Hardware

It’s the most wonderful time of year! When everyone gets together with family or friends they haven’t seen in who knows how long. Of course, the topic of Trump, social media, and burnt gravy stories will come up. But, my personal favorite topic is, “I have this issue with PIECE OF TECHNOLOGY XYZ. Please help me!” Luckily, despite having not worked on anything other than Mac and Linux the past seven years, I don’t get too many wild questions from family. I’ll sit down with Grandma and help her with an iPhone issue from time to time. My mother-in-law has some legacy e-mail stuff all filtered in her Gmail. Sometimes AT&T changes something and it breaks. These things happen. Complex systems are hard enough. No sense in me being an asshole about it (although I will get frustrated from time to time). ...

This is a comprehensive review of the T-Mobile Sidekick II. I wanted to push this review out a lot quicker but I figured that a thorough testing and experience with the Sidekick II was necessary. After spending a year with the original color Sidekick I think I’ll be able to write up a very good review. On Tuesday, my Sidekick II came and like a gleeful school boy I dropped my SIM card in it and plugged in it to charge. I analyzed, prodded, poked, and so on then took it to SeaWorld the next day. ...

I finally did it. I bought a laptop before I headed out to California. Not so much for the trip to California but for another PC in the house and some more horsepower (a lot more horsepower). I’m not a gamer but I can always use a powerful processor. I picked up the HP Pavilion zv5260us. Here are the specs of the system: AMD Athlon 64 3200+ Processor 512 MB of DDR SDRAM 80 Gigabyte 4200 RPM Hard Disk Drive 15.4" WXGA Widescreen Monitor 64MB NVIDIA GeForce 4 440 Go Video Card DVD+RW/R & CD-RW Combo Drive 54g Integrated Broadcom 802.11b/g Wireless LAN Adapter & Bluetooth 10/100 Mbps Network Adapter and 56K Modem Decent Sound Card with Good harman/kardon speakers 5-in-1 Card Reader Firewire (IEEE 1394) 3 USB 2.0 Ports ...

The first step when preparing for the move to Linux is to make sure that your hardware is compatible. It requires a great deal of research when you get very specific (as I did). For example, I have a Logitech QuickCam Express and I wanted to make sure it would work with the latest Linux kernel. Well initially one would say, “Well it’s USB 1.1 it should work in Linux, no problem.” My research took things one step further by looking to see if that actual model worked and what it would take (if anything) to make it work right and to see how well it actually worked. This research utilized all the resources I had available to me. Searches on Google, newsgroups, and other Linux oriented web sites were quite helpful. There was never really a lack of information. Here is the hardware that I’ll be using regularly in Linux: ...