that there are eight more books planned for the series.

I got hooked on the Dresden series when SciFi (currently known as SyFy) was showing the Dresden TV series.   I was quite disappointed to see the series end.   It had a lot of potential, in my opinion.

One significant thing about this book was not the book itself … but how I read the book.   I purchased it as an eBook from the Apple bookstore and read it on my iPhone.

I have to say … I was surprised how easy reading the book on my iPhone was.

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Where Did “All Users” Go?

Recently I was having a problem getting some software installed on my laptop running Windows 7.

The software (IBM’s Rational Developer for Power Systems) has a custom installer.   When I tried to run the installer, it was complaining about some internal version number.   Problem was, I couldn’t find any trace of the installer or it’s data.

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In Flight WiFi

OK, this is pretty cool … I’m on my way to the COMMON Conference in Orlando … and, just before the flight leaves, Ginny sends a text telling me that the blogs are down.

I use the TouchTerm app on my iPhone … but can’t figure out what is going on.

Luckily the flight I’m on has WiFi available … $9.95 for the flight.

Well, I have nothing better to do on the fight (other than read my Wired magazine, which isn’t all that interesting), so I plunk down the fee and log in.

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SSD and D630

A few weeks ago I saw a a good deal on a 80gb Solid State Disk (SSD) from Dane Elec at NewEgg (officially “DANE-ELEC DA-SDM25-80G-N-T-MK 1.8″ with 2.5″ adapter SSD Migration Kit”).

The unit is actually an Intel X18-M SSD in a 1.8″ to 2.5″ SATA adapter.

It only cost $149, so I got one.

I had high hopes for improved disk performance and faster startup & shutdown.

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Report as SPAM

It’s nice that many of the major mail providers give you the ability to report a message you’ve received as spam … but some of them make it far TOO easy to report something as spam.

I’ve noticed that many of the big names put the “Report as spam” button way too close to the delete button.

Let’s take a look at some of the providers …

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Activate AHCI in Win 7

Last week I decided to start playing around with Windows 7 on my laptop … just to see how it’s going to work.

Luckily I have a spare SATA hard drive, so there was no risk that I would damage anything permanently.   If the Windows 7 install went bad, I could simply switch back to XP on the original hard drive.

Well, it’s been a little more than a week with Windows 7 and I’m quite impressed.

One thing I noticed is that the hard drive controller wasn’t for the AHCI I thought was configured.   Then I remembered, when I had the motherboard replaced due to the video problems, the default hard drive controller settings would be in place … and the default is to use ATA instead of AHCI.

Theoretically, AHCI should give me better performance than standard ATA.

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