review

Press

The RSS feed world was taken by storm by a simple app. It was a modern, design first, Android app called Press. It’s just a feed reader. I like feed readers. So here’s my little review.

The Press app is definitely modern. The first place to notice is just in its icon. I would describe it as the tip of a ribbon with a large white semi-serif P stamped on the front. Compared to Google Reader’s typically blurry icon, the Press icon stands out among other apps that have paid less attention to the first detail anyone could notice.

Press lists all of your named folders on the left hand pane. The right hand pane is used for different purposes. Selecting a folder, the discrete feeds open on the right hand pane. This could look great, but there’s a problem. Most feeds are accompanied with low quality or non-existent art, making the experience feel half baked. It just looks bad.

My Tech News folder is a combination of Techmeme and Google News’ technology section, along with special individual feeds from The Verge and Ars, among others. I don’t read the sources separately usually because there’s plenty of overlap in the news, so I skim the bunch of them at once. The first “feed” in each folder is always All Subscriptions, which is what I’ve been using most. Once you open a specific feed (or just all of them with the aforementioned All Subscriptions feed), you get a list similar to that of Google Reader’s headline view with another couple lines of summery. It’s pretty good.

A unique touch is that the feed is listed in posted date order. I’m sure Google Reader does this too. The unique touch is the separator with the date that groups long swaths of posts. I let my news accumulate over the week, so this is nice. From there, there’s reading stories. Just tap a headline item and it will open in full (whatever that ends up being) in the right hand pane. If you’re lucky enough to find a full text feed, you can easily read it in lovely font choices, the default being Source Sans Pro, but also Roboto, Open Sans (see WordPress’ 2012 theme) and others. If you’re not so lucky and need to click through, you can and the requested page will open in an internal browser. Google Reader will open the article in the default browser. At least on the Nexus 7, this is fine because it’s Chrome and the device itself is actually fast enough to switch apps properly, but on my phone, it’s annoying. Press opens the requested article in a webview without leaving the app, saving time and a jarring trip.

There are simple buttons for starring, read and unread and sharing in the preview pane. In the list view, there’s a great Mark all as Read checkmark button (that you can set to not ask if you’re sure).

This is where my praising review turns into some criticism.

Press does not have a way to star stories without viewing them in the right hand preview pane. Often, I’m purusing headlines but not spending time right now to read the full story — I want to save the story for later. Sure, I could send the story to Pocket and call it good, but that was never in my workflow for reading. With Google Reader, I would star stories I wanted to get back to. Press neglects having a list view favoriting function. If they add this, it would be perfect, but it would get perfect plus status by adding a star and share button from the list view.

Press does not offer a way to slide through stories. Let’s say you’re reading Daring Fireball and Gruber’s on a hot streak, so he’s written twenty things in one hour. It happens (or it feels like it). Every time you want to read the next story, you have to leave the preview pane on the right side and return to the list view. It wastes time and it’s annoying. The solution is obviously a swiping gesture, but where to? Swiping to the left brings the list view back, so that leaves the right for the swipe, which would be fine, probably. A similar swiping problem is that I’m right handed so I hold my phone and tablet in my right hand. It’s fine, but it’s just a little too far for my thumb to swipe comfortably up and down in the list view. This is mostly my problem though.

Finally, I mentioned the imagery for the individual feeds. They are so out of place in an app that is focused on its modern design. Techmeme’s icon is literally a 16-pixel favicon while iFans is a much better size. Some others do that do well are Apple’s Hot News, Betali.st, Paul Thurrott’s Supersite, Lifehacker, CSS-Tricks and others. But so many people have broken or super-low resolution feed art. I don’t know why, specifically. But the app can’t force my feeds to have nice images, only the feeds themselves can be fixed by their authors. (And that’s totally going to happen, right.) Maybe this isn’t a problem, but it’s something that’s out of the control of Press, but hopefully something that is addressed eventually.

Despite this tiny problems, the best part of this app is that it is in active development. The developers are listening to their audience too. It’s great.

Press is an app on the Play Store for $1.99 (which is a euphemism for $2). The TwentyFive Squares guys are great, especially on Twitter. I bought it. I like it. You can see some screenshots, if you’d like.

HTC Evo V 4G Review

I think everyone knows about the HTC Evo V 4G by now and its specifications. For more information, this phone is a re-branded yet identical model of the Sprint Evo 3D. I had this phone for two weeks and it is time for my initial review. Let’s just say I’m quite pleased with the Evo V 4G.

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Motorola Triumph Review

TL;DR

Let me make this easy for you. If you buy the Motorola Triumph now, you are doing it wrong. Opt for the HTC One V or the HTC Evo V 4G. A Triumph in comparison to either HTC phone is a rip off.

Let’s talk about the Motorola Triumph. It’s still the “best” phone you can get on Virgin Mobile and likely elsewhere that is also prepaid barring the slightly less fantastic Exhibit. Two weeks ago I forked over an arm and a leg to ditch my year-old long over-used Optimus V for this behemoth of a phone. So let’s talk about the Motorola Triumph.

We already remember the first weeks – the glory of getting the newest phone in the market and praising how wonderful it was to finally have an actual smartphone. That’s how it was when the Triumph came out in Summer of 2011. It was short-lived though as quality control issues came to light through numerous blogs, forums and just about everywhere else. That tarnished my enthusiasm for the phone and I held off from buying it. I had been using my replaced Optimus V from February 2011, and was nearing the practical limits of what it could do, and only by deleting messages, application caches and just about everything to keep it from displaying the dreaded low on spasce notification, was I able to prolong its life.

The build quality problems I knew about were screen flickering issues, super-weak GPS signals and general system instability. If only I had a source for these uncited problems!

My particular handset does not exhibit the GPS problem, the flickering problem is more likely a software bug and even at that, it’s less noticeable overtime as you learn how to avoid it (wait at least four seconds between pressing the power button into sleep and then out of sleep). So my problems at the very least are not the usually reported problems, are at least not among those that were reported at release of the Triumph.

The Big Problem – Wi-Fi

No, my problem is with wifi. Yes, wifi, the very point of having a smartphone is Internet connectivity and through wifi at that. So what does my Motorola Triumph handset do? It crashes and then restarts.

Here’s the deal. At the University of Minnesota, we have a wifi network called “UofM Secure” because you need your “X500” credentials to login, which is simply a username and password. This is technically a 802.1 EAP network, which is all just a fancy authentication system based on WPA and WPA2. It’s secure and wonderful, and definitely beats having to authenticate through an open wifi network login page.

So with the Motorola Triumph, if I’m in an area with wifi, and it is already connected without going into Settings > Wireless & networks > Wi-Fi settings, there’s a low chance of the crash. But if I do have go through settings to select the network (essentially forcing wifi to connect), it will often become unresponsive and then just crash! But then it gets better. It can do this multiple times if the network does not come back on its own without going through settings. The saving grace now is the phone is fast enough to restart in less than 30 seconds, but still. It is ridiculous to have a phone that crashes because it has connected to wifi.

But the problem does not end there, oh no. In fact, wifi problems continue. If I am connected and either downloading a page, podcast or using some sufficient amount of wifi data transfer, there’s a large possibility that I will lose the connection to the network. And you know that means – more chances to restart. Typically, this is rarer than the previous restarting problem, but it certainly does happen in places where the Optimus V (at the university) had no problems on the network. I can be reading in Google Reader and suddenly, bam! no wifi. But here’s the kicker – and a confusing point – it’s not just 802.1 EAP in this case. It happens at home to in my 802.11n network, the connection will suddenly drop out – just like that, in the blink of an eye.

To explain that better, let me contrast with the Optimus V. At home, I never had a wifi drop out, if it had gone to sleep and turned wifi off, it would reconnect seconds after waking up, no problem, and while using the phone itself, it would stay on perfectly for extended periods of time to the point it never actually dropped out while I was watching. Ever. For instance, my favorite podcast player, Listen by Google, would allow me to listen and download podcasts at the same time. The Motorola Triumph cannot do this because it will often drop out, and Listen even insists that when I try to listen/stream while downloading – especially while the download is incomplete, it will state, “An error occurred while playing this episode.” That error never came up on the Optimus V. It may not be related to the wifi, but the staggering amount “Error (file not found)” and “Error (connection timed out)” notices I receive from Listen is surely a sign of the wifi problem – it simply cannot keep up a stable connection for an entire 60MB file.

But it’s not just Listen, it’s something as simple as browsing. I can be checking my bus schedule and be unsurprised that what I thought was just slow Internet on campus was actually due to the phone losing the connection yet again.

There are certainly lesser problems in the phone, but this is the one I demand to be fixed. It absolutely must be solved. Either by software or hardware or magic.

Let’s talk about some other observations. I have had this phone for two weeks; long enough to get a feel for oddities.

Battery Life

Let’s begin with the battery life. In a normal school day, I clock in at 6am and clock out around 3pm (and by clock in and out, I mean take off and put on the phone from the charger). By noon, I usually from down to 55% with light to moderate usage, though with heavier usage it goes to 40%. That’s no a big deal. Now, if for some reason wifi is being insane inane on any given day and it disconnects and reconnects continuously, well, say goodbye to that battery – 40% by 9am! Great. Actually, barring that exception, I’m pleased with the battery life in the phone. I have not had a close call yet, and I feel like I need to keep more battery life for a longer day (like Wednesday with my physics lab through 5pm), I go into Airplane mode with cuts me off from the celluar network (and who needs that during lab?) Since I only read and despise games, this works fine for me. No problems there.

The Keyboard

Now how about that keyboard? Here’s an example of my poor typing with the stock Android keyboard.

Now, how abiut rhat keyboars. This keybaord isbso easyto use becuas it ahs no ictiondarg. Revooutinary right? This is ibsabity.

Why did it come out like this? Because autocomplete does not exist on this phone naturally. Oh no, somehow, there is no dictionary except for your previously imported list of contacts and built-in names. So the words, “about”, “keyboard”, “easy”, “because” and more are unintelligible because it cannot correct them, it doesn’t know them. This demonstrates a lack of … what, I don’t even know? Who decides to sell a phone without an autocorrection dictionary? Who’s fault is this? Motorola’s? Google’s? The World’s? My solution was to install the ICS Keyboard that was simply too slow on the Optimus V (and immature at the time). But do normal people even know they can do this? My father certainly does not and his messages look like they were often written by birds (that may be angry).

Speed & Stability

Speed and stablity are interesting topics. Barring the occasional wifi-restart, the phone is generally stable. I run LauncherPro as the homescreen, and it runs with minimal effects enabled (none of that cubic nonsense) without any problems, the apps drawer scrolls smoothly, webpages, long lists and everything scrolls just fine. Stability wise, I’ve rarely had an app crash on its own and if it did, it was Facebook, and that didn’t work well on the Optimus V anyway. Switching from portrait to landscape works fast and flawlessly, where on the Optimus V, it was quite slow. On the Triumph, the phone is pretty much always responsive to the touch, but a problem is the capacitive menu, home and back buttons are less responsive than the actual screen, so I have to hit them multiple times quite often to know I registered a response. The haptic feedback helps, but it’s minimal.

Comfort

I’ve spoken about comfort before. Comfort is in terms of being able to swipe with one’s thumb from corner to corner of the phone. That is kinda possible but not easy with this Motorola Triumph’s huge 4.1” diagonal screensize. In fact, it almost hurts. Actually, it does hurt to overextend; with two hands the problem is solved, because you can hold with one hand and swipe with the other. So now I know why everyone claims smaller phones are better. The screensize is great and all, but the pixel density is more important for me compared with actually being able to interact with the controls. If you’re holding the Triumph in one hand, it’ll be a tricky maneuver to hit that notifications bar, which apparently is something you do pretty often.

The Network

Initially, I heard various reports of weak 3G reception and that reasoning isn’t condemned by the fact there is visually 4 bars on the Motorola Triump while there are 5 on the Optimus V. I’m not exactly sure what that means, but in my experience, the Motorola Triumph is fine in the University of Minnesota, Saint Paul region. The bars are a bad indicator of 3G service, and as far as I know, I have always been able to send and receive text messages in all but the deepest depths of the great buildings at the university.

The OS – Android 2.2.2

What else is there? How about the operating system itself? Android 2.2.2 isn’t bad; but it has no more to offer than my already year-old phone, the Optimus V, running the same. 2.3.5 I believe is the leading version of Gingerbread but I don’t even remember what it could do; let alone improve performance. It doesn’t matter either way, every app functions perfectly – nobody can drop 2.2 support because, well, there are 96% of all Android phones running that. Oh yeah. That said, after having experienced the glorious Ice Cream Sandwich, well, it’s a shame this phone will never support either an official build or completely a self-installed variant. Hacking the TouchPad to support CM9 was easy enough but on the phone it’s a slightly different story.

Wrap Up

So, how about a numeric score? I like the 1-5 scoring system, but let me explain how I broke the score down all down.

-1 for the many and consistent wifi connectivity problems
-0.1 for the outdated version of Android despite being available for more than a year and half, software wise and hardware wise
-0.1 for the insane screensize and minor discomfort
-0.2 for a completely broken stock keyboard

Despite those cons, I liked that the phone is suitably fast for a 1GHz processor and modern phone smartphone; it actually feels fast enough to be smart, and that goes for being responsive too. And of course, for having more storage space even after twice as many apps as I had on the Optimus V at the end of its life. So my final score is 3.6 out of 5. So that’s a 72% satisfaction rate, which is considered a B+ in my physics courses; a C- in the curvless world.

Bonus

While writing this, I did a little more testing. Using my favorite Wifi Analyzer and Listen to download an episode of Tech News Today. The episode in question was only 25MB. While it was downloading in the background, I was watching the Analyzer. My office is about 8 feet away from the n-router, and that’s separated by a single wall. In that time, the wifi dropped out from a nearly -30 dbm signal to a mere -80 dbm signal and of course the download was interrupted; my laptop was still receiving wifi perfectly right next to the phone. Wikipedia explains that anything around -10 dbm is the ceiling on wifi signal but anywhere from -30 to -70 are fair game for wifi. A drop from -30 dbm to -80 dbm is definitely unusual as this is a logarithmic scale and that’s like dropping 50 orders of magnitude. So I don’t think I’m making all of this up.

Despite all of this, I consider myself lucky as there were no restarts while writing.

Book Review: The Name of the Wind

In June I bought my first Audible audio book and it was The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss.

To save myself and you from having to read another long and inarticulate description, why not just read about it where justice is served chilled. Instead, I’ll tell you what I thought of it.

The best cover art for the book yet - mysterious and cold blue

I rate this book 4.5 stars out of 5, or on Amazon’s star rating, 4 out of 5. The book is repetitive in some parts and the initial setup is long and almost overwhelming, but after that, it gets better.

I suggest you pick up a copy and read it slowly. There are light spoilers below (e.g. what happens but not how it happens).

The book’s split time lines do nothing to confuse me. I know exactly when something is taking place – there is a definite distinction between the keeper-Kvothe and hipster-Kvothe in their style of talking and what is taking place. For instance, in the inn, nothing exciting happens except the two instances of mystical attacks from spider things and a possessed mercenary. Something like that, at any rate.

Kvothe reads his past out loud to his audience of both the scribe and his fairy helper Bast. It might seem odd at first to tell a story this way, but it essentially becomes its own book as if it were written in first person narrative form anyway. In fact, it might be better that the majority of the book is in the first person when listening in audio form. It feels as if Kvothe is telling you the story.

The most repetitive section is of Kvothe’s living the giant city, Tarbean. His poverty and depressing attitude was almost enough to make me lose interest in the long run. It feels as if it takes forever because there is no scientific magic in that part, but once it ends, the magic comes into the story pretty well.

You can imagine the book comprised of three parts, the first part of Tarbean, the second is comprised of his first struggles at the University where he gets kicked out of the library, meets his humanoid arch-nemesis and meets his girlfriend, and the third where Kvothe defeats a dragon of sorts. The ending is actually after the third part in his narration, but it feels as if the climax lies somewhere within heart of the dragon.

The struggles with Kvothe’s lover is interesting. She is mysterious and has men surrounding her most of the time, but she accepts none of them and she says it is because they are not understanding of her either. Kvothe tries to hide his feeling from her and she toys with him in a whimsical way, but neither admit their love for each other, although Kvothe is known to admire her in more than one way.

The magic introduced, sympathy as it is named, is unique from any other type of magic scheme I have encountered in my many years of reading fiction. It’s unlike the rhyming nature of Stile in the Apprentice Adept series and it is not elemental like that of the magic in Golden Sun’s Weyard. Of course in addition of the scientific magic sympathy, there is runic magic that rely on the same principles and alchemy but it is more than just slapping their hands together. The true mysterious magic is the magic of absolutely understanding so well, to know it’s name. Kvothe has a brief glimpse of the name of the wind late in the story and even while fleeting, it wields it powerfully.

The Name of the Wind is a long book full of exciting tales except for a few areas of prolonged engagement. It maintains a high standard of writing, excellent descriptions and well formed character interaction. In my case of the Audible audio book version, Nick Podehl voices Kvothe’s old and younger self differently making the transition points easier. His masterful interpretation of the forgien voices from Kvothe’s teenage friends from other countries also had depth to otherwise simple words on a page.

Fantasy is a hard genre. Harry Potter has ruined magic for children and many young adults and sparkling vampires have ruined the fairy creatures for the same audience. There is no book that will appease everyone, but this makes a great stab at penetrating the mind for the kids beyond their years.

Angry Birds for Chrome Review

During Google IO 2011, Google annouced that even their own App Store would have the platform invading Angry Birds game from Rovio. If you hadn’t heard of Angry Birds, you must have been living under a rock. With the deployment of Angry Birds to a bigger platform, Google Chrome, it’s now possible to not only play on your iPod touch, iPhone, iPad, a morass of Android handsets, your Mac, your PC, but also now in your browser. In fact, I think my list is missing a few.

I first played Angry Birds about eight months ago in October of 2010 when I bought my first iPod touch 4G. I played more recently when Amazon open their own Appstore with Angry Birds Rio as the free-app-of-the-week for Android. It’s always been a lot of fun, either smashing pigs or release fellow birds. That said, I like the simple improvements they made in the new Chrome version.

Let’s start out with the obvious. It’s huge. I can see everything because it’s not sitting in a 3.5 inch screen anymore – it’s on a 21′ monitor running at 720p. It’s fantastic.

Zoomed Way Out - Angry Birds on Chrome

One gripe I always had was that the restart control was hidden in a slide out menu instead of being on the mainscreen. That made the price of restarting higher because it took two taps/clicks instead of one. In the new Chrome version, the restart button is now aligned to the left of the game screen and it’s much easier to try something, hate your choice, and quickly restart before someone else looking over your shoulder notices. It’s just that easy.

Controlling the birds angling and firing is a nice change. Using your fingers was a great way to draw people in but the accuracy and precision wasn’t always there. Or maybe I’m just clumsy without my mouse.

Finally, there are some special Chrome-extras. For instance, on various levels, you’ll see a little Chrome-logo floating around or sitting somewhere. Once you hit it, you’ll get your points and it’ll disappear from the level entirely. It’s a one-time bonus. They’re not always easy to get to either.

Finally, I got 3 Stars - Angry Birds on Chrome

I give Angry Birds a 5 of out 5 for the simplest of improvements that just come naturally for being on the big-screen. Great work, Rovio, and of course, Google, for making Chrome excellent. Finally, I offered a shorter review on the Chrome Web Store for Angry Birds. Oddly, there is no way to link to individual review. Here it is.

It’s hard for the same game to get better every time it’s remade and put on a different platform. This edition of Angry Birds actually puts the restart button on the game screen so experimenting is encouraged now. I’ve officially played Angry Birds on more platforms than any other game, ever. It’s really fun and I really hate games.

Galaxy Tab Wifi Spring 2011 Software Review

The second part of the Samsung Galaxy Tab Wifi review is here! I started a review of the Galaxy Tab however the Hardware portion of the review was incredibly long. This is the Software portion. I have a lot less to say about the software because it is just Android after all.

Galaxy Tab Wifi - Banner

The Software

The Galaxy Tab Wifi offers the same system that the 3G models do. It’s nothing special or different in that regard. However, compared to a blank slate (pun?) installation of Android like my LG Optimus V, it’s a little different.
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Galaxy Tab Wifi Spring 2011 Hardware Review

On April 11th, Samsung released a wifi only version of the 7” Galaxy Tab. It wasn’t covered very well in the news so it took me a while to find out. For things like that, Samsung, you need to make a little bit bigger announcement. Seriously. Anyway, I like to write initial reviews for products I get. So here we go. This review became so long that I split it into two parts! This first one will cover the Hardware and second section will come later focused on the Software.

Galaxy Tab - Banner

The Hardware

The Galaxy Tab with Wifi (GTW). It has that same 7” screen that the 3G models do. It has the same look and feel without carrier branding. It has the same kind of glossy plastic body. It’s the same. Except for Wifi. That’s it. You’ll want to checkout the spec-sheet here.
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April Fools – Google Scholarship

I keep bringing it up, but if you haven’t heard about my April Fools joke, where have you been? I allegedly “got a scholarship from Google” that essentially would give me $10,000 per year for college, free food, gas money, car money, travel money, and so on.

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HP Pavilion dv7-4170us Review

One of my mother’s friends recently bought a good looking HP Pavilion dv7-4170us laptop from Micro Center. Her friend knew I was a little geeky so he let me optimize his brand new computer for him. ~~Since I didn’t have much time with the laptop, this review will be relatively short~~. Despite not having much time with the laptop, this review is actually really long.

The Hardware

The look and feel are great. The aluminium finish looks clean and simple. Since the owner is a truck driver, the aluminium body makes sense because it should be extra-sturdy for on the road conditions. The etching is not districting because it is such a light color compared to the background metal color. The etching however can be felt under the finger easily.

The keyboard is interesting. In my personal opinion, after typing this review on the laptop in question, my hands really hurt. Let’s start with the good though. The keys are finished in matte and the layout is a full size without any key crunching. It’s a MacBook Pro-esque chiclet design, which I think is quite appealing. The downsides is this: the letters are spaced really far a part. Maybe I wasn’t used to typing on the laptop yet, but after ten minutes, my hands were getting achy. You’ll need to practice using the keyboard a while before getting used to having keys spread so far from each other if you’re not used to the chiclet keyboard design. Another observation is that some keys when typing quickly will seem to squeak under the touch. My mother’s friend doesn’t type as fast as I do and probably won’t notice that, but it certainly drove me a little insane.

The screen is bright and vivid just as everyone says it is. Looking at the screen from maybe 30 degrees of center, it still maintains a pretty clear image with modest brightness. Looking from 30 degrees off center from above does reduce the brightness more than from side to side, but really, who does this in the real world? The size is huge and the default resolution is 1600 by 900. That however does mean it is not running at true 1080p. After looking, the default resolution is the max resolution. Not a big problem, really.

The trackpad. What can I say? Someone messed up. It was a mistake to include such a insensitive touchpad. I know what they were going for: MacBook Pro class trackpads. I know that was the goal and it was missed entirely. Tap to click works, but it’s not always picked up the first time. The drivers support two finder scrolling but it is very annoying to use. Perhaps an update will solve that one day, but the lack of responsiveness makes the very useful feature very useless. The click buttons are located on the bottom of the trackpad. I noticed that I tend to leave my thumb hovering over the button and mouse with my other fingers, but sometimes I rest my thumb and I cause the mouse to spasm. The size is great at least.

I have first hand experience with facial recognition built into laptops. This one is better because it has finger print recognition. Why is that better? Lighting conditions don’t matter at all and you rarely loose your finger; a bad hair day won’t thwart your successful login. Jokes aside, the biometric scanner on the right side of the computer is small, out of the way and pretty much just works.

The other goodies spec wise. Starting with 600GB hard drive split two ways between the main drive and a recovery partition, it is rather roomy for movies or pictures or whatever people put on hard drives these days but it is 5400RPM so it is terribly slow. The laptop comes with the industry standard 4GB of DD3 which is excellent. With dedicated graphics in the mid-range in the scheme of things, it’s actually possible to play modest looking games. It is an ATI Mobility Radeon, but I don’t have anymore specific details on that end. Finally, the processor is not the typical i5 Intel I’ve come to expect in HP laptops. It’s actually a AMD Phenom II N850 Triple-core. It felt snappy doing just about everything except when accessing the hard drive, but that’s no surprise. Among the three, a hard drive upgrade would benefit the dv7-4170us the most.

The System & Software

As always when buying a computer from a retail store, there is a load of junky software that nobody wants. This HP Pavilion is no exception to this rule.

The first boot caused the HP registration program to fire up. It wasn’t really annoying but you’d expect it to be just three lines: your name, email address and whether or not you want HP updates. But no, your address, phone number and more other extraneous bits are needed. Also, I don’t quite like that it looks so blurry. On a high definition screen, it’s safe to crank out the graphics, HP.

Upon entering Windows, there was a little top-docked dock. I’m leaving it there since it’s not really bothersome and it does give quick access to the HP-oriented features. The other evil installed program was Norton. I quickly removed that and replaced it with the much better Security Essentials provided by Microsoft.

Microsoft Office was preloaded through a trial program and Micro Center apparently sold my mother’s friend a $119 Office Home & Student key. For the same price on Newegg, he could’ve got a three-pack. Just saying. At least it was easy to enter the serial key and get it installed.

Chrome and Firefox were installed thereafter and loaded with Ad Block Plus for Good Measure^™. I was surprised but pleased to find Flash, Silverlight and Java preinstalled. I’m glad too because I doubt a Normal Person^™ could install plugins like that. I hid the Internet Explorer icon even though IE9 is pretty good. Just stick with Chrome, kids.

In the scheme of things, the system wasn’t loaded down with too much aside from the general HP sillyness. On my initial inspection before I did anything to the system, it was running with the expected 88 processes, with no visible foreground running programs. After uninstalling some junk and adding some good things like Chrome and Security Essentials, and while running other programs at the same time, I find that it runs at 96 processes. That’s pretty good. Overtime, I find laptops need more and more processes from the manufacture to work properly. It’s a shame but the bitter reality of laptops.

Speaking of which, at 96 processes, the system is only burning through 43% of it’s available memory. I’m guessing it’s split among Windows at 15% and HP 28%.

While the HP laptop does have a huge drive and a clearly marked Recovery partition, I wanted to make recovery discs anyway. Well, it takes five DVDs and about 5 hours. It was a lovely time to do some reading.

The Conclusion

I believe this laptop was purchased for about $800 after tax. It was a good deal considering there is a $50 mail in-rebate and the specs of the system. On Amazon, I’ve seen many five star reviews and a few lower ones based around individual build defects. For me, and my mother’s friend, this computer seems great and is perfectly adequate for just about anyone who wants a fast big-screen decently weighted laptop for under a grand.

I’m looking forward to my college laptop shopping: if HP makes something similar in a 14-inch package, I might consider it. If you want me to review a computer, give it to me for a week and I’ll give you a bittersweet review based on what’s excellent and what sucks.

Have a good one.

Dark Tower Adaption

The Dark Tower is one of my favorite series. It paved the way for some of my philopshies all the way back in middle school. My friend recently emailed me an interesting story about the upcoming Dark Tower movie adaption.

Deadline’s post about the Universal Dark Tower Movie + TV Adaption reveals the full details but here are my highlights and thoughts.

Universal Pictures and NBC Universal Television Entertainment have closed a deal to turn Stephen KingÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s mammoth novel series The Dark Tower into a feature film trilogy and a network TV series, both of which will be creatively steered by the Oscar-winning team behind A Beautiful Mind and The Da Vinci Code.

That’s great. Universal and NBC seem to be a good fit for this kind of thing. NBC supported Heroes for ages and it did well. Admittedly, Heroes was accessible to just about everyone – the Dark Tower is seriously not accessible to everyone. Looking in the comments, it is strongly suggested that the TV series will not be on the over-the-air NBC channel.

It is reminiscent of when Peter Jackson directed three installments of The Lord of The Rings, back to back, so that they could be released in three consecutive years.

The Dark Tower series has a cult following, sure. I don’t know for sure it has the recognition though of the Lord of the Rings. Good luck with doing that again.

Considered KingÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s answer to JRR TolkienÃ¢â‚¬â„¢s Middle Earth trilogy, The Dark Tower…

I don’t have a source, but I remember King’s words about this. He wanted the The Dark Tower to be longer than any other series in this genre that had ever come before. After reading for many years, I realize his dream wasn’t accomplished. Look at Terry Brook’s silly but long Shannara series. No, it’s not the same – not at all. But it’s still a reality based on a ruined earth, with some magic thrown in for good measure. I think that if King wanted to continue, he could have. The story would’ve changed, but The Dark Tower was destined to finished, in terms of where it could go and how it could.

King granted an optionÃ¢â‚¬â€for $19, a number relevant to the plotline–to JJ Abrams and his Lost partners Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse. They never cracked the sprawling plotline and all the characters.

I felt at the time that Abrams could really make The Dark Tower amazing. Lost was incredibly intricate and complicated. He had recently finished his movie, Cloverfield, and it was a hit on a low budget from what I hear. What happened? Well, I think he had more compelling offers that were much more complete. The Dark Tower is a lot of work – not to just read but obviously produce. In any case, they’ll doubtlessly sprinkle 19 all over the place. For instance, the run length will be divisible by 19.

Anyway, this is great. I’ve been waiting years for news on The Dark Tower Movie. I’m glad it came true, finally.

One more thing…

Are they going to have a guy walking around in the desert looking at remains of fires for half an hour? I’m not the only one to say that The Gunslinger starts slow.

A Quick Review on the Physics IB SL Papers 1, 2 and 3

I took the International Baccalaureate Physics exam on Monday and Tuesday. It was much less of an exam than others were and that’s part of my reason for being so late on this one.

Paper 1

Paper 1 was the multiple choice. There was not a single calculation that was required to answer any question. It was just simple stuff requiring basic knowledge of situations (think EM field and the way things move) and other basic concepts like if velocity is 4 and then 16, what is the acceleration?

Paper 2

Paper 2 was harder. There were two parts, section A and B. A was required while B a 3-subsection where you had to pick 1 subsection to complete. I can’t remember anything about these sections honestly. Did I mention how I was not serious?

Paper 3

By far the easiest Paper, there 8 or so sections and two had to be completed. Which two sections were completed however were at my discretion. I picked Digital Technology and Lenses. I was supposed to pick The electromagnetic spectrum or something like that, but Digital Tech was so much easier.

As you can see from the sparse clippings above, I wasn’t really into the test that much.

A Quick Review on the Mathematics IB SL Paper 1 Exam

As this is AP and IB testing week across the world, I took the ~~Calculus~~ Mathematics IB SL Paper 1 exam yesterday. On Monday, I took AP US Govt. and on Tuesday I took AP Computer Science. Since this is only the first paper, I’m sure I’ll have more to say about the second paper when I take it later today too, but that’s another post.

First of all, it was only ten questions long. The specimen papers lead me to believe that it was going to be a long and atrocious exam. It wasn’t. The first 8 pages had write-in-the-book answers and then the last three were the extended multipart questions that were to be written on the answer sheets. One thing I really hated was having so much paper on my tiny little desk. The exam booklet is standard 8.5 by 11 paper but when opened, it takes up twice as much space horizontally on the desk. Having the answer document and also a scratch piece of paper side by side is not really possible. I didn’t even mention the formula packet yet. I had to have it under my answer book and move everything around when I wanted a quick refresh. Actually, it wasn’t helpful.

On to the questions. Since I don’t know how much I can say about the contents, I’ll be very ambiguous. The test actually had some derivatives and integrals on it. The specimen papers did not really have much in the way of that. The focus on vectors and trigonometry really murdered my score to say the least. One of the final questions concerned 3D vectors and there was a bunch of find the angle between them, find the k value, find the other line when so and so is parallel. Stuff like that. Anything involving trigonometry, I was lost. Otherwise, I wasn’t too struck by anything. There was this derivative problem which was sort of tricky, but it was an illusion.

My calculus teacher has her class setup so that next week we will go over the entire 10-problem packet. It will be work 100 points and it is open book, open resource except math teachers. So it’s a win-win situation next week.

That’s all I’ve got for the paper one section.

A Quick Review of the AP Computer Science Exam

Monday began the two weeks of Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate exams. I took AP US Govt. yesterday. Today, I took the new and improved AP Computer Science A exam.

The first section, the multiple choice has 40 questions that range A through E and an allotted time of 1 hour and 15 minutes. It’s just like it has always been. Since the discontinuation of the rouge AB level exam, the College Board has touted the new course material. Something about Integer.MAX_INT or something. I think it is safe to say that it wasn’t there.

The multiple choice covered the standard things like recursion, loops, classes, methods and our favorite five questions on grid world. There were questions too that asked you to look at five different output examples and pick one was actually output with the given code segment. I skipped 4 questions, but unlike yesterday, not because I couldn’t remember how. It boiled down into effort. I’m dead lazy. Have you met a programmer that wasn’t? No, you haven’t. So, I lost some points for being lazy. I seriously only answer if I’m seriously sure of the choice.

The second section contained four free response questions. Luckily, I wasn’t forced to use a pen again. The time allotment was reasonable, running at 1 hour and 40 minutes. I had half an hour to reread my responses eight times. I’m not sharing the order of the questions, nor the content. But I will discuss instead the lengths of my responses. The first was short. In terms of lines (since we’re writing code here) was about 4 lines (not counting brackets). The second and third were about the same, running at about 10 lines. Finally, the last, was by far the longest of them all, probably at 16 to 25 lines. My implementations were rock solid in the first three problems, but the fourth was unstable in my honest opinion.

My Score Foresight^™ tells me I got a 26 on the multiple choice. The free response was better for me, so again with my Score Foresight^™ tells me that I’ll get 8 + 9 + 9 + 8. After weighting and other mesmerizing things, the prediction is 37.74. The grand total is approximately 63.74 which I think qualifies me for a 4.

That’s it.

And no, none of this violates the wonderful guidelines set forth by the ever amazing College Board.

A Year in Review: 2009

2009 is drawing to a close in a week. I wanted to share my thoughts on posts and events that shaped my life in 2009.

Mootools

As I close the year myself, I’ve dived into the Mootools world again. It’s a wonderful place to be, there’re so many great people working on it and it’s really quite incredible to be apart of that community. I was never much of a developer, but more of a documenter or tutor. That’s the role I fell into and I really enjoy it.
Recently, I added some MooShell demos to the mooWalkthrough. It’s great having the ability to have in-guide demos.

Social Networking

Going head first into Twitter from Plurk was probably by best decision in this category. I tried to spread my name at school (I got a fan group page for that effort) and of course online. This blog is a pivitol component for spreading my name. My tiny work in GoodCorners and GoodCarousel helped propel me into a new age of blogging, I think. I’ve growing quite a lot, looking back from when I used Plurk to share my silly thoughts to Twitter and actually talking to people, they’re all there, not on Plurk. (I’m not saying Plurk is that bad or anything, it just has less people.)

Programming

On a scale of 1 to 10, I’ve programmed this to at about a 5. I accompished a couple of things, GoodCorners, for instance. However, there just wasn’t ever enough to merit any big personal victory. I always feel like I’m getting further and further behind, especially now that I tried to write some PHP after three months of Java. Woah, I totally messed up. I feel like I dropped the ball this year for coding.

Blog Stuffs

Top Posts

Stats

I get around 200-350 hits to per day across the board. There have been spikes, some unexplainable and some predictable. Nothing that exciting this year, but overall, better than last year.

Next Year: 2010 – Goals

I hope actually make 2010 count. I graduate in 2011, so I won’t have much more free time after next year. So I have a few things I must do.

I must tweet once a day about something interesting.
Do something with Mootools that actually makes a difference.
Actually write some code that actually matters.
Redesign this blog, the main page. This is important.
Write posts that make readers come back.
Figure out how to write without rambling on pointlessly.
~~Figure out how to write without rambling on pointlessly.~~ (I’m just joking here.)

I hope you had a great year, I hope I can do it!

TeraCopy – An Alternative to Windows Copy

I was looking for ways to boost the speed at which files copy from drive to drive. In my search, I found an excellent free option called TeraCopy. It has a very nice feature list and a pro-version of TeraCopy can be tested for 30 days before committing to 14.95 (in euro, about 2o usd).

Features:

Copy files faster. TeraCopy uses dynamically adjusted buffers to reduce seek times. Asynchronous copy speeds up file transfer between two physical hard drives.

Pause and resume file transfers. Pause copy process at any time to free up system resources and continue with a single click.

Error recovery. In case of copy error, TeraCopy will try several times and in the worse case just skips the file, not terminating the entire transfer.

Interactive file list. TeraCopy shows failed file transfers and lets you fix the problem and recopy only problem files.

Shell integration. TeraCopy can completely replace Explorer copy and move functions, allowing you work with files as usual.

Full Unicode support.

To find out if I really was getting any speed boost though, I decided to do some tests with TeraCopy and Windows Explorer Copy. I’ve always known that copy on Windows Vista was to say the least, slow.

A faster transfer

My tests were pretty simple, nothing scientific here either. The results aren’t comprehensive enough to merit a definitive answer. I think you should try TeraCopy regardless. TC means TeraCopy and WC means Windows Copy, times are in minutes:seconds format.

My first test was moving a Fedora 10 ISO, about 3.89 GB, from one drive letter to another drive letter on a physical drive. In this test, my average time for TC was 2:36 while for WC, the time was 3:12. TC was 24% faster on average than WC.

The second test was moving the same Fedora ISO but it was being copied to a different physical drive. The average time for TC was 1:17 while for WC it was 1:23. Tiny difference being 5%.

The third test was moving 1.5GB of music files from one drive letter to a different drive letter on the same physical drive. The average time for TC was 1:05 and for WC the time was 1:11. Not much of a difference here, only 6% at most.

Finally the final test was moving the same music files to a different physical drive. This took TC only 36 seconds while it took WC 46 seconds. That’s a small difference, only 15%.

So in the end, it appear that TeraCopy is just slightly faster, maybe just 12% faster than Windows Copy. Is that enough to keep it around? I think so.