Today, I tried the snowshoes. I wore the Garmin 305 mainly to check my heart rate. I wanted to see if snowshoeing was a reasonable cardio workout. Turns out that it is, as the data below shows (click it for full resolution). When I walked the same route a few days earlier with no snow, my heart rate averaged 102 bpm. It does seem that I could stand to do a few sprints here and there to liven things up.

The ideal form-factors for computing and mobile devices come down to the environment they’re used in. If you’re sitting at the same desk in an office most days, a desktop is the way to go. If you sit at multiple desks or coffee-shop tables, a notebook is the thing. If you don’t sit, but either walk around or lay on the couch, you need a tablet.

There’s a gap in the available platforms between notebooks and smart phones, where a notebook is cumbersome, and most mobile devices are too small. Netbooks are edging into this gap, but a multi-touch tablet would be a better fit.

The applications you’re likely correlate to the environment. If you’re a graphic designer, you probably need to work at a desk with a full-blown application. If you’re sketching some ideas, you might relax somewhere with a tablet.

I view the iPhone OS/UI as a happy accident. Given the small screen real estate, the iPhone OS has to have a simplified and sharply-focussed UI. This clean UI makes the Touch a pleasure to use. Not only does it offer direct manipulation though multi-touch, but it’s sheer simplicity makes it very transparent.

Compare the experience of the iPhone’s YouTube application to the experience of YouTube in a web browser. On the web, YouTube is cluttered with all manner of suggestions and up-sell. On the iPhone, it’s wonderfully simple. The differences between Mail on OSX vs. Mail on the iPhone are similar.

The iPod Touch is most of the way there. It just needs to be bigger, making it more useful for reading and viewing media. More real-estate would also allow some real work product. The iPhone/Touch are really about consuming content. A bigger device would open the possibility of its use in creative and productive output.

I’ve laid-out the two product design issues that make the “bigger iPhone” the right approach for Apple: finding the usage gap between the iPhone and the notebook, and the general superiority of the iPhone OS for that usage.

Beyond those product issues, the failure of Windows tablets to crawl out of their niche (doctors’ offices) shows that putting a personal computer OS in a tablet package isn’t going to sell in any significant proportion to notebooks.

We run a Mac Mini as the “family computer”. It’s been chugging along since we got in 2005. It seemed kind of tired until we installed Leopard on it, which gave it something of a new lease on life. But lately it’s been running slower, and now often refuses to boot, giving the grey screen with the folder on it that alternates between a ? and the Mac OS face logo.

I’ve tried all manner of troubleshooting on it. When it does boot, the disk verifies, and there are no suspicious log messages. I’ve disconnected everthing on its USB and Firewire busses. Nothing seems to have any repeatable effect. Yesterday, I’ve started rapping on the case, or giving it a bump against the desk, and that does seem to have some effect. So, I’m starting to think it’s mechanical – perhaps a bad solder joint, or crappy cable connection. The next step is to disect the thing, which isn’t easy, as it’s really not intended to be user-serviceable.

I’m reluctant to even get into that, because at best, if I fixed it, we’d still have a computer that performs just barely well enough to be useful. The form-factor is nice, but compared to
my Dell desktop, it’s much noisier despite its laptop components, it’s not in anyway serviceable or expandable, and a new replacement is close to double the cost of a low-end Dell.

On the other hand, I like running OSX much better than Windows, and we need iTunes, as every family member has an iPod of some sort. I also use Garageband, have a Line 6 interface and run their software, and occationally use iDVD and iMovie. So, replacing the Mini with a Windows system would potentially save $300, but then I’d have to acquire software replace what comes bundled with a new Mini, have to move iTunes, photos and other media libraries to Windows, then reformat every iPod in the house. At the end of all that, I’d be stuck running Windows.

What I really want, is something like the mac mini, but maybe just a little bigger and user-serviceable and expandable. The Mini has a nice form factor, but it’s lack of expandability means that I have two external disk drives, a USB hub, two different iPod sync widgets, and my Line 6 outboard sound interface. In contrast, my dell mini-tower contains all its parts, with no extra wires and wall-warts required, and has USB ports on the front, top, and back of the case.

I just don’t get why Apple can’t sell an entry level, expandable system on the strength of OSX. and their ability to design hardware nicely. Why is the no desktop cheaper than the Mac Pro line, other than the Mini, which seems neglected as it is?

Also, I’m not thrilled with the Mini’s durability. It’s only 4 years old, after all. I wouldn’t expect it to avoid obsolescence, but just plan crapping-out is unacceptable. Again, this problem is made worse by it’s total lack of serviceability.

I still can’t decide where to throw money at this problem.

I tool a walk in Bradley Palmer yesterday – the snow was almost gone then, some ice on the trail made it tricky. Today we got 8″ new snow, so maybe I’ll try out the XC skiis.

Bradley Palmer at EveryTrail

Map created by EveryTrail:GPS Geotagging

I got my replacement Garmin 305 today. It works great. Apparently, the problems I had with the bundled software on OSX were due to a defective unit. This one works great. I took it for a walk and it tracked nicely. The only hitch was that it measured my heart rate down at 35 bmp most of the time. That just can’t be right.

Walk2 at EveryTrail

Map created by EveryTrail:GPS Geotagging

I tried to use my Garmin 305 yesterday, and it was not responding to any button presses. So, back it goes. I may try and get a replacement.

I got a Garmin Forerunner 305. I’m trying to get it running on my Fedora 10 system, as well as my Mac Mini.

So far, pytrainer just won’t work. It seems to rely on an old blacklisted driver gps_garmin. I have gotten
gpsbabel working, via a usb permissions rule change:

I added the file /etc/udev/rules.d/51-garmin.rules with the following contents:

SYSFS{idVendor}==”091e”, SYSFS{idProduct}==”0003″, MODE=”0666″

With that, I could run:

gpsbabel -t -r -w -i garmin -f usb: -o gpx -F outputfile.gpx

This is a nice XML file. But what can I read it into?

On the mac, it gets a little wierd. The Garmin Training Center wouldn’t detect the device at all.
I downloaded the latest version. It still had a lot of trouble detecting the device, asking me
to reboot the 305 several times. There seems to be a hint that some maps are included
in the application, but no luck downloading them. It’s odd that the “supported” platform doesn’t
even work as well as Fedora.

I’ve spent a little more time with POD Farm, and I’m pleased with it. I got it via a free upgrade with my Line 6 Tone Port UX2. Most of my experience with guitar sound is from my Digitek 2101, which has a tube tube preamp followed by a digital signal processor. I would either record direct from the line outputs with it’s speaker simulator on, or run a solid-state power amp and mic the speaker.

With POD Farm includes amp, speaker cabinet, and room simulation (early reflections). In short, this gives you control over distortion (non-linear amplification) on both sides of the effects processing, allowing sounds that just aren’t possible with the 2101.

On the other hand, POD farm can’t match the flexibility and control of the 2101’s signal processing, which allows you to create completely novel effects. POD Farm’s effects are simulations of “classic” and popular discrete effects stomp boxes. What would be really cool is the ability to create your own models from scratch.

A minor annoyance with POD Farm is the blatant up-sell: it installs numerous patch (called “tones”) definitions that refer to device models you don’t own. This means that 70-80% of the factory presets you get can’t be played on a stock install of POD Farm. Fortunately, customized presets can be stored in directories on the file system, so as soon as I pick the factory presets I like, I can move them in my own directory and ditch the upsell/broken ones.

My Tone Port UX2 came in last night. I’m pretty impressed with it. The amp/cabinet modelling stuff is really cool; I’d never tried it before. It’s not going to replace my GSP 2101, but it’s great at its intended use: getting guitar tracks on to a computer.

I ran it with Garage Band – it pretty much clobbers my poor little Mini, the UI is pretty sluggish, but all the real-time stuff (getting the audio recorded without latency issues) works flawlessly.

Here’s a little sound test I did with a GarageBand drum loop and a couple of tracks of guitar:

quick test for Tone Port/Gear Box/Garage Band

Now for the hard part: I have to start writing.

Macintosh SE
Bought: 1987
Cost: $2,300 (with Student Discount, normally $2,900).
RAM: 1MB
CPU: 8MHz Motorola 68000
Storage: two 800 kB floppy drives

I bought my first computer just before going to grad. school in 1987. It was a dual-floppy Mac SE. I started programming by writing a Pascal program that was an N-body gravitational simulation of the solar system.

Macintosh Quadra 630
Bought: 1994
Cost: $1200 (?)
CPU: 33MHz Motorola 68040
RAM: 4 MB

My last Mac – the OS was getting ugly, and I couldn’t depend
on buying stuff that would work (MIDI interfaces, CDROMs, software).

Dell XPSR
Bought: 1998
Cost: $2,300
CPU: Intel Pentium 400MHz
Storage: SCSI 40 MB (?)

My first PC, purchased when I joined a start-up. It ran as my web-server up until 2003, first running Windows/IIS, then Windows/Apache, then Linux (RedHat 9).

Dell Dimension 8200
Bought: 2001
Cost: $2300
CPU: Intel 1.3 GHz
RAM 512 MB

This is the first PC I tried to do media on. I got an Audigy external box for the thing, plus a DVD burner. I switched this to Linux around 2005 (FC3?). I used it up until a couple of days ago.

Dell Inspiron 518
Bought: 2008
Cost: $330
CPU: Intel dual-core 2 GHz
RAM: 1GB
Storage: 250GB

My latest – significantly cheaper and quite a bit better. Fedora 9 is running nicely on it.