Marcus Hamaker is The Sleepy Geek

Watches can be quite simple and they can also be very complex. The Citizen Eco-Drive isn’t really geeky on the exterior but it’s one of the coolest watches I have ever owned. I have had mine for about 3 years and I am as happy with it today as the day it was given to me as a gift (thanks Ann & Dad!).

So why so cool? SOLAR! If there is light it recharges and you never have to worry about a battery. One of my biggest peeves with regular watches is changing the battery. After doing that the warranty for water is void and I am always cautious with the watch after that, always worried that water will get in and mess it up. Some watches  I have just stopped wearing because the worry of breaking it bothers me too much.

They give you the best description of how it works:

What is Eco-Drive?

Citizen Eco-Drive watches use the simplest, yet most technically advanced power generating and storage system in the Watch Manufacturing Industry. A Solar conversion panel and energy cell are the power provider for these Quartz Watches. Eco-Drive’s ability to use light from any source to generate electrical power means that the supply is limitless and free. The absence of any added complex power generating machinery that would require additional upkeep is another big advantage.

Given that it’s light that powers the watch, they have incorporated a really cool feature. When the watch is left in the dark for an extended period of time it stops all the mechanical movement on the front and just keeps the time in memory. When you show the face to any light source it immediately turns the hands to the correct time – in essence “catching it up”. This saves battery power and thus lessens the chance that your time ends up incorrect.

Love mine :)

Geek on!

You absolutely need to backup your data! The geek needs a cool way to do this so there are is the Western Digital MyBook Studio. This thing has Firewire 800 and USB 2.0 for connectivity. If you have only your computer then this is a really nice way to backup your data.

Western Digital has a few models out there, some less fancy and some more portable but this one is there Cadillac. Featuring support for Windows and OSX along with a cool little LCD display give you drive information, this model takes the geek factor up a notch.

My most recent version of MyBook that I bought has a backup software included with it that I think everyone should use. If you don’t have something built into your OS (ie. WinXP) then it’s a good solution. It does all the regular things like allowing you to choose what to backup and when.

There isn’t much else really sexy about backing up. It’s like doing laundry, you just have to! But if you are going to do your laundry then do it with a MyBook Studio :)

Geek on!

This is more of a gush post than anything. In preparation for a trip to Maine with my family, a place I have been going to every summer since I was 3 years old – Google’s Street View helps me locate a missing piece of my memory.

You see; as a family with my parents we would always stay at an apartment rental near the beach which you rent by the week. Due to budgets being a little tighter these past couple of years we were forced to try and find a place we could rent by the night. With success it is still very close to where I am used to but I couldn’t picture the building when I was talking about it with my parents.

GOOGLE MAPS! It pops into my head and off to my laptop I go. This is my first actual real reason for using Street View. I have played around with it to have a look at Central Park, San Fran and a few other things but to actually need to find a building by image so I could remember which on it was – never!

Sure enough the Google car has been down that little street that heads out to the coast and within 30 seconds I was able to exclaim – “Oh, THAT building!”.

It was also nice to take a “drive” down the street to check out all the places that my brothers and I hung around at. The arcade, the Beachcomber corner store, the beach view. I can hardly wait now!

Amazing.

Geek on!

I know that you’re probably all thinking that you have the best hard drive out there and “never had any trouble with it”, and that’s great! I have been doing some side work for some people and I can honestly say that 66% of the work I do is hard drive replacement and Windows re-installation.

I remember working in a local computer shop during my youth. We used to have the odd batch that was total crap but I remember that we repaired all kinds of problems. I remember this batch of Samsung hard disks that were more likely broken then working at all. But then there were some Quantum hard disks that were ROCK solid! I know, not the Bigfoot!

It’s a bit ironic because in the past month I have had 2 of my hard disks die on me. I had a WD 500GB external drive crap out that held all my backups. I also had a 160GB in a test machine that I run sometimes when I am not in the mood for the laptop. It died just the other day.

I asked some of the guys at work and one of the gents that is in the PC Build department said that most the the rebuilds they need to do on X60 tablets are due to dead hard drives.

So our of frustration comes a post. I hope that HD manufacturers realize that most of us would like something that lasts the life of the PC instead of saving a couple of bucks. After all this isn’t a modem we are talking about… ALL OUR DATA IS ON THERE!

I rarely post anything that has to do with my 9-5 job because I don’t like to mix the washing, if you know what I mean. This I don’t think is crossing any lines. We use a number of hardware models, some being IBM/Lenovo notebooks and tablets, Dell desktops and some Dell Laptops. One of the Dell machines we use is the D420, a nice little machine that is very lightweight and still large enough to be usable.

That is until you get to anything that requires the use of the hard drive. They have used a 60GB 4200 rpm 1.8″ disk in these systems and it simply kills the performance. When we first received our test units we thought that something was wrong with them. Possibly they didn’t have as much memory as we ordered, causing an exorbitant amount of HD swapping. No beans! It is just the hard drive is that slow.

Let me put it into perspective. We use a Dell Optiplex desktop here that is very fast. Duo Core, 2 GB RAM, the whole bit. Plenty for a corporate desktop. We install our XP over the network with an answer file. Total automation. The build time for this desktop is about 1.5 hours. We use Dell D620 laptops with 1 GB of RAM, another Duo Core machine, also very fast. The build time for that is about 2 hours. The D420, that has the same processor as the D620, more RAM at 1.5GB, takes 4 hours to build. What amazes me is that in the build it is the HD that is the bottleneck and not the network connection.

I wouldn’t use one of these machines if you threw it at me. Well maybe, I could install some server on it, or using it as backup space. But to use it day to day would kill me.