Wednesday, February 08, 2012

Joy at my finger tips

Joy is found in the simplest and easiest of things. A 68 cent cup of Nescafe Expresso, two  dollar plate of vegan breakfast that looks it came from a buffet line, a 90 cent newspaper with your favourite pullout section called Digital Life... It boils down to having expectations and needs and wants all met, without too much effort or cost, and having made the right decision, which was both modest and wise.

My aging Acer 4818T now four years old, was one of the best PC purchases I ever made. Top specifications then, with 4GB RAM and it was slimmer than a Mac Book, although made of thermoplastic. I migrated it to Windows 7 in early 2011 and the installation taught me a whole lot about the dovetailing of hardware with software beyond the mere specifications. The rest of the year meant never going back to Windows Vista, but every now and then, the processor (dual core) seemed to have problems even with the 32-bot Windows 7 Home Premium, and some applications would go awry and simply stall. Sometimes these recover just before I intervene a forced shut-down, and sometimes, it would stall for several hours and not be able to resolve. Worst of all is when it stalls and all applications freeze, including the 3G dongle: I call it "the death, le morte". When that happens, you have no choice but to force shut-down (power button hold) and let the CPU reboot. You know immediately that there is some deep incompatibility patches could not solve and that would be a chronic problem awaiting to aggravate.

In some respects, computers are like people, and the overall behaviour mimicks all the known characteristics of weaknesses in human behaviour. If you get a high specification processor, you will enjoy its yield only until larger and more sophisticated programs come around and beat it to pulp. Then you need to have it replaced. Now, with Windows 7, although it would work on the Intel Dual Core, the processing speed was simply too sluggish and my observations of the CPU core temperature via a Windows 7 widget showed that in running even my 2007 Office applications and some video files, both Cores would flare up to about 80-90%.

Therefore, I deduced that even my back-up AMD processor in the Acer Iconia W500a 32GB + 32GB SD card memory full SSD would not be viable for all the work and video I needed for work and play. The ultrabook craze is just flaring up and will need to go into full swing, as Intel and Samsung make more chips that will encourage its eventual replacement of the laptop and tablet fling. So, I decided to get a custom-build - high specification home business desktop (i.e. sans expensive GeForce Nividia graphics card, which years ago I installed in my last PC desktop and never used it because the X-Box360 followed...). So great dedicated machines built for sleek operation is what works best for me.

At Sim Lim Square, I wandered about for about 90 minutes and passing a workshop via the back corridor, one technician said hello and I paused and spoke to him. It turned out that they had the best value offer anyway, and a later walkabout the 6th floor confirmed that. The slim case CPU featured a ASRock motherboard but with only one slot for an additional card, but includes an Intel HD graphics card (premounted) and the Intel i-Core 5 processor. I threw out the DVD writer as I never liked the whirling vibrations inside the tower anyway. And with Windows 7 Home Premium installed. I had planned to transfer my Office 2007 from the laptop to the desktop and all the other key application software as well. Under two hours later and after a couple of other successful low cost errands (iOS dock extender S$10, LED USB flexible stem lamp S$4 and such), I collected the CPU and left the building. Getting home from that corner of Bencoolen Street and Rochor Road is not that difficult, but lugging around a few cases (I bought a flatbed Epson scanner) with an empty stomach is another. So stopped by a Kopi Tiam for a cooling dessert to bump up the blood sugar and off I went. I found a cab, more easily than expected and in a jiffy was home. I though to do the set-up another day, but I knew that it would be a straight-forward and simple task. As I had some work deadline the same evening, I had my laptop opened in front of me while the new CPU desktop and LED screen backlighting it as I loaded up and tested the new toy.

While the process of setting things up can be tedious somewhat, if you know how things should run and these occur as they should (expectations met or surpassed), there is no sense of disappointment. The new Bluetooth keyboard from Targus was thought to be a great buy because it could work on iOS, Android and Windows, unlike many other portable and slim keyboards and best of all, ran on AAAx2 alkaline with 5 year life. Unfortunately, in practical terms, it turned out to be a nuisance if everything you logged on you have to search for the keyboard and log it in - not always with immediate success - and this was already a five step process, burning up precious start-up time. So I think that keyboard will get into the gift stash for the time being. But it will be great if I ever needed to run it with my iPhone, for sure!

Quickly, everything got set up but the matter of the keyboard remained a concern. So, off I went last evening to the Cash Converter store, thinking to try and check if I could get a simple wired keyboard there instead of buying a new one at S$11.90 or S$16.90, at Popular. Well, there were a good many, and I found a HP original keyboard in great shape. I brought it back, gave it a good anti-bacterial wipe after brushing it clean and removed the price sticker and such. The print on the keys looked a bit faded, so could estimate that these were as old as 6-8 years, but probably were very under utilised, as there was virtually no wear on the keys. I fit the USB into the hub and the worked well. Best of all, was that after so many years of using this type of keyboard, the spacing was so intuitive to me that I could revert back very quickly to blind typing. Even now as I type this blog entry in, I also found that my mind seems to be able to recall where some keys are, as if I had been using this keyboard all along.

Now, I look at the Epson V33 scanner (for receipts, photos and document conversion), the ATake USB 5W speakers, the HP WLAN antenna, the Acer LED 22" HD monitor, this HP keyboard, the Freecom Combo BluRay and DVD read-writer, Memorex optical mouse, my iPhone and iPod Classic, the ComLab i-Core 5 CPU and my trusty Acer Aspire 4818T (now a browser and such with some dedicated software on Windows 7), and my Aztech WLAN with M1 3G dongle, it all fits and falls into place - quite well. And that is happiness. But just paying S$2.50 for that HP keyboard, that was a joy, albeit silly, but still.

It is joy at my fingertips for every keystroke I make, and that can be quiet a lot.

Saturday, February 04, 2012

Before deafness, hear great sound

We all grow deaf, sooner or later. My ringing in the ear (tinnitus) caused by a scuba diving accident has finally healed, but with the chronic rhinitis which came on Thursday, the ear drums are back at it again - strained, and singing a high pitch strain - like a cacophony of crickets in perpetual song in the forest. Or being in Tokyo during the summer cricket chirping season. Having realised what frail biomechanical beings we are, and prone to damage and failure, these growing ailments and deterioration of the senses as I age, lend me to think that if you want to use any of your senses, try to get the best out of them - of course, within reasonable means one has. So, after accummulating thousands of songs in my Windows Player jukebox, and for the newer ones, ripped them in lossless format, I found that with with the triple armature Westone UM3X (because I liked the audio tuning best for my taste - part jazz lounge, part acoustic rock), I would easily be transported into my world apart from this world.

The iPhone 34GB has a decent memory for all my songs in compressed AAC mode, which is more energy efficient for the device, but with those earphones, you can distinctly hear LESS. Any audiophile will tell you that the human ear is really quite incredible and idiot deaf geeks might say otherwise. So with the few albums in Apple Lossless on my iPhone, the memory is all used up - more or less. After searching for a suitable MP3 player that can store gazzillion songs (my friend Ian has 6000 in his 120GB iPod Classic), I am quite happy to finally settle for the new silver iPod Classic 160GB which actually only has an allocated memory of 148GB for storage. Now, I can comfortably move my lossless music and listen to them guilt-free.
Of course, Apple geeks are warning that using Lossless means wearing out the HDD faster and using more power, because of the file size. The alternative is lugging around a stack of CDs and using a CD player, right?
Last night I went to bed with my Westone UM3X in-ear and within a few minutes was in audio heaven asleep with Matt Maher's new album brainwashing my dreams.
The new iPod Classic may be cheesey to some because of the click-wheel... but that intuitive device works very well for quick navigation and I don't tire of it. That is very important. Ultimately, it is being able to immediately access my Jukebox with all these newer additions in lossless quality. You have to listen with great earphones, and when you do, your perception is changed forever. It's like a child who has tasted sweet and never wants bland any more.