So, I dont (ever) do reviews of hardware products, but I thought I’d hammer out a few words on a new piece of hardware that I picked up: the MSI Wind.  Its part of genre of smaller sub-notebooks that were initially popularized by the Asus EEE.  I decided to pick one up because I knew I’d be spending this month and next doing home visits around Toronto.

My previous laptop — besides being old and rickety — was also large (17″) and heavy (5 lbs).  Coupled with the other stuff I have to lug around, I was looking for something small and light, recognizing that my needs were very modest.  Light emailing, blogging, and hooking into the virtual office to update patient files.

I ended up going with the MSI Wind for my purposes.  I tried the Asus EEE, but found that amongst the various models available in Toronto, the keyboards were tiny.  Miniscule, in fact.  The HP 2133 was another one I looked at, but it was a little more expensive ($700+) and came with Vista. Boo.  Dell came out with their own super light sub-notebook, but it came out before I picked up the Wind, which does come with Windows XP.

If you want specs, you can check out this website, but subjectively I’ll just say that it has done the trick.  Its about 2lbs and the size of a largish softcover novel.  The size of the keyboard is just large enough to accomodate adequate sized keys for my clumsy fingers, and doesn’t make many compromises for the sake of a form factor. 

One of the biggest problems that I just recently solved, however, was the touchpad that comes with it.  It was far too sensitive.  I’d be writing, and then the cursor would go to another position based on a phantom (or what would seem like a phantom) touchpad-click.  It was so bad that at one point I was considering returning the item.  

The MSI Wind, luckily, has some active boards that pointed me to the solution, which was an updated driver which I will be happy to host here –> Wind MSI Touchpad Driver, in case the original site goes down.

The updated drivers, I think, natively make the touchpad less sensitive, and also, thank goodness, allow me to disable it automatically when I’m using the keyboard.  

I’ve found the MSI Wind good value for money ($500) which is quite modest in its specs, but adequate for what I need to do.  If I had any gripes now, it would be in its battery life, which, for the 3 cell version that I have, can’t seem to eek out any more than a couple hours.  Perhaps there are other ways to squeeze out another hour, but I haven’t found them yet.

In advance of the release of the Android OS for the T-mobile today at 10:30 EST there are a ton of questions — most of which I will not be addressing in this post.  One of them, however, seems to have escaped the attention of most bloggers and that is this: will the quality and number of the applications for Android at all vary because the iPhone has a way for app developers to easily monetize their work?

Rather, could Android software development suffer because it won’t be able to attract the same number of developers — who are now looking to make boatloads of cash via the iPhone apps store?

Correct me if I’m wrong folks, and Android may surprise us yet,but there doesn’t seem to the same kind of simple application where you click, choose, and download — which is tied into a singular payment scheme.  True, one would think that this would natively exist with software for cell-phone companies that allow you to put everything onto a single bill (I think our Japanese friends have already sorted this one out) but this level of sophistication is something that I will certainly be watching for with Android’s release.

Why?  Well, I’m sure that many developers are looking to contribute to the growing library of Android applications out the goodness of their own heart, I’m sure many of them are also writing with dollar signs in their eyes … particularly with the rash of articles written recently about how profitable it can be writing popular iPhone apps.

Will Apple and the iPhone be poaching the best and brightest for the lure of cold hard cash?  Hard to say at this point — particularly as I’m sure people program and dev for a great many reasons.  

But with application development (for the iPhone, for Facebook) clearly being much more than a basement hobby, and something so profitable that it can power a real business, it seems reasonable to think that from the developer side at least, free vs. fee is, going to be, for some, a bit of a no-brainer.

On the flip-side, of course, is the mind-set of the user of the respective systems.  Will iPhone users, because of things like iTunes, be conditioned to paying for software?  And will Android users, being used to open-source ethos (whether they call it that or not), be used to software that is free?

I guess we’ll have to wait until 10:30EST today (and likely much later) to find out.

I am a fan of online storage services, to the extent that I do follow things.  Omnidrive is one of those services that I profiled briefly more than a year ago, and at the time I really liked it.  In fact, at the Web 2.0 Summit in 2006, Venturebeat annointed Omnidrive winner of the Launchpad portion of the conference.

Well, it looks like Omnidrive has hit the deadpool.  

Both Omnidrive *and* the blog for Nik Cubrilovic now forward to a page called Financial Amnesty, which I’m not linking to, because its on the dodgy side of sketchy.

Now, I have no idea if Nik and Omnidrive have been hacked, and perhaps that’s why there’s a redirect going to this site, but given how quiet Omnidrive has been in the recent past, and other whispers of its impeding demise, if this is the truth … well, it doesn’t appear to be any surprise.

Well, solved for me anyway.  Sometime a few hours after it was released, Firefox stopped becoming my regular browser, and Chrome *did*.  I know — I was kind of amazed myself, in spite of all the plugins I’ve been missing.  At any rate, one thing I’ve begun noticing has been getting worse: its seeming inability to “resolve the host”.

This would lead to the browser essentially “hanging” and then timing out while it was waiting to fetch web pages.  For a browser that I’ve been relying on mostly … well, to browse … this was becoming problematic.

Turns out there are a few easy solutions for this that you can try:

1. delete your cache

2. delete your browsing history

3. delete your download history

4. disable “DNS pre-fetching”

Personally, I skipped right down to #4, and once DNS pre-fetching *was* disabled, Chrome was as zippy as ever.  As always use the above tips at your own risk if you feel like trying them out.  

via: Google Groups

Update: Of course the rumours were debunked.  Ah well.  It made for a tasty morning. :)  On another note, it did whet our collective appetite for what Google would or could do with gaming. Third note: in spite of being Google, they are still Google, and their next acquisition, be it gaming or otherwise, might have the same effect as other “exciting” purchases: a wet blanket (ask fans of jaiku, grandcentral, jotspot amongst others).

Rumours are swirling that Google may be in the process of acquiring Valve, the company that is behind the monumental success that is the Half-Life franchise.  Valve also owns Steam, the *only* distribution platform on PC’s with any great pull in the industry, with an install base of 15 million users.

Now, having personally used Steam since its early days (but not having used it for some time, I’ll admit), its one of those things that gamers love to hate.  There are issues around reliability, amongst other things.  But it deserves big props for being the only game in town, and really pioneering a way of selling and distributing games *online*.  Full versions of it.  And giving smaller indie publishers (long before the Xbox 360 Marketplace) a *potential* means of selling their wares.

How does Google fit in all of this? As MCV notes via Forbes, Google has been thinking of getting into games for a while.  Why?  Well, why not?  It already does online documents.  Online video.  It probably has its eyes on every dominant sector of the Internets, if not in content creation, then at least in the background machinery in terms of both finding and distributing information and productivity.

I could imagine a future where Google does pick up the Steam platform (via Valve), so that it has the automatic install base of 15 million, PLUS a way to quickly acquire the technology *and* engineers so that it create its own branded way of …

1. hosting and distributing games

2. searching for games

3. installing ads for games … ?

Oh, its a crazy idea.  But, in retrospect, probably just as crazy as Google acquiring the legal craziness that was YouTube.  Oh, Google’s not in the content business, we all said.  Oh, they’ll just get sued into oblivion we all said.

Well, Google’s looking crazy, all right.  Crazy, like a fox.

A billion dollar, Skynet-becoming, ad-serving, we-have-all-your-bases … fox.

Upon the write up and coverage of BackBlaze yesterday on TechCrunch, I decided to download and try BackBlaze, the online backup tool.  As writen by others, its entering a bit of a tough arena as there are quite a few established competitors, all of whom are probably trying to grow the space.  At $5 a pop for unlimited data storage and transfer, however, its a deal I had to check out, particularly as they had a 15 day trial period.

… Man, did I want to like this product.

There are one big problem I had with the trial that made me stop “trying” it out.

You don’t select the files you want to back up.  You *exclude* the ones you *don’t*. The problem, I think, is that the well meaning folks behind BackBlaze assume that you have your files organized into a well organized architecture.  That way, its *easy* for their users to *deselect* the files or media they don’t want.  They would just — for example — go to the “video” folder and unselect that.

If you’re like me, the reality is that you probably don’t.  I have different file types of varying importance scattered across my hard drive.  For me to find the one’s I *don’t* want to back up, is a such a colossal hassle, its a deal killer, because I obviously don’t want to include every single file on my hard drive (excluding windows and operations-type ones).

The result?  On default, BackBlaze *tries* to upload everything it sees, and I got a screen that says that it will “only” take about 82 days to upload all my junk.

The irony, of course is that because I’m too lazy to exclude the files I don’t want to upload, the time it takes to upload vastly exceeds the 15 day trial. In fact, I was hoping to just *include* a few directories (or a few gigabytes of storage) to see how the rest of the service goes.

Sadly I won’t get that chance, as my gerbil-like attention span just killed any desire to do so. If and when Backblaze changes this, I won’t be coming back to it.  As it stands there are too many other competitors to try at the moment.

So, throughout IzeaFest, one of the folks I have hung around with (no pun intended) has been Tamar Weinberg, of Mashable, Techipedia, and LifeHacker fame.  I’m just throwing out huge props to her today, as today she’s at a tech conference and being the Sabbath, she cannot use any of her usual gadgets, like her laptop, or her Treo.

It must require a superhuman amount of will to not want to blog, twitter, or anything of that sort while she’s surrounded by people in laptops.  I know I wouldn’t be strong enough, but Tamar — she’s clearly a woman of faith.

Tip of my hat to her. :)