Graves On SOHO Technology

Not long ago I read a post by a blogger who had made the effort to give up his laptop for the day. While attending a conference he left his laptop in his hotel room intent upon using only his Nexus 7 tablet throughout that day. I thought it an interesting experiment.

The tale of his day highlighted a few worthy accessories for the Nexus 7 tablet. He pointed to a premium stylus and a Bluetooth wireless keyboard as key to his productivity. I was impressed by his logic and the tale of his experience that day. So much so that I ordered those same items so that I might try them for myself.

At this very moment I’m typing on the Logitech Keyboard for Android , wirelessly connected to my Nexus 7. Just as he described the case for the keyboard doubles as a stand for the tablet. It’s handy. To use it properly really requires a table, but it’s working on my lap at the moment.

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A lot of offers drop into my email inbox. Sometimes companies are trying to sell me stuff. Quite often they want me to join in on their free “webinar!” I’ve made no secret of the fact that I hate the word “webinar.” It’s an abomination.

Over the years I’ve used Citrix GotoMeeting quite a lot. It’s a bit scary to think of how long I’ve paid them their monthly pound of flesh, but the service has truly changed my life. It allows me to perform remote support and maintenance processes without physically travelling to the customer site. When Citrix later offered GotoManage, a service more optimized around remote admin functions, my employer adopted it company-wide.

So, you see, I’m open to the use of such services…but I despise the way the language is warping around their use. “Webinars” don’t typically happen on the web. They happen online. You may access a web site into order to get into the session, but they don’t actually occur on the web. If they occurred on the web there’d be no installable applet involved. It would all happen inside the web browser with no plug-in required. It would all happen over HTTP.

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This past week I’ve been getting to know Google’s Nexus 7. So far I’m liking it a lot. It’s interesting to see where I find it useful and where I still reach for my cell phone, netbook, laptop or desktop. How the Nexus7 changes my relationship with those devices is possibly one of the more interesting things about the tablet.

Of course, the Nexus7 is not my first attempt to make a tablet part of my routine. Last year I bought a Viewsonic gTablet, which is a 10” tablet running Android 2.2. I went so far as loading Cyanogen Mod to it, but eventually lost interest. it was simply too limited to be useful.

Last summer we bought an HP Touchpad running WebOS. The fire sale price was attractive. My wife ended up claiming that as her own. When she thought she’d lost it we ended up with a second Touchpad. That one was almost refit with Android 4.1…and may yet in fact.

Finally, in a fit of bad judgment I bought the HP Slate 500. That was an 8.7” tablet running Windows 7. I purchased it with a specific, work related project in mind. When that project failed to materialize I decided to resell it on E-bay, but not before I had also purchased the companion Bluetooth keyboard and protective cover.

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When HP did their now famous about-face on WebOS I saw it as an opportunity to acquire a Touchpad at a fire sale price. So did a great many others. What limited inventory HP had sold out very quickly.

We eventually managed to obtain one, which my wife claimed as her own. I was ok with that. I had a chance to get to know the Touchpad here and there. It was enough maintain my impression that tablets are better for media consumption than creative tasks. In essence, the touchpad made me appreciate my aging HP5102 netbook..enough to justify the move to an SSD.

Back in May my wife reported that she had lost the Touchpad. She was certain that she left it somewhere off-site and it was surely lost forever. We also hunted all around the house and office, just in case it could be found. It wasn’t. Much changing of passwords ensued.

A few days later Woot.com offered refurbished Touchpads for $199. I informed Stella, suggesting while I had purchased the first touchpad, she might like to purchase another. She eventually decided to buy one.

When this new Touchpad arrived it was defective. It would not find any wifi, as if the radio was disconnected. Woot advised me to deal with HP WebOS support, which I did. That process took a week or two but they eventually replaced the defective device.

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Every day I get an email from the HP SMB Outlet sales team. Attached to this email is a spreadsheet listing all of the overstock and refurbished products that they have available. Beyond discounted pricing, I’ve had a good experience buying laptops and desktops from this group over the past few years.

Today’s list includes all the usual suspects, with one notable exception; a better than average selection of thin clients. As I’ve written previously, these little thin clients make great platforms for small embedded systems projects, including; Asterisk, Freeswitch, SqueezeServer, etc.

Consider the HP T5565 pictured to the right. Here’s the current offer:

• HP t5565 ThinPro (Linux)
• VIA Nano u3500 @ 1.5GHz
• VIA ChromotionHD 2.0 video
• 1GB Flash
• 1GB DDR3 1333
• 1 Gigabit Ethernet port
• 6 USB 2.0 ports
• 2 DVI ports
• Analog audio I/O
• $135

If the VIA Nano processor doesn’t rock your world the T5745 model has an Intel N280 Atom processor for $159, with a full warranty.

I have no connection to the HP SMB Outlet. I just think that these are great little, affordable, techno-playthings.

A couple of weeks ago one of the daily deals emails from New Egg made an offer that I found I could not resist. I am weak, it’s true. The offer in question was a 120 GB SanDisk Ultra solid state disk (SSD) drive for a mere $120.  Most SSDs of that size are $180+.

The appeal of SSDs is rooted in the same kind of sensibility that had me building Asterisk appliances that boot from flash media. Flash offers an attractive combination of performance and reliability.

The trade-off presented by SSDs is very high cost-per-gigabyte of storage. This offer, which was basically $1/GB, seemed like a nice chance to try an SSD for the first time. I wasn’t really certain how I’d use it, but I ordered one anyway.

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