After using a Treo 700p for the past year, I decided to get a new phone, an HTC Touch. I bought it off of a BST forum and just received it on Thursday. So far it is a pretty awesome phone. I’ve put a custom rom on it so that I get the TouchFLO Interface from the HTC which is a really slick interface for the today screen. Bell also offers unlimited data on the device for $10 a month, which you can use any Window Mobile app on, including VOIP, Qik, Google Maps, even youtube. So far Windows Mobile 6 has surprised me, I haven’t had a single crash, the device is very fast, and browsing is a pretty good with Skyfire, not quite the experience that the iPhone gives, but its many times better than Internet Explorer on the device.
The phone also has a built in GPS which locks on withing 20 seconds for me and works amazingly with Google Maps and Live Maps. While it would be nice to get an iPhone, unfortunately I can’t stand Rogers, they have terrible customer service and even worse reception where we live. Lack of 3G in our area also kills the deal. Bell offers much cheaper plans than Rogers, especially for corporate users, so for a similar plan it would be nearly $80 a month where on Bell they charge $35.
Unfortunately, that is the sad state of Canada’s Cell Phone Networks. Hopefully with the spectrum auction that happened recently, Bell and Telus will be able to hit Roger’s where it hurts, and drive down costs for consumers or at least give us another option for HSPA networks.
Many people don’t know that OS X has a built-in Color Calibration tool that works quite well. I’ve calibrated my Macbook Pro’s LED LCD screen and my Viewsonic monitor with it and it is a major improvement over Apple’s default color setting.
To calibrate your screen, open up System Preferences and go to the display pane. Click on the Color Tab and then click Calibrate.
In the Calibrate Assistant, select Expert Mode to get the best color.
Next you will need to move the slider’s until the Apple appears to be neutral compared to the background. Squinting and sitting far back can help. While the screencap below may not look to be remotely calibrated, that is how different LCD panels can be.
You will do a few of these curves, once you are done, it will ask you to select gamma you would like to use. I left it at the Mac Standard of 1.80, you can play around with it if you prefer more or less gamma.
Now you can change the white point. I left it using the native white point since it seemed to be the optimal setting.
Once you are done, it will show you all the technical details of the calibration.
Congratulations! You have just calibrated your monitor, and it probably looks a lot better than before. I suggest running through the calibration assistant a few times, renaming the profiles and then choosing which one you think looks the best, mess around with both sliders.
Also, if you are calibrating an external monitor, there is one other step at the beginning of the assistant which asks you to set the contrast and brightness on the monitor itself.
If you’ve been following my blog, you may have noticed the recent lack of posting for the past two months. There is this game I started playing, you may not have heard of it (Judge Judy hasn’t), It’s called World of Warcraft. If you have heard of it, those three words can explain the lack of productivity, and who knows, perhaps even AIG and the Lehman Brothers were playing it too.
Anyways, I’m thinking of doing another mini-series like my Home Server Guide (Which I’m working on fixing), so if you have any idea’s on something that you would like to see, drop me a line at shawn@32packets.com or leave a comment, I’m open to pretty much anything unless it involves decapitation.
There was a terrible problem with my web host, they apparently nuked my VPS due to a billing error or something. Lost all the data that was on there, fortunately I have backups of the webapps I was working on and a backup of the Wordpress Database. I’m working on rebuilding the blog, so you’ll just see the default Wordpress theme for now. I’ve found the old theme thanks to Time Machine, pretty sure I have all of the plugin’s I need loaded on, now I just have to upload all of the images to fix the how to.
It appears that Lenovo has made the W series available for sale. The W700 starts at $2,978, and adding the Intel QX9300 costs an additional $1,275. The 15.4″ W500 starts at $1,629.
While the W700 base model cost’s more than the 17″ Macbook Pro, it does pack quite a punch spec wise in comparison to the Macbook Pro.
Our ThinkPad W Series includes the new ThinkPad W500 as well as the new ThinkPad W700. Both offer lightning-fast Intel® Core™2 Duo technology, advanced NVIDIA® Quadro® FX MXM based graphics, cutting-edge technology features and the durability and rock-solid reliability you expect from Lenovo — making the W Series the ultimate mobile workstation.
Ultimate performance
Powerful Intel® Core™2 processors with Intel Active Management Technology (AMT) offer superior performance along with enhanced management and security.
Built for Windows Vista® to enable a premium user experience.
Hard drives up to 320GB 5400rpm and up to 200GB 7200rpm with Full Disk Encryption (FDE) offer maximum security and storage.
Solid State Drives (SSD) offer improved performance, reliability and battery life.
High-performing DDR3 memory lowers power consumption.
Intel® Turbo Memory helps speed boot time, loads applications faster and saves power.
Ultimate graphics experience
ThinkPad W700 mobile workstations feature the NVIDIA® Quadro FX® MXM based graphics solution for unsurpassed mobile graphics processing and performance.
OpenGL (Open Graphics Library) with up to 1GB of dedicated video memory enables graphic-intensive applications.
High-resolution, premium WSXGA+ or WUXGA panels provide an improved viewing experience. The W500 features a 15.4″ display, and the W700 features a 17″ display.
Next-generation DisplayPort technology provides clearer, crisper images and a larger viewing area.
ThinkPad W700 mobile workstations offer X-Rite® PANTONE® color calibration for greater image accuracy, more precise color matching, and a consistently true display.
Palm-rest digitizer and pen
ThinkPad W700 mobile workstations offer a 120cm x 80cm Wacom® palm-rest digitizer and pen, ideal for digital content creation and CAD/CAM applications. The digitizer can be configured to map to the entire screen or a user-defined area, and is compatible with a wide range of applications, from Windows® Paint to Adobe® Photoshop®.
While I was reading the MSDN Blogs feed, I found this screenshot.
That is 2.046965 Terabytes of RAM and 64 CPU Cores. It’s only using 4% of the total amount of ram at the time of the screenshot, which is 92GB.
Seeing this made me wonder when is this going to be the norm? When will our laptops have 2 Terabytes of RAM? What could we possibly be using that would ever need 2TB of RAM? Will we actually ever need that much amount of RAM?
