>Here a Blog, There a Blog, Everywhere a Blog Blog

>Just as a heads-up to my handful of readership (Thanks for the support from Mr. JTH, BTW), this is just an FYI post on the various links to my sites and a description of what’s there.

1. Smartphone and Pocket PC Magazine: I contribute reviews, and articles for the Magazine’s blog and have had some print success as well. It’s kinda free-lance work on gadget-related topics. I was also recently a judge in their annual awards. I have lately been posting my judging scores and comments, which are handy as a quick buyer’s guide for Pocket PC software.

2. My Home Page: I’m working on getting a registered domain, but first wanted to create a useful gadget-related site for the masses, and my cable provider gives away the space, so thought I’d start there. There’s a few gadget articles, reviews, tips, how-to’s, along with some Pocket PC themes and skins I have created (exposing my inner artist) along with links. Articles are in e-book reader format. There’s also a mobile home page version, and a mobile preview version of this blog.

3. This Blog: This started out as a way to goof around with blogging in general, and then became more gadget-oriented, but is really a test-site for posting stuff, and the home of the occasional rant. I often use hubdog’s mobile application to quickly grab feed articles and stuff them here from my handheld. By the way, you can chat with me directly from this blog page by using the meebo chat item to the right (if I’m logged onto meebo that is)…

4. My Bloglines Blog: Bloglines is the best on-line service to handle all your feed subscriptions in one place. They provide a blog when you sign-up and a handy feature for clippling feed material to your blog. I use it to clip stuff I’m thinking of writing about or want to check out.

5. My WINKSite Page: WINKSite is a mobile content publishing engine. I use it to provide a mobile version of my blog, but it includes chat, forums, and more. If you want a great stripped-down method to provide mobile content, it doesn’t get any easier. Use this link from your phone to see what I mean. You can also chat with me mobile style if I happened to be on when you pass by.

6. Natescrap Mobile Channels on Plusmo, and Hubdog: Hubdog, and Plusmo are great mobile content providers that allow you to view feed subscriptions in a channel that is optimized for display on your device.

Just click on the links above to check out the various ways I consume time/space outside of music, and computer-related work in general, and thanks again if you are a return subscriber to this little blog o mine. Feel free to leave your own links in the comments section, and of course, if it’s offensive or spam, I will delete them. If I like them, they will probably get included in my list of links, and so on…and on and on….

>Vista Slow?

>

I recently read a PC World Article (Feb 2007 issue) titled “Vista: Not Slow” that goes on to add, “Overall, our test apps did seem to run slower with Window’s Vista”. Uh, but wait…you said “Not Slow” in a review that in fact reveals that XP is actually faster than Vista? I’m confused… All-in-all, the review reveals a mixed bag of results that left me scratching my head. Long story short, if you run Vista on older crap hardware it is much slower than XP, which accounts for Vista’s monster hardware requirements. It apparently does better when loaded up with the best dual-core CPU, and high-end graphics card (which OS doesn’t?). The 64-bit version is slower than the 32-bit unless you feed it lot’s of extra memory. The tests involved running single or multiple applications (Adobe, Far Cry, etc.). Mainly, I’m pissed that PC World didn’t call it like it saw it. If the damn thing is overall slower, say so, and maybe get some feedback from MS (which probably would have been minimal, admittedly). Better yet, compare Vista to similar applications running on x86 Linux, eh? I’m not sure how useful a performance test of Vista vs. XP really is, in the final analysis.

My current x86 machine will barely run Vista, and by the time it hits the scrap heap next year or thereafter, I will probably have to run Windows Vista on something new anyway, and it will still be a pig, eating gobs of memory like a rottweiller in a meat-packing plant (“super-fetch”…puh-lease). Last year, I won an old refurbed Sun Ultra 10 in an on-line contest (shout out to bytekcorp.com) with 256MB of RAM (think 10-15 year old technology). I downloaded Solaris 10 free from Sun, installed it on the old warhorse and was chatting, browsing, and doing e-mail with it in like 10 minutes. It’s a tad noisy, ugly, and for some graphics tasks admittedly slow, but it runs Star Office twice as fast as Office on my PC, and straight-up browsing or e-mail, fahgedddabouttit (and I’m talking x86 in the last 5 years). Oh yeah, it’s also stable. Maybe PC World should stop being a shill for MS, and maybe MS should go shove Vista where…well you get the idea.