crusty ol laptops vs Droid

My Apple iBook G4 is dead tech. It has almost always functioned perfectly and continues to do so. However, I ask less and less of it as time goes on. It has a PowerPC processor which cuts it off from being able to play a lot of streaming media (such as Netflix) and OS X is no longer being updated for it. It's a dead platform. It's no longer being supported and its weak graphical capabilities are beginning to flag under the weight of today's graphics-rich computing experience. It's done its job admirably for around 6 years and I'm thankful for that. But there's part of me that desires to smash it to pieces on the ground. I'm done with it. I wants a sweet new computer.

Speaking of dead tech, I'm typing this on my trusty old Toshiba Satellite. This tank is even older than my iBook. It has better stickers on it, though. Plus, it's able to stream Netflix. It also has Office, which the iBook lacks. The more time I spend in my electronics classes the more I feel that I'm much better off with a Microsoft-based computer. I also took a Cisco class and its online curriculum was much better suited and tailored for Windows.

The iBook is my music center. Almost all of our music is on there and I often use it for Last.fm, MySpace music, and Pandora. The Toshiba is where I get things done.

Battling the laptops for computer time is my Droid. I use it more than I use the laptops. It does everything they do and almost always does it just as well. Sometimes the system lags a little and sometimes there's network lag but such occurrences are not often and the Droid is ridiculously convenient. It does everything I need a computer to do except that I wouldn't use it to compose anything longer than a text message or short email, but even that's changing. I recently downloaded Swype and it's been great.

To sum up: iBook is a jukebox, Toshiba is for typing and Electronics Workbench, and Droid is for everything else.

Happy New Year

Cheap Phone Chargers and Predictive Texting

In less than a month I've gone
through three mobile phone chargers.

The first one to go kaput on me
was a wall adaptor for an LG
KE970 Shine. To be fair, it's not the charger the phone came
with. The AC adaptor shipped with my phone came from another planet
or something so I bought the only one I could find at Target. It
worked fine for about a year. Then the metal piece that goes into the
phone became loose. It would move inside its little black plastic
housing. I swear I didn't beat or mistreat the thing. Being a budding
electronics technician, I decided to open up the housing and see
what's up. Basically, one of the tiny plastic holders inside broke. I
still used that charger for a few months. I just had to open it up
every time I wanted to use it and get the insides resituated. Right
around New Years, the wires inside the charger came loose from where
they were soldered. I don't have a solder iron and I don't really
know how to do it so that charger was retired.

Fortunately, I had a back-up
phone, a CECT
P168 (iPhone clone) with adaptors for regular outlets and car
cigarette lighters. The home adaptor lasted maybe a whole day. Once
again, I don't think I was being rough with it. I missed the outlet
when trying to plug it in and its plug became loose and unusable.
Whatever. I still had the car charger. That one lasted a few days
before I accidentally yanked the cable and the USB socket it plugged
into became loose. I pried it open and saw that the circuit board had
snapped. Great. I returned to the wall adaptor to see if I could fix
it. I unscrewed it and opened it up nice and professional-like and
had a look-see. Like the adaptor for the Shine, an important little
piece of black plastic had broken. I tried to tape it (!) but my
pathetic attempt was mocked by reality.

So I returned to the Shine. I
went to Best Buy and bought a Rocketfish
USB charging cable. I'm satisfied with its quality. It feels
solid. It's lasted a few days. It seemed to charge the phone faster
than the wall adaptor did. I hope that doesn't lead to my phone
exploding.

While going through my phone
charger travails, I was switching back and forth between the Shine
and the iClone and I got to thinking about the merits of predictive
texting. The iClone's touchscreen worked quite fine. I might even
say it impressed me. I can't compare it to an iPhone's because I've
never used one. I found it a pain in the ass to use versus my Shine's
conventional keypad. It wasn't just a matter of not being used to
using touchscreens. The touchscreen requires more effort. There are
the 26 letters, plus keys for 0-9, and punctuation. The Shine has 12
keys. I don't need separate keys for every number and letter. It's
fine when I have both hands to use as on a conventional computer
keyboard but I don't need all that on my phone. I just need the bare
minimum of big fat keys to press. Qwerty keyboards on phones seem
silly and I prefer the feel of real keys versus touchscreens. I'm
happy to be back texting with my LG Shine. I missed the vast library
of personal and ridiculous words I've loaded into its predictive
text.

And I was thinking about the size
of various phones out there. The Shine is big enough. That iPhone
clone was even bigger. I want a phone that fits easily into the front
pockets of my jeans.

Author's Note: This post was originally created in NeoOffice. I wanted to try cutting and pasting it to see how it'd turn out. I'm too lazy to fix the formatting.