Making use of my Christmas Present… dual Monitors!

When my wife asked me what I wanted for Christmas, I really couldn’t come up with an answer. I have all the gadgets that I want, and my computer/laptop are less than 1-year old, so I really couldn’t think of anything that would really excite me on Christmas day. So, I told her that I could use a 2nd monitor for my Desktop PC which would give me double the screen space. I didn’t really need it, but I thought it might be nice to have dual monitors (it seems a lot of people are doing it). As such, guess what I found under the Christmas tree on Christmas day?

After discovering that my wife indeed ordered a 2nd LCD monitor for me, I went to Newegg.com and ordered a new video card that could drive two LCD displays. My requirements, were that the video card have a PCI-express slot, have dual DVI ports, and was fanless. My old video card was a fanless Gigabyte card and I didn’t want to add more noise in my office by getting a card with a fan. Those requirements really limited my selection, but I decided to order a Zotac GeForce 9500 GT card.

Today the video card finally arrives via UPS delivery, so I unboxed it for my initial inspection. I knew from the reviews on Newegg.com that this video card had a huge heat sink, and I might have some difficulty getting it installed in my existing Desktop PC. Below are a few images of this new video card:

As you can see, it does indeed have a giant heat sink to dissipate the heat from video card chips. Luckily, this card did fit inside my Desktop PC case without intruding very much with the other inserted cards. Below is a quick snapshot of the inside of my Desktop PC. Can you spot the new video card?

Kind of a tight fit, but the heat sink missed all the surrounding cards (whew!). I then buttoned up my PC and reconnected all the various cables and wires, along with the two DVI video cables which were tethered to my two LCD monitors. After a little configuring with the Windows 7 display settings, I got both monitors working flawlessly… no muss or fuss! The Zotac video card seemed to be of high quality construction, and it seems to do the job just fine with not too much heat build-up inside my computer case.

The only thing that surprised me, was that the new LCD monitor (a Sceptre 20.1 “) had a brighter and whiter screen than my old monitor. Both monitors were from the same manufacturer and had the same model number, but one was about 2 years older than the other. Either my old LCD monitor was wearing out, or the new one was using a different LCD screen or newer electronic hardware. In any case, I’ve got both up and running and they look good to me.

So I’ve got my MS-Outlook email up and running in one monitor, while the other has the Firefox web browser and my software development IDE app running. It’s really nice to have the extra screen space, but I sort of feel like I have two computers staring down at me! Would it have been better to get one giant monitor? I don’t know. It seems to take me a while to accept such a big environment change, so I’ll report back in a few weeks on how I’m doing with these two 20″ displays.

Merry Christmas!

It’s Christmas Day and I hope everybody got what they were hoping for. It’s the best time for getting electronic gadgets, even for those who already have everything!

My wife got me an LCD Monitor and a Nikon Digital Camera as my Christmas gift, both of which I’m very happy to have. The LCD Monitor is identical to the Sceptre 20.1″ that I already have, so this will give me two monitors connected to my Desktop PC system (woohoo!). So I’ll have monitors spanning almost two-thirds the width of my physical desktop, so I’m stoked. The only thing I need now is a video card that can drive both monitors and an extra video cable.

I’ve ordered a Zotac GeForce 9500 GT video card from Newegg.com which has dual DVI output, so I should be in business sometime mid next week. Hopefully, Santa was generous to all of you as well.

My old Moto-Q phone feels like a rock…

I’ve been using my new Palm Pixi smartphone for the last few weeks, and I really love it. Its thin, compact, had a touch screen and runs the Palm WebOS operating system. Yesterday I picked up my old Motorola-Q phone to check for possible text messages, and I noticed that it felt really heavy…. like a rock! I’m getting so use to my lightweight Palm Pixi other smartphones are now just paperweights in comparison. The Moto-Q now feels like a militarized version of a smartphone — heavy and hardened to take an EMP blast. But, I know from experience that dropping it can cause the glass screen to crack very easily. It’s a good thing the back cover of my Pixi has a rubber surface, since that makes it easier to hang on to it and less prone to dropping it.

Boeing’s has has their new lightweight composite 787 plane, and I’ve got my lightweight Palm Pixi!

Free WiFi Courtesy of Google

I was pleasantly surprised to find free WiFi access at the Seattle Airport courtesy of Google. I read about Google providing free WiFi access at various airports for the holiday season, but it was nice to see that this will be a permanent feature in Seattle’s airport.

I also noticed a similar advertisement at the Phoenix Arizona airport, however, they’ve had free WiFi at most of their gates for the last few years. It’s nice to see free WiFi spreading out more and more.

Business Traveling with my new companion: The Palm Pixi Smartphone

This week was my first business trip with my new smartphone, the Palm Pixi, and I had high hopes that it would be a better companion than my old Motorola-Q (Windows Mobile 5 OS) smartphone. I’m happy to report the Pixi has been a fantastic replacement for the Moto-Q phone for my travel needs. So let me start from the beginning…

While I was waiting in the Seattle airport for my plane to arrive, I used my Pixi to quickly check all my various email accounts as well as the weather conditions for my destination (Phoenix, Arizona) using the Weather Channel App. I then reviewed my upcoming schedule for the next two days, mentally planning out when and where I might have breaks between customer visits and meetings.

Once on the plane, I switch my Pixi to “Airplane Mode” and used the Notes App to jot down a few reminders so I wouldn’t forget to do them after I arrived in Phoenix. Once I landed, I quickly checked my emails again (responding to the critical ones) before catching the rental car bus for the quick ride to the rental car center.

After getting my rental car and settling in, I plugged in my Pixi car charger connecting it to a Touchstone charger that I brought with me. I then started up the Sprint Navigation App and entered the address for my first destination, allowing the program to figure the best route and guide me with turn-by-turn audio directions. If you’ve never used the Sprint Navigation, it’s a wonder application that essentially replaced my Garmin GPS unit. Also, because the WebOS is multi-tasking, I was able to put the Sprint Nav app in the background while I looked up the address of my first visit on my customer’s contact card. Once I got the address, I simply closed down the Contact App and switched back to the Sprint Nav App to enter the destination.

I continued to use the Sprint Nav App for all my various visits, and it seemed to work very well with the GPS being spot-on for my current location. There was only one time when I had to turn the GPS off and then back on so that the Sprint Nav would reconnect with the orbiting GPS satellites.

In addition to driving directions, I used the Google Maps App on my Pixi to help find nearby restaurants and Starbucks coffeeshops during my travels. A much better solution than just driving around and hoping to run into something!

The Web Browser App was useful when I wanted to check my outbound flight on the airline’s web site.  In fact, I could have checked in for the flight using the web browser, however, I usually like to check in live at the airline kiosk.

And, because the Pixi is a Smart-Phone, I did in use it for phone calls as well.

The one big quirk with my Pixi was the changing of my scheduled appointment times when I switch time zones. In MS-Outlook I set my appointment to use local times, and these times were modified when I went from the Pacific Standard timezone to Mountain Standard. Luckily I noticed it, otherwise I would have been 1-hour late for all my meetings.Next time, I’ll have to remember to set the timezone for out-of-town appointments so this won’t happen again.

Although Microsoft Outlook has a provision for specifying the timezone for an appointment, I didn’t see any options to set the timezone when editing appointments on the Pixi.

So as you can tell from my trip review, the Palm Pixi was a valuable asset on my business trip. The only disappointing thing was when I check the weather back in Seattle and it was below freezing… ugh.

I love my Palm Pixi Smartphone!

For the last few years, I’ve been using my Motorola-Q Smartphone (running Windows Mobile 5) as my cell phone. When I first got it, I thought it was really cool that I could get emails “pushed” down to my phone automatically through the Microsoft Exchange Server system that my company was using. Along with emails, I could also view my calendar and get alerts on events and tasks.

As time went on, newer smartphones appeared on the market with GPS for positioning, better web browsers, and better apps. Blackberry phones were very popular, and the Apple iPhone raised the bar when it came to a productive user-interface. About 6 months ago Palm, Inc. came out with the Palm Pre running Palm’s WebOS operating system. Very much like Apple’s iPhone and Google’s Android interface, WebOS was the new Linux-based OS that would help propel Palm back into the modern Smarphone arena.

It was the WebOS that really interested me, as it made the Windows Mobile 5 OS on my Moto-Q phone seem prehistoric. Unfortunately, the first Palm phone to run WebOS  (Palm Pre) had a slider keyboard form-factor which I really didn’t like. The Pre was also somewhat thick (because of the slider keyboard) and I didn’t want to get something that was thicker than my current Moto-Q phone (since I normally keep my phone in my front pants pocket).

Then appeared the Palm Pixi, which was a very thin candy bar-form factor smartphone that ran the WebOS and had a fixed keyboard. It was similar to my Moto-Q, but thinner, slimmer, and lighter and also sported a touch screen. This was the phone that I was waiting for!

Getting a Palm Pixi Smartphone Tomorrow

Sprint will be selling the Palm Pixi Smartphone running WebOS (same operating system as the Palm Pre) tomorrow, and I’ve decided to get it. Although I’ve been developing applications for the Palm Pre for the last few months, I’ve held off getting an actual Palm Pre phone because I was waiting for Palm to firm up their Palm Catalog program. In addition, I wasn’t so crazy about slider phones, so I was waiting to see what the 2nd WebOS phone would be like, and non-slider candy-bar phone is what appeared in the Palm Pixi.

The Pixi has a less powerful CPU, no WiFi, lower resolution camera, and smaller screen when compared to the Pre, but even so I like it better because it is one solid unit (no slider keyboard), the keys on the keyboard are raised and easier to type on, and it’s very, very thin. I’ve never had a WiFi phone before therefore I probably wouldn’t notice it not being present in the Pixi.

I just figured that I’ve gone on long enough without a physical phone to test my WebOS apps on, so now is the time to get one. As such, I’ll probably start posting more on the Palm Pixi and the WebOS, so stay tuned!

Evernote : My new information manager

I love using the Google search engine (who doesn’t?). I can very easily and quickly search for anything on the Internet using any web browser, and find the information that I’m looking for in a snap. Often, I’ve wanted to have a Google-like search engine just for my personal information which can be accessed on my PC or on the web. It turns out I may have found my answer with a product called Evernote.

Evernote is a cool product that can store various bits of information in a central database system “in-the-cloud” (Internet), on your PC, or on your smartphone. You can create multiple “notebooks” and store “notes” in each of them. Notes can consist of plain or formatted text, web page content, pictures, and audio. The single most useful feature I’ve seen, is the ability to easily grab content from a web page and save it to Evernote. A perfect example is when I come across a web site and I want to look into it further at a later date, I can easily save the full web page (or a portion of it) to a note in Evernote. In fact, there’s a FireFox browser plugin that easily does this for you.

All data stored in Evernote can be searched using a text string, just like with the Google search engine. In fact, if you store images in a note that contains text (say, when you snap a picture with your phone of product description at the store), Evernote can recognize the words in the image for the search! Speaking of snapshots, the Evernote app that runs on your smartphone (iPhone,Blackberry,Windows Mobile, or Palm Pre) interfaces with the Evernote database very nicely, and you can use the camera on your phone to easily snap a picture and store it in Evernote as a note. The Evernote site suggests using your phone’s camera for taking snapshots of business cards, airline tickets, travel receipts, etc. which is a great idea if your phone has a good camera (unfortunately, the camera on my Moto-Q phone is crappy).

Ninite – A great automatic software installer

If you check out my Netbook Blog, you’ll see that I recently purchased a Dell 11z netbook system. The bad thing, is that it arrived with Windows Vista installed and not Windows 7 (which is what I expected). As such, I have to wait about 10 days to get the Dell OEM Windows 7 install DVDs in the mail (ugh).

So I’m in a dilemma– should I install all my standard apps under Vista and use my netbook for the next 10 days and then later wipe out Vista with a clean Windows 7 installation and RE-install all my apps again? I normally install about 10-12 standard applications that I use for my work (most of which take a considerable amount of time to install) and I don’t want to do these installations twice in such a close period of time. So, I decided to just install the FireFox web browser and use my new netbook at a very minimal level until the Windows 7 OS DVD arrives.

This morning, I stumbled upon a wonderful utility called Ninite which seems to be the answer to my prayers. The www.ninite.com web site has a list of programs that you can select, afterwhich you download an installer program that runs on your system and automatically installs all the selected applications using the default settings. So I was able to use this free service to download and install the latest versions of 18 different applications completely automatically. I launched the installer and 15 minutes later it was done, with no user interaction on my part.

Since I normally select all the default settings when I install apps, this utility was perfect for my needs. It also answers “no” for apps that try to install junk (like Yahoo toolbar add-ons, etc). What’s really nice, is that nearly all of my standard apps are among the listed available applications for installation, especially some of the programming apps I use.

So now I can use all my favorite apps on my new Dell netbook under Vista, and later do the same fast installation under Windows 7 and be up and running. Great, great utility!

Windows 7 Family Pack – 3 copies for $150

If you’re like me and you have several computers in your home, Microsoft is offering a Windows 7 Family Pack for those wanting to upgrade multiple PCs. You get 3 licensed copies of Windows 7 Home Premium for the price of $150 US. Since a single copy of Win 7 Home Premium is selling for $120 US, that’s a good deal. Note, this is for an “upgrade” price, so you need to have a copy of XP or Vista on your machine. However, I did a clean upgrade where my PC’s hard drive was wiped clean, so I’m not sure how the upgrade checks for a prior Windows copy?

In my home, we have lots of PCs and laptops so I do plan to get the family pack to upgrade a few laptops and one desktop PC. If you want to save even more money, you can order your family pack from Costco for $140 US. Now, I don’t think Microsoft will be offering the family pack indefinitely, so I suggest you not wait forever to get one if you’re considering it.