tastewar.com » Technology

iPad, therefore iAm

tastewar — Mon, 05 Apr 2010 13:50:18 +0000

I ordered an iPad the first day that Apple was taking orders. I thought (still think…) it will make a great internet appliance for my elderly mom, who has no real experience with computers. Some of those characteristics that are perceived as negatives for techies I think will be positives for her. It has a great web browser, for an almost full internet experience (I will have to steer her away from addictinggames.com, of course), a perfectly good email application, and there are already a bunch of apps for news, which she is feeling out of touch with. Having played with it for a day and a half (on and off), I am pretty impressed. On the down side, it feels a little heavy (compared to my iPod touch. What was I expecting?), and it won’t sync wirelessly, which is a shame, because she and my dad live downstairs, and that would make it just that much easier. On the plus side, it doesn’t multi-task . The touchscreen is much easier to adapt to than a mouse. It just feels much simpler than a PC/Mac, which for my use case is a decided plus. I am now waiting for the keyboard dock, which should make it more comfortable to sit and type at before I give it to her, but I have added some music, photos, contacts, apps, etc. The on-screen keyboard is definitely usable, but the lack of tactile feedback is noticeable. We shall see…

Here are the obligatory, goofy un-boxing photos:

It’s been a while

tastewar — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 23:27:25 +0000

I’m not much of a blogger. Having the summer trip provided me with an endless supply of material to write about. But (my) ordinary life hardly seems worth writing about. Another roadblock for me was that I wanted to “preserve” the trip blog as a sort of whole. And in fits and starts, I have, I think, accomplished that. There is now a Trip Diary page which lists the posts related to our Big Trip in chronological order. The blog format is nice if you’re “following along” in that the most recent entries appear at the top. However, if I were to tell someone today that we had a great trip this past summer and that they can read about it on our website, the standard blog ordering (reverse chronological) is less than ideal. So with some help from the WordPress community, I was able to code up a page that presented the trip log entries in Forward chronological order, as a diary would be. Which I think you will agree is much more friendly for the newcomer.

Feature Creep

tastewar — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 13:58:28 +0000

I’ve added a couple of new pages (see the “tabs” along the top) for a photo gallery and a map showing pictures along our route. Enjoy!

C8H10N4O2

tastewar — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 15:08:54 +0000

Mmmm…

Shaving Hotel Costs

tastewar — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 11:45:08 +0000

In two or three of the hotels we’ve visited, the pop-up drain plug has been missing. In two or three others, the sink wouldn’t hold water in spite of the presence of a plug. This makes shaving rather less efficient. I tried to fix one of the non-water-holding ones, but failed. Are the missing ones the result of vandalism?

Whapped WAP

tastewar — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 14:02:25 +0000

As I mentioned earlier, my pictures were uploading to flickr very slowly last night, and when I woke up, I was not surprised to see that the upload had failed. I started it up again, and it failed on the second picture. After a couple more iterations, I decided to take another tack, and connect to a different SSID, as there were many available and provided by the hotel. That seemed to fix it — the remaining few photos uploaded in minutes rather than hours, and the rest of the web sites I was using worked much more smoothly.

The problem felt like the LAN connection to that particular WAP must have been dropping packets (and lots!), either due to a bad cable or a bad interface. So if you’re ever at the Comfort Inn on Elm Hill Pike in Nashville, avoid BBHWIRELESS_18.

Overall, our experience with hotel wifi has been good. Performance hasn’t always been the best, but the availability has been ubiquitous, and as opposed to a few years ago, always free. The only exception was the non-national-chain sportsman-oriented motel we stayed in outside of DeSmett, South Dakota.

Tom’s Titles

Susan — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 03:45:30 +0000

I don’t tend to check the web-site everyday and Tom does 98% of the posting (many from the car while I’m driving and Jim Dale reads Harry Potter to us). He is doing a great job to keep up with the speed of our travels… But how about these post titles… He’s really out-doing himself this week. All this on only one cup of coffee (or less) per day!

Backfill…

tastewar — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 18:51:14 +0000

I’ve been going back occasionally and filling in with posts from previous days. It’s hard to keep up in real time, and even though it feels wrong to pre-date blog postings, it feels like the right solution to make this a record of the trip. Be sure to look back a bit; there might be something you missed!

Ketchup

tastewar — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 17:16:41 +0000

I’ve been playing catch up with the photos on Flickr. If you go to my page of “Collections” you will see the Collection for this trip, and in it, the many sets I’ve organized thus far. Still more to go, and hopefully I’ll keep up with current work in the future, although after tonight we have four nights of camping, so who knows…

Literally Blew a Fuse

tastewar — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 13:09:09 +0000

We brought along a new powered cooler for the car,

so that we could keep slightly more interesting food than bread and peanut butter for picnic lunches. Prior to coming through Canada, we hadn’t used it, as we didn’t want to deal with any customs issues. But yesterday, we used it for water bottles, then after grocery shopping we filled it with a few items. At a certain point, I noticed that its fan wasn’t going, and it’s simple enough to have no thermostat, so I was suspicious. When we got to the hotel, we brought it with us, as we also have an A/C adapter for it. I looked for a switch or a fuse, and finding none obvious on the unit, I took apart the cigar lighter plug where fuses often are, but this proved more difficult than it should have, due to either a junky CLP or it being melted due to a current overload? Anyway, while the wire in the fuse wasn’t visibly broken, the fuse showed signs of being blown.

After dinner, we drove over to Home Depot which was right behind the restaurant, and while they didn’t have the exact same fuse (8A), they did have slow blow 8A and normal 10A fuses. I bought both. So far, the slow blow 8A is holding up.