Thank you for contributing $139.60 towards the new exhaust for my motorcycle. And $15.64 towards a Bluetooth headset for my motorcycle helmet. And $58 towards a Zune HD 32GB.
If I come across another ≥ 15% eBay link, I’m gonna buy a shiny new iMac. Suckers!
Was going to ride my motorcycle to work this morning. Took some patience and liberal application of the throttle to get her started, which is typical when she has been sitting for more than a couple of weeks. Got my gear on, dug up my tire gauge, and of course…
The front tire was completely flat.
Not too surprised at that — on my road trip, every morning when I checked the tire I would find a drop of the tire goo coming out of the hole. Oh well. New tire has been ordered. If I’m really lucky maybe it will get here on Wednesday…
The people who complain most about “non-existent documentation” are the ones who never bother searching for it in the first place. It is documented, you lazy fucking bitches.
Earlier this year Comcast launched a failed DNS redirect “service” called Domain Helper that redirected NXDOMAINs to an Advertising / Search page. Needless to say, the first time I saw one of those pages my first priority was figuring out how to make it stop. Unfortunately our Comcast account has never worked and tech support has never been able to resolve the problem so using dns-opt-out.comcast.net was not an option.
Luckily, I run a caching DNS server on my router and it supports a parameter called bogus-nxdomain. Give it the IP addresses of the Domain Helper servers and it replaces any DNS queries that return those addresses with NXDOMAIN responses. This worked well enough until the IPs changed.
So tonight I dug a little deeper and found that Comcast now has a DNS information site. Complete with a list of all of their DNS server IP address that don’t implement Domain Helper. I re-configured my router with the two servers closest to my location plus the national server nearest me and hopefully this is the last time I have to think about Domain Helper.
I’ve got some serious lust for the new Quad Core 27-inch iMacs, but I get the feeling that the refresh story isn’t quite over yet. Take a look at this product comparison:
| iMac Quad i5 | iMac Quad i7 | Mac Pro Quad | |
|---|---|---|---|
| CPU Speed | 2.66 GHz | 2.8 GHz | 2.66 GHz |
| L3 Cache | 8 MB | 8 MB | 8 MB |
| Hyper-Threading | No | Yes | Yes |
| Included RAM | 4 GB | 4 GB | 3 GB |
| Maximum RAM | 16 GB | 16 GB | 16 GB |
| Disk | 1,000 GB | 1,000 GB | 640 GB |
| Superdrive | 8x | 8x | 16x |
| Open PCI-e Slots | N/A | N/A | 3 |
| Display | 27″ IPS LCD | 27″ IPS LCD | None |
| Price (USD) | $1,999 | $2,199 | $2,499 |
Not since the return of Jobs has Apple’s product line-up had overlap like this. The Mac Pro has always been terribly overpriced relative to Apple’s other products but right now it borders on ludicrous. Is Apple going to let this stand until the Mac Pro can be refreshed with Intel’s upcoming “Gulftown” six-core processors next quarter? It doesn’t seem right…
As mentioned in a pre-vacation posting, I’ve been giving a new netbook a whirl — an Acer Aspire One AO751H. This is an 11.6″ screen model with an Intel Atom Z520 1.3GHz, the particular SKU I purchased came with 2GB RAM and Vista Basic but was otherwise your basic netbook recipe. The pokey CPU speed made me nervous about its usability so I made the purchase thru Costco.com because their return policy on computers and electronics is superb.
From the physical perspective, the AO751H is nearly perfect. The 11.6″ screen is a nice step up from the 8.9″ screens of earlier models and the keyboard is exactly the same size as Apple’s compact / laptop models. It had all the usual ports, 3 USB, three-in-one memory card reader, etc. The only faults I have with the design are the keyspacing — the keys are larger than on Apple’s keyboards, the minimal gap between keys makes it slower to touch-type on than an Apple — and that the touchpad doesn’t support the ubiquitous two-finger right-click action. Oh, and of course, the damned screen is glossy but I find that to be less annoying on smaller displays.
Unfortunately the great physical design is marred by the fact that it is a completely unreliable computer. It regularly locks up. No blue screen, just a straight-up freeze. I downgraded to XP, side-graded to Vista Ultimate, and even gave Windows 7 Premium a whirl, all with the same disappointing results. Using the out-of-box Windows drivers, the latest WHQL drivers from Windows Update, and bleeding-edge drivers directly from the vendors involved had no impact. I also applied several firmware updates without any improvement.
Reading several netbook-related forums it appears that freezing problems with the AO751H are not uncommon but not so widespread as to imply that the entire platform and drivers are flawed. It’s just the luck of the draw — probably you will get a good one but many are bad.
Needless to say, I took my work MacBook Pro on my trip — wasn’t about to jeopardize my own MBP for nearly 4K miles on the back of a motorcycle. I took the AO751H back to my local Costco warehouse this afternoon after another round of driver and BIOS updates this week failed to improve the stability.
I’m still in the market for a new netbook. Right now the Intel SU4100 has my attention, a real Core2 Duo @ 1.3GHz, presently available as an upgrade on the Dell Inspiron 11z. It is a little pricey right now for the configuration I want but I expect we’ll see better deals once more systems with that CPU are available, I think there will be a flood of them after the Windows 7 launch. I’m also keeping my eyes peeled for a good deal on a Lenovo IdeaPad U110, a nice little ultra-portable with a bit more punch than the SU4100.
Looks like I got a stealth speed upgrade from Comcast:
More upstream is always greatly appreciated, just wish that I’d known when it happened. I use QOS on my router and to effectively manage the upstream bandwidth it needs to know how much is available. I’m hoping that 2+ Mbps is finally enough to make Mac OS X’s desktop sharing usable.
Will have to give Comcast a ring soon to find out if DOCSIS 3.0 is available in my area now. 50/10Mbps would be a nice bump 
