I currently own a Nano 1G, but it’s a pain for working out because it bounces around, and I’ve dropped it all over the place several times. I’m surprised it’s not totally broken yet.

So, this is what I think the Nano was designed for – extremely portable, wearable, music player. Nothing else. Why people nowadays expect an MP3 player to do more is beyond me. I remember back when black and white iPods were awesome. So maybe I’m too old to understand, but I didn’t think 20 was really that old.

I do however own a Droid Incredible, everything people are upset about missing from the Nano.

Anyway, I’m not going to show you a bunch of benchmarks because I’m sure you already know SSDs are fast, depending on which one you get they may be blazing fast. What you may not know is how they change the feel of the overall system. Boot time is cut in half, roughly, but I didn’t really care about that because I don’t even turn off my PC all that often.

What does surprise me is that applications overall feel more responsive!  Any application you put on the SSD for general use pops open faster and feels better in the interface. Not sure why they feel better while already opened, but I have separate windows + apps on the HDD and SSD and I compared how they functioned, the SSD wins hands down. Probably because the program still accesses the hard drive on and off while in use.

Storage: if this is an issue for you (like it is for me) install windows + apps on a 64GB drive and move everything else to a 2TB 72K drive or something. I have about 2.2TB of usable storage other than the 64GB SSD and it works out great.

One thing though.. If you’re sort of a power user and have lots of applications 32GB is definitely not going to cut it. 64GB+ will work. In fact, I cannot install all my games on the 64GB drive, so I’ll have to install/uninstall if I want the loading speed of the SSD. So in my case, I think I’d be better suited to a 128GB+ drive if I wanted to fit everything that needed speed on it.

With the storage issue, not being able to fit all games etc, is it still a worthy upgrade? You bet. Hard drive are obviously the bottleneck in most newer PC configurations, and with an SSD they really pop alive as far as general use

I really have NO idea why I didn’t get an ergonomic chair earlier. I’ve been on the computer for extended periods of time since I was about 10 years old. Always using crappy wal-mart chairs, that were NOT designed for what I was doing. Even when I did have money, all of it went to processors, video cards, speakers, monitors, and nothing went to my chair. The chair remained a POS from wal-mart at all times.

Now that I’m 19, I’m starting to feel some back issues develop. Those 9 years on wal-mart chairs for countless hours are starting to take hold. However, I think with this chair those problems may go away completely. (Only very slight pain from leaning over all the time has developed)

Anyway, the best way to describe the feeling of sitting on the Knoll Life Chair is “good”. Mine has adjustable arms that go up and down and side to side, which I would recommend. I think these are “High Performance” arms. Adjusting the height of the arms along with forward/backward and side to side really comes in handy depending on how you’re sitting or want to sit in the chair.

The seat moves forward slightly depending on how you sit on it, and you can slide it forward or backward as much as needed. You can of course lean back in the chair as well, and adjust the tension.

Overall, I have to say I’m super happy with this chair, it’s the first time I’ve felt comfortable sitting at my desk in years (No joke.) Even though I did not pay retail for this chair and bought it at an eBay auction, I think it’s actually worth the retail price of $808.

I was actually very scared of ordering a chair online without trying it out in person, and the only reason I got the knoll life chair was because of the auction and I didn’t want to pay more than $400 for my chair. Unfortunately, there really aren’t any shops nearby that sell “performance” task chairs. I was going to get the steelcase leap, but so far I’m glad I didn’t. This chair seems perfect for me. I really like the breathable back, and steelcase doesn’t have that.

Conclusion

Finally, a chair I WANT to sit on.

Update

6/16/10 – After sitting on this chair for a few months, I can form a more full opinion. My opinion hasn’t really changed – it’s still the best chair I’ve ever sat in. My back has not hurt since getting this chair. It makes the couch seem uncomfortable due to less ergonomic support Has also shown no noticeable wear, usually by now a $100 chair would have plenty of wear.

Definitely worth every penny.

DD-WRT is pretty easy to install, I’ve had to do much more in the past to get a modified firmware up and running. Mine came pre-flashed though, it was pretty cheap on eBay, so I don’t have first hand experience, but in the past I’ve had to solder certain points and jtag the device in order to flash it. I’ve also used telnet in the past to flash, so the steps for this router seem all too familiar.

Anyway, just from playing with this router I love it. So many things I can tweak and mess with. Mostly, what I’ve done so far is setup WPA2 for my wireless encryption, MAC block, QoS, and virtual AP’s.

WPA2 is the best encryption out there right now, so I’m happy with it, I’m also blocking by MAC addresses, so only known devices can connect. QoS (Quality of Service) is rather interesting because I can set priority to certain connections, so if one program is hogging bandwidth, I’m still able to surf the web at full speed.

Virtual AP’s is another interesting feature, it makes it so I can setup different AP’s that have different types of access. For instance, one could have the internet only, the LAN only, or both LAN and internet. This could be useful for a bunch of different things.

I can also adjust the wireless mW so that can help cover more area, but after a certain point you’re going to want to get a better antenna if you need longer distance.

So far, that’s all I’ve played with, but there’s many, many more features I may or may not use in the future.

Uptime on this router is awesome, it stays up for weeks.

Statistics are also pretty interesting, I can monitor all my bandwidth, how much bandwidth other devices on the network are using, overall internet bandwidth consumed, and LAN bandwidth.

Overall, I’m pretty impressed with this router, and if you don’t have a dd-wrt capable router what are you waiting for? It’s worth every penny.

At first, I thought the HD5850 was going to be bottlenecked by my Q6600, after some in game testing, this doesn’t seem to be the case at all. I’m able to run Crysis at the max settings at 1920×1200, and have very playable frame rates. I tested a few other games and the result was just awesome. I probably got more than 2x the performance of my older card, the HD4850 which I bought when it came out. I don’t plan on upgrading the motherboard/cpu until the next gen cards arrive, such as the HD6850 or something, I’m sure by that point the Q6600 will just be too slow to keep up so a full system upgrade is in store around that time

If you’re debating about the HD5870 or the HD5850, 10 – 15% more performance just isn’t worth the extra cost in my opinion, just go with the 5850. Right now, it has the best price/performance ratio out there. I didn’t get all into the benchmarks and stuff yet, I might never get to it this time. Usually I always do when I get a new card and go quite insane with overclocking. I guess I’d rather just game than play with the benchmarks

Oh yea, almost forgot.. I’m extremely impressed with Windows 7, it runs great. I’m always on the computer for work or entertainment so having a good setup is pretty important to me. Below is a pic of my current desktop

Should you be worried about it? Basically yes and no. I have had a few drives fail on me in the past, all of different brands. Some hard drives are more likely to fail than others, depending on the build quality, but basically any drive can fail at any time. Usually even if you weren’t keeping great backups of all your info you still should be able to recover most of it, but maybe not. All my drives that failed had to do with corruption. I lost no data really.

That particular drive (The 2TB Hitachi) I did purchase because I need to replace a corrupt drive. I leave my computer on almost 24/7. I have some fairly heavy hardware though and I haven’t had an issue. Some Dell computers might not be able to put up with it, since they can barely withstand running something like Prime95.

If you’re really worried about your data then you should get server class hard drives and make backups regularly. Desktop grade drives just aren’t built to last as much.

Don’t worry about drive failure too much, if it happens it happens, deal with it then

SideNote: I’ll probably never be able to fill that 2TB drive but I’ll try

So far this is what I’ve come up with. I’m using a mini-pc design, I just hope everything is actually able to fit in the box. The reason why I need the cheap video card is for s-video and overall better quality.

The total cost for everything with shipping would be around $400 or so. Randomly going over the specifications, CPU: Intel Atom Dual Core Ram: 2GB HD: 500GB Video Card: Radeon 7000 PCI, TV Capture Card: WinTV USB2.0, KB/Mouse: Wireless Logitech.

I’ll install Windows/Linux through a USB cd-rw drive that I have already. As far as DVD playback goes, I might be able to use the drive on my PC to stream the DVD over the LAN to the box, or I could just use my PS2 for DVD playback. (Another option would be to just buy an external USB DVD drive.)

According to the specs on the JetWay box, it should be able to fit one 3.5″ hard drive and fit the PCI video card. However, I’m not really sure that everything will fit. Anyway, that’s the current plan, but I’m still tweaking it a bit, and I’m not sure whether I will run windows or Linux on it. I believe either one would be capable. However, it might just be “easier” to go with Windows in case there is some compatibility issues with the hardware.

If you’re curious about the TV this will be connecting to, it’s a 42″ Plasma EDTV.

The invention of the transistor in 1947 changed things forever. Right now it’s more of a “how small can we make the transistors”. Well they’re making them super small, seeing as they can fit 4 processor cores or more on a single chip. I find all this very impressive. We’ve come a long way with processors, but still have a long way to go. There’s no telling what computers and processors will be able to do in the future.

I for one am glad to be alive and able to witness some of the advancements. My first computer had about 233MHz and Windows 95. At the time, it was supposed to be a “top of the line” computer gaming system. That was when I was 6 or 7, and I’m still young at only 18 and guess what I’m running a quad core processor with 2.4 GHz power on each core with 4GB of memory. Quite astounding the advancement in such a short period of time.

When I was born, the Internet was just getting started. Didn’t even quite form yet, and look at it now. It’s enormous, and growing every day. This is what makes me happy to be alive, technology is almost my life force. Without computers, I guess I’d be tinkering with radios or printers. Printing machines used to be enormous and required some one with quite a lot of knowledge to maintain them.

Anyway that’s my rant for today. You bet I’m a technology geek, and I’m proud of it.