Brian Fitzgerald

I think the only questions we ever ask our Google Assistant are those along the lines of “Are [insert food item] okay for dogs?”.

@cpultz it was great! Did my drive and walk then the sidewalk all along this side of the street and still had half a battery left. If we had more than a couple inches I might have had to switch to the second battery. It didn’t have much to throw today.

@cpultz I don’t have a two-stage but I spent some money on an battery-powered toro last winter and barely got to use it… I was too excited to go out at 6 this morning to clear things off for the doc before she took off for the day.

@cpultz Agreed. All night, my wallet and I are worried about what’s going on out there…

@dj3ei People were posting photos of natural waterfalls for waterfallwednesday… I was just posting a radio waterfall. Couldn’t help it :-) 73

#waterfallwednesday … Did I do that right? 😁📻 #HamRadio

Trying the Mr. Milko at Cosmic Eye Brewing!

@chrisdunker Captial Jazz Society holds their weekly concerts there. With holiday, looks like next is Jan 9. http://www.artsincorporated.org/cjs/

Contacted a nice collection of European countries this morning, but FT8 is still kinda like being a kid at a fishing game where the adult inside the box is putting a prize at the end of your line for you 😁 #HamRadio #ft8

@chrisdunker storm cellar is pretty great on Mondays with jazz music

https://www.lps.org/post/detail.cfm?id=14861

@cpultz Congrats on the KState win! We were at Big 10 champ game where Nebraska got blown out by Wisconsin. I was glad we were all in red as I think it saved us some harassment leaving Stadium 😂 I’m sure some TCU fans were thinking the same today.

Those couple of seconds between thinking you solved all of the RF noise issues in your home and realizing your antenna isn’t plugged in… wonderful. 😂

In the absence of blue check marks, I’d love to see mastodon instances hosted by trusted domains … to validate them the same way we validate anything on the internet. mstdn.npr.org, mastodon.NYTimes.com… This could be a tremendous convenience for institutions that manage hundreds of accounts.

Viva Magenta! https://www.pantone.com/color-of-the-year-2023

Anybody else ever wish your HT had some sort of Tx Lock? When just monitoring? When messing around with settings? I’d love a switch, similar to iPhone silent switch, to disable Tx. D878UVii can prohibit Tx per channel, so for some local repeaters I have one channel that can Tx and one that is Rx-only. I may or may not have accidentally blasted a repeater with APRS from a FT5DR this morning.

#7FilmsToKnowMe

Hunt for Red October
Field of Dreams
Star Trek IV
Thomas Crown Affair
Napoleon Dynamite
Evil Dead: Army of Darkness
Office Space

Nice night to ride but a rough evening of pitching for my son. He was so good last time he pitched, allowing no one to score over the 3 innings he was in. Tonight he’s pitched one and got lit up for 5 runs (the limit). It’s so hard to watch him stand out there and struggle 😧 I have to go for a walk!

I’m looking forward to leaving these mosquitoes behind and riding back home!

Test post

More coming here

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The Computer

• There is enough speed here to do anything that I would want to do on a day-to-day simple productivity computer.
• There is no more wait launching applications like Firefox and Thunderbird than there is on a full-size computer.
• It plays back video and display flash-based video on websites clearly and smoothly.

The Software

• The Eee PC features a perfect set of pre-installed applications including Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice, Skype and Pidgin.
• There is even a terminal app available with a simple command-key sequence.
• The application launcher is simple, pleasing to look at and sufficient. It offers easy access to popular internet services and has a favorites tab that can be loaded with user-defined goodies.
• The add/remove utility in the settings tab makes it easy to update included software or remove applications that are not needed.

The Hardware

• The screen is small, but it's high resolution allows it to display more than you would expect it to. It is large enough to display productivity apps like OpenOffice and Google Docs without dropping or clipping elements of the interface. It's also very brigh and great to look at.
• The keyboard is, in my opinion, only a little more useful than a phone keypad. It will allow you to do simple instant messaging, compose short replies to email messages and enter URLs into Firefox. For anything more than that, I would connect an external keyboard as I am using right now.
• The trackpad is functional and not terrible to use. The right side of the pad allows you to scroll web pages very easily and the button gives you easy right-click, left-click access.
• There are 3, THREE USB ports. That's one more than my macbook!
• I'm surprised by both a microphone jack and an ethernet port. Combine the mic port with the web cam and skype and you've got quite a portable video conference computer.
• There is a VGA port on the side. I haven't hooked it up to a monitor, but the combination of that with a external keyboard and mouse would turn this into a nice desktop computer. It would also be a fantastic computer to take somewhere to present.
• The DC power converters for portable devices are often as large as the thing that it's charging. The brick for this is a nice small size and it has a power cable that is longer than most laptop cords so you don't have to sit right next to power if you are using it while you charge.

For Web Development?

I figured that I’d better put a web-development take on this whole review…

• There is not a text editor or development application on the device that would suffice for doing web development. While I'm sure that you could find something and install it, I do not think that the computer would be a good choice for doing any real code work.
• I'm sure that in a pinch, the computer would do a good job of accessing an html file and making necessary changes if a "real" computer was not readily accessible.
• The camera on the laptop seems to take decent pictures and good video. These would work well for someone doing blogging or working on other social-class applications.
• The microphone port would work well for someone wishing to podcast with it. There are already instructions available on the internet to install audacity for podcast editing.
• Final analysis? Web site development = bad. Blogging = awesome.

I think that just about covers it. Alone, it is probably the best portable internet device available. Combined with an external keyboard, mouse it is a very sufficient portable computer and combined with a display it has enough power that it would easily fit many computer users' needs.

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I can't believe the number of leaves that we have had at the new place. Liam think they are great. He sat still here while I just raked at him.

Sox beat the Indians and wait for the Rockies to come to Boston

on Wednesday.

P.S. Pabelbon is insane: