getting started with the chromebook – part 1

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When the Chromebook came out last year, I blogged about the target audience; one of which was people who literally just use the internet.  My mother does four things with her computer:

  1. Internet (email, news, research, etc)
  2. Update firewall/virus scan
  3. Deal with problems
  4. Listen to CDs

I think the Chromebook is for her!  It handles #1 well and eliminates #2/3. (rebooting solves all problems as near as I can tell.)  While it doesn’t do #4, that can be replaced with a standalone CD player.  You don’t need a computer to listen to music on CD.  Being the good daughter that I am, I bought the Chromebook earlier myself to “set it up” and get used to it so that I can provide good tech support.

Disclaimer

If you are a regular reader of this blog, the Chromebook is not for you. You need a “real computer.”  As such I will not be trying to use it as my primary computer for X days as many of the reviewers do.   I will be using it regularly for email/web surfing to make sure I encounter any problems there are and get familiar with how it works to answer basic questions.  I also bought a copy of My Google Chromebook (see review)

Think of this blog post as “how to get someone else going with a Chromebook”.

Picking a Chromebook

Google’s site shows the choices of Chromebook.  There are the original Acer and Samsung 5 models (wifi only or 3g).  In the last few months, there has also been the Samsung 5 550. I was waiting for the “second generation” to buy the Chromebook as I didn’t want my mother to be a true early adopter.  A year after initial release and early in the second generation wave seems like a good time.

I picked the 3g model because my goal is for her to not need home internet.   I’m hoping paying for 1GB data per month will be sufficient.  That’s one of the things I’ll learn in the next month or so – whether it is feasible to rely completely on 3g and not wifi.

Also, note that there is a ChromeBox now.  This is not a laptop.

Buying a Chromebook

You can buy a Chromebook from Amazon or BestBuy.  I was originally planning to buy from Amazon.  Then I read the reviews and learned a few people had problems with the 3g.  I then decided to buy from BestBuy instead so I could return/exchange in store if the 3g was dead on arrival.   About 100 BestBuys in the country actually have the Chromebook in stock where you can buy same day.  Mine does not.  However it was easy to order online and have it delivered in store.  It took just under a week to arrive and I was given a little over a week to pick it up.  My Best Buy did have a floor model of the Chromebook pictured above.  This is quite a change from a visit to BestBuy last July (when it came out and “BestBuy sold it”.)  A year ago the BestBuy floor sales hadn’t even heard of it!

Unboxing

The box is 14.5 x 14.5 x 2.5 inches and not heavy at all.  Good for carrying home from a physical store.  The box even references Samsung’s Chromebook website and the fact that Verizon gives 100MB 3g per month for two years, which is very store friendly.  (And yes, 100MB is hardly anything.)

The box contains:

  1. Chromebook (laptop)
  2. Google chrome sticker
  3. Warranty (call Samsung before going back to the store)
  4. Safety precautions (don’t put the chromebook in the bathtub)
  5. A welcome sheet advertising google services (docs, talk, google+ etc)
  6. Quick start guide
  7. A brown box containing the power cable and AC adapter – the way this box was setup near the hinge of the bigger box, I didn’t see it for a few minutes.  I knew it had to be in there of course so I kept looking.  It is also lighter than I expected which didn’t help.

Assembling

  1. Take the plastic wrapper off the power cord
  2. Unvelcro the power cord and AC adapter to make the wire longer (the AC adapter is 1.5 x3.5 inches or so which feels tiny compared to my “real computer”
  3. Connect power cord and AC adapter
  4. Connect AC adapter to laptop and plug in power cord
  5. Press power key – a real keyboard key – not a button.

To be continued…  Part 2 is where I compare setting up a real chromebook with the chromium OS in a virutal machine

OS X Mountain Lion Kills Parallels 6

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It seems I am unable to perform at least one Mac OS X upgrade without finding some major faults. This morning, Apple released OS X Mountain Lion, and like its predecessors, there was at least one show-stopping problem following installation – namely, that Parallels Desktop 6 no longer works.

Following installation of OS X Mountain Lion, upon startup, Parallels Desktop 6 shows the following message:


The only known solution at this time is to upgrade to Parallels 7 for $50.

Official Response

Parallels has posted a response on their website

A Senior Member of the Parallels team, whose username is YanaYana, has replied in the Parallels forum that although Parallels Desktop 6 will be continued to be supported for years to come, this does not include making it work on OS X Mountain Lion. The Parallels representative also commented that select users were offered a free upgrade to Parallels Desktop 7 for a short period when OS X Lion came out, although many users have commented they were not notified of the offer.

Abandoning Parallels

One user hit the nail on the head when they wrote “Is it worth to pay $50 more for a $20 OS upgrade?”. In fact, I have decided that unless Parallels fixes this issue or offers me an upgrade, I will not be purchasing a Parallels product ever again as a form of protest. After all, there are plenty of alternatives, such as VMware and VirtualBox, which I would rather use.

Update [07/26/2012]: As one user on the forum noticed by reviewing the Google cache, Parallels, Inc recently changed it’s policy to exclude Parallels Desktop 6 from working in OS X Mountain Lion: Knowledgebase article. See if you can spot the difference between the previous and current version of the page:

Before:


After:


Looking at older versions of the article shows that it had been active for months with the Parallels Desktop 6 text. Therefore, it is reasonable to suggest a user could have purchased Parallels Desktop 6 in the last year, believing it would work with OS X Mountain Lion. This smells of bait-and-switch tactics. Perhaps it is time for a class action suit?

udacity and coursera – python editor, peer reviewing and complaining

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Since I last blogged on the topic, I’ve taken an additional course from udacity and coursera. While I did learn from both courses, I took them largely because I wanted to see how they would handle certain aspects.

Udacity – CS 253 – Web Application Engineering (aka building a blog taught by a founder of reddit)

Feature #1 – a good inline Python editor made the interactive quizzes fun.  The homework got me to practice Python a lot to which was nice.  And there was exposure to a Python MVC framework for those interested although it wasn’t required.  It was also interesting to see what college students are taught about the web “these days.”  More emphasis on performance/scalability/ideas then 10 years ago when I graduated.

The time commitment wasn’t large.  The lectures were short snippets and easy to fit in.  The assignments were easy – probably because I already am a web developer – albeit not in Python.

The forums were good (stack exchange style).  Udacity structures things so the quizzes/assignments don’t count and are “self paced.”   They offer final exams every hexa-semester which is what counts toward the “certification.”  I find it more fun to stay with the initial offering because you get the benefit of discussion with other students exploring together.

Coursera – Human Computer Interaction

Feature #2 – Peer review/grading.  This was nice in that you got to see how others attempted the assignments.  And get feedback from real people.  It also lets the assignments go deeper since they don’t need to be reviewed by a computer.

The style of the course was similar to the SAAS one  with the addition of peer review and the removal of a required book.  Oh and the assignments were significantly longer.

Feature #3 – complaining

This isn’t new.  I blogged about it in March.  Both classes this time around had more complaining than in the past classes I have taken in this model.  Why?

  • Udacity – The inability to get a google app engine account internationally and ignoring the pre-requiste (Python) by students than annoyed they couldn’t follow the lectures were the big ones.
  • Coursera – Oh boy.  Where to begin.  Many people don’t like deadlines.  They don’t like peer review.  They want exceptions when the instructors said don’t ask for exceptions.  They are overly concerned about grades. There was too much work.  (This I think could have been communicated better.)   There were also plenty of constructive people in the forums.  Which meant reading through complaints to get to the good parts.

Anti-complaining

I wrote the following essay and posted in the coursera forum in response to “I don’t want to interview/take photos of my three test subjects and you are making me drop the course.”  As of today, it has 70 upvotes.  And a day or two after I posted the essay, photos were extra credit.  Which implies the staff do monitor the forums for legitimate comments.

Don’t. Here’s why – it reads like a flow chart. Higher options are better. The theme is to see how close you can come to the goal.

  1. Can you observe/interview three people and just not take a photo? Awesome! You’ve learned everything the instructors want you to learn. You just don’t have evidence of the fact you did it. But from a learning point of view, you are set!
  2. Can you interview one person in person? Can you interview a person online and take a picture of the screen? – If so, great. You still get some of the experience of observing/interviewing someone. And you get to do the brainstorming/finding inspiration based on real observations. Granted it isn’t as complete an experience as if you do the full assignment, but it is more of an experience than if you drop the class.
  3. Can you interview someone on the phone? Can you seek out a couple of volunteers in the forum to observe online or interview on the phone or even ask questions in the forum? – If so, great. You still get some of the experience of observing/interviewing someone. And you get to do the brainstorming/finding inspiration based on real observations. Granted it isn’t as complete an experience as if you do the full assignment, but it is more of an experience than if you drop the class.
  4. Are you so busy you can’t talk to a soul? Or maybe you are reading this on June 2nd and it is too late? Skip the observation step and move on to brainstorming phase. – Granted you miss a third of assignment. But you learn more about brainstorming for HCI and HCI inspiration than if you drop the class.

But wait you say. A requirement of the assignment is to observe and take photos as evidence. Well, let me ask you this – does the act of taking a photo make you learn more? Of course not. For observing, you do learn by really doing it. If you can’t meet the assignment criteria, getting as close as you can means you learn as much as you can.

Ok. But what about my grade you ask? This is a free online class. We are all enrolled because we want to learn. You don’t learn less because you’ve gotten a low score on one assignment. And as an added bonus, this class is essentially pass/fail. If you get about 80% or so, you get a certificate of accomplishment. Projects are 67% of that. This means that the decision to not provide photos or observe three people is at most 4-5% of your grade. Do well at everything else and you still have a pass on the studio track. Don’t do well enough on everything else and you have the apprentice track and a heck of a lot of knowledge and experience.

Finally, think back to school. Suppose you were in an English class where everyone had to see a play. You had to work or couldn’t afford to see the show. You did poorly on the one assignment, but tried your best at everything else. And you passed. Coursera is even better because the grade doesn’t count!

I always liked my “pass no credit” classes best because I got to learn without having to think about my grade.

Don’t fret. Don’t drop the class. Knowledge is the reward here.