Ted's Blog

I got the 32 GB Nexus 7 today from J&R Electronics. I had been tracking the package online and I knew it would show up this morning with the mail. It came in a bigger box than I thought, but the box inside was smaller, about the size of a big paperback book. Good unpacking experience with a black cardboard box inside a sleeve with bright colors on a charcoal background. Not many pack-ins: just a small AC adapter and a micro-USB cord which is used with the AC adapter or to connect to a computer. It came with about a 50% charge and they recommended charging it right away. Very small instruction book and warranty info included as well.

I found a web page with 23 “essential tweaks” for the Nexus 7 and did a few of them including unlock the automatic screen rotation, set a special swipe gesture to unlock the device when it is turned on, signed up for Google Plus, downloaded the entire Google Map of metro Atlanta (62 MB), set up owner information in case I misplace it and someone wants to return it to me (also stuck a label on the back with my name and phone number), and turned off the keyboard sounds.
Continue reading “Nexus 7”

A few years ago, Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone 4 with a “retina display” which was so sharp that the human eye couldn’t see make out the pixels. There were no jaggy edges, everything looked like it would in a photograph, a book, or the real world. What they did was cram 960 pixels across a screen that was only about 3 inches across, for a pixel density of 326 pixels per inch (ppi). Later on they introduced a retina display on the iPad and a notebook computer, but there were not as many pixels per inch as the iPhone. The justification for this was that people would hold the iPhone closer to their eyes and the added distance for the iPad and notebook would make the pixels seem just as dense. So in addition to pixels per inch, you also have to take into account the distance to the screen. The Wikipedia article on retina displays say that Apple calls this figure pixels per degree, or PPD (although the article said the PPD does not have a linear relationship with the distance from the eye to the screen, it has since been corrected). Anything with a PPD of 53 or above is considered a retina display.
Continue reading “Retina Display”

Last week Apple introduced the iPad Mini, a 7.9-inch screen version of the 10-inch iPad. The smaller iPad starts at $329 for the 16 GB version, $429 for the 32 GB version. People compared it to Google’s Nexus 7, introduced earlier this year, at $199, but that 7-inch tablet came with only 8 GB of memory (you could buy a 16 GB version for $249, a fairer comparison, $80 less than Apple). Amazon’s Kindle Fire is also $199, with 16 GB of memory, but the Kindle platform, based on Google’s Android, doesn’t seem as open an implementation as Google’s own device, and seems mostly to be a conduit for content from Amazon (I could be wrong on that).
Continue reading “Thinking About a Nexus 7”

My laptop computer is getting on in years and I think the memory upgrade I got was faulty because sometimes the computer will just die, usually when it is asleep. It starts back up again, but that can’t be good. The other day something happened where if I tried to open a document in Excel, the program would stop working and then quit. I tried reinstalling Microsoft Office to get rid of the problem and I think it was still doing it. I had recently installed a Java update, and while it seemed highly unlikely that would be the problem, I wanted to roll back that update. I think I did a Windows restore to an earlier date and that actually solved the problem. But Java had me worried. And there are multiple versions of Java installed, plus it is always updating, and if you do the update wrong then it installs a toolbar in your browser. I know Java was a big deal at one time, but I’m not sure a lot of websites use it anymore. We have some Oracle web apps at work that use it, but I couldn’t think of any sites at home, so I looked around on the web to see if I really needed Java. One site said that most computer users didn’t need it. So that was enough for me. I uninstalled the 4 or 5 different Java flavors that had been installed over the years (Microsoft does the same kind of thing with its .NET framework which has multiple versions and one of them went bad, preventing me from installing two .NET updates, but then reminding me every day to install the updates, which would fail again; solution: uninstall and reinstall all the different .NET versions).

It has been about a week and so far no problems.

I was watching something recently that used the music “In the Hall of the Mountain King,” which is one of those great pieces of classical music that you recognize instantly, starting off slowly and building up pretty quickly in a little more than 2 minutes. There is the instrumental version plus a version with singing that comes from the Norwegian play, “Peer Gynt” by Henrik Ibsen, with music by Edvard Grieg, written in 1876. I figured I would like to download it, but the version with the singing is kind of scary, even in Norwegian (a bunch of trolls want to torture and kill Peer Gynt). I found the instrumental version on some compilations of popular classical music on Amazon. You could buy the song for 99 cents. But if you look at some of the albums it appears on, you notice that some of these are MP3 compilations of 99 songs and the entire compilation is only $1.99. So for another dollar, you get 98 more songs.
Continue reading “Cheap Music”