I have followed the Netbook craze with some interest and it is rather fascinating how fast this part of the marked developed with more and more companies putting out small notebooks with 12 inch and under screens with predominately Atom processors. While these machines are decidedly underpowered compared to most notebooks, there purpose is as the name suggest used for web browsing and other tasks that don’t require much power. Many of the Netbooks have some form of Linux installed on them (or Windows XP) so they do make good use of the processor power and fairly small memory they do have. Their main appeal is having a small and very light computer at your disposal.

They are though not a Techtemption for me since the idea of having such a small display and less than full sized keyboard is less than appealing to me. Though I can understand their appeal by others. I am more of a desktop person wanting full power and lots of display space, so my idea of a laptop is one with a full sized keyboard, lots of power and and 15 or 17 inch screen. This is pure prejudice since the things I would do on a laptop fit within the Netbook’s area of expertise.

The quest for ever lighter notebooks has reached a point that bothers me. Now as someone who use to carry around a Zenith Supersport 286 laptop that I am sure made one arm longer than the other, I can appreciate that carrying around a heavy machine is burdensome. But when we complain about carrying around a five or six pound notebook it just seems overboard to me. It sounds to me like telling your grandkids “I remember having to lug around a six pound computer” as if the weight is something so excessive. I can just imagine arms atrophying over time. Now the footprint of the computer can certainly be a concern depending on where you need to use it, but the whole weight thing just seems a trifle excessive to me.

Maybe the largest factor of why a Netbook is not tempting to me is that I use my iPod Touch pretty much like I would use a Netbook. I can check email, browse the web, use an RSS aggregator, monitor and update Facebook/Twitter/Plurk etc. The fact that the iPod Touch’s display and keyboard is even smaller than a Netbook only shows that I have an irrational prejudice against them.

Since I had some gift cards burning a hole in my pocket for Best Buy I ended up browsing three Best Buy stores until I settled on something.

I ended up getting a Samsung BD-P1500 Blu-Ray player.  Since the Blu-Ray/HD-DVD format wars had ended I had been wanting one, but it was still rather pricey last time I checked.  Low end players cost about half as much as they did last year. They had an insignia one for $199 but it really looked like a piece of crap.

So we selected the Samsung one which was $50 dollars more knowing that we could always return it.  I was not stupid enough to buy a HDMI cable for it at Best Buy because that is for suckers.  A digital cable is a digital cable and will either work or not work. No reason to buy fancy Monster cables or other high priced brands.  It’s only a cable.  I would suggest Monoprice.com for low priced HDMI cables.  Regardless you want an HDMI cable since component video cables that come with it will not display full resolution to the TV because of copy protection concerns (I so hate DRM which only punishes the consumer).

We bought one Blu-Ray movie Hellboy II to test it out with.  Movie manufactures are wondering why Blu-Ray isn’t catching on all that fast.  Well they might want to take a look at 25 to 29 dollar movie prices.  This is the old trick media companies always pull on us.  When they went from record to cassette they increased prices. When they went from cassette to CD they increased prices even though manufacturing prices went down. Now they are doing the same thing with Blu-Ray.  If you want a faster adoption rate make them the same price as regular DVDs.  Yeah the resolution is much better, but that just means that they were selling us movies before that were at a lower resolution.

So we decided to get a NetFlicks account since they have Blu-Ray movies and this will be a much cheaper way to watch Blu-Ray movies.  The next model up for the Samsung Blu-Ray player included the ability to stream movies from NetFlicks built in, but at a hundred dollars more for that model I am more likely to stream them to my computer instead.

Hellboy II was a good movie to test out Blu-Ray. Quite stunning visually and actually a pretty good movie and a step up from the first one.  The resolution is excellent and the picture is so much sharper and clearer and without the normal soft blur that we get use to.  Really is quite worthwhile over regular DVD.

Most Blu-Ray players have upconverters that will play regular DVDs at at higher resolution and I certainly wanted a player with this feature.  I was quite pleased with how it displayed a regular DVD and it is a significant improvement.  Though you can’t compare it to Blu-Ray since the software is making guesses to upconvert and so it is nowhere as crisp, but still a major improvement.

As a geek I love the fact that more and more consumer electronics allow a firmware upgrade.  This is especially important with Blu-Ray devices.  I was able to easily download the latest version of the firmware and install it via a USB thumbdrive by inserting it into the USB connector in the back.  There is also an ethernet port to do upgrades and enable some of the advanced Blu-Ray features.

So far I am quite pleased with the Blu-Ray player and having some gift cards was a good incentive to make the plunge.  Though one annoying thing is that while my TV has an HDMI port it only has one and it is being used by my satellite receiver.  Maybe one day I will buy an HDMI switcher, but I found it just as easy to unplug the HDMI cable from one unit and then plug it into the other along with the optical cable used for the sound system.  A bit of an annoyance, but for weekend movie watchers not that big of a deal.

So if you are a movie lover and have an HDTV it is a pretty good time to take the plunge with Blu-Ray.  Though of course players will get cheaper over time, but good players are no longer at only a premium price.

Part of the transition to OSX is of course leaning to use Finder since file management is always such an important part of life in a operating system.  Finder in Leopard is definitely improved, but since I often  move files around from one folder to another I wasn’t finding the experience to my liking.  In Windows though I almost never use Explorer either.  I guess I just don’t like single pane file managers.  In the days of DOS I use to love Norton Commander which was a dual pane file manager and Windows 3.1 and before also use to have a dual pane file manager.  When Windows 95 came out I started looking for a Norton Commander clone to suit my needs and for over a decade I have been using a program called Servant Salamander.  Silly name, but very powerful and has a ton a features I use often.

I think one of the basics a file manager should have is the ability to bookmark folders and then easily access them.  This way you can easily move to your most used folders rapidly.   Servant Salamander allowed you to use keyboard shortcuts to these folders and I found this indefensible.  Unfortunately the file management program that come with OSs just don’t give you this capability and have very little flexibility as far as customization.

So I started looking for a file manager for OSX that had the flexibility and the power I wanted.   I looked at a couple of dual pane file managers for OSX, but didn’t find any too my liking.  Forklift is pretty good and had some of the features I wanted, just not enough of them. There is a freeware dual-pane file manager for OSX and other OS’s called muCommander that gives some basic features, but it doesn’t give you  a solid OSX interface and has limited features.

Looking around I started seeing Pathfinder recommended by many users.  When I looked at the screenshots I wasn’t much impressed with it looking like a standard file manager.   But I ended up downloading it to check out the trail.  It has a lot of features and is highly customizable and has a real enjoyable interface.  It was the drop stack though that really sold me on it.  The drop stack is an area that allows you to drag one or more files into it from multiple folders if you want.  You can then easily change to another folder and drag the files from the drop stack into it.  This gave me a much better experience in moving around files like I was use to in a Norton Command clone.  I also like that it has multiple ways that you can access frequently used directories.  There is a shelf where you can just drag favorite folders to, a tab bar where they can be placed, and even a Folder History panel that you can use that shows you a list of the last folders you have accessed.

So I ended up buying Pathfinder when my trial expired and wouldn’t you know it just a couple of days later it shows up as 20% off at MacSanta.  Oh well.