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To Grandma's House! (via the Nokia N810 GPS)

Yesterday it was Spot the wonder-dog who took her master on a GPS walk via the Nokia N810. Today, Grandma gets here turn. In my continued testing of the Nokia N810 (see all posts) we learn how to use the embedded GPS capability of the Nokia N810 to reach Grandma's house. While the test is in good natured fun, one could really use any address:

• Northstar Nerd Presents - Let's Go to Grandma's House
  (Nokia N810 GPS Test / Screencast: 4 minutes 40 seconds)

 

Spot Takes a Walk (the Nokia N810)

As I mentioned a few days ago, Nokia sent me a loaner N810 to evaluate. As I really like my N800, I was excited about using the higher end model. There are two big differences between the N800 and the N810. The latter model has a slide out keyboard, and embedded GPS. Yesterday evening Spot (my bassamation) and I decided to test out the embedded GPS during our late afternoon walk. Here is short screencast that reviews our walk and the Nokia's GPS featues:

• Spot Takes a Walk - The Nokia N810's GPS Capability
  (may take a moment to load)

With respect to the basic capabilities, link to my earlier post where I have a screencast which reviews most of the Nokia basic features. Finally, I also created a "silent slideshow" which assumes one is lost, and shows how to find oneself:

• Where Am I? - The GPS "Find My Current Location" Feature
  (50 seconds in duration ... one may pause the show)

A couple of comments... My N800 cost me $200. Amazon lists the N810 for $390. I've invested $45 for a full sized bluetooth keyboard and plan to add a bluetooth GPS receiver soon (also $45). Thus, my N800 investment is $100 less than the price of an N810. I personally like using a full size keyboard, but I have found the N810's slide out version also works nicely.
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Nokia Unplugged in Frostbite Falls!

I was excited this afternoon when my wife phoned me at work to let me know that my Nokia N810 had arrived. Actually, Nokia's N810 had arrived. You see, Nokia has graciously agreed to provide me a loaner 810 for evaluation purposes. As I love my N800 ... I thought why not??!

Well, there was one minor problem with the N810 that Nokia sent to me ... the included power adapter is for the United Kingdom. Unfortunately all of my power converters assume that someone in the USA wants to plug American appliances into European or Asian outlets ... not the other way around.

Now on one hand, an external power charger which is independent of a PC is nice; however there are times a trickle USB charger might also be nice! This is one of those times. Thankfully, my Nokia N800 charger works with the 810.  Thus, I'm still in business.

What was Nokia thinking when they sent me the English version? Regrettably, this is often a problem in we locals face in the frozen Northland. Minnesota is fly-over land ... perhaps somewhere near Siberia? Ever heard of Frostbite Falls?!

Anyhow, over the next few weeks I'll give you my impressions of the Nokia N810 and my own N800. (view all my Nokia posts)
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The School Bus Wore Skis

I just bought some new cross-country skis this morning, but my new equipment pales by comparison to this rig up in northwestern Wisconsin (expand image). Although I grew up just 80 miles away from this bus, and have told some TALL tales to my suburban Minneapolis children about life growing up in the Northland ... this bus is just plain COOL! Actually it's also, if required, a boat.

• International Herald Tribune Newspaper Article

The Web Shall be Free!

Back at Wikimania in 2006 I met Larry Lessig. This Stanford professor has done more than most people to insure free access to knowledge (a founding goal of this blog). One of his top accomplishments was the founding of Creative Commons. This organization allows for "open sourcing" of ideas. Anyhow, Professor Lessig has decided to take on new challenges (corruption in Washington DC). If you've never heard of Larry Lessig or Creative Commons take a few moments to either:

1. Download (w/o charge) Mr. Lessig's book: The Future of Ideas
   (or)
2. Watch Mr. Lessig's last lecture on this topic, Free Culture

If your job has anything to do with eCommerce or the web, you will be doing yourself a major disservice by not accessing these resources. Whether you agree of not with Professor Lessig, you need to understand his point of view.
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Technical Tag ... Harmonic CAD!

Sorry ... I couldn't resist combining today's two topics in this manner. Today is the second post of interesting engineering learning sites which I learned about via my company's social search / tagging engine. If your company does not have a tagging engine, it should. Don't underestimate the value of enhanced search and find which uses a homogeneous group. Anyhow, today's winners are ...

• Harmonics Modeling and Simulation from Virgina Tech
• MathCad Help Files from Louisiana State
  (a number of these resources are in downloadable pdf)

As they say ... the south shall rise again! In this case in support of engineering education! I'll make certain these resources are added to the engineering learning wiki. Did you know that three different sections of the wiki actually have custom built Google Co-Op search engines built around them? These wiki sections allow you to both browse or search the content:

• Engineering Courses
• Engineering Podcasts
• Engineering Seminars

Today's Learning Tag ... UML

Our company has an internal social search / tagging engine. Every few days I like to take a look at what some of the other techies have tagged. A quick scan often yields some diamonds! Over the next few days I'll post some of the "tags". In all cases, I've added the content to the Engineering Learning Wiki. For today's post, the UML content has been added to the software engineering section of the wiki.

• Practical UML (Universal Modeling Language)

This "hands-on introduction for developers" was created by Borland. The online manual provides great detail. Make certain you click upon the <More Details> and <Self Test> links to insure you have truly understood the concepts.

Boeing's 787 Dreamliner

I've been excited about planes and the aerospace industry since my first ride on a North Central DC3 back in the early 1960's. Many years later in my adult life I'm working in the aerospace industry, and still get excited about new planes ... thus from the University of Washington Department of Engineering:

• Building the Future of Commercial Aviation: Boeing's 787 Dreamliner

The presenter for this 90 minute webinar is Al Miller, who is Boeing's Director of Technology Integration. This free seminar is part of a three part series ... Engineering the Best: Boomers, A Bridge and the Boeing 787 from UWTV (University of Washington TV). You may watch via streamed webcast, or download a MP4 file for off line viewing. I also added this webcast to the Materials Engineering Section of my Engineering Learning Wiki.

 

Intelligent Computing: Follow-Up Posting

Earlier this week I posted, and provided a tutorial (ppt or pdf versions), on the benefits of setting up a virtual computer on your physical computer. A number of folks have contacted me privately, and Pythagore asked this question publicly via the comments section:

"I would like to understand the difference(s) between creating a virtual space and creating a partition. By creating a partition, if there is some problem (viruses, worm, etc) should be affected only the partition or the all disk? It's also true that creating a virtual space can be an easily way to solve this problem."

First the warning comment! I am not a computer security expert ... just a friendly nerd, but here is my take on why one might want to use a virtual PC rather than a new hard drive partition:

1. A virtual PC allows one to back out of mistakes or problems very easily. If your virtual computer gets screwed up when installing and testing new software, no matter what the cause of your problems (poorly written software code, viruses, etc), you can just choose not to save your virtual computers session settings ... and you are reset PC was in prior state. Problems arising while you're using any separate physical partiton can not be solved / cleaned this easily. If you choose to install new software onto a physical partition, it's hard to track down all the places any new software application touched.  Uninstall programs often don't really uninstall all traces of a given software package.
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2. Should your needs change, it is very easy to change the amount of hard disk or RAM allocated to a virtual PC. In addition, you can create multiple virtual PC's as separate testing environments, or even production environments. Sometimes the problem with software is not that there is any innate problem with the code itself, but that your new application interacts poorly with another installation on your computer.

This does not mean that there is not a time and a place for multiple hard drive partitions on your computer. The desire to run both Linux and Windows XP on a computer would be a perfect reason for setting up separate partitions. However, in each instance, I would still be likely to set up virtual PC's on each partition. You can learn more about this topic via two excellent Wikipedia articles linked below. Finally, i've linked this post via the Engineering Learning Wiki Software Section.

• Universal Virtual Computer - Wikipedia
• Microsoft Virtual PC - Wikipedia

Intelligent Computing

Can you answer "yes" to any of these questions? If so, then the Northstar Nerd's Intelligent Computing Tutorial is for you!

1. Do you download software from the web and install them onto your computer?
2. Do you run complicated software that often requires testing various configurations?
3. Are you worried about computer viruses, worms, etc?

If you're read this far, then it's time to install Microsoft Virtual PC on your computer. If your computing environment is Windows XP or Vista, then my instructions / tutorial will work. These examples may also work with Linux, etc, but I've not yet done a test. The key item to know up front is a virtual PC protects your system from mistakes caused by either you during set up tests, or from malware. The installation process is simple, and after you're done your computer will have a "safe zone" for testing. Oh yes ... did I mention that Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 is free?

Use either of the links given below to download my tutorial (45 screenshots with comments) on the Virtual PC installation and setup process: (see follow-up posting)

• Northstar Nerd's Microsoft Virtual PC Tutorial: Adobe PDF | Powerpoint
  (file sizes: 4 mb and 5 mb respectively)