go sand flea, go!

a little bit of Braun in this Pentax

This new camera design for Pentax by Marc Newson is a welcome move away from the recent spate of retro-classics.
But retro isn't entirely absent. The design still reflects the influence of Dieter Rams and his Braun products, specifically in the top of the camera.

why I love my BlackBerry

Josh Topolsky, Editor-in-Chief of the Verge, asked on Twitter if anyone in the world actually LOVES their BlackBerry, not just liked it.

My response was YES, because it's a smartPHONE not a little computer. And I want a smartPhone not a little computer.

My BlackBerry works as a phone. It does e-mail perfectly. You can text without errors because it has a physical keyboard. Contacts are seemlessly integrated into Calendar, E-mail, Phone. And it still does those functions demonstratably better than Android or iOS. It's a device that has stood the test of time for those functions. If those are the functions you want, it's beautiful.

Additionally, and very importantly, the latest BlackBerry is physically a wonderful device to hold, nicer at least to my hands than anything else out there.

I also own a Nexus S with 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. It simply can't compare for the four functions of Contacts, Calendar, E-mail, Phone, not merely because it doesn't have a physical keyboard but because the interaction with those four functions are simply not as well thought through and hasn't gone through the inumerable revisions of the BlackBerry OS.

BlackBerry's are vintage devices, even in the newest model. There's a virtue in that vintage that some users appreciate and even love, but it's questionable whether it can survive in the market that way.

But everything else on the BlackBerry is a shadow of what's on other devices.

Why I just purchased the SAAB of Smartphones

Why did I just purchase the SAAB of Smartphones, friends want to know. Or less accurately, why did I just purchase a new eight-track tape player in the era of Spotify?

There just aren't any physical keyboard phones out there, at least in the United States, other than BlackBerrys. The integration between e-mail and phone just works so right. The thing is first and foremost a phone with e-mail rather than a computer with a phone built-in. And it the nicest device in my hand--curved in all the right places, unlike the slab that is the current iPhone. Since it's the inanimate object that I touch daily more than any other, that's really important.

Yes, I've tried virtual keyboards. I have a Nexus S too. But for actually doing real typing, I simply can't get adjusted to virtual keys. Same reason I still use a ThinkPad. Can't get used to a trackpad.

Now, if anyone could find me an Olivetti portable ... I really miss the way that thing typed and Mom gave it away when I was off at college.

quick question on mass production and personal modifications

There's something nice about modifying a computer in even the slightest way. I just yanked off the silly little cover to the headset jack and USB port on my ThinkPad X1. It was put there by the designers so the down-angled sides of the box would be flush, hiding the cutout for the jack and port. Now I'm happier with the machine and it's mine. Earlier I undid the keyboard and put a mSATA drive into the guts of the machine. You could argue that neither of these things would have been necessary if I'd bought the perfectly designed MacBook. True. But I wonder if setting up a computer so that it can be modified isn't a better design. I'm not suggesting such intentionality was present in the design of this laptop, but I wonder, what examples are out there of mass produced, personal products like computers and cars that are specifically designed with mods in mind? Some cars, certainly, like Jeep Wranglers. What else?

mSATA on a Lenovo Thinkpad X1

There's a type of SSDs (Solid State Drives) called mSATA that takes the form of a mini-PCI Express card (LINK for more info).

For $200 (September, 2011) you can purchase an 80gB Intel mSATA drive (LINK to NewEgg). It's a minuscule thing!

I have just installed it on a Lenovo ThinkPad X1. I'm running a standard 160gB Intel SSD on the computer and now have a secondary drive in the form of the mSATA installed under the keyboard where the mobile broadband card would go. Unfortunately, it's either the mSATA or the mobile card, not both.

The user guide for the X1 has a pretty good explanation of how to do the install. One step you can skip is disconnecting the keyboard. You'll have to remove the keyboard but no need to disconnect it.

Remember that you have to format the drive after you install it and also that if you don't have it as the boot drive, make sure it's set as the second drive in the list for startup.

the URL to be able to download Skype onto your Verizon BlackBerry Bold 9650

http://mobile.vzw.com/download/Bourbon/BB9650/Skype_mobile.jad


Because even though your BlackBerry 9650 is pictured on the Verizon/Skype website and the site says it's compatible, when you try to download through normal channels, Verizon and Skype will say your phone isn't compatible but it is ... sort of ... at least on my phone with BlackBerry 6.0 it does work but not very well. Takes FOREVER to connect a call. Only time I use it is when I have to take a Skype call on my mobile.