- Published:
- September 20, 2011 – 10:48 am
- Author:
- By Dave
Recently picked up a “Phillytablet” from the local newspaper publishing group, Philly Media Network (PMN), publishers of the Philadelphia Inquirer, Daily News, and a few other smaller news publications.
Read on to view my review of the actual hardware (The Arnova/Archos 10 G2 Tablet) and of the Philly Media Network applications that you are subscribed to.
Categories: Hardware,Reviews,Social Media
- Published:
- August 23, 2011 – 10:03 am
- Author:
- By Dave
Fellow tech friends, I have a find for you. If you have a job, or hobby, or whatever where you find yourself meddling with a bunch of .iso files, whether to boot off of them or just to access the data on them, then I have the device for you. It all started after I backed the Kickstarter project for the isostick. Having never heard of a device before that would accept .iso images on a filesystem and then present them to the computer as a disc drive, I thought this was (and is) a pretty cool idea. When browsing through the comments, I saw folks mentioning that this is just like the Zalman ZM-VE200 external hard drive enclosure. So of course I decided to do some research on this newly discovered gadget. Overview The Zalman ZM-VE200 at its core is an external sata hard drive enclosure. These have been….
Categories: Hardware,Reviews,System Administration
Tagged: external-drives, hardware, sysadmin
- Published:
- January 24, 2010 – 3:32 pm
- Author:
- By Dave
Canon’s site for the LiDE 50 does not list any Windows 7 drivers for download, nor Vista 64-bit drivers. However, I did find that you can use the CanoScan LiDE 60 drivers in place of the LiDE 50 drivers, and they do have options listed for Windows 7/Vista in both 64-bit and 32-bit varieties. Do do this, you download the appropriate driver (either the Windows 7 64 or 32 drivers) which is contained in an executable file. Use a program such as 7zip to uncompress this file into another folder. Within this folder, there are no drivers but further cabinet files. Use 7zip to decompress the _winzip_ file, which actually contains the driver you need to install. In your device manager, locate the scanner and select the option to update the driver. You will need to select the driver manually, then specify the device type and driver, then click the “Have….
Categories: Hardware,Other Technology,Windows
Tagged: canon, drivers, lide, scanners
- Published:
- January 22, 2010 – 2:39 pm
- Author:
- By Dave
EDID stands for Extended display identification data and is what many computer monitors and televisions with a VGA/HDMI use to tell the PC what resolution they support. Which, in theory at least, is great. However what I recently found out is that many LCD and Plasma televisions do not broadcast the correct 16:9 resolution via EDID, and therefore the computer doesn’t know what resolution to display and you have a stretched image.
Categories: Hardware,Other Technology,Windows
Tagged: drivers, edid, nvidia, windows-7
- Published:
- January 21, 2010 – 1:17 pm
- Author:
- By Dave
Gone is my 500+ channel television subscription along with the required boxes necessary to decode all of that content. The DVR, which has been a mainstay of my family’s television viewing habits, has been ousted. In it’s place is a kick-ass system that keeps the DVR functionality for many of the TV shows that we usually watch, brings in much new content, and also saves me a few bucks each month.
Let’s face it, you don’t want all of the content that your cable provider offers. Cable providers have fought a-la-carte programming tooth and nail for this very reason. Much of it is specialty programming, and though I admit it is nice to know it was there, my family and I rarely watched any of it. My new setup brings many new sources as well as a CHOICE to what you want to view. I am very happy with the results so far.
Categories: Hardware,Other Technology,Reviews,Software,Television
Tagged: acer-revo, boxee, cable, home-theater, htpc
- Published:
- January 6, 2010 – 11:05 am
- Author:
- By Dave
The beginning of a decade is always a time for prognostication, and this year is no exception. This is an interesting collaborative look on mobile device trends for 2020. A lot of these trends are already well on the way to widespread adoption, and I would argue that many will be seen by 2015.
View the complete article to view my own predications for the Mobile Trends of the 2010s.
Categories: Cell Phones,Other Technology
Tagged: mobile, predictions, trends
- Published:
- December 27, 2009 – 12:16 am
- Author:
- By Dave
I’ve decided to replace my cable plan and DVR box with something a little more… functional. Sure we get a ton of channels from Verizon FiOS, but we hardly ever watch them. Our television viewing habits mainly consist of a few programs that my wife watches and a few programs that I watch, but we almost never watch them live. We typically DVR them and then watch them on our own time. For the few instances where we would like to watch live TV, for example when a Penn State game is on, we would like to be able to watch that. Normally the games are on ABC/NBC/Fox so premium cable channels such as ESPN aren’t necessarily needed. There will be some instances where a game may only be available on the Big 10 network or some other premium channel, but honestly I am not that big into sports and….
Categories: Hardware,Other Technology,Software,Television
Tagged: boxee, replace-cable, Television