Tag: hardware

When reading my Think Pad T42p review the other day, you may have seen that my only problem I had with the fine machine was that the DVI port of the docking station supported only the 1280×1024 resolution. This forced me to use the analog video otput to power my cool 21 inch 1600×1200 LCD at my workspace.

My problem with this solution: The picture was blurry and a bit unsharp. While it got way better after upgrading the VGA cable to something better than what came with the display, it still did not get as sharp and crisp as the image I had on a 1280×1024 18 inch display I had connected via DVI. Actually it was still quite blurry – at least for me, used to the sharper display.

A comment in my blog entry (many thanks – comments like this are the only thing keeping me deleting all those SPAM-comments while still not disabling the comment function) pointed me to this forum entry which in turn pointed me here.

Omegadrivers provides a hacked version of ATI’s Catalyst driver that enables the Think Pad’s DVI port to support the 1600′ resolution (Actually, the driver is optimized for gaming-performance, but that’s not so important for me)! Very nice!

Now the image is clear and crisp, just as I always wanted it to be. Cool

Now… if someone could tell me what I have to do to un-break the OpenGL-Support, I’d really appriciate that… Whenever a program is using OpenGL it immediately crashes using those new drivers.

Quite exactly one year ago, I reviewed my then new IBM Thinkpad T40. To save you from going there and have a look: I really liked the device.

In the year that has passed, I had some things that began to bug me me, though they are somewhat minor. I have not noticed them back when I made the review:

• The harddrive is slow. And when I say slow, I really mean it. Windows has a tendency to swap, regardless of available memory. And those times when my TP was swapping made it nearly impossible to work with it. The boot time after entering my password and before the system really gets responsive (you know: The GUI is drawn, but does not really react to input yet) was quite long – stripping down the installation and defragmenting the drive did not really help, which – considering 1 GB of available RAM – lead me to the conclusion that the drive really was quite a bottleneck.
• The display had a resolution of just 1400×1050. I would really have liked the 1600×1200 one
• Soon after I got my T40, the T41 was released with a feature to automatically park the heads of the harddrive and spin it down when the laptop is shaken. This feature was absent in my T40 and this march, I had to learn this the hard way: The drive died (I was very lucky: It only had tons and tons of bad blocks on the system partition – my data was not affected). This was when I really wanted this drive-spin-down feature
• Graphics-Performance was somewhat behind of what I would have whished for. Especially it was not possible to run epsxe at sufficient speeds. Certainly not something I would need in a computer I use mostly for work, but it would have been nice. Doom 3 comes to mind, too, though I don’t think any laptop existing today is actually powerful enough for that game – at least no portable one ;-)

And that’s about it: Minor issues. I am a really big fan of my T40. Really. Believe me. And continue to believe me when I tell you this: IBM has announced the T42 model which finally comes with the 1600×1200 screen resolution. And not only that: The built-in Fire GL Chip from ATI should definitely provide enough juice for epsxe (though I’ve not tested that yet because of the lack of PSX-CD’s here in the office). I could not resist getting one

I mean, 1200×1600 resolution is just great for anything you do beyond just surfing the web. While you can use more than one monitor, it’s always more convinient to have everything on just one screen. Just think of Delphi with all it’s palettes and stuff. Very convinient

And this harddrive spinning down feature. Very convinient too.

So, I’m writing this blog entry on my brand new IBM ThinkPad T42p. Time for a review, don’t you think?

From the outside, IBM has not changed much: With it’s 15 inch monitor, the whole thing got a bit bigger (and a little bit thicker, if I’m not mistaken), but else they have left the outside unchanged from my T40 model.

On the inside, when installing Windows XP (while the IBM preinstallations are quite un-intrusive, I still prefer a completely un-customized installation of Windows and downloading just the drivers I need. That way I could even test my slipstreamed SP2 installation), I noticed the immense power this thing had. After just about 15 minutes, the installation was completed (excluding the drivers, of course). Boot time was much shorter than what I had on my T40 – even considering the emptyness of the harddrive. And it remained to be that short after copying over my profile. I really think, they finally used a better harddrive. Because the new computer is just 100 Mhz faster than the old (1.6 -> 1.7 GHz), I think that it must be the drive performing better.

The display is great. Highly readable and very bright. I really like the resolution. Display-related, though is my one big problem I have with this wonderful toy (why oh why must everything have at least one flaw?):

The DVI-Port (provided by my docking station) is (still) limited to 1280×1024 pixels, so I have to use the analog output to power my 1600×1200 monitor, giving me a somewhat suboptimal performance. Too bad. Maybe tey’ll fix that later.

Now I’m looking forward to check the computers 3D-performance. If there’s something unusual about it, I’m going to post it, of course.

Overall, I think, if you don’t need the 1600×1200 resolution, you can live without upgrading. If you really like (or even depend on) that big resolution (and consequently high DPI count), you should maybe consider updating. Was there not that problem with the DVI port, this would be the perfect notebook. With this flaw, it’s just the best one existing on the market. ;-)

UPDATE: Jepp. ePSXe works. It works extremely well, actually. I’m using Pete’s OpenGL GPU plugin with nearly everything turned on and I’m still not getting any lag. This is nice.

New year, new iPod. They made so many small usability enhancments with those new models, that you actually ask yourself, whether the predecessors are really made by Apple (because if they would be, there weren’t that many usability flaws in the first place)

• Playback stops when you plug out the headphones. Oh an speaking of headphones, I’m using these. They are a great compromise between extremely expensive and good-sounding
• The menu item where the Music is stored is called – surprisingly – Music now. This is much better then the “Browse” in the older models.
• The click wheel is the best user interface they created so far. I hated those soft keys in the 2nd genration: They were extremely inprecise and fired ofthen when I did not acutally want them to.
• It’s faster. My old model paused quite a while when entering the artists list. The new model does this instantly.

Convinience-wise, the jump to the third generation of iPods was the biggest step. Thanks, apple.

Oh and the Music I’m playing on the photo is this CD. The music is difficult to describe. A bit jazz-ish, but not really. I really like it – especially as a passionate gamer of the Chrono series and Xenogears, where the music is inspired from. Consider buying it. It’s great!

I really like to photograph. I do so since I was a child. Then I bought my Canon ixus 500, which reawakened this old passion of mine. About a week ago or so, I bought O’Reillys Digital Photography Hacks and read through it, which was quite fun – it’s an excellent piece of work. Easy to read while still providing you with quite some knowledge.

You should defintiely read the book too, if you are interested in digital photography (some hacks apply to the old fashioned analog one too)

One thing, I noticed when reading through: There is quite a lot of stuff that can’t be done using those compact cameras. Many hacks just begin with “if you have feature X, you can…”

The feature list of this baby actually contains all those Xes from the book. Wow. That looks nice (besides being written in light-gray on white ;-) ). Expensive, but nice.

I laughed at them. Just like everyone did. I mean: Why on earth should I pay more to get less? Tablet PCs usually have a much too small monitor and are much too powerless – not to speak about resolution (I’m quite the screen resolution guy anway, considering that I’m seriously thinking about buying myself a T42p with the cool 1600×1200 resoulution, just because of that. But then: Have you ever really used Delphi? If yes, you know what I mean). And on top of that: Why on earth should I rely on handwriting recognition when everyone knows that this doesn’t work?

Then, I got a panel on my table to evaluate it’s potential as mobile device running our PopScan. While it’s not important what brand the thing actually was from (Acer in this case) and while I certainly did not have the opportunitiy to really test the thing like I did with my T40, one thing I’ve seen: Tablet PC’s are cool. Really cool.

For one there is that extremely powerful handwriting recognition engine. In contrast to all other engines I’ve seen, the one running on the tablets really works. Without training or getting used to on my part, I had a recognition rate of about 95% with the exceptions being some non-words anyway (like gnegg or “Sauklaue” which actually got recognized as Saddam [Sauklaue is what you call a really terrible handwriting in German]). The engine is so good that it actually can serve as a keyboard replacement – at least if you’re not writing too long texts (like this entry here ;-) )

But the real killer application of that thing is the included Microsoft Journal: A digital notepad (the name notepad was already taken for something… else… in Windows). You just make your notes, which goes very well using the pressure sensitive pen and because you can rest your hand on the display while writing – the tablet reacts to the pen only. Then, when you are done, you can draw a circle around the text you want to have recognized. Journal will do as you ask and replace your writing with a common text-box, leaving your drawings in place.

This is perfectly adapted for my workflow. I usually have a piece of paper lying on my desk, serving as container for all that small stuff I have to keep in mind. Line numbers, small concepts, interface definitions – quite a lot of stuff actually. Then, when the paper gets full, I usually throw it away and take a new one.

If I could do those notes on a Tablet PC, I could actually conserve them. But not only that, I could search for them – in full text (recognition is done in the background)! And it does not stop there: When I actually wrote down program code in those notes, I could immediatly reuse it, instead of manually retyping it

All this potential is realized with the really great UI the Journal has: You can insert space everywhere you want, pushing down the content below (and doing that quite intelligently), you can copy and paste your drwaings (sometimes I really whished I could do that on paper) and all that with a really simple UI. This is so incredibly great.

So to all those people laughing about the Tablet PC’s: Try them! Maybe you will be quite surprised. I for myself am quite sorry, I had to send the thing back.

Note: I’ve written this yesterday, but I forgot to post it until it was too late…

You may have noticed that I’m quite interested in the new trains, Forchbahn recently purchased. Now hear my sad story of failed attempts to finally ride one of them:

1. Monday, the 23rd of February was the first date when the new cars would have been used in public transport. This is what happened to that train.
2. A week ago, March 22nd was the new date when the train was to be used. This time it went smoothly, but unfortunatly, no one told me.
3. Last Thursday, March 25th, I would have had time to finally take the ride (they use it just for one run per day (7:32am from Forch) – about 40 minutes. Afterwards the train is used to teach the drivers how to use it). The wednesday before, I was at my parents and had a look at the new train: Three people where above it and tweaking something. When I went home about four hours later, they still where there and it was already 11pm, so I deceided against going at thursday morning – I didn’t think, it would have been fixed until then.
4. On Friday I didn’t have time
5. I wasn’t sure whether the train is used during the weekend (considering its current stability I think not), so I did not even try to get up at 6 in the morning
6. Today I finally went to Forch. What I’ve seen was the train leaving the depot halfways, then stopping, turning off all lights and lowering the pantographs. Then I’ve seen the replacement-train coming out and driving to the track where the new one should have departed from. I asked around whether it would work tomorrow and they told me that “yes, it will – provided they fix the train until then” – let’s see what tomorrow brings to me.

On the positive side: This afternoon, I’ve seen the train in one of the instruction runs down here in the city, so I suppose they fixed it.

I love new stuff!

This post is the first of a series introducing some suburban railways here in switzerland. All of those I will present here I’ve already tried out (some more thoroughly, some less).

If you know interesting railways for me to try out, please do not hesitate to tell me!

Forchbahn

I used to take the Forchbahn every day to go to school and later to work, but now that I live in the city, it’s just interest and visiting my parents that keeps me using it. Recently they had this bad accident, so I am still waiting for the new trains to finally be available to the public. Quite lame website by the way, but
here is some light-content which a non-german speaking visitor may understand.

Probably the most interesting thing about the Forchbahn is the terrain it is running through: It starts in the middle of Zürich (city environement) and goes all the way to quite agricultural environement – all within just 40 minutes. The most interesting spot in the whole track is the station Rhealp: It is non-planar and if there is only the slightest bit of moisutre on the track, the train will have quite a hard time in getting away there. Additionally in Rhealp, the voltage is changed from 600 Volts DC in Zürich (shared with the tramway) to 1200 Volts DC for the rest of the stretch.

The oldest cars they have where built back in the fifties. They are quite loud and shaky. If you happen to get into one of those (numbered 10 [although car number 10 isn’t used any more] to 15 and 101 to 110), take the control car as those are not quite as loud as the motor coaches. You will recognize them by having only two doors on the side and no pantographs.

The medium series is numbered 21 to 32 and 201 to 206 (i think – the 200-numbers habe no motors) where 31 and 32 have some smaller modifications but the whole series has the same motors. They are a lot quieter than the old ones (actually even quieter than the newest ones) and quite a bit faster but they have problems with moisture on the tracks – they are sliding quite often.

The first two cars in this series have no armrests on the side of the window.

The newest series is numbered 51 to 58 (all with motors). They are fast, don’t slide around that much, but they are quite noisy when accelerating. This is the first series containing a real computer for cruise control and other stuff and thus it’s the first series which can have softweare-problems preventing it from working ;-)

The Forchbahn really is quite cool, but there’s more to ride and I will tell you about!

The red train you see in this picture is the new model of trains, Forchbahn, a small train leading from Zürich zu Forch and Esslingen, recently bought. This is the very same train that sohuld have been used for public transport next monday. The first new model for 12 years.

Now it seems that I have to wait for some more time before trying it out ;-)