The replacement for my Sylvania / Digital Gadgets tablet is here. First impressions:
I like Android 2.2 very much.
The damn thing charges so much faster when you plug the thingie into the AC port rather than the headphone jack.… Read more
A little over a year ago, my Avid decided to kill its power supply with fire. As if to show computer solidarity, my primary desktop PC, a Dell Dimension 8400 that’s proven to be the most reliable PC I’ve ever had, gave up the ghost a little over a week ago. After doing a bit of research into similar issues with the same model, cracking open the case and having a look, the problem seems to be that the CPU is fried. Well, not just fried, really – it’s pretty much cajun. Its towering heat sink ceased doing its job at some point, and that machine is toast. … Read more
After a few phone calls today, I can report that, hopefully, I finally have a little bit of resolution in the nagging case of the non-functional Sylvania wi-fi tablet. If you recall, I got it on special on Black Friday, and within a month it was falling apart from the inside. Since shortly before Christmas I was trying to reach the New Jersey-based outfit to whom Sylvania has farmed out all support for their tablets and netbooks, to no avail. … Read more
A couple of months back, you probably remember me waxing rhapsodic about the Sylvania wi-fi net tablet… and then being extremely frustrated that it failed to even last four weeks without falling apart from the inside.
I tried to contact the company handling customer support on this device, Digital Gadgets, to no avail – they sent me a link to an online trouble ticket system that didn’t work. And that was a few days before Christmas. I haven’t heard a peep from them since, despite trying to bring the issue with their trouble ticket site and the issue with my tablet to them several times.
With no further response from Digital Gadgets (why do I have a feeling that I’d be dealing with Peggy?), I’ve now taken the matter up directly with the company whose name is on the box and on the product itself – Sylvania. … Read more
After the huge disappointment that was the extremely fragile Sylvania wi-fi tablet, it’s nice to be able to say that here’s a gadget that does indeed do what it says on the outside of the box. And it couldn’t have arrived at a better time. … Read more
I’m pretty protective of my gadgetry, especially since I have more of it on my person at any given moment than the average bear does. Also, I’m not exactly loaded with money, so the gadgets I have are the gadgets I’ve got – I’m generally not in a position to replace stuff very quickly (see also: the Avid that’s been out of commission for most of 2010).
But this is beyond the pale. Not even a month after I bought the Sylvania wi-fi tablet, I grabbed it one night and saw… this.
As visible as the crack is from certain angles, you can’t feel it from the surface, because it isn’t on the outer layer, nor does it affect the display itself. The crack is right across the touchscreen sensor. At its “epicenter”, you have absolutely no touchscreen function right on the crack. Starting about about half an inch our, the touchscreen does work, but its calibration is way off, and remains that way on the rest of the functioning portion of the screen.
At least that’s how it was at first when I started writing this blog entry. Now, a few days later, the touchscren doesn’t function at all. For a tablet, that’s death – the touchscreen is its function, and without that it’s just about useless.
And it gets even better.
The company listed in the back of the manual as the customer’s point of contact for technical issues is Digital Gadgets in Monroe, New Jersey. Now, granted, at the moment, New Jersey is (A) an iceberg, and (2) an iceberg that’s just come out of the Christmas holidays. I’m trying to be patient and understanding of that. But this problem began before Christmas, and my attempts to communicate with them were… spectacularly unsuccessful. Their 888 phone number directed me to their web site. Their web site directs me to a trouble ticket system. I open a ticket, describing the problem in great detail.
Within a few hours, I’m sent an e-mail that my ticket is closed, but I have to follow this link to their website to see it.
Problem: the link produces an “invalid login” result at their site. In other words, their trouble ticket system isn’t working.
Only half-jokingly, I submitted another trouble ticket for that. And that’s where things stand right now.
I know this thing was fairly cheap on the gadget price scale, but I expect it to last more than a month. This didn’t. And that’s incredibly disappointing.… Read more
Christmas this year didn’t go quite as planned, as I wound up having to work most of the day on short notice. We opened gifts at our house on Christmas Eve. The runaway favorite among Little E’s goodies was his very own digital camera.
To say that he has photography in his blood is probably something of an understatement. I’m a video production geek, and both my and my wife’s maternal grandfathers were professional photographers. I remember going to my Grandpa Harvey’s place in New Jersey and seeing all of his photo gear and thinking that maybe I did have a kindred spirit in my family after all.
Little E’s camera is a Little Tykes model, built to withstand a not-inconsiderable amount of punishment. It has 640×480 resolution and can hold 1,000 pictures in its flash memory. There’s a “trap door” that hides a USB connector so these pictures can be dumped to the nearest computer. I’ve made it a point to try to “borrow” the camera every couple of days while the little guy’s asleep (even though he complains bitterly about not being able to sleep with it) to check out his work.
The verdict: he’s three years old and he’s right on the edge of cranking out photos that aren’t documents of blurry motion. As soon as he gets a handle on the basics, he’s going to be leaps and bounds ahead of me in this department.
I think back to my friend Jason and Mike, who ran the darkroom in the yearbook department when I was in high school. I wonder how old they were when they first had something like a Polaroid instamatic camera thrust into their hands. My son is not even going to have to worry about developing pictures, emulsion fluid, or any of that. He is never going to have worked with film. Anything he does will have always been in the digital realm.
I have some useful ‘shopping skills that I can pass on to him as he gets older, but I have no doubt he’ll quickly exceed my abilities there too. I hope so.
One other thing: if one needs an example of how far digital photography has come, consider this. My first digital camera, purchased in late 1999, was a Sony Mavica, or as I affectionately call it these days, the “floppycam.” It used 3.5″ floppies to save its pictures. These days, you can’t find a computer that can accept or read 3.5″ floppies. So the boy’s first camera is the equivalent of the state of the art about a decade ago – no, actually, in terms of storage and data management, it’s superior to my first digital camera.
I really am getting old – by the time I get anywhere near the state of the art, the state of the art changes its address and doesn’t leave a forwarding notice.
Here, then, are some of Little E’s first pictures. … Read more
…or so I keep trying to remind Puck. He’s a little jealous that I’ve got a new toy.
So… two things. As of today I’ve got a few days off, for the first time in a year that didn’t involve anyone dying. After the past two weeks at work, I can safely predict that someone would’ve been dying if I hadn’t gotten a few days off. Even the expanded-hours training schedule we’ve been on lately was truncated today, so I got to go home today after – get this! – only eight hours.
And then the fun really began. I get home and bring my two desktop machines out of standby, and my older machine – a Dell Dimension I’ve had since ’05 that has served faithfully even though I sometimes think the best thing for it would be a reformat of the ol’ C drive and a solid kick right between the registry – sounded like it was gonna freakin’ take off. The fan keeps getting louder… and the pitch of this loud whine it’s making keeps rising… and I had a bit of a flashback.
So I did now what I did then: pulled the plug out of the back.
Bad move. When I waited a couple of minutes and reconnected the power cord to the power supply, the thing stayed asleep when I tried to wake it up.
Let’s pause for a moment and see what all this machine does that I don’t/can’t do on any other machines in the house:
Okay, I think you get it: double-plus-non-good. Fortunately, after about half an hour of trying to call friends in the know, I tried to power the Dell up again… and this time, it woke up.
I think the plan is to keep it awake until further notice, giving me a little bit of time to buy a new power supply, without it being an ohshitgottagetanewonenow thing. But I’m under no illusion that it’ll stay awake forever waiting for me to finish that search at a leisurely pace.
This has not been my year for power supplies.… Read more
Okay, the real reason for my craptabulous mood of late. Are you ready?
Can you handle the truth? Read on. … Read more
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