The Motorola Droid officially dropped yesterday. It’s the first of several Android-powered devices coming to the Verizon network. Here’s a quick list of relevant phone features.

• 3.7″ capacitive touchscreen, 480×854 resolution
• 5 mega-pixel camera with flash, zoom and focus
• 16 GB storage card, 256 MB of system RAM
• Horizontal slider with on-screen and physical keyboards
• Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, e-compass

Apple iPhone, Motorola Droid, Palm Pre

The Motorola Droid is less a phone with smart capabilities and more of a computer with phone capabilities. I’ve had my Droid for just over 24 hours, and this review will primarily compare the Droid with the Apple iPhone and Palm Pre. I’ve been using the Pre since June, and while I don’t have an iPhone, I do use an iPod Touch and am familiar with the app store and interface. I’m staying away from comparisons with Windows Mobile and BlackBerry, in my mind the current fourth- and fifth-place smart phone platforms, respectively. I believe neither platform is anywhere close to as powerful, usable, professional or advanced as Apple’s iPhone, Palm’s WebOS or Google’s Android.

Appearance
This phone is beautiful. The iPhone and Palm Pre each has a resolution of 320×480 pixels. The Droid has a resolution of 480×854. The Droid has as many pixels across as the iPhone has vertically. For those of you doing the math at home, that’s over 2.6 times as many pixels as the iPhone. Indeed, the Droid’s vertical resolution is even greater than most netbooks.

The physical shape is perfect. It’s large enough that it doesn’t feel cramped and yet small enough to not cause you to look like you’re holding a computer to your ear. The edges are crisp and industrial looking, and the body sports a flat black finish.

Phone
This phone is loud. I don’t remember the last non-corded phone that I could hear without complaining or constantly pressing the increase volume button on the off-chance that I bumped the decrease volume button in the two seconds since the last time I hit increase volume. I can’t make a call comfortably with the Droid at full volume. Not only is the experience right for the Droid user, the transmitted volume level is stronger as well. In one of my first calls, the other person told me to be careful not to be too loud when I was speaking. The Droid improves other people’s experiences.

This phone is heavy. It’s not uncomfortably heavy in a way that will make you tired when you’re using it. It’s heavy in the sense that it feels great in your hand and isn’t going to blow away. One of my complaints the Palm Pre is that it’s too small, too light and feels cheaply constructed. The Droid isn’t any of these things.

This phone gets service. It’s on the Verizon network, widely accepted as the carrier with perhaps not the fastest data network, but certainly the widest coverage area. Verizon’s recent purchase of Alltel means that their coverage is superior in the Midwest, especially in rural areas.

Future-proof number portability is assured with complete integration with Google Voice. I’ve covered Google Voice here before, but until now my usage of Google Voice when mobile was limited to using clunky apps that initiated voice calls by having Google Voice call back or by calling Google Voice and navigating the dial prompts. Google Voice on the Droid actually results in a change to the phone’s native dialer so you don’t have to think about using Google Voice before making calls. Now, the only time I’ll have to remember my Verizon number is when I’m dealing with Verizon; the Google Voice number shows on caller ID, not the Verizon number.

Internet and data functions can’t be used at the same time as the phone or SMS functions. It’s not a fault of the Droid or the Android but rather of the current CDMA network itself. The CDMA coverage in the Midwest is so much better than GSM, however, that this limitation is barely worth mentioning.

Mobile office
The Droid is the perfect business device. Must-have features such as Microsoft Exchange/Outlook support and a removable battery mean that this phone can be your connection to your office. I haven’t had the phone long enough to make a comprehensive comment to battery life, but so far it seems to be much better than the Pre’s battery.

Official tethering support is coming in 2010, meaning it can serve Internet to your computer. If you don’t want to wait, and you have a Windows computer, June Fabrics has a version of PdaNet for Android that will tether without hacking.

Apple iPhone, Motorola Droid, Palm Pre

The enormous 5 MP camera has auto focus, zoom and dual-LED flash. There is a dedicated camera button located where a standard point-and-shoot would have the shutter trigger button. This button on the Droid also serves to launch the camera app, so a picture can be taken at any time simply by a long-press on the camera button to load the camera application and then pressing the button to take the picture. The included 16 GB storage card provides a ton of space for these high-resolution images that are so easy to take. The camera supports DVD-quality (720×480) video capture, and a third-party application called Qik allows instant, live streaming video to the web at the press of a button. Another application, called Shopsavvy, allows the camera to scan product bar codes, showing you product offerings based on proximity or price.

Applications are a joke if you can only use one at a time. The Android’s multitasking isn’t quite as intuitive as the Pre’s, with no clear way to understand which apps are running or to quickly switch back and forth between them, but it does allow multitasking and I have yet to be confused or even take any issue with the application switching in Android.

The Droid does turn by turn directions. For free. The news in late October of Google’s free GPS application destroyed the stock of Garmin and Tomtom. The share price of each went down 16% and 21%, respectively, in one day. I think it’s safe to say that the mapping and GPS on the Motorola Droid are more advanced than any other portable device.

I have never found voice recognition useful. Even products such as Dragon Naturally Speaking have came up short for even my most basic of hopes, to say nothing of providing functionality that is beneficial enough to integrate into my work flow. I had the Droid for over 8 hours before I noticed the microphone icon, prominently displayed in the primary search bar on the Android desktop. I touched it and was presented with a prompt that said speak now. I said “directions to Medicine Lodge”. It didn’t load the browser. It loaded the GPS application and automatically began directing me to Medicine Lodge, Kansas. I said “call Diane Poe” and it called my fiancé without even prompting me to confirm my intentions. Other inquiries are converted immediately to Google searches with the results immediately presented. Unlike every other voice recognition program I’ve ever used, the Droid’s voice command actually works in a useful way.

Entertainment
The Droid comes with the Amazon MP3 store, a very mature and robust marketplace for DRM-free albums and songs. The music player is feature-complete, unlike the Palm Pre, and the Google Listen application brings podcast support that simply embarrasses the iPod Touch.

The phone’s speaker is much louder than any other device’s speaker. Listening to music at full volume in a room is almost so loud as to be slightly unnerving.

The Android Market is a mature app store, unlike the store for the Palm Pre. While it may not have as many applications as the Apple app store, we’ve found an app for every function we’ve needed. Loopt, Last.fm and Qik were nowhere to be found on the Palm Pre. They all work flawlessly on the Droid.

Droid vs Pre
Where does the Droid fall short against the Palm Pre? The Droid doesn’t have a mirror. The Droid is a horizontal slider, which isn’t nearly as convenient as the vertical sliding keyboard featured by the Palm Pre. The Palm Pre’s operating system is very intuitive when it comes to multitasking. There isn’t an easy way to zoom out and see previews of the multiple applications that are running in Android at the same time. As I mentioned, it hasn’t been a problem so far since everything in Android is intuitive enough to use without difficulty.

Droid vs iPhone
Where does the Droid fall short against the iPhone? There is no question that Apple has the app store lead, closing in on 100,000 applications while the Android Market houses just over 10,000 apps. The app count isn’t as important, as I mentioned, since there seems to be an Android app for everything I’ve imagined so far. The iPhone does have a robust desktop management application in the form of iTunes, but the days when syncing your device to your computer with a cable was the cool thing to do should be long behind us.

Summary
The Motorola Droid is quite surely the most remarkable device I have ever seen. The physical keyboard, multitasking and high-resolution screen place the Droid squarely ahead of the iPhone, and the quality construction, call quality and Android Market apps are easily enough to best the Palm Pre. All the other features in the article above simply widen the lead against the other competitors.

We’ve mentioned sporadically that Palm would be releasing the closest thing we’ve seen to an iPhone killer in the last two years. We just didn’t know when it would happen, though we knew it would be exclusively on the Sprint network for at least a while.

Today, Palm finally announced the official release date for the Palm Pre. It will be June 6 on Sprint, which matches to within a day of the most recent rumors floating around the Internet. The device will cost $200 with service plan and after rebate. This release date puts it two days before the World Wide Developer Conference, where Apple is expected to release a new iPhone to go with its recently-announced iPhone and iPod Touch 3.0 software.

The buzz about the Palm Pre started in January at CES. It’s going to be smaller than the iPhone, but the screen resolution is the same. This means it will fit the same amount of content on the screen but be more portable, less bulky. The screen will have a capacitive touch screen like the iPhone rather than a screen based on pressure like previous Palm phones. The touch-sensative part of the phone actually extends below the visible screen, and the Pre will use this area to enhance the multi-touch gestures. Unlike the iPhone, the Pre boasts a slide-out, physical keyboard and support for a MicroSD memory card. The Palm will be the first major phone that can be charged wirelessly by letting it rest on the Touchstone, a dock-like charging station that uses inductive charging rather than cables to charge the battery.

The operating system for the Pre is the WebOS, a new interface designed by Palm to make it easy to write software. WebOS applications are based on XHTML, CSS and Javascript – the fundamental web standards about which we preach constantly here at AuctioneerTech. Anyone who can write a web application should be able to code for the Pre without learning new technologies.

The Pre will have GPS, a 3 megapixel camera, Bluetooth, an accelerometer and light sensors. Many of the new features announced by Apple recently for the iPhone 3 software are actually a response to features in the Pre such as copy and paste and correct Bluetooth implementation.

Where the Pre gets the better of the iPhone is in background applications and support for Flash. Multitasking on the iPhone is prohibited – listening to Last.FM and browsing the web at the same time, for example, is not allowed. The Pre has no such limitations, and in fact has developed an easy way to gesture between running applications – called cards – that makes multitasking easy. Support for Flash won’t be included with the initial release of the phone, but Palm has stated that it will be available in future software releases for the device.

Palm is betting the farm on the Pre. Sprint could use a boost as well. Right now, AT&T has the only device that is actually causing customers to switch carriers. Sprint needs this phone to be big to stop hemorrhaging users and Palm needs this device to be big so it can survive until this fall when it releases it’s next WebOS device – a smaller, non-sliding phone rumored to be called the EOS – to AT&T.

We’ll have a detailed review of the device in June when we get ours.

Optical media has had a great run. Music CDs are only now beginning to be retired after being the dominant distribution medium for the last two decades. DVDs continue to remain popular to distribute movies, though their days are severely numbered in favor of both Blu-Ray and, more importantly, Internet distribution of movies.

The CD-ROM achieved dominance as the successor to magnetic media – floppy drives and ZIP disks – about two years before the Internet obsolesced the technology. During that time, there were great products released on CD-ROM. Games like Myst and reference libraries such as Microsoft Encarta would never have been possible on floppy disks. We still have a box on a shelf with our beta copy of Windows 95 that was the last operating system we saw to be distributed on floppy disks.

All things end, however, and optical media is quickly going the way of the tape drive with regards to data storage. The netbook revolution is proving that consumers don’t need CD drives when they’re on the go. The additional weight and, more importantly, additional size added to the laptop chassis is just not something that consumers are interested in any longer. They want convenience and portability, and optical drives provide neither. The latest version of Ubuntu Linux comes in a version called the Netbook Remix that is tailored specifically to mobile computers and is meant to be installed from a USB key instead of a CD. It’s not only happening on the reasonably-priced side of the market, either. Apple’s failed huge-but-thin entry in the mobile market, the Macbook Air, also lacks an optical media device.

We routinely reformat and reinstall the operating system and all software on computers and the only time optical media is required is in the operating system installation. Once the OS is installed, we copy network drivers via USB key to get the machine on the Internet. Once connected, we download everything we need including Windows or Linux updates, antivirus and OpenOffice from the web. We use not a single program that comes on CD or DVD. It won’t be long before Windows retail boxes include a USB key instead of a CD-ROM disc.

Hardware drivers and software distributions were provided on floppy disks for many years after the market penetration of CD-ROM drives made this practice silly. Now that the market penetration of the Internet has made distributions on CD unnecessary, it doesn’t mean we’ll see the end of discs any time soon. We’d be silly to say that it’s time to get out the screwdriver and remove the drive from your desktop computer, especially while optical media is still a popular way to deliver audio and video content. We can say, however, that we look forward to the day when we buy a retail piece of software in the store and the only tangible thing included in the box is the license agreement and the website where we can download the release. Sure, we’ll still keep our $70 USB DVD-RW drive on the shelf beside our USB floppy drive for those just-in-case emergencies or operating system installs, but we’re done with the needless hassle that is CD-ROM.

Bob McBride addresses the KAA

Held this year from January 22 through January 25 at the Broadview Hotel in Wichita, the 53rd Annual Kansas Auctioneers Association Winter Convention featured entertainment and education. AuctioneerTech had the good fortune to be able to cover it.

Education

Dwayne Leslie from Global Auction Guide

Dwayne Leslie from Canada-based Global Auction Guide Media Group did an excellent job presenting an Internet marketing class. He covered many of the basics on which we harp regularly here at AuctioneerTech, such as don’t use PDFs, stay away from Flash for splash and navigation, and keep your website simple and light for dial-up users. It was thoroughly enjoyable and right on the money.

Monty Lowderman from Lowderman Auction

Monty Lowderman with Lowderman Auction Company and Williams and Williams spoke Saturday morning as well as Saturday afternoon and did a fine job. His morning course described how to be a professional auctioneer living a fast-paced lifestyle. The afternoon course covered the auction method and the reasons to use it and how best to use it.

Other educational courses offered included real estate courses by Dave Goscha from the Lowry School of Real Estate on Friday and Joe Calhoon on Saturday.

Entertainment

Mayor Carl Brewer addresses the KAA

Thursday was the first KAA Livestock Bid Call Contest held at the El Dorado Livestock Auction. Charlie Cummings is the first champion.

Friday night’s banquet featured a welcome by Wichita’s mayor, Carl Brewer, a solid meal, the St. Jude’s benefit auction event and a performance by the Walnut River String Band.

Walnut River String Band performs for KAA

Saturday night’s Awards and Honors Banquet found auctioneers Marvin Knopp and John Shoemaker inducted to the Kansas Auctioneers Association Hall of Fame. Richard Garvin was awarded the Presidential Award of Distinction. Scholarships were given to Adam Pounds, Callie McCaffrey and Logan Fullerton. Following the banquet was the fun auction, where any auctioneer can sell a few items he or she brought or any of the many gift certificates or other donations from the many vendor sponsors.

Sunday’s luncheon finale featured a nice meal and the introduction of officers for both the KAA and the KAA Auxillary.

Business

2009 officers and directors

The new directors for the term beginning 2009 are Eric Bloomquist, Byron Bina and the first lady ever to be elected to the Kansas Auctioneers Association Board of Directors, Megan McCurdy. The new Vice President of the KAA is Jack Newcom. The new President-elect for 2009 is Andy Conser, CAGA, AARE. Dave Webb became the new President of the KAA.

The KAA business meeting, in full parlimentary style, was conducted by 2008 President Bob McBride. 2009 President Dave Webb adjuourned the meeting.

Video can be a fantastic marketing tool. The same video can convey a sense of incompetence if not distributed correctly. Ignoring the difference between an expensively-produced video and simple footage captured with a camcorder, both of which can be effective and important as components of marketing campaigns, the way a video is delivered can mean the difference between a customer’s respect and a customer’s desire to do something else.

I’ve seen video delivered poorly. I’ve seen video actually attached to email. I’ve seen video so small that it could have been attached to email delivered on CDs and DVDs. Improper or inappropriate video delivery can result in both poor video quality as well as customer annoyance. Here are a few tips for video content delivery that will help to prevent both of these issues.

Never email video
Email over a megabyte or two annoys customers. Perhaps not everyone gets frustrated by large attachments, but plenty of people do. Some are on slow connections, some use POP email, some use POP over dial-up which means they’ll have to download the entire email before the next emails download. The other factor is that if video is smaller than a few megabytes, it’s probably not worth sending in the first place. YouTube makes large, high quality video distribution very easy. True, YouTube videos are branded for YouTube and allow links to other auction videos, but the benefits of being able to email a link to a video far outweigh  the issues created by trying to actually email the actual video. For a more advanced and non-branded solution, there are Flash video players that will allow you to directly place video content on a website without embedding content from a third party such as YouTube.

Physical media should contain high quality video
The benefit of delivering video on physical media like CD, DVD or flash media is that quality doesn’t have to be compromised. Promotional video can be delivered that looks crisp and clean on even the higher quality HD TVs and computer monitors. Unfortunately, I’ve seen plenty of promos on physical media that look pixelated and blurry when made full-screen. It’s important when creating the video to maintain the quality. Most of the consumer camcorders can take video that looks fair in high definition, but one improper mix-down in Windows Movie Maker can ruin the future chances of playing the video on anything bigger than a postage-stamp-sized video window on a computer.

Build menu systems on optical media
Content delivered on CD or DVD should be playable as a VCD or DVD with a menu system. Computers can read and play menu DVDs, but customers who receive a CD or DVD that don’t have a computer or don’t think to try it will receive an invalid disc message when they throw it into their TV’s DVD player. The odds favor them assuming a defect in the media rather than performing another attempt at reading the discs in their computers.

Remember that there are many ways to deliver appropriate video quality in a variety of methods. As long as production methods account for the quality at every step, the final product will be easy to upload to YouTube as well as serve as a source for DVD or VCD creation that will play in a customer’s home DVD player and computer at high resolution. A thousand dollar video production can be worth next to nothing if the consumer sees a finished product of low resolution.

Hard drive image via Wikipedia

Hard drives fail. I want a Drobo.

I guess I’m probably not going to get much Google play out of those two statements, so I’d better keep going.

Hard drives fail. As hard drives keep getting bigger at an absurd rate, they become more complex and more fragile. There are so many moving parts in conventional, platter-based drives that it’s a miracle they work at all.

Is this stance simple fear-mongering? I know I hear it mainly from Steve Gibson of GRC when he’s hawking his Spinrite product on Security Now!. While I don’t necessarily believe that Gibson’s Spinrite is all it’s cracked up to be, I will say with certainty that I’ve had hard drives fail causing me to lose data recently and the $90 purchase of Spinrite will be my first action to try to recover my data.

Having said that, what I would much rather do is have a policy in place that is tolerant of drive failures. RAID stands for redundant array of inexpensive disks. Essentially, a RAID system lets you use multiple drives to either increase speed or increase reliability. I have a Netgear ReadyNAS configured so that any one of its four drives can fail and be replaced without having to turn off or lose access to the data on the drive. If two drives fail, then everything is lost, but the odds favor only one drive failing at a time. The problem with RAID is that each of the drives must be identical in size and speed, meaning that an array of 4 500GB drives must have each of its drives replaced in order to upgrade the storage capacity.

Drobo from Data Robotics

Drobo is different. Drobo’s hardware design is as cool as something made by Apple and the software is as intuitive as something open source. Like RAID, the Drobo is an array of hard drives. Unlike RAID, those drives can be any size. It uses software, rather than hardware, to store the files on the drives in a redundant way so that at any time a drive can fail without data being lost. Where its functionality is superior to RAID’s is that, like the example above, if you have four 500GB drives you can replace one of them with a 1 TB or 1.5 TB drive and increase your available capacity without having to replace all the drives.

The original Drobo, which I have at work, sports a USB interface and software that lets it show up as an external drive on Windows, Linux or Mac as well as report its condition. For network access, the DroboShare is an additional device that connects to the Drobo and offers Gigabit ethernet port to put the Drobo directly on your network.

Data Robotics, the company behind the Drobo, recently released both a new version of the Drobo that supports FireWire 800 as well as Drobo Apps, which are community applications that allow you to turn your Drobo and DroboShare into an FTP server, iTunes media server, web server and more.

The Drobo does have some downsides. The original Drobo, priced at $349, has been discontinued. The new Drobo, priced at $499, doesn’t have enough features to justify the extra $150 for me. Security is also a problem. As far as I know, there is no way to encrypt the entire device as you can with a normal external hard drive. The Drobo uses a proprietary file system, so any one of the drives is useless when removed, but should someone take your Drobo and plug it in somewhere else, the contents would be accessible. I supposed you could create an encrypted partition with previously-mentioned TrueCrypt, but it would be nice if there were support for AES encryption directly in the Drobo software.

All in all, the Drobo is one of the coolest devices I’ve ever seen. The hardware and software design makes it something that you want to play with. I rarely get excited about messing with my RAID. It makes it easy to protect against losing data due to hard drive failure, it’s less expensive than a RAID of similar size and its incredibly easy and fun to use.

auctioneer with display

One of the first pieces of auction technology adopted by an auctioneer augmenting his business processes is a projection system. I was at an auction in Denton, Texas, where there were more than 30 large plasma and LCD TVs – most to be sold that day – showing the same display of the item currently selling. The ability to make the crowd comfortable and more informed by providing chairs and a completely pre-lotted inventory is generating much greater returns for auctioneers who have it.

Whatever the display method, be it projection or TV or monitor, there is a computer driving it, usually with a cable connected from the VGA, or monitor, output to a VGA splitter. That splitter then amplifies the signal and offers two, four or more VGA outputs to run cables to all the display units.

One of the problems we’ve faced is an issue with Vista notebooks. We’ve noticed it with both ATI and NVidia graphics sets, so it doesn’t seem to be manufacturer specific. All of a sudden, seemingly without warning, the display will flicker or flash, almost as if the computer is re-detecting the external display. Most times, the flash is accompanied by the sound that Windows plays when it detects new hardware, confirming that this process is indeed what is occuring. This detection, refresh and re-detection can go on, sometimes in a continuous loop, until you unplug the external display’s cable from your notebook.

We’ve historically simply made sure that the computers we’ve used for digital projection were running Windows XP, but as this practice becomes an increasing security risk and as it becomes harder to find new laptops with XP, it’s simply both unwise and unpractical.

My recent purchase of an ATI-based notebook which exhibited the problem frequently both confirmed that the problem wasn’t specific to NVidia and made me determined to find the solution. I came across this thread in the vistax64 forums and the fix has been working great for me for the last 24 hours.

As it turns out, the problem in notebooks seems to be caused by a process called the Microsoft Transient Multi-Monitor Manager that is supposed to detect when you plug-in or unplug an external display. As it turns out, it is a little too sensitive, causing the system to think you’ve done this action when sometimes you haven’t. This errant re-detection causes the system to refresh its display settings which causes the flicker and flash. Here’s how to shut down the TMM.

1. Run task scheduler by clicking start button and then typing “task scheduler”
2. Browse to Task Scheduler Library > Microsoft > Windows > MobilePC
3. Click TMM in the list at the top-center
4. On the right pane click disable

After you reboot you should notice no more unexpected flashing. The solution, however, does have the side effect of requiring you to tell windows any time you connect an external monitor, but that’s easy and a small price to pay for the comfort of knowing that your auction display won’t start flickering on and off when you’re in the middle of an auction.

My HP Pavilion tablet PC is slowly dying. Sent to and returned from the shop twice already since I bought it 14 months ago, both times for a motherboard replacement, its hard drive started flaking on me last month. I was able to repair the hard drive with a disk utility and it’s been working fine since then, but yesterday the USB ports and Bluetooth adapter quit working.

As I spent today moving data to and installing software on a new Toshiba Satellite, I was faced with a couple of challenges. First, how could I easily transfer my seven Mozilla Thunderbird email accounts from my old notebook to my new. Second, how could I easily and quickly get a printout of all the software I had installed on my old machine so I could be sure I installed all of my programs on my new one so as to not be left without needed, though infrequently used, software when I needed it. I found two free and painless utilities that met my needs perfectly.

MozBackup
The first problem was solved quickly and easily with MozBackup. Here’s the description from the MozBackup website.

MozBackup is a simple utility for creating backups of Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird, Mozilla Sunbird, Flock, SeaMonkey, Mozilla Suite, Spicebird and Netscape profiles.

It allows you to backup and restore bookmarks, mail, contacts, history, extensions, cache etc.

Its use couldn’t have been simpler. After a quick download and install on my HP, I selected the product and profile I wanted to backup, in this case Thunderbird and default, select a backup destination, and 20 seconds later, I had a single file in my temp directory with all of the IMAP email settings from Thunderbird. I copied the file, which was about 600k, to my Satellite, installed the program on it, and reversed the process. I opened Thunderbird and found all my email accounts looking back at me. It took me probably 3 minutes all told and saved me 20 minutes of adding all the accounts and remembering all the server and port settings for my Lunarpages, AppRiver and Gmail accounts.

It’s important to note a couple of points. First, all my accounts were IMAP accounts, which means that the mail is stored on the server and not on my computer. That’s the reason why the backup file was under 1 MB. Had I used POP accounts, where the mail is downloaded to my computer and removed from the server, the size of the backup would have been much, much bigger. Second, the program claims to perform the same kind of backup and restore for Firefox and many other Mozilla products, but I only tried it with Thunderbird. For Firefox, I would use Mozilla Weave or Foxmarks.

Belarc Advisor
If the act of re-entering all the information for six or seven email accounts is annoying, the act of reinstalling 20 or 30 software applications and utilities is a royal pain in the ass. It’s pretty simple, though, as I have all my open source applications saved on the 2GB SD card I carry around in my Treo, but I wanted to make it easier. I wanted a simple list of all the programs I had installed on my HP so I could check off the programs as I installed them on my Satellite. A quick Google yielded Belarc Advisor. Here’s the description from their website.

The Belarc Advisor builds a detailed profile of your installed software and hardware, missing Microsoft hotfixes, anti-virus status, CIS (Center for Internet Security) benchmarks, and displays the results in your Web browser. All of your PC profile information is kept private on your PC and is not sent to any web server.

While there is a small software installation involved, it not only listed the programs I had installed, it listed many other valuable pieces of information such as IP address and network configuration, domain information and the service packs I had installed. All these results were returned in a fairly well-organized page within my browser so it was easy to print. It makes a great way to take a snapshot of the condition of a computer, and I see great value in printing the report to PDF using the previously-mentioned PDFCreator and saving it for reference.

Picture by Aaron Traffas

As I was browsing my daily news feeds this morning, I came across an article about Skyfire.

I got my Treo 700wx based on Windows Mobile 5 in November of 2006. Its coolness lasted for several months, but I started wanting for more when the iPhone and Windows Mobile 6 came out. The biggest missing pieces from my phone’s browsing experience were Javascript and Flash. Skyfire is a browser for Windows Mobile and Symbian operating systems that just rewrote the rules.

Flash support
It supports true Flash and AJAX. I just watched my Auctioneer Tech YouTube video on my Treo in the Skyfire browser.

Search
It has a single address bar at the top that functions like the bar in Chrome that allows you to enter a website or a search query. The searches are displayed in a custom-skinned results page that, by default, lists results from Google. At the top is a tab that lets you quickly switch to results from Yahoo! without re-keying your query. It also offers to add this search bar on your home page, allowing for quick searches without loading Skyfire first.

Interface
One of the biggest secrets of effective use of the Treo is leaving the stylus in the holder. Using the stylus slows you down. The problem with browsing with Internet Explorer on Windows Mobile is that using the four-way navigational selector on the Treo left you at the mercy of the tab-stops built into web pages. It was clumsy, but still better than navigating with the stylus. Skyfire gives you a mouse. Or at least a pointer that is controlled by the four-way selector. It lets you browse the web as you would on your PC, allowing zoom similar to Safari on the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Speed
What Google Chrome is to a PC, Skyfire is to a PocketPC. The speed gain is amazing. This gain is accomplished by the rendering being performed on the server side. Skyfire’s servers take the page you’re trying to view, render the content, compress it and send the rendered information to your phone. This process means that the phone is simply displaying content, not deciding based on the code how that content should be displayed on the page. The user agent reported to the web server is Firefox 2 on Windows XP, so it looks like they’re using Gecko to render. Want to be blown away by numbers? Look at the speed chart posted by MacRumors.

I’m fewer than 20 minutes into being a Skyfire user. I’m bound to eventually find something I dislike about it, but right now I can’t imagine what that something may be. If you want to turn your Windows Mobile browsing capabilities into something much closer to the iPhone – arguably better since the iPhone doesn’t support Flash – then I definitely recommend installing Skyfire. If you find something you don’t like about this browser, let me know in the comments.

Apple today released new versions of their iTunes software as well as updated versions of iPods. This release was hardly surprising and, as predicted, there wasn’t anything unexpected or widely diverging from the rumors that had been floating around the Internet.

The take-aways are really fewer than I had expected.

iTunes 8 is out and it’s cool. It seems to combine features found in web radio stations like Pandora and Last.fm where it will predict what you would like and automatically associate similar styles of music into playlists. They call this the ‘genius’ feature.

The Nano and Touch have both received a redesign, both in shape and price. The iPod Touch and iPhone have a software update that will be made available on Friday. It’s also free for users of the 2.0 Touch software.

The Nano has an accelerometer, like the iPhone and iPod touch, and also has a microphone on the back. I don’t know if there is a time or size limit on the recordings, but at $199 for 16GB version, it would make a high quality voice recorder for auctioneers to use to catalog merchandise or to record auctions.

The iPod Touch has a speaker. Thank god. That’s probably the biggest feature that was lacking from it. We’ve been using my girlfriend’s Touch as a timer when cooking, and it doesn’t work very well when you can’t hear it ding.

The one feature for which I was hoping in the Touch that didn’t apparently seem to be added is GPS. I had hoped that they would find a way to push this feature into the new models. I’m on the fence right now as to whether I’ll get an iPhone or an iPod Touch. I’m going to do one or the other in the next month or two, and had they put a GPS in the Touch I’d have an easy decision. I may yet have to brave leaving Alltel for the AT&T void that is Kansas.

I’m typing away on my Apple slim aluminum keyboard. It’s the one I poured nearly a full cup of coffee into a couple weeks ago. I dried it, wet it, dried it again and when it wouldn’t work I’d left it for dead. A week passed and I tried it one more time and it’s been working well ever since. I guess I bought a pair to have a spare. With all the damn computers around here, I guess it will get plenty of use.

Everex Cloudbook CE1200V, photo by Aaron Traffas

I sold my Cloudbook at last Thursday’s auction. I couldn’t ever get the wireless to work as well as I wanted, though it seems I’m not the only one. The graphics always seemed weak, though VIA just released an open source driver for it.

I’m currently rocking the ASUS EeePC 900 netbook. It’s quite possibly the finest piece of equipment on which I’ve ever laid my hands. I turned it on long enough to hit restart on the Knoppix distribution of Linux so that I could install Ubuntu. I had good luck with Ubuntu-eee as opposed to Eee-Ubuntu. Everything worked pretty much right away. I had to load a different kernel to get the microphone working so I could play with Skype with my girlfriend. I got her an Acer Aspire One netbook as an early birthday present. It’s slightly bigger than my Eee, but the difference in the keyboard size is pretty huge. It also runs Windows XP, which is pretty much a must for her iPod Touch. It was also crazy-cheap, weighing in at $349 at Best Buy.

Both the Acer Aspire One and the Asus EeePC come with either Windows or Linux. A Windows netbook makes a great and very affordable terminal for running stand-alone clerking software at auctions that aren’t at your facility. A Linux netbook is an even more affordible way to make a statement about how cool you are and how much fun you want to have with your computing experience.

Dell has hinted at releasing a netbook, similar to their Inspiron Mini 9, with Windows and built-in 3G, which would be a great solution for web-based clerking software. Immagine being able to clerk an auction wirelessly without having to setup a wireless network.

I was playing around on the NAA forum, a great member benefit for auctioneers, and I realized that what I was writing was applicable to just about anyone, not just auctioneers. Here you are, for whatever it may be worth to you.

I’ve been using Linux on the desktop for the last two years. It’s fantastic and provides many programs and packages available by simply selecting which ones you want to install. You don’t have to download and run an installer, for the most part, you simply select the programs from the list.

I can’t stand Microsoft Office or, worse, anything from Adobe, so not having these programs isn’t a problem. There are many other open-source alternatives that allow you to sleep better at night and get more work done easier.

For anyone looking for video editing on Linux, have you tried Cinelerra? I looked at it and was very impressed with the features and power offered.

For any of you who use Firefox on more than one computer, you should look at Mozilla Weave. It provides the ability to synchronize bookmarks, tabs, passwords and add-ons across different installations of Firefox. They have yet to support 64 bit Linux, which makes me sad, but it works great between my Vista notebook and my XP aux-box.

Are you still using OpenOffice or have you tried the Google Office version? I can’t remember if I asked you in Nashville…

I’m still using OpenOffice. It’s not equivalent to Google Docs in that Google Docs is a web-based product that has a fraction of the features of a complete office suite like OpenOffice, StarOffice or Microsoft Office. Google is working continuously to add features, and rumor has it that they will allow for offline Docs use via their Gears package within the next six months, but as of now they the analogy is like comparing apples to band saws.

if I decide to move to this Linux system, do I dump MS Windows completely and migrate to that desktop?…I have a computer that I need to erase a hard drive on and was thinking of using it as a trial computer.

The beauty of most Linux distributions is the live CD. My preference and recommendation is Ubuntu Linux. Download the ISO and burn it to a CD from http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu. Put it in your computer and start it up. It will load the Linux desktop without touching your hard drive or installing anything. You can browse the Internet, work on documents and browse your network without ever installing the operating system. Note that because your CD isn’t nearly as fast as your hard drive this practice isn’t a good idea for anything other than trying it out, but its a good way to get your feet wet and make sure it will run on your hardware without dumping a computer.

You know, you should really try it on your Macbook. I always wanted to get a Macbook and put Linux on it. I bet it runs like a sewing machine.

The auction panel was a blast. I love talking about auctions and the tools we use to conduct them.

What other program/software etc creates/edits etc. a .pdf? I was under the impression (wrong?) that Adobe owned that file tag… 

Thanks in advance.

Adobe submitted its format for ISO certification and received it. PDF is an international standard. Many programs do a better job than those by Adobe for creating and modifying PDF files.

If you’re on XP, get PDFCreator.
If you’re on Vista, get CutePDF.

Both of these free programs will let you print to PDF anything that you could print to a computer.

Regardless of your Windows distribution, get Foxit PDF reader and ditch Adobe Acrobat for viewing PDF files. Foxit loads many times faster and takes up much less space on your hard drive.

Of course, if you’re running Linux, PDF support is built into the distribution.

If you want to do things other than view or create PDF files, check out the great solutions from Lifehacker, where you can find many posts about cool tools to create, modify and tweak PDF files without paying hundreds of dollars for Adobe products that will just bloat your system and infect it like a root-kit virus.

So what do you do when a page is set up for IE only? Typically, I find this on GIS websites. Is there an add-on to emulate IE?

Use IE. IE isn’t evil. An up-to-date version of IE is just as good as Firefox, in my opinion. I prefer IE to Firefox, in fact, but I can only get IE 6 to work on Linux. When Mozilla released Weave, I started using Firefox 3 on my Windows machines, but because Weave doesn’t support 64 bit Linux, I may be moving back to IE on Windows.

Firefox 3 has a speed improvement that arguably puts it slightly ahead of IE 7, but when IE 8 comes out I’ll probably be recommending it as it will be the first Microsoft browser that will default to standards mode instead of quirks mode. I can’t wait for everyone who designed a site without using web standards finds that his or her site is completely hosed when viewed in IE 8 for the first time.

I did notice that Dell offers ubuntu as an OS on some of the newer laptops and desktops it sells.

Yeah, but they’re all Intel-based systems and I’m an AMD guy! I just can’t do it!

Seriously, they’re still not a good deal in that they’re about the same price as a similar Windows-based system. The advantage to Linux is that it should cut down on manufacturer cost, but because of all the deals OEMs make with Windows crapware companies, the systems still cost about the same.

The best thing to do is to buy the system with the specs you want with Windows, then call the manufacturer and get your Windows refund. It takes a while on the phone because most phone-grunts don’t know what you’re talking about, but there are widespread reports that many people are getting as much as $50 back by not using the Windows that comes pre-loaded on a laptop.