I have been using a Acer 22″ widescreen monitor for the last few months, but I needed another monitor last week so that my girlfriend can work on adding products to a couple of ecommerce sites that I run.  She had been using my Mac connected to the Acer 22″ and the wide aspect made her more productive than using a smaller screen so I decided to buy another 22″ for her.

I went to Pantip Plaza in Chiang Mai and looked at all the 22″ monitors for sale, which was easy because there were only two options, the Acer and the Samsung Syncmaster 226BW.  The Samsung looked the better monitor, and for only 12,900 thai baht I figured that on looks alone it had to be done, so I bought the Samsung and gave the Acer to my girlfriend!

The Samsung is a better monitor all round than the Acer AL2251w, which is not to say that the Acer is bad, far from it, but the Samsung is better.  One thing that may be an issue for many is the Samsung’s glossy screen.  It’s no problem for me as I have no light facing the screen, but if you work with a window behind you then it will be an issue.   On the whole I prefer do a matt screen to a glossy one, but the Samsung performs so well that it can be forgiven!

Like most 22″ screens the Samsung is 1680 x 1050 resolution.  On the Acer things looked a bit bitty compared to my Macbook pro which has the same resolution on a 17″ screen, but the Samsung makes it look smoother and nicer.  I have not tried the VGA analog socket yet as both my machines connect via DVI.  The Samsung can switch between analog and DVI at the touch of a button whereas the acer was tricky as you had to go into the menu to switch.

I don’t often pay attention to specs on a monitor, I trust my eyes instead.  The bottom line is simple, if you are looking for a 22″ screen then buy the Samsung 226BW and you will be impressed.

It says nothing on the box about Mac compatibility, but then few monitors do!  It works perfect with a Mac, no setup needed and no adaptors so long as your mac has a DVI socket (all Intel macs do).

I was in Tachileik (Myanmar formerly known as Burma) the other day and I saw a range of what looked like Blu-Ray movies.  On closer inspection they are no Blu-Ray at all, neither are they HDDVD, no..these are HD-Disk!

Just about everything in Tachileik comes from the Chinese border which is only about 150km away, without exception every DVD or Music CD on sale in the town is counterfeit, but the police in Myanmar appear not to care at all as hundreds of shops openly sell counterfeit goods such as copy handbags, copy shirts, copy DVDs and copy CDs in their thousands.

Knowing this to be counterfeit I bought a couple anyway in order to see what they are and how (or if) they work.

I put one in my Mac and I was surprised to see that it played OK using quicktime (though it prompted me to download an add-on codec first), it’s full 1080p High Definition and using a HDMI to DVI cable I can hook my macbook pro up to the TV, the results are impressive to say the least.

The second movie is in a .ts format and would not play on my Mac, but it played on a PC no problem.

The back of the box has the following text (spelling errors included):

“Compared with Blue-Ray and HD DVD, HD DISK provide  you the same qulity and pristine picture in a easy and convient way!   HD DISK not only for Home Theater Personal Computer users, a various of HD players,Media Box, can also play it smoothly.  HD DISK delivers the greatest high-definition programs up to 1080p in all kinds of formats: MPED2-TS/TP, WMVHD, H264, XVID/DIVX…”

Further down the back of the box it describes 3 HD player devices that are compatible, they are:

• IPHD-DVD made in China
• HD Media Box made in Korea
• HD Player made in Europe

It’s worth mentioning here that the actual media is just a normal dual layer pressed DVD.

I’m hard on printers, they always end up going wrong within a very short time of me owning them.  In the last 3 years I have had 3 Canon, 1 lexmark, 1 HP and 1 Brother Printer.  Actually the Lexmark, HP and Brother have all been Muti Function Devices.

I use both Mac and PC, so I need full compatibility with both.  I have plenty of room in my office but I don’t want to waste space by having a Fax, Printer & Scanner all on the desk, but I require all three devices to be top quality, oh and I dont want to spend too much money either!

I bought this Brother when my HP C5180 screwed up when printing labels and decided to say screwed up.

I don’t need to print colour, so this time I decided to buy a laser printer based multi function device.  There was plenty of choices, but the Brother has cheap toner and easy availability of both the toner units and other consumables, and the fax and copier work without the computer being switched on.  It has proper drivers and software for both the Pc and Mac.

I installed this on a PC first, the install was smooth and includes paperport, which is an amazing application.  The scanner can stack and feed hundreds of documents and archive them as PDF files..great.

The Mac software is good, it does not include paperport but my Adobe Acrobat software (not Adobe Acrobat Reader) seems to do a good job or archiving documents.

I don’t use the supplied scanner software on my Mac, just the Twain driver.  I can import a scan straight into Photoshop and edit it there.

The printer is great, the scanner is super, the fax is fabulous and plain paper faxes are very good if you are used to the old thermal paper rolls as I am.

This device just sits in the corner of my desk and gets on with the job, I can recommend it to anyone with a home office, small business, or just the requirement for a Fax, Scanner, Copier and Laser Printer.  Don’t ask me the spec, I don’t even know the maximum resolution, how many pages per min or whatever but I know it does the job and that’s what counts.

I have been running an ecommerce web site here in Thailand for some time now, it’s got easier over the years for two main reasons.

• The Postal Service has got more reliable.
• It’s easy to accept credit cards and get paid to my Thailand Bank.

For years I would only ever use International Registered Airmail, but last year the cost of International Registration doubled and that has had a serious impact on my postage costs. I need to keep my postage costs low because my customers have the option of ordering from a UK seller which would mean lower postage, so I subsidise the postage a little based on my making a decent profit from the goods that I sell.

A couple of months ago I got about 8 packages returned, all but one had a sticker from the UK post office to say that delivery had been attempted and due to nobody being home a card had been left, and nobody had collected the parcel from the sorting office. The other one said “no such address” which is strange as it was verified by the credit card company.

It’s fair to say that a great deal of my time is spent dealing with cutomers who are waiting for their parcel to arrive, and if it gets to 14 days after posting I always suggest that they check the sorting office. But recently I have started sending items by plain Airmail with no registration, the result is that items are getting there faster, and the level of complaints of non delivery have gone down to virtually nothing.

I know that if a customer makes a chargeback based on non delivery then I would not have a leg to stand on, but I guess that’s unlikely given the kind of product I sell online. And I’m saving lots of money on postage too.

Now that I have downgraded my Sony Vaio VGN-TX56SN to Windows XP it runs like lightening.  It starts up about 12x faster than it did with Vista, and the whole experience is totally different.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not knocking Vista, I’m just saying that Sony Thailand made a big mistake choosing to supply Vista on this machine.

Sony DO NOT provide XP drivers for this machine, I had to go to the Sony UK site and download drivers for the Vaio VGN-TX5XN, which is the same.  The only bit I cannot get working is the bluetooth, but as I don’t want to use blusetooth this is no real hardship for me.

I’m not enterely sure why Vista was so slow on this machine, the Sony shop (Chi Chang) offered to install more memory but I did not see that an increase from 1gb (supplied) and 1.5gb (Max) would make such a difference. 

These days I use a Apple Mac for everyday computing, but my little Sony is so easy to carry and has such amazing battery life that it’s hard to resist using it when I’m on the move.  Interestingly I read a website with instructions on how to install Mac OSX Tiger on my Sony Vaio, but it’s a bit too much trouble for me, I simply dont have the time.

If you own a Vaio VGN-TX56SN in Thailand (or anywhere) then get rid of Vista and Install Windows XP, it makes such a difference.

I expect to get better battery life too on XP, as with Vista the HD was continously churning away and it took so long to boot under Vista that it must have had a negative impact on battery.

If you need any help with drivers for this model, just ask.

This morning I had a delivery from Fed-Ex, nothing unusual about that except this one had kept me awake at night in anticipation since I placed my order on eBay.com for my sim free iPhone.

I won’t go into the nitty gritty of how much this sucker cost me, but let’s just say that it was expensive by any standards, especially when you consider the cost of shipping. My real concern was that It may be intercepted by customs, I have had that happen before and It takes all day to get it sorted as technically your need a licence (costing 1500 baht) to import communications devices.  No problems with customs getting my iPhone today.

I should point out here that this iPhone is unlocked, most of the ones on eBay are locked to AT&T which would not work in Thailand at all.  It cost more than a standard iPhone, and I should say here that I have no idea at all about how to unlock a iphone, either for use in Thailand or elsewhere.

Like all Apple products the iPhone is very nicely packaged, it’s obvious from the start that this is a very high quality product.

I slipped my AIS sim card into the iphone, switched on and after a moment and an impressive startup I now have a working iPhone in Thailand.

I’m going to play with setting up my email, browser etc.  I have already made a couple of calls to check that it’s all working and it seems to me to be very high call quality indeed.

One problem that I need to get sorted is that my AIS prepaid sim charges me 1 baht per min for data transfer, this thing seems to be using the data connection all the time so I need to get that changed to an unlimited plan, perhaps DTAC will be a better option.