Adventures in Tech

I have always been allergic to buying specialized electronic devices that do only one thing, such as the Kindle, the iPod, and fitness trackers. Why buy these when technology evolves so fast that a multi-purpose device such as the phone or a smart watch can eventually do the same thing, but with the convenience of updates that fix bugs and add functionality? So, I was shocked when this weekend I made an impulse buy and got the newest Kindle Paperwhite—a special purpose device for reading eBooks. I was walking past the Amazon store in the mall and saw that the newest Kindle Paperwhites were marked down by $40 for the holidays. The device looked good in the display, so I went in to look at it closely. The Paperwhite is small and light, with a 6” screen that is backlit and waterproof.   The text was crisp and readable, and in the ambient light, it felt like I am reading a printed book. I was sold and bought it on the spot. At home I have struggled to put it down. The bo...

When I first installed Windows 10 preview on my laptop, IE11 scrolling stopped working when using the touchpad to scroll. Interestingly scrolling worked great in all other programs: explorer, outlook, one note, and many others. For IE11, unless I click on the tab title, and avoid clicking on anything else in the tab area, scrolling did not work. It was quite an annoying behavior, but not a show stopper for trying out Windows 10. I ended up learning how to use the keyboard for scrolling through the web pages in lieu of touchpad goodness. With preview updates, the problem did not get any better, so I searched on the web to see if the issue was widespread. It turns out that it was, and it was not restricted to Windows 10 preview either. There were a lot of solutions online, that did not make much sense, like resetting IE11, going to the advanced tab and disabling smooth scrolling, and a slew of others. The one that made sense was a problem in the Synaptics driver, which for older style...

There are a lot of articles on the Internet comparing font rendering philosophies between Windows and Mac, including Damien's,   Jeff Atwood's, and Joel Spolsky's. The articles come with a vibrant set of comments that advocate one rendering philosophy over the other based on aesthetics, readability, and eye comfort. So far I have been oblivious to the difference, since I have been using the Mac exclusively for the last 15 years. But with my recent switch to Windows the rendering difference popped up, and it was not the font aesthetics since the font rendering on both platforms looked good to me. Rather I noticed that I can read on Windows for a long period of time without my eyes getting tired. On the Mac I needed AntiRSI or Timeout to help me take work breaks every half hour to alleviate eye soreness. After I switched to Windows I have not had a need to search for their equivalents.

I joined Microsoft a couple of weeks ago, and after 15 years of only using Macs and OS X for my work and personal computers, I traded both for their Windows equivalent. For my laptop, I got a Lenovo X1 Carbon that is growing on me. It reminds me of my Mac Book Air: it is very light, with a great design, and an excellent battery life—with a ton of applications running, I usually get 6 or 7 hours of battery life. And the icing on the cake is the touch screen, and the great tactile feel ThinkPad keyboards are well known for. The laptop had Windows 8.1 on it, but since I have access to any Windows build, I decided to image it with a prebuild of Windows 10. After a couple of weeks of usage, I can safely say I like Windows 10. It has definitely come a long way since the last time I used it 15 years ago.   For one, hibernation and wakeup are much faster now, and file operations—which I remember were slow and infuriating, are now acceptable. I also like Cortana, and the ne...

One of the great things about getting a haircut besides the feeling of freshness, is the enjoyable conversations that I have with my barber. The conversations usually span multiple topics, and are mostly random, but sometimes we chat about technology, and it is always great to get the perspective of someone not embedded in the field. Last time we talked about how the younger generations are using technology to communicate. My barber made astute observations about the topic, gleaned from his observations on how his kids, nephews and their friends communicate. It was interesting to learn that despite having cell phones, the younger generation has forgone all types of voice communication on the mobile device, and instead has opted for text messages and instant messaging. My barber was complaining that his kids rake in thousands of text messages a month, and if he did not select the right cell phone plan he would have gone broke by now. Despite not using voice communication on the mob...