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After two weeks of living with the HP 2133 mini-note, I have had to change a few things to make it more livable with. I used this machine for a few days with the default Windows Vista Basic and it was quite hard to live with. First, the (lengthy) boot time and then the issue of a long wake up time (from hibernation), so it does not give me much of what I want from a small carry-everywhere notebook. Even to adjust the wireless and other settings which needs to be done quickly when you are on the go, takes a while for the window to even open up. While it may not be a problem for some, this is a problem when you need to quickly open the computer up to take notes or to look something up.

I was then wondering whether it was worth installing XP on this machine to somehow speed things up as far as boot and wake up times were concerned. I then proceeded to create a custom install disc using nlite. I thought:”why not install SP3 as well while I am at it?”, so I slipstreamed SP3 to my XP SP2 install disc and created a streamlined and slipstreamed install disc with SP3 built in. The wonderful thing about nlite is that it also allows you to incorporate drivers for your computer into your installation disc, so I incorporated all the XP drivers from the HP site. Everything was going really well until I actually installed it on the notebook.

After installation, the notebook booted fine and I must say it was noticeably quicker and wake up time was what I expected. There was, however, a problem between explorer and the graphics driver. On wake up from hibernation, the screen would flicker uncontrollably for about a minute or two. Sometimes this craziness will stop when I open a window, but not always. This cancels out the advantages of the quicker boot time with XP.I would have to wait a couple of minutes before the machine would settle and be usable again. I was glad to discover that Via had put out a new driver for its Chrome 9 integrated graphics chip. Alas, after installation of the latest driver, the machine still had the uncontrollable case of the flicker.

Working with a notebook that flickers after hibernation is almost impossible. In fact, it makes this notebook pretty useless since I bought it to be able to take notes and work pretty quickly during my day at work and during times I spend on public transport. I had to come up with a solution, so I gave XP SP2 a try and it seems to have made it a better notebook. I can put it into hibernation at anytime without any concern for what will happen when I start it up again. So, if you are having trouble with XP SP3 on your HP mini-note 2133, do not hesitate and install XP SP2 on it and you will have a nice and usable notebook.

I wish there was a netbook like the mini-note that has an instant-on feature to allow working in shorter stretches of time with a lot of sleep in between. Such a notebook, couple with a decent battery life will make a nice companion to people who need a lightweight machine to either write or code while on the move. Did you hear that HP?

I recently acquired the HP mini-note 2133 netbook and I have been using it almost constantly for the last few days. It is a very nice little machine to use on a day to day basis, although in terms of raw power and speed it is no match for my Dell Inspiron and my MacBook. A lot of people seem to forget the fact that this machine was built to a price to occupy the same market segment as the Asus Eeepc. In my view, this machine is superior to the Eeepc in many ways and it is working very well in what it was designed to do: lightweight ultra-mobile computing.

For a while I was really comparing this machine to the Eeepc and the clincher for me was the storage capacity (120GB) as opposed to the various flavours of Eeepc which come in anything from 4-20GB, which means that this machine could also function as a mobile storage unit for photographs and other files when on the go. The other factor was the size of the keyboard. While it may be difficult to type quickly and accurately on the Eeepc’s cramped keyboard, it is, by comparison, quite effortless on this machine, which means that for typing documents and code the HP wins hands down.

The few gripes that I have with this machine are: no booting from the SD card slot, Windows Vista pre-installed (only the vista version is available here in Australia), it only comes with a 3-cell battery and (because of Vista) a long boot time and wake up time (from hibernation).
The specs:

• 1.6Ghz Via C7 processor
• Via Chrome graphics adapter
• 1GB of RAM
• 120GB HDD
• a/b/g Wifi
• Bluetooth
• VGA Webcam
• SD card slot
• 3-cell battery (expandable to 6)
• Express Card 54 slot
• 1280×768 8.9 inch screen

Pros:

• Relatively light, therefore easy to carry
• Large 8.9 inch screen
• Nice 92% size keyboard
• Spacious storage

Cons:

• Battery could be larger
• Awkward power switch
• Only comes with Windows Vista Home Basic
• Webcam utility (modelled on Apple Photo Booth) does not work properly

All in all, this notebook makes a great companion when you are out and about and not wanting to carry a 3kg+ load on your shoulders.

Recently while I was on the run I needed to find a location on a map and of course I immediately fired up my trusty new netbook and launched Firefox. Lo and behold, I could not get Google Maps to display whatsoever. I tried refreshing the page, I tried relaunching it and finally I had to fire up Internet Explorer to access the map. Since I usually avoid using Internet Explorer at all costs, this was really an exception.

I thought it might have something to do with my connection setup, but after a little bit of digging and retracing of my actions, I remembered that I had just updated Skype and I noticed that it installed an add-on onto Firefox. After I disabled this add-on from Skype, Google maps loaded effortlessly. Since I do not know what this add-on does and why it is there in the first place, I am probably not going to miss it.

So if your google maps not loading in Firefox 3.0, do not hesitate and disable that plug in to get your maps back. Someone at Skype needs to check this.

Recently while I was upgrading a hard drive on one of my servers, I found a webcam that I purchased around 18 months ago. It was one of those cheap webcams that I bought,installed for a test then I just promptly forgot about. Somehow I must have stored it on the top of the server case (under a desk) and then I somehow must have pushed it to the back of the case and guess what happened next? It fell off to the back of the server.

Not remembering what I had done with the camera box and the driver disc, I tried to search for a driver online. Since there was hardly any marking on the camera itself, except the word “kinstone” on the front of the clip that forms the base of the camera. Well, lo and behold, I found a website called kinstone.net. I quickly found the download section and before I knew it I had downloaded a driver to my desktop.

After decompressing the file, I found a folder called kinstone_xxx_xxx on my desktop. I opened the folder and found a sub folder called “setup”. After I double-clicked the installer file (setup.exe) it installed all the files and created shortcuts. However, using this method, the camera was not recognised and therefore was not working. I attempted to install the driver through the “found new hardware” wizard and it was still no go.

When I tried to find the instaleld files in “Program Files” directory I found a folder called “vimicro” which the installer had created. So when multiple attempts to get windows to install the driver for the camera failed, I put vimicro into Google and then voila! I found out that vimicro was a company that made the chipset for the kinstone webcams. So I downloaded a driver from their website and there was even a tool which will tell you which driver to download (can identify the chipset of the camera). The driver downloaded from vimicro works flawlessly.

So if you have a Kinstone USB webcam it might be best to head straight to the vimicro website.

With rumours circulating in the last couple of months of Apple’s plans to open new stores in Sydney, I wonder if this will mean a vastly improved customer experience at the store level. If it is, then it will be the one-stop shop for all my Apple needs (everyone has an Apple need, right?).

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Right after I had had enough of Knoppix in a PMI (poor man’s install) configuration, I decided to look for something better. While Knoppix was a great beginning and an eye-opener to what could be achieved in a well-configured Linux laptop, it was not enough. It did not allow for software install (well, without a lot of difficulties anyway) and everything I worked on had to be saved onto an external USB drive.

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Having three notebook computers has its own problems. My main notebook at the moment is the Macbook that I purchased nearly 11 months ago. It has been a solid companion of mine in doing teaching work and general everyday computing. Then I have my old Dell Inspiron 8600 which functions similarly to an everyday desktop computer. It is also the machine on which I play games such as Colin McRae and Medal of Honor (not the latest ones, of course).

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The other day I was working on my file server after a couple of hard drives failed within almost an hour of each other. Bizzare and unfortunate as it may sound, I was not in so much of a panic as I had the two drives mirrored onto another large, hard drive daily using Delta Copy. While potentially I could have lost nearly 200GB of data on the two drives, the fact that they were mirrored meant that I only lost around 10GB of files that were mainly DVD rips (will have to rip them again).

To cut a long story short, I was waiting for Windows to install on my server when I noticed that the response time for my web server seemed to have increased considerably. While it is not the fastest web server around, it has been doing its job well for nearly five years with a few reboots in between. Usually it responds to web requests quite speedily, but for some reason it was taking its time. For a very brief period I felt a little panicked about the possibility of the server’s main hard drive failing, but after seeing half of my website load I figured something else was up.

I looked at the netstat and it showed there were quite a few connections open and on reading the server’s log file life (via tail -f) I realised that not only I had Googlebot crawling my site, I also had Slurp from Yahoo and another bot from Webalta in a Russian domain all crawling all over my web server at the same time. This kinda crawling gave my web server the creeps.

Can’t these bots at least have a roster about who was going to crawl which site at any given time? What is the point of being indexed by the search engines if no one can reach your site without patiently waiting for nearly a minute?

The HD DVD is looking like it’s on its last legs at the moment. Toshiba has quietly admitted defeat to Sony’s Blu-Ray and is currently preparing to cease further production of hardware for the platform at the cost of hundreds of million of dollars and probably thousands of jobs worldwide. Having been dumped by the movie studios and then retailers such as Netflix and Walmart, the future of the format looks a lot less than rosy. Certainly without the support from the movie studios the format will be without or very limited entertainment content which makes it less desirable for the consumers.

The problems that always faces a new format in the market is that it cannot get support from the movie studios unless it is popular and it cannot be popular until the movie studios supports it. Well it is just one of those dilemmas, I guess. So while I am not looking forward to having a Sony-only entertainment format choice (could this be called Buckley’s choice?), I am kind of glad that the format war (was there ever a war like VHS vs Betamax, anyway?) is now almost over. It can be now definitively said that the better format lost the way (I am not sure if Blu-Ray or which one is better I am just saying that because the looser is always the better format).

One thing that HD-DVD could do is to direct the platform more towards data storage or software delivery platform. This might be where HD-DVD will end up, rather than in the living rooms of consumers. Well, an HD-DVD player is always welcome in my living room!

Recently I needed to digitise around 60 pages from a book which was a tutorial I was going to give out to my students. Of course I could have photocopied the pages and given them out but at 60 pages for each person I could have been looking at 600 pages just for 10 students and that would just not have been very green. I thought by digitising them and then putting them into a pdf file I would save not only a lot of time in copying and then stapling pages together, but also a lot of my sanity.

Out I went into a computer superstore and I bought myself a copy of OmniPage Pro version 15. I have used OmniPage Pro software for my OCR requirements since version 4.0. I always thought that if you knew the best in the market, why settle for anything else? Well was I in for a surprise. I took the shrink-wrapped box home and installed it on my desktop PC. After making a cup of coffee I just fired up OmniPage Pro and then I began scanning straight away. The interface was decently laid out and everything I needed was easily accessible. Before I knew it I had already scanned 60 pages and so I started to edit the recognised text after I saved the project as an OPD document, which is its native file format.

I spent nearly an hour and a half to go through all the recognised text and the quality was quite reasonable. I would say that OmniPage Pro recognised over 95% of the text without any problems at all. At the end of the editing session I saved the file as an OPD again. So now I decided I should save the recognised data as a Word file (.doc). As soon as I tried to do this, the whole program crashed. After telling windows not to tell Microsoft about it, I started the program again. This time it asked if I wanted to recover data from the error encountered before. When I clicked “yes”, the damn program just hung there and I found that it was using around 97% of processor capacity in the Task Manager.

I started the software again after forcing it to quit (after waiting nearly 30 minutes). This time I chose not to recover data from the previous error. The program started (phew!) but when I tried to open my OPD file from the previous session it just crashed again. This continued through a few restarts and even after rebooting Windows (there’s nothing wrong with trying, right?). I thought there was a really serious issue with OmniPage Pro 15 so I went to another store and bought OmniPage Pro 16. I came home and installed it after uninstalling OmniPage Pro 15. It installed fine, but when I went to start it I saw the splash screen for about 3-5 seconds and then it disappeared. This went on for nearly half an hour.

I decided by this time that never would I install anything from OmniPage (or Nuance, the parent company) on my computer again. I searched Google for a better OCR software and I came across Abbyy Fine Reader Pro 8.0. I just bought this software online and then I installed it and it started fine. After a couple of test scans, the program seemed to be working just fine, so I rescanned my 60 pages all over again. During scanning, I decided to save the file (or batch as it is called in Fine Reader 8.0) and found a really nice feature that I thought every OCR software should have. Instead of embedding the scanned images into one massive file that could be easily corrupted, AFR 8.0 puts them all into a folder as TIFF images.

This reminded me that the worst thing about OmniPage was that I could not open the massive 264MB file in anything else other than OmniPage. If somehow I could import the pages into Acrobat it would have been much better. Instead I just had to scan all the pages all over again when OmniPage decided to quit unexpectedly. Also, with version 16 of OPP, how am I supposed to update it if the damn thing won’t start (you can only update it from within the program’s interface and the updates are not downloadable!)? Did I also mention that support call cost $US19.99 per call? So I uninstalled OPP 16 and I am returning both version 15 and 16 for a full refund.

As for Abbyy Fine Reader 8.0, despite the weird spelling of “Abby”, she is a keeper.