Kindle Fire 7"

My wife has an iPad mini that she uses constantly.  It's a lot easier to on the eyes than browsing and using apps on a smartphone is.  Yet it's lighter and not much bigger than a book.  True, it's not as portable as a smartphone is, and I wouldn't give up my dedicated Kindle Paperwhite for one.  But for indoor use with WiFi, you can't beat it.

I was suffering from tablet envy, but I couldn't bring myself to spending another several hundred dollars for even a cheaper Android tablet.  Then a few months ago, Amazon came out with this.

$50?  Are you kidding me?  At that price it's practically disposable.  Even if it doesn't do everything I wanted it to do, if it's still useful, I'd live with it.  I figured that I'd probably get frustrated with its limitations pretty quickly, especially being used recent generation iPads.  But for $50, I'd give it a try.

Folks, it's worth it, and then some.    OK, it has low res front and rear cameras.  The fact that it has any cameras at all is rather amazing.  Not that I even bother using them.  Yeah, it only has 8 GB of internal memory, but most of my programs and all of my pictures, videos, and music are on a 32 GB microSD card I sprung for it ($10).  I now have just about every app I would want on it, and still have some room on board for more.

OK, it's a loss leader for Amazon, runs on their stripped down version of Android that some apps won't run on, and is a generation behind the curve on performance.  But it works amazingly well.  They did a good job of making it reasonably snappy and it uses a reasonably modern quad core processor with graphics acceleration.  OK, its resolution isn't even 720p, but at 7 inches diagonal, movies run smoothly and they look good enough.  There's no mistaking the text resolution as competing with an Apple "retina display" on their devices, but it's readable enough with small fonts.  OK, maybe it's not nearly as readable as reading a book on a Paperwhite Kindle is, but it's OK.

$10 for a decent case and another $10 for a 32 GB microSD card, and you're done.  But wait, there's more.  They offered it for $35 during Thanksgiving week, so I bought two more as gifts.  I should have bought more.  Never lacking for being cheeky, Amazon also sells them in six packs (buy five, get one free).

Do I recommend it?  YES!  Especially if you're an Amazon Prime member (it's great for shopping, reading Kindle books, and using it with Prime Video and Music).  It's certainly not a high end tablet, but you are getting a lot more than you paid for it.  And for 90% of what you'd want a tablet for, this gets the job done.

Amazon Fire 7", 8GB, WiFi only

Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi 2

What's a Raspberry Pi?  It's a small $35 computer board that works like a full sized computer.  There are a lot of similarly priced microprocessor hobby boards out there, but you have to program them down to bare metal to do anything with them.  By "bare metal" I mean they don't have an operating system that does the heavy lifting for you, allowing you to use keyboards, mice, monitors, storage, and other devices without having to write drivers to do anything useful.  This thing couldn't be simpler.  Power it using a simple cell-phone charger into the microUSB port and uses a small microSD card for storage after you simply download and copy the operating system onto the card, and plug it in. Plug an Ethernet cable into it, the HDMI output into an existing monitor or HDTV, and borrow a USB keyboard and mouse to get started.  Once you're up and going, you can set it up with a WiFi adapter into one of the USB ports and remote into it (running it "headless"), not tying up a monitor, TV, keyboard, or mouse thereafter.

Why, you might ask?  Think about all the software and projects you'd like to try that you don't want to mess up your primary machine up with.   And wouldn't it be nice to have a computer that only uses a few watts, and with no moving parts, that can be left on 27/4, indefinitely?   OK, it will set you back a few bucks if you don't have a spare reasonably powerful cell phone charger, and you'll probably want to sink $5-$15 into a case for it.  And $10 for a WiFi USB nub, if you don't have an old one around you can't spare.  But that's it.  With a WiFi nub installed, you could hide it in your sock drawer with only a USB cable hanging out.  Hell, run it from one of those USB cell phone charger battery packs, and you won't have even a cable poking out from your sock drawer.

So what do you get for $35?  How about a quad core 900 MHz floating point ARM processor with an integral 1080p graphics coprocessor, 4 USB ports, and an Ethernet port.  Audio and several discrete and serial I/O lines, if that's what you're into.  Yes it can stream HD video and it can be used as media server.  It can be a web server, TOR relay, and Email client or server.  Or in my case, a radio controller and signal decoder.  Or a surveillance camera appliance, detecting motion from a webcam and uploading it to your Dropbox account.  Yes, you can surf the web with it.  The default operating system even comes with a Microsoft Office clone (LibreOffice), a couple of programming languages, a nice desktop GUI, and even a few over the top programs: Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha.  Download more programs if you like, or modify others written for bigger machines, using on-line tutorials and videos.

With its default operating system (Raspian) it's a robust Debian Linux general purpose desktop using cheap cell phone chips and technologies.  You can do a lot more with it than you can with Windows 10 (which you can load onto it by the way, but please don't).

I have an original Pi (single core, half the memory, only 2 USB ports) that I've dedicated to a single purpose, and I recently bought the version 2, described above, still at the same $35 price for general learning and amusement.  They even sell a $5 stripped down version that you can embed in your projects.

For more information, go to:  https://www.raspberrypi.org/

Online Backup - Mozy

Local backup is great, as long as your backup is independent of your PC, is at least as reliable, and is portable. Backing up your files on the same drive as the operating system is a poor choice, since it’s that drive which will most likely fail. Backing up to a separate disk on the same PC is still asking for losing it to a system-wide failure (such as a power surge from lightning). Network backup between different PCs is a good choice, as long as the other machine is always on.

Until recently, I relied on automatic periodic backups to external USB drives. For compatibility, I used the Winzip jobs function to produce scheduled full and incremental backups in plain vanilla zip format with date and time stamps embedded in the file name to the external drives. In case of emergency, the USB drives are small enough to wrap in plastic, take along, and access with a laptop on the road.

Great idea, but that means you have to leave the USB drive plugged in all the time, as there is no way to put them asleep and to wake them up on schedule with Windows XP. Meanwhile, the disks on the PCs themselves can be powered down during periods of inactivity, extending their lives compared with the hot/small drive enclosures, which cook drives quickly.

After having several IDE drives in USB drive enclosures fail much quicker than the drives on the PCs they were supposed to back up, I finally decided on going to on-line backup. The free accounts are great for a few GB of files, but they’re not enough for all the photos, music, and E-mail I’ve accumulated over the years.

So I expanded my free Mozy account to unlimited backup for $4.95/month. It took several days to do the initial backup of 22 GB, during which the performance of the PC took a hit. But after that, the incremental backups were scheduled for off-hours, and the bandwidth used was limited. After the initial backup, the incremental backups have been painless and I don’t have to think about them. The on-line backup shows up a drive so you can see what’s backed up. All I do is to periodically check to make sure everything I care about is being uploaded. If not, it’s been easy to expand the file types and directories in the configuration program. The files can be accessed from the web and restored to another PC, if needed.

Recommended.

Portable Applications

One of the biggest problems with most software written for the PC is they aren’t designed to be stand alone. They use a tangled web of resources from windows and other programs, and often make complicated registry entries. The registry becomes all too easily corrupted by botched installs or removals, viruses, spyware, and by just plain badly written software. Wrong, missing, corrupted, or incompatible DLLs further complicate the process. Clueless, careless, or simply desperate users often give up and simply erase unused software, leaving a real mess behind. We pay good money for expensive and often obsolete software only to have it become the “living dead” when it’s updated, removed, or whacked by some other badly behaved software.

Solution: Open Source (free) software which doesn’t “install”. Remember when life was simple and all you had to do was to copy the executables and support files to your hard disk, and click on it to use it? No installation and no registry entries to get messed up. It doesn’t depend on anything outside of itself other than basic operating system services, and it won’t get tangled with your other software. If you don’t like what you’ve download, simply erase the whole directory. To update it, simply overwrite the old files with the new ones. And the updates, like the original, don’t cost you a dime. Want to share it with someone else or have it on another machine, simply copy the folder over to the new machine and you’re in business.

Why Open Source? First, it’s written by people who care and aren’t just out there to make a buck, and the code is out there for other people to find the bugs and improve it. It can either be designed to be to be “portable” as described above, or someone might be able to create a “portable” version of it.

And as a bonus, properly written portable software will run fine on any type of portable storage, such as a USB keychain drive, without changing the target machine it’s running on. Pull the stick out when you’re done, and nothing’s changed and no personal files are left behind.

Where to you find these jewels? The best source is portableapps.com. They’ve created portable versions of many different and popular Open Source programs, including heavyweight programs like Firefox, Thunderbird, and the OpenOffice alternative to the expensive and bloated Microsoft Office suite. Look also under “portable application” on Wikipedia for a list of other programs which were designed to be, or simply work, as portable apps.

I’ll report on some of these applications in the future.

Broken Windows

I have always been an early adopter. I owned an AIM-65 early 6500 development system, a commodore 64, wrote programs on an Apple II at work, and had the first generation IBM PC on my desk (4 MHz 8088, dual low density floppies, no hard disk). From those prehistoric times to the present, software has always seemed to fall short of the potential of the underlying hardware. Not that the 8086 architecture is the epitome of elegance.

I have suffered through DOS, Windows 3.1, Windows 98, Windows NT, Windows XP, and Windows Vista on the PC, while being exposed to much more stable VMS and Unix operating systems on larger machines. Why, oh why, is Windows still so buggy and unstable? Vista is a step backwards, so I keep XP chugging along on most of my machines at work and at home. Even so, it seems I can't go too many years without having to reload XP when it gets too gummed up from all the exposure to viruses, spyware, and from all my install/removals of software I evaluate or use.

Reloading, reactivating, and trying to get back to where I was has always been a major pain, but at some point, too much accumulated damage occurs too easily with Windows and it eventually becomes unmaintainable. The average user is clueless and doesn't know how to maintain their machine. Even with obtrusive virus and spyware software, their machines quickly get gummed up beyond repair, and they all too soon either buy a new machine or suffer through major loss on reload because they rarely back their stuff adequately. That is if they even still have half of their original disks for all the accumulated "stuff" on their hard drives.

Apple does a much better job with their operating systems, but I don't like their higher price, proprietary hardware, and their closed system attitude toward development on that platform. Their machines are arguably worth it and I have no problem recommending them to new users.

There has be a better way, and I’ve found some which I’ll report on shortly.