Monday, February 28, 2011

The perfect kitchen computer?

One of the first things I thought of when I saw the iPad was "Kitchen Computer." When I heard about the Android tablets, I knew I had to get one, and the kitchen would be the first application for it.
Why? Well, it's pretty simple. When I'm at home, especially weekends, I spend quite a bit of time in the kitchen doing various things. Polishing the stainless steel, cooking stuff, making beer, drinking coffee, what ever. While I'm doing that I like to have a computer near by. I use my laptop as a cook book, mainly using Evernote, when I'm not looking at recipes I'm watching video or listening to music, occasionally chatting online, researching something or another, or just browsing the web over coffee. Why it really took me this long to put the Cr-48 through the kitchen paces, I don't know, but it did. This last weekend I made just about full use of my kitchen needs, and for the most part, I was very impressed. My setup was simple. A cheap pair of PC speakers, and the Cr-48.
Of course, looking up recipes is easy. That hasn't changed from my regular laptop. I open Evernote, and do a little searching. I'm covered. I want some music, open up Audiogalaxy, and I'm good to go. In the past, video hasn't been great, but I tried something a little different this time around...Now stay with me, this is relevant...I've recently gotten a Logitech Revue and in conjunction with that, I've learned that TVersity is an extremely cool application. Back to my Cr-48, I decided to load the TVersity flash library on my Cr-48, and to my surprise, I got much better streaming than I do with Hulu. Pop my browser in to full screen mode, and I've got a small, lightweight TV in my kitchen serving up my own movies and tv shows. The only issue I had was when the video froze up while the audio kept going, and I was unable to get out of the full screen browser mode until I actually shut down my computer. Sounds pretty bad, but I attribute this to someone trying to start a Facebook chat session with me on another tab. I can't prove it, but that's when it happened, and I could not reproduce the issue. My kitchen experience could potentially be enhanced by a touch screen, but until I have one to compare against, the Cr-48 performs extremely well.

Tuesday, February 22, 2011

What's up with that shift lock key???

During the day I live the life of a mild mannered programmer. Most of my work is c#, a little bit is java on an evil, mobile, non-tree-born-food-item platform that I shall not name just now, and currently all my work is in Windows. I can't use this cr-48 as much as I'd like, but I use it almost exclusively (aside from pumping video to my TV) when at home.
What was that ramble about? Well, I use shift lock quite a bit. Google, for what I have determined must be a joke...and really, a pretty funny one at that, has decided to place their search key in the exact location that the rest of the world expects the shift lock key. Once in a while I like to yell on twitter or facebook, or I'm actually doing something productive that requires all caps, and I just start typing. I'm on my cr-48, and I hit the shift lock, and my cr-48 spazzes out and opens a new tab. I say, "woah, what the hell was that?" I close the tab, go back to typing, hit the shift lock, and my cr-48 spazzes out, etc. I usually do this maybe 3 to 5 times before I look at the keyboard and remember which computer I'm on. Why I can't remember this, I don't know, but to remove the shift key and replace it with something that opens new tabs has got to be a joke.