www.NewVentures.ca

So as you may ( or not ) have noticed I’ve been doing a little tinkering with my blog over the last little while.

The most noticeable change is the Coffee Cup icon and in case you hadn’t noticed I’ve actually done two different things with it.

The first one was pretty straight forward. I just added it to the bottom of my posting. I think it helps  to identify the break between one article ( including any comments ) and the next.  It also helped to tell me that I was done with it ( in that I can now sit back and enjoy my coffee. )

The second icon is more subtle, but actually took me a long while to figure out ( like over two years to be exact…. )

What I’m referring to is the small icon that now shows up in your web address, and if you were to bookmark my site in the bookmark as well. This one really took me quite a while to track down and get operational.

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So my wife bought me an amazing little gadget a little while ago, and I have to tell you, it’s amazing….

It’s called  “Beamz“, and while it may have been around for a while, I think it’s finally getting some deserved notice.

I think it originally must have had some bad marketing, because you can find all sorts of people from 4 years or so ago giving this little device ( although it isn’t really ‘little’ ) a big raspberry/bad rap/huge laugh. But in the last two years, it’s been getting some big time notice from some big time names ( more on that later. ) For now let’s just say that it was developed by a musician ( Jerry Riopelle ) for DJ’s/other musicians/people who can’t play music….. yeah I know. HUH 😕 ? But it works! And it works really well!

It’s a great little device that allows you to sort of play music, without really having to know how ( if that makes any sense. )  😯   What I have found over the past few weeks of playing with it is that you need to have, or develop a sense of, rhythm using it. Once you have that, you can create music from it’s music ( again not very clear, but hopefully soon it will be. )

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So after all the issues I ran through trying to get our CherryPal Bing up to speed, the next thing I wanted to do was to get some form of Linux or Ubuntu installed within the Windows environment so that I could use it’s more powerful tools to help manage the system.

I had done this in the past using a not very well known release of Linux called Cygwin, which is a Linux-like device designed specifically for Windows. I’ve used it on all my previous laptops and it has paid for itself many, many, many times over. One of the favorite tasks I liked to use it for was to open up a window on my Windows machine that would ( for all intensive purposes ) allow me to access my main Linux machines desktop as if I was logged into it directly.

So now, that the Bing was operating as it should, I decided to see what else was out there and with luck maybe Ubuntu ( my favorite version of Linux ) had such a release itself. It really didn’t take very long to discover it. It’s called Portable Ubuntu Remix and it plays very well indeed. It’s installed just like a regular Windows application and can be uninstalled just as easily. It doesn’t partition your drive, nor even take up a lot of disk space. The whole package is very very compact and self contained ( from what I could discern. )

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Let me start off this story by stating right up front that both my wife and I love the little CherryPal Bing we bought her, it’s a great little machine that does exactly what she needs to do and does it very well. It’s a sleek little Netbook that gets lots of ooohs and aaahhhhs from everyone who sees it. It’s sexy and smart. It should have been an amazing success story for Max Seybold ( founder and CEO ) but unfortunately it’s turned into a train wreck.

The problem that they have isn’t clear, they seem to be pointing a lot of fingers at China ( where they sent their off shore production to ) and they certainly have some pretty scary stories to tell about that, like this one ( click on the title to get the full story ):

The Cherrypal Underwear Crisis
… It took us four weeks until we found out that the shipping company actually didn’t ship the laptops to our customers, they sold them in Mainland China to their own distribution channels. During this nerve-wrecking four weeks some of our customers got faked tracking numbers, others cheap underwear, others nothing at all. Only after we got the first emails from “customers” in China praising our laptops we found out what was really going on…

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So another problem that I just fixed with my CherryPal Bing has been overcome. This one needed a lot more prep work in advance ( in case things went wrong ) compared to the actual fix, which was pretty straightforward.

The problem was the hard drive. The bing comes with a great little 160GB drive. Which is plenty of space for email, and a lot of other stuff. The problem was that when Windows XP Professional was installed, someone had partitioned ( cut up ) the hard drive into smaller drives when they installed it. Specifically 26GB 50GB 50GB and 34GB ( roughly remembered .) Which in essence for most people turned the 160GB hard drive or pie into something less than a 30GB one. Also since Windows insisted on putting everything into it’s C: drive ( usually where it is installed ) it would quickly fill up as one added programs, updates and other paraphernalia. I needed to re-cut this 160GB pie into something that would work better and longer on Windows or better yet, turn all four small drives into one large one!

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