Tag: gadgets Page 1 of 2

Weekend before last was a fabulous and fun trip up to Massachusetts, about which I really ought to talk about in a separate post. But what I really wanted to talk about was driving.

Oddly, despite the number of trips I’d previously made to New England, I’d never once been a driver there. I’d always been picked up by someone, or relied entirely on public transportation. (Or, y’know, hired a stretch limo, but that was a one time thing.)

Despite the legendary reputation of Massachusetts drivers, I really had no troubles at all. Of course, one of the reasons for this is that we have a GPS unit, specifically the Garmin StreetPilot c550 that I bought kitanzi for Christmas. Aside from a couple of odd bumps, it’s been an awesome little gadget, and one I’m glad to have in our possession.

Recently, I updated the software on it, and in the process downloaded some extra voice packs. So now we can have the GPS give us directions in an English or Australian accent, and we had fun playing with it. Now, I’m hardly the first person to think “Gee, there should be celebrity voice packs.” But it occurred to me that there’s really only one actor who I’d want to be powering my GPS…William Daniels. Why, I bet you could make a fortune if you could put the voice of KITT (not to mention the voice of John Adams…As you miss a turn, it could exclaim “What in God’s name are you waiting for?”)

Well, it turns out that someone else already had that idea:

The Knight Rider GPS can be customized to speak your name from a list of 300 popular names. Once you’ve selected a name, the voice of William Daniels will greet you with a random selection of phrases such as “XXX, where would you like to go today?” or “XXX, I’m really looking forward to this.” Your selected name replaces the “XXX.” Then, the Knight Rider will instruct you, for example, to turn right at 500 feet, but won’t pronounce the street names.

Based on Mio’s Moov 300 series, the Knight Rider GPS has a 4.3-inch screen, a 20-channel SiRF Star III receiver, measures 5.51 by 3.15 by 0.76 inches and weighs 6 ounces. The case has been redesigned to accommodate the flashing LEDs, and the Moov interface is “skinned” with a color scheme that seems appropriate for Knight Rider.

Despite the fact that I totally love the idea, I feel sorry for the people with unusual first names, as they will once again be left out of the customized product business, just like the keychains they sell at the county fair. But I think it’s incredibly cool that someone has done this.

The product is apparently available in stores as of last moth, and you can find out more info at their website.

Following the herd into the Apple store, I have purchased myself an iPhone. So far, I’m loving it, but there’s always the slight frustration with a new phone of getting everything set up the way you want it. I managed to import most of my contact list, but in the process seem to have lost most of the postal addresses. So I started moving those over by hand, and realized that I don’t know how many of them are hopelessly out of date.

So…..please leave me a reply here with the following information, so I can make sure I’m all up to date:

Name
Address
Home Phone
Mobile Phone
Email
Birthday
Webpage
IM contact information

Along with anything else you think I should know. Comments are screened, but you can also send me e-mail if you’d prefer that route.

Thanks!!

Thinkgeek FTW:

Doctor Who Dalek Webcam

So full of want. 🙂

For quite some time, I have desired a portable Internet device that i could carry when I traveled, as I admit to being such a hopeless Internet junkie and I much prefer to have my own computer for such activities. (My PDA/Mobile is an Internet device and useful in a pinch, but it’s not really the best application for serious websurfing or journaling.) Using other people’s computers is like using other people’s kitchens. You can get done what you need to, but nothing is where you expect it to be and you have to rummage about to find anything.

tarkrai kindly donated me a couple of ancient, but working, laptops from his collection of derelict computer parts, but for various reason neither was able to transform into what I really needed. Then baiku announced his intention to divest himself of a similar crop of old tech for anyone who’d be willing to come take them away. Since I had a DVD full of 2006 Doctor Who episodes for him, we made arrangements to meet up and he handed me two Dell Inspirons of unknown status. Neither of them turned out to work, but I figured it was worth the $30 that Ginstar would charge me to find out what it would take to repair one of them. So the Inspiron 4000 went into the shop, was determined to have a bad motherboard, and completely repaired for $200.

When I got it back, I ran diagnostics and found that the hard drive had bad sectors, so I pulled the hard drive out of the still non-functional 3500, and found it was perfectly ok, so I transplanted it into the 4000 and installed Ubuntu Linux 5.10 on my now fully functional Death Star laptop computer.

I have to say that Ubuntu has impressed me greatly. I’d already been using it for sometime on my workstation at the office, but given the horror stories I’d heard about getting Linux working on laptop computers, I was unprepared for how utterly seamless it was to install. I didn’t have to recompile any thing, hunt for drivers, twiddle with my settings. It installed, brought up the X display, let me log in, and *everything worked*. Well done.

Having gotten the laptop up and on the network, there was one last critical accessory to make this laptop perfect. I wanted to install a WiFi card. Even with the tremendous ease that I got the base OS installed on the machine, though, I wasn’t expecting this to be easy. Everything I’d read about getting wifi to work on Linux laptops led me to anticipate a lot of fiddling ahead.

I got some advice from fleetfootmike and rinioth, who said that my best bet was a card with a PrismII chipset. rinioth also sent me a great chart with pretty much all the cards that were on the market and the state of drivers for each of them. So I printed that out and headed down the local Best Buy. Unfortunately, none of the cards they had in stock were PrismII cards, but I did find a Netgear WG511T, which uses the Atheros chip and which the chart said had a good driver. Knowing I had 30 days to try it and bring it back if I couldn’t make it work, I decided to take a chance.

Brought it home, plugged it in. Booted up. Ubuntu recognized the card immediately. Is that supposed to happen? Interesting. Looked up the commands for configuring the card. Attached to my AP, got an IP from dhcp, and was surfing. Just like that. I didn’t have to install any drivers. I didn’t have to struggle or swear or do anything at all. it just plain worked the way it was supposed to. I even found that the GUI Network Configuration tool in Gnome already knows how to talk to it and feed it its necessary configurations.

I believe the appropriate word is “squee!!”

I now have a working wireless laptop. I am a happy cat.