Greg In The Desert

Intel CEO Paul Otellini announced a new product at CES called Intel Wireless Display, or Wi-Di. It consists as an adapter that plugs into a HD TV set and allows streaming video and audio from a computer. That’s it.

Other than purchasing the adapter, I would expect the only requirement would be that the computer has WiFi. I would be wrong.

Processor ONE of the following: Intel® Core™ i7-620M processor, Intel Core i5-540M processor, Intel Core i5-520M processor, Intel Core i5-430M processor, Intel Core i3-350M processor, Intel Core i5-330M processor

Chipset ONE of the following: Intel® HM57, Intel HM55, Intel QM57, Intel QS57

Graphics Intel® HD Graphics

Wireless ONE of the following: Intel® Centrino® Advanced-N 6200, Intel Centrino Advanced-N +WiMax 6250, Intel Centrino Ultimate N 6300

Software Intel® My WiFi Technology and Intel Wireless Display must be pre-installed and enabled

OS Windows* 7 64-bit, Home Premium, Ultimate or Professional

Not only does it require a computer with the very latest Intel chips, it has to have all Intel chips. I expect completing technologies to come out that do not have technical requirements around a specific brand of chips. Also note: not Mac compatible.

Costco has La Crosse Technologies weather center that appears to be the same as the La Crosse Weather Pro Center WS-2810. I couldn’t find any markings on the package at the Costco in Albuquerque other than Costco Specific.

The WS-2810 is has PC compatibility using a wireless USB dongle. I’m interested to know if it’s Mac compatible. La Crosse only supplies PC software but I’m using WeatherTracker by After Ten Software with a similar wired model I picked up last year. This wireless model looks to be improved over the wired model I have now.

Costco’s price was around $80 and the La Crosse website lists the WS-2810 at $249.99. I did not see a simialr model on Amazon’s La Crosse Technology Professional Weather Center page (Update: There are 2810’s on Amazon
, they are not labeled as such are there are currently none available).

The description from La Crosse’s website.

WS-2810
Weather Pro Center:
Wind • Rain • Weather •
PC Software
$249.99

• Included PC Interface
• Wind Chill, Direction and Speed
• Solar Powered Wind Sensor
• Rain Data
• Forecast w/ Tendency
• IN/OUT Temp
• IN/OUT Humidity
• Weather Alarms w/ Storm Warning

Dimensions:
Receiver: 4.59" x 0.94" x 7.01"
Thermo-hygro:3.13" x 3.54" x 7.45"
Rain Sensor: 5.18" dia. x 7.19"
Wind Sensor:9.84" x 5.74" x 11.11"

My next option would be the Vantage Vue wireless weather station for about $300 at Amazon which is considerably more expensive.

A botnet is a group of computers that have been infected with automated software that is used to do nefarious things, like attack other computers or send spam. The owner of the computer doesn’t know their computer is participating in the botnet. Botnets are common on Windows based computers due to their ease of being infected by viruses.

Back in January, it was widely publicized that pirated versions of iWork ‘09 had a trojan or a virus of some sort in it. Someone with bad intentions took the standard installer package for iWork, added their malware to it and released it on Bittorent. People who downloaded the Bittorent thought they were just getting a bootleg version of iWork. They also got an added surprise.

According to ZDNet, the purpose of this malware is to create a Mac botnet that is now being detected. This shouldn’t be anything to worry about for most Mac users who legally purchase software. It was more of a social engineering solution to get the malware on users computers buy hiding it in other software. It’s interesting to see that virus writers are making some attempt to target the Mac.

Apple has released a Safari 4 beta for Mac and Windows. Although I am forced to use Internet Explorer 6 at work for internal sites, I almost use Safari exclusively for non-internal sites.

The biggest change is the user interface. Apple has abandoned the Mac OS like metal look on the Windows version. Hallelujah! I have no problem with a Mac applicaltion looking like a Mac application on the Mac, it’s just out of place on Windows.

The menu bar is missing and is replaced with two icons. One icon looks like a document and the other looks like a gear. Tabs are now on top. There is no progress indicator in the URL text field.

I don’t have the Flash plugin installed on my Windows version of Safari and Safari 4 no longer pesters me about it ever time I go to a page that needs Flash.

I have the absolutely slowest T42 on the planet and I used to most applications loading slowly. Safari has always loaded faster than Internet Explorer, but that’s not saying much. Safari 4 does seem to be considerably faster.

So far I am happy with what I am seeing but the UI changes are going to take some time to get used to using them.

Bulk Rename Utility for Windows (via Daring Fireball). See also Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines.

I’ve known for a while that Intel won’t be deploying Microsoft Vista internally. Now that the New York Times is reporting on it, you can know too.

Intel, the giant chip maker and longtime partner of Microsoft, has decided against upgrading the computers of its own 80,000 employees to Microsoft’s Vista operating system, a person with direct knowledge of the company’s plans said.

The person, who has been briefed on the situation but requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of Intel’s relationship with Microsoft, said the company made its decision after a lengthy analysis by its internal technology staff of the costs and potential benefits of moving to Windows Vista, which has drawn fire from many customers as a buggy, bloated program that requires costly hardware upgrades to run smoothly.

“This isn’t a matter of dissing Microsoft, but Intel information technology staff just found no compelling case for adopting Vista,” the person said.

An Intel spokesman said the company was testing and deploying Vista in certain departments, but not across the company.

What sounds like good news for my home town of Rio Rancho is bad new for Colorado Springs, CO. To open the new support center in Rio Rancho they are apparently closing one in Colorado Springs. 800 people have to move to Rio Rancho or lose their jobs.

HP told local workers that the Colorado Springs center is scheduled to close in the second half of next year, when the company plans to open a new center in the Albuquerque suburb that eventually will employ 1,200, said the sources, who said they were told not to disclose the information outside Hewlett-Packard.

I really feel for the people of Colorado Springs. In 2007 Intel announced they are closing their plant in Colorado Springs in which many of those people came to Rio Rancho. I checked out the Colorado Springs plant when they opened in 2000. It’s a beautiful town and I can imagine it will be tough for people to leave there.

HP is bringing 1300 jobs in the way of a support center to Rio Rancho. HP is receiving tax breaks and the 1300 jobs could be realized by 2012.

According to the Albuquerque Journal, it’s likely to be build near the new downtown in the same are where the Santa Anna Star Center is. Yet another building that can be added to the list of building to be built in the new downtown which actually are not.

In another example of crack reporting (or reporters on crack) at the Albuquerque Journal:

Jobs at Hewlett-Packard mostly would be in customer support and sales. They could help offset layoffs at Intel, which remains the state’s largest private-sector employer despite cutting about 1,000 jobs during the last year.

I’m not sure how that works. The Intel layoffs were last year and new HP jobs are not likely to come for a while. A year or two at least. Maybe they will come in time for the next round of layoffs.

In any case based on what I read on the Consumerists, HP needs all the support center help it can get.

Note: I don’t actually know of a new round of layoffs at Intel. I’m mostly being sarcastic but I wouldn’t bet on anything in these times.

About 5 years ago Intel was giving PC to employees. I got one of those PCs, a HP Vectra VL420 MT. As a Mac guy I did use it for a few things, games mostly. This thing has no built in video and I upgraded the video card to a ATI Radeon 9800 All In Wonder. With the video card I am driving a Apple 21″ Monitor via DVI.

A side effect of this new video card is apparently the BIOS cannot display through it. While the HP logo and start up text is suppose to display I get a black screen with the Apple monitor flashing it’s LED. I don’t get a display until the Windows login screen shows up, which displays normally and in full resolution.

I haven’t had this thing powered up for several years. It’s still a very capable computer and I want to run an alternative OS on it (that’s for another exciting blog post). I need to access the BIOS. Any of my dozen or so readers have any ideas?

As a former Palm OS user, I was accustom to syncing my Palm device with both my Mac and PC. My primary interest with this cross sync is to get the same contact and calendar information on all three devices. This is a path that can be wrought with disaster since none of these devices have exactly the same fields. For my Palm devices, I used third party apps to deal with these differences. Pocket Mirror on the PC and Missing Sync on the Mac. They did a very good job and I almost never had to worry about data getting messed up or deleted.

Cross syncing with the iPhone is a different experience, it reminds me of the early days of the Palm. Syncing the iPhone on both Windows and MacOS is done via iTunes. iTunes does not expect a iPhone to sync calendars and contacts with different computers so it puts a extra dialog telling you this and asking if you want to replace or merge the data. This is an annoying extra step. The Windows iTunes interface is exactly the same as the Mac, including the sync dialogs.

The iPhone’s calendar application is lacking in many ways. It does not duplicate iCal exactly, it’s missing categories, it doesn’t display attendees and the alarms are not persistent like they are the palm (they alarm once and that’s it). Syncing with Outlook in a exchange environment has been safe so far the several times I have synced. iTunes has not wiped out categories or attendees or any meetings. I have noticed if I delete a individual appointment in a repeating event, it does not get removed from the iPhone. I’m suspecting that the iPhone stores categories and attendee information but it’s not shown in the calendar interface.

Syncing the phone with the Mac, after syncing with outlook, results in a single category in iCal called “Outlook Calendar”. if the iPhone does remember the categories and attendees, it doesn’t transfer them back into iCal. For that reason I’m not syncing the iPhone with my Mac, Outlook wins in this case.

Syncing contacts works a lot better. The iphone contacts application (if you can call it that, it’s actually located in the Phone application) does know groups, which is the equivalent of categories in Outlook. I first synced my contacts with my Mac, the with Outlook and there were no contacts missing or screwed up. When I synced back to the Mac and used the Check For Duplicates function in found lots of duplicates, I told it to merge them and I couldn’t find any missing information. I think that category information might be lost with the sync but the contact entry is kept. The Mac’s address book is kind of weird in the way it displays groups, so it might have the same contact under a group and not assigned to a group. I need to experiment with this a little more to understand what’s going on. Since it’s not loosing information I will continue to sync contacts and use the merge duplicates feature in Address Book.app.

This is my first look at cross syncing. I haven’t researched it beyond my early attempts here. I can live without the calendar information on my Mac for now. I need contacts on all three systems. This cross syncing is working for me at the moment even if it’s imperfect. It’s no where near as good as it was on the Palm. I hope that either Apple improves the syncing experience or, more likely, a third party will step and take over the syncing.