As you can see, I ordered the silver+natural lcd model because it looked the best in my opinion. So I was really excited when the small Fedex package arrived just 3 days after my order. When I took the watch out of the package, I noticed quite a lot of dirt inside the scratch-resistant protection from the manufacturing process. But the dirt all stuck to the foil when pulled off and no scratches were on the watch, so I guess that’s not a reason to complain.

After unpacking the package and adjusting the wrist band length, I began to set the time. There, I encountered a little problem I didn’t expect this watch to have. It doesn’t support 24 hour display format of the time. Here in Germany, it is very common to say 15 o’clock for 3pm. But oh well, I can live with this minor handicap. The watch itself looks very nice on the arm. From the pictures of the Tokyoflash site, I’d expected the watch to be too thick, but on the arm, it look just fine. It feels a little heavy, but that’s probably because I haven’t worn a watch for so long.

You can clearly see the complex LCD with all the elements, which makes reading the watch much harder than the images from the concept. I suppose I need much more practice to get used to the segments. It is easier than those sample images from the Tokyoflash website though. So except for the little segments, the four touchscreen areas also distract a little from reading the time. The touchscreen is not that sensitive if you’re used to touchscreen phones. You will need to hold you finger for a second to make sure that the watch will react to it. On the other hand, it is probably good that it won’t interact to fast screen wiping gestures.

The last feature to test is the EL back light, which works just as intended. All in all, the watch is really nice. Even with the downsides, it is definitely worth the money. The uniqueness and no physical buttons at all are just great!

• faster than a current €500 notebook
• More USB ports (she has a wireless mouse and a wireless keyboard, which eat up both of her USB ports and make it impossible for her to plug in anything else)
• 3G HSPA Internet for browsing the web everywhere (tethering is for geeks eh?)
• as cheap as possible

Let’s start with the first problem: A computer is always as slow as its slowest component, which in a notebook’s case is the hard disk. A spinning 2.5″ hard disk is slow, so that needs to be swapped for a SSD. As SSD are incredibly expensive, only the system partition should be on a SSD, as it shows the biggest improvement there. Pictures or videos which take up a lot of space should be stored on a normal magnetic hard disk, as those are cheap. So I need to make space for a second hard disk. Luckily, Sony uses a standardized IDE slim DVD drive, which can be swapped for a universal SATA to IDE hard disk cage. By exchanging her 80GB hard disk with the 320GB of her external drive and inserting a 96GB Kingston V+ 100 SSD, she will have ~400GB of space, which is more than enough. Next, I swapped her RAM with the RAM from my broken Toshiba notebook, increasing it to 4GB. With this combination, her notebook should outperform most current notebooks. As the Toshiba had a WiFi N card, I swapped it into her notebook, too.

The next two problems can be solved “relatively” easy with an internal USB hub. At least I thought so until I tried soldering it inside. Every single guide on the web showed how you removed a USB slot permanently to connect the hub, which is simply not possible in my case as that would make the mod visible. So I needed to find a different way. I found a user connecting his USB hub to a mini PCIe port, as it should contain USB data lines. Unluckily, the free mini PCIe slot on the Vaio didn’t have working USB signal lines, so I needed a completely new approach. Then I spotted the Expresscard slot, which is nothing else than an external mini PCIe slot. I checked the PINs and it did have working USB signal lines there, but… my girlfriend uses a SD-card reader in that slot which of course already uses those lines. The only solution now is to hijacking the signal line, connecting the card reader to the internal USB hub and the hub to the lines. Luckily, I found that both USB signal lines were connected in series with capacitors, giving me a clean pleace to intercept them. I installed a 4 port USB hub, connected her mouse and keyboard dongle in 1 of each port, a 3G HSPA stick in a third and connected the last port back to the Expresscard slot. Now the only thing left is to place everything so I can still close the notebook perfectly. Done.

So how fast is her notebook now? Well, it boots twice as fast as a brand new i5-2 notebook with a clean Windows installation. Every applications starts up way faster. Unless you decompress a file or do something really CPU intensive, the Vaio will feel faster than any €500 notebook. In fact, if you take 3G HSPA into consideration, a comparable notebook would cost €800. So how much did the upgrade cost?

• Kingston 96GB V+ 100 SSD (€100)
• 320GB hard disk (€35)
• 3G HSPA stick (€20)
• WiFi N mini PCIe card (€20)
• Universal HDD cage for slim-drive (€15)
• 2 GB RAM (€15)
• 4 port USB hub (€5)

That’s €115 in my case or € 210 if you don’t have any parts, which is a lot cheaper than a €800 notebook isn’t it?

• Palm Pre back cover and Touchstone dock (thanks to handingo for providing the parts)
• Self-adhesive copper foil
• thin wire
• small (#00) Phillips screwdriver
• soldering iron
• solder

And here is how you do everything:

So how did I do it? Well, the basics are the same, take a Palm Pre back cover (€10) + Touchstone dock (€20) and tear off the inductive circuit from the Pre back cover and insert it into the cover from the Samsung Galaxy S Plus. The tricky stuff is modifying to the micro USB plug. To be exact, to cut it really short so it doesn’t stand out. This requires some skill and a lot of patience. As the plug is really small, you definitely don’t want two wires coming from it. Two wires would require really small solder points which offer no stability at all and will just break after some days of use. So what you will have to do is to only wire the +5V only. Luckily, you can get 0V from everywhere inside, I used the micro SD card slot for it. The rest is pretty straight forward. Take a look at the video to see the finished mod:

If you like to rebuild the mod, here are some more hints for you:

• Remove all pins from plug by pulling them out forcefully before sawing.
• Buy more micro USB plugs to play with, as you will certainly break some before you finish one. I suggest using the inner (black) part of one plug combined with the metal casing of a different plug.
• Bent one pin as shown on the picture so it can fit into 2 pin slots, then cut it to a length that it won’t shorten any pin.
• Make the solder point as long as possible, this will add more stability.
• If you happen to have black hot-glue, use it as a finish to cover up the complete slot.

UPDATE

After I have shown this mod to my girlfriend, she wants it too on her Galaxy S. But she wants to keep her micro USB port free for cable connections for USB charging. Warranty is not much a problem for her, so she just wants a really pretty looking and invisible mod. If you like see a guide for that, drop me a comment here and I will document the process for you guys.

UPDATE 2

So as so many of you seem to want it, I’ll be filming the whole process of creating the high WAF mod. For this, I will try to do this mod with no visible wires (why do girls hate them?), everything else as invisible as possible, backcover easily removable just as without the mod. I already ordered the parts and I am waiting for them to arrive. The camera is ready to roll.

UPDATE 3

Still waiting for parts to finish the high WAF mod, half of the mod is already completed and documented. I ordered them on Monday and they still haven’t arrived. Until then you can take a look at a step to step guide for this version of the mod done by Yujie.

UPDATE 4

Done! View the results here.

To enable developer mode, all you need to do is to enter webos20090606 at your home screen where the just type it field is. This will let you start the Developer Mode Enabler and flip the switch. Done!

So what next? Jailbreaking an iOS device comes with Cydia, so what’s the counterpart for WebOS? Well, the name is Preware. Just follow this step to step installation guide for Preware via WebOS Quick Install. Now start up Preware on your TouchPad and install the following Patches:

• Muffle System Logging
• Remove Dropped Packet Logging
• Unset CFQ IO Scheduler
• Unthrottle Download Manager
• Quiet powerd Messages
• Faster Card Animations HYPER Version
• Increase Touch Sensitivity And Smoothness 10
• Remove Tap Ripple
• Ad Blocker
• Advanced Reset Options

My plan was to buy the TouchPad and put Android on it, but now, after trying WebOS, I want to keep it, as it really seems to be a nice OS for tablets. I have tried the iPad for quite a while but I could never find iOS very useful. It takes forever to switch between email, instant messaging and the browser. Android at least let me see all incoming events, but with webOS, the true multitasking fun is back. It’s actually fun to switch between the apps.

Maybe it was HP’s goal to let people try WebOS this way. I would have never bought a WebOS device if the price wouldn’t be this low. Now they should have quite some market share. People who bought the device will start making apps for it. This might be just the kick WebOS needed to start off. I wouldn’t pay more money for it, as tablets are pure couch browsers to me, but for this purpose, I find WebOS actually being the best choice for a tablet OS. I wonder if I will see any new WebOS devices around in the future.

The people at printjob24 are really nice, so I can really recommend them if anyone else needs an engraving. Here is the video:

When I looked at the HTC Desire’s screen, I found it to be looking really odd. I could see red pixels between black and white transitions, which is really irritating when reading text. When looking at a pure gray image, it looked like I was looking at a white background through a mesh. It gave me the feeling of looking at a cheap $100 low-res phone where pixels still could be seen.

After having used high-res screen devices like the HTC Touch Diamond or the Motorola Droid, I’m pretty sure that something was wrong with the screen of the HTC Desire, it simply didn’t look like a 800×480 screen to me. Well, I dropped the seller an email, saying that the phone my cousin got is broken. But today, I got my hands on a Google Nexus One, which I immediately examined for this weird behavior. The Nexus One got the exact same problem. Is that coincidence? I started asking other people whether they are seeing the red pixels, too, but most of them replied no.

I started to dig deeper and found an interesting article on arstechnica.com describing this problem. Basically, the Desire/Nexus One screen only has 2 colors /pixel instead of 3. So the screen is a mesh of red/green and blue/green pixels instead of every pixel having red, green and blue. The whole thing is based on quite a lot of rules of human eye reception, like

1. Green is a color the human eye is most sensitive to, the screen has the full amount of green pixels.
2. As the human eye is more sensitive to contrast than color, having a high display density should make this effect invisible.
3. Having the color information only on every 2 pixels is a very commonly used procedure in compressing video to save space without visible quality loss.

But there is one problem with not beeing able to show all 3 colors at the same time. To show one white pixel, you would need to turn on 2 pixels, as red, green and blue has to be on to mix a white. This wouldn’t be a problem it the colors weren’t alternating between red and blue. So instead of having a nice black with almost invisible blue side, you get a eye-catching ugly red/blue border on every white to black transition.

Well, I sure hope that is the only device HTC will build with such an ugly screen, if not, I’d recommend people to switch to that nice Retina Display of the iPhone 4.

But this time, it’s a legitimate offer from Microsoft. It’s called “das wahre Office” here in Germany and offers Office 2010 for the unbeatable price of €52 to students. You can only buy Office Ultimate 2007 right now, but as soon as 2010 is released, you will get a free upgrade. I’m a big fan of Outlook with Exchange, so well I guess the €52 are well spent here. Don’t hesitate, the offer is limited to the end of june 2010!

Not only Microsoft is offering these increadible cheap packages, if you use Adobe Software for example, they offer 80% savings for their CS5 packages on their education store. Adobe even allows commercial usage of their software, so if you happen to design websites with Photoshop or create videos with Premiere Pro, the production premium set is available for around €350 on several online shop.

aptitude install php-apc

Afterwars, edit the /etc/php5/conf.d/apc.ini and replace it with the following:

extension=apc.so
[apc]
apc.enabled = 1
apc.shm_size = 64
apc.ttl = 7200
apc.user_ttl = 7200
apc.mmap_file_mask = /tmp/apc.XXXXXX

Now restart Apache with /etc/init.d/apache2 restart and APC is up and running.

Next you will need to setup mod_expires to configure client side caches. mod_expires is usually already installed when you use apache2, so you will only need to enable it via a2enmod expires. After that, find the default vhost configuration file (usually /etc/apache2/conf.d/default-config) and add the following lines:

ExpiresActive On
ExpiresDefault "access plus 300 seconds"
ExpiresByType text/html "access plus 1 day"
ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 1 day"
ExpiresByType text/javascript "access plus 1 day"
ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/jpg "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash "access plus 1 day"

Now restart Apache again with /etc/init.d/apache2 restart and client side caching is ready to go.

The next step is installing a WordPress caching plugin with APC support, like W3 Total Cache and setting up Page, Minify and Database Caching with Opcode APC, which is so easy I don’t even need to explain it any further.

There is one optional step, which helps improve page loading time on site with a lot of static content (like images). As connections are limited per hostname, having a lot of images will cause the site to load really slow, as the browser has to wait until the current images have finished loading before it can load new ones. To solve this problem, simply create multiple ServerAlias in your virtual-host file and serve your static content from them. It is strongly recommended that you use a hostname wrapper in this case, which generates the same Alias for each file. You certainly don’t want a user to start loading the same file from different hostnames, as that would actually slow down the page speed. There are several ways to solve this problem. I created a function that calculates a number from the filename and use that as a subdomain where the file is being loaded from.

With this steps, page loading time dropped from 10-20s to 1-2s on my web projects (Full page load with images and scripts). It feels really nice to see the page load up so fast.