Month: March 2007

Found: Vista drivers for the Toshiba M200 tablet.

There has been quite a lot of discussion from M200 owners about whether or not Toshiba was going to support Vista on this model or not, including this detailed post from Scott Hanselman.

When I first got the tablet, I set up a Google blog search RSS feed for “m200 vista” and it paid off exactly as I had hoped. On the forum GottaBeMobile, someone posted that the drivers were spotted on the Swiss Toshiba support site [link]. You don’t have to actually read the foreign language (German?) page, the dropdowns are in English or product-name-eze.

And it looks like everything is here, video drivers, “value added package”, etc. The biggest problem by far — the tablet not coming back from sleep — seems to have been addressed with the new video driver.

Once again the link: http://ch.computers.toshiba-europe.com/cgi-bin/ToshibaCSG/download_drivers_bios.jsp?LNG=8&service=CH

One of my rules for blogging is that I spend more than 15 minutes searching for something I should do a post that will help someone else in the future.

I am using a second monitor attached to my laptop when I’m at the office. I’m able to put everything (mail, IM, firefox, etc) on the second monitor and just keep Visual Studio and IE open for development on my main screen. Fantastic productivity enhancer. Except this is a laptop so when I’m connecting from somewhere else, and I’m don’t carry a second monitor with me, windows will sometimes open in the phantom window, rendering them useless. Side note: I bet most people with laptops don’t realize that they can probably do this with their relatively new machines. I think the assumption is that the monitor input is just for projectors and won’t function as a second display. You should check. Monitors are cheap and you might even have an extra one around.

Lifehacker has a trick that works maybe 70% of the time here, but many windows don’t have the “move” handler that this trick relies on.

I had discovered this one other time in my life, but it must have been pre-blog. It took me forever to find, but here is a very simple (crude) tool that will bring back any window. Also works in Vista, unlike a shareware tool I tried for this problem (Shove-It).

Force Window Visible 

Future Google searchers, maybe this will help:

Restore off screen windows
Force windows on screen
relocate windows multi monitor tool
relocate lost windows
windows off screen
Help, I used to have a second monitor, now I can’t find my windows

YouTube – Shell & Partizan

Thank you AutoBlog for posting this! We have here four or five Ferrari F1 cars ranging from the ’50’s up to an F2004 or so rampaging through Rome, Monaco, Rio, Sydney, New York and Hong Kong city streets. Amazing stuff and be sure to turn up the sound! [Bigger, better looking QuickTime link here]

Comments, when I first saw the ad, I was sure that the Ferrari I saw back in October [flickr link] parked in the Anthorpe building [9k/month apartment listing] was used, but the ones in the ad start a little later than the one I saw.

Also, this is the kind of thing that could convince a guy to buy an Apple TV device and an HDTV.

I installed this on my servers within about two hours of it being released to the web. I am compelled, I can’t explain it.

Anyway, just a tiny little note to say that when you upgrade, all NICs will have their firewall turned on automatically. As you can see in the picture we have a backend, management NIC with dedicated hardware, it doesn’t really need a firewall. 

I caught this pretty quickly, but I’m putting this up there in the hopes that I can save someone else some degree of suffering. Don’t rollback just yet anonymous Google friend!

This will be hard to hear above the din that is Arcade Fire indie music hype, but I have a new album to rave on.

Kings of Leon’s new album Because of the Times.

I liked, but didn’t love their first two albums, I thought they were somehow muted and timid in the production and it didn’t do enough for me.

But I’m completely rocking out to this new one. There’s a new dynamicism on this record that I didn’t hear before. It doesn’t hurt that I rediscovered the volume knob and am going through a loud phase. Every two months or so, I remember that, as an adult, I can crank it up whenever I feel like it.

Favorite tracks: 2. Charmer, 3. On Call, 6. My Party, 7. True Love Way, 8. Ragoo This is pointless. There are more favorite tracks than non-favorites. This is a great album.

While I always speak of my foray into the world of being an entrepreneur in positive terms, and indeed this is shaping up to the most exciting thing I’ve ever done professionally, it is also quite *hard*.

Of course I am well prepared to know how hard it is. My father has been an entrepreneur for nearly my whole life, my brother-in-law is an expert as well.

You can guess the obvious stuff like money, stress and long hours and of course I knew those going in. Yet I have been surprised by a few things in my not-quite four months of this.

The old-timey hand car pictured serves as a useful metaphor. I’m on that thing pumping away, moving down the tracks, but as soon as I stop, there’s not much coasting. In a normal 9-5 job at a big company, you can come in late or uninterested and things are already moving along, you just hop on and away you go. Not so in a startup. Determination to keep momentum going is a requirement to be in this game.

Anybody that knows me personally would undoubtedly describe me as even-keeled. Generally I’m not prone to over-worry or over-excitement. Except that now I do have to admit that pulling up TechCrunch, the key blog that tracks our market, drives my anxiety to rare levels. First mover advantage is not a life and death factor for us, but it clearly matters a great deal. So it happens quite frequently that someone will claim to be all the things we aspire to and for a few minutes, mild panic sets in. It only lasts until I continue investigations and determine, in all the cases so far, that there might be elements of similarity, but the differences are key and the blood pressure drops.

Old-timey hand car over there also demonstrates pretty clearly having someone else (or two or three) on that car with you makes all the difference and I’m extremely fortunate to have great partners.

My fourth generation ipod is a bit long in the tooth at this point, but at twenty gigs, it has plenty of space for music and it doesn’t play video so no biggie there.

Like everyone else I’ve run into trouble with it from time to time. I even had to replace the headphone jack and the logic board — through a third party, not Apple, since it was past the warrantee at that point. A couple weeks ago, I had some issues with the drive and I thought maybe it was click-of-death time. I ran a thorough chkdsk and it found and fixed a few things. Great. Except iTunes no longer recognized the ipod. It showed up in Windows fine and the ipod diagnostics even came back with all green lights. The most frustrating part was that all of Apple’s advice involved doing a restore from within iTunes, except iTunes wasn’t recognizing it. Argh.

My research was pretty extensive into the inner workings of firmware and partitions because I as considering drastic measures. My plan involved resetting the firmware myself using one of the linux based tools that were created for the linux on ipod projects.

I don’t need to get into all the details to be able to share my eventual fix with you. At some point I realized that the actual drive partition doesn’t really hold any of the ipod logic on it. I simply did “format i: /x /fs:fat32” (where I: is the drive letter for the ipod!!) from within Windows. The ipod restarted, iTunes detected it and offered to give it a name and set me up fresh all over again.

Granted this method must be taken as a measure of last resort and this was a 4G ipod, I don’t know if other generations work the same way. I can confirm this worked on Emily’s mini though as well.

I mentioned a couple weeks ago that I was working out of my father’s office. This is working well, but I have a minor issue with music. I had tried burning DVDs with MP3s to listen to, but I got tired of them by the third day and wanted access to my entire library as well as the latest, newest stuff I was getting.

I’m skipping a ton of details, but basically I needed a solution that would work over the Internet to stream my own music collection to myself. Normally I would have used iTunes streaming over Hamachi, but the firewall here blocks Hamachi’s native mode and SSL mode is not reliable enough for my tastes.

I found a couple choices so far:

1. TuneVine. I won’t bother finding the link because although this is the right idea, it is no where near ready for prime-time and that is coming from a die-hard bleeding edge kinda guy.
2. Izimi. I just found this the other day and I was optimistic based on the sign up experience, but as far as I can tell you can only “publish” one song at a time. I certainly am not going to do that 64,476 times.
3. Orb. My current choice.

Orb’s main features are around streaming video to yourself. A bit like SlingBox, but implemented in software. If you have a media center PC, you can watch your video from wherever you are, including mobile clients. I’m just using the Audio portion of it and so far I’m pretty happy.

You install a small client on the server, set the folders you want monitored, poke a hole in the firewall and you are ready to go. The Orb web client has most of the library tools you’d expect like playlist, search, browse, etc. Once you’ve selected what you want to play it will launch in either their built in flash player or externally (Windows Media, iTunes, Winamp, Real). Performance and audio quality have been great. I haven’t needed it, but I installed the mobile client on my BlackJack and it works great as well.

This isn’t Orb’s fault, but it appears that Last.fm’s audioscrobbler isn’t picking up my streamed tracks. I’ve got an email out to last.fm support on that.