November 2004 Archives

AnandTech: A Guide to Choosing the Right 19" LCD Monitor - 7 Models Reviewed. Monitors have truly gotten cheap. You can get a very nice 19" one for just $500 or so. Here's the summary:

• Samsung 193P. If you have $650-700 and want the best in quality, this is the one to beat right now.
• ViewSonic Q190MB. This is nearly as good as the Samsung but is just $480.
• NuTech L921G for $411 which is identical to the Viewsonic technically is very good. You can get two NuTechs for about the price of a single 193P and a dual head display is the bomb believe me!

Paul Thurrott's SuperSite for Windows: Windows XP Home Edition vs. Professional Edition, What's the difference?. This is the first PC I've bought that uses XP Home instead of my buying XP Professional from the Microsoft Company Store. I have to say having used it for a while at work, I'm not sure it is that important in a small business environment.

We don't use Active Directory and we don't need lots of permissions for desktop users. Saves quite a bit the list is $99 for XP Home and $149 for XP Professional when you are building up a laptop.

We are looking for a new notebook standard at Ignition. I'm partial to the build-it-yourself models that ASUS has. I have the older M3N and it is just as good as any other that I've seen (Dell and IBM thin and light), but you spec exactly what you want. Here are some reviews;

• ASUS M5200N: Elder Brother of ASUS S5200N

There are two places to get it:

• JNCS. The build it option has a 768MB with Pentium M Model 735 at $1,298. Then you add a nice big hard drive $189 for a 80GB 7200 Hitachi 8MB drive and $129 for Windows XP Home plus $20 for ground delivery and you get a screaming laptop for $1748. This is a well know reseller.
• Proportable. 768MB, Pentium M Model 745 (1.8GHz), 80GB 5400, no XP for $1772 not including shipping, so quite a bit more than the JNCS, but I've ordered from them before and they are reliable.
• Topmic.com.
  $1300 for base plus a 512MB Ram, 1.8GHz Pentium M 745 and 80GB 4200 rpm (so less power) and $99 for XP Home is $1658 with free shipping. Low price, but I've not heard of them, so caveat emptor
• Chembooks. They have the $1690 with the Pentium M 745 (1.8GHz), 512MB memory, 80GB 4200RPM Toshiba hard drive and Windows XP Home. NOt a bad deal, but haven't heard of them.

Been using this for about two weeks now. Its my first iPod. A nice device mainly because the screen is so easy to read.

In termsof buying one, it is impossible to get much off the list price of $499 right now. Best you can do is to get free shipping and no sales tax as iPod Photo 40GB MP3 Player (Apple-M9585LLA) - PriceGrabber.com shows.

Today Vanns seems to be the best buy. Is selling for $499 but a high quality merchant and no sales tax or shipping.

My Minolta-Konica Dimage 5400 scanner only produces 16 bit scans in negative mode. So, you get an inverted picture. How depressing. Works find in 8-bit mode, but why the heck pay so much for a scanner if you only get 24-bit (3 colors x 8-bits) and not the full 48-bit range. So how to fix this?

Here is how I did it in Photoshop Elements 2.0 after some experimentation:

• Open the TIF file that is the negative
• Choose Image/Adjustments/Invert
• Choose Image/Adjustments/Equalize

This isn't documented, but Equalize seems to be the way to get the orange mask in negatives out.

Three Easy Ways of Negative Conversion. Took a while to find this site, but with Photoshop Elements, you can do the following:

If you just invert the color it doesn't work because negatives have an orange cast in them (for some technical reason that I don't understand, but Alex loves since he loves orange).

But here is the way to fix this:

Method 1 (easy) in Photoshop

1. Load the scan that is in negative mode
2. Enter the menu command: Enhance, Auto Levels
3. Enter the menu command: Image, Adjust, Invert (Ctrl-I)

This works because Auto Levels fixes the Orange (which becomes Blue in the positive world btw).

Here is a more elaborate way:

1. Load the negative scan
2. Open the curves dialog (Ctrl-M).
3. Press the Auto button. This sets the black-white points for each of the 3 color channels and eliminates the orange mask.
4. Open the red channel.
5. Grab the black anchor point and drag it to the top of the graph.
6. Grab the white point and drag it to the bottom of the graph. This inverts the red channel.

Brad Choate: MT-Textile does that???. We use Textile 2.0 on this site. Still learning some of the amazing features. The float left and float right are great, but I still can't get tables to work as well as with the first Textile. Textile™ drew a dark line by default, but this Textile 2 doesn't seem to work that way.

Well, it is Christmas time, so this might be a good guide for those of you who want to give the gift of computing. As usual, we'll cover a "high value" system and a "low cost" system. The best value means the best price/performance for a computer but it is more expensive. The "low cost" means it not insanely cheap, but as low as you can get without really sacrificing either quality or good performance.

Ironically, most "high value" systems seem to come out at $1000-$1500 while the "low cost" ones come out at $500-750 no matter how I do it. I mainly use Anandtech and pricegrabber as guides for this. They are the best at this analysis so far. In each case, we'll use overclocking to improve the overall performance.

The main references are:

• AnandTech: Price Guides November 2004: CPU and Motherboards. The socket 754 for low cost and the socket 939 for high value.
• Optical and Disk Drivers. Not many changes here, but the big splurge is going two spindles for the high value system. For both systems, the $70 NEC 3500A is a great choice. Dual Layer, 16x DVD writer, what could be better?
• Video and Memory. Memory-wise, last month the Crucial Ballistix 3200
• "19" LCD Monitors Reviewed":http://anandtech.com/displays/showdoc.aspx?i=2289. Good review of wonderful monitors.

High Value PC

Ok, the main controversial recommendation here is to have a two disk drive system. Disk to me is the biggest achilles heel of performance right now. Having two spindles makes things really, really fast as swapping is the single biggest detriment to performance. It is expensive, but super worth it.

Low Cost PC

This is a PC optimized with good, but not expensive components. The performance is still amazing, but the drive is the cheapest that is good enough.

The list isn't very long, but since I'm at it (and it is the holiday season), here's a list of software that I would (and have) paid for over the last year. Amazing utility for little cost:

• DBPowerAMP. I've only been using this for a short while, but it is amazing in that it allows conversion from essentially any music format to any other. You can directly go from .WAV to .FLAC or to .AAC. Also, it has the only decent bailer for the iPod so you don't have use iTunes and synchronize your entire collection, you can take pieces of anything and just copy them over. It's $19 for the Sveta Portable Audio (that includes their convertor) so that is probably the most amazing bargain. I still the freeware Musicmatch for editing tags (nothing is better) and Exact Audio Copy to copy CDs (because it does the filenaming better), but this is becoming indispensible.
• Tsunami MPEG Encoder. Another utility where I paid $25, but lost the serial number. This is probably the best and cheapest MPEG-2 encoder. It does variable encoding and is very artifact free. They have a huge number of tools now, but the latest is called TMPGEnc 3.0 XPress. It is $58, but worth it if you really want to fill your DVDs.
• SmartFTP. OK, I actually paid $30 for this and have never gotten the serial numbers right, so I'm technically still using it as freeware. It is the most amazing utility for those of us who use Linux sites for hosting. Super convenient and very fast (that's a theme for this list BTW). Biggest CON is that the queue feature is very unintuitive. Very useful, but not intuitive. You basically drag the files to the queue area and then say where it goes. The opposite of drag and drop.
• MovableType. Paid my $99 for an unlimited license. Still the best and most used blog platform around.

EncoderRoundup

A counterpoint. This reviewer found simple !(@ cbr to beat --preset standard because these fancy vbr schees can get fooled. And can be bigger than cbr.

For spoken word, cbr(^kpbs sounded terrible

mp3dev They've been changing the presets in Lame. With 3.96, the names changes from --alt-preset to just --preset. Here is a quick list:

--preset medium

This preset should provide near transparency to most people on most music. The resulting bitrate should be in the 150-180kbps range, according to music complexity.

--preset standard

This preset should generally be transparent to most people on most music and is already quite high in quality. The resulting bitrate should be in the 170-210kbps range, according to music complexity.

--preset extreme

If you have extremely good hearing and similar equipment, this preset will provide slightly higher quality than the "standard" mode. The resulting bitrate should be in the 200-240kbps range, according to music complexity.

fast option

Any of those VBR presets can also be used in fast mode, using the new vbr algorithm. This mode is faster, but its quality could be a little lower. To enable the fast mode, use:

lame --preset fast [medium|standard|extreme]

For version earlier than 3.96

The same options apply, except you use the --alt-preset instead of --preset.

As someone who has been hit, I can say I wish someone would spend the $150 and make cars safer when the monsters hit you :-)

WordPress Download. It's a MovableType world for me and I'm spending more time figuring out BitTorrent and Podcasting, but sometimes I'm tempted to switch to a different blog tool. Wordpress is one of those at the top of the list. Maybe the next blog I do I'll use it.

X-bit labs - Articles - Closer Look at 17” LCD Monitor Features. Part V (page 19). X-bit did their usual thorough job. The Samsung Syncmaster 710N was expensive but the best looking of the monitors. Of course these days I'd recommend getting a pair of 17 inch monitors or splurging for a single 19 inch monitor.

SyncMaster 710T

AnandTech: NVIDIA's GeForce 6 SLI: Demolishing Performance Barriers. The coolest thing out there. You can now slam two video cards into a single machine. The first board out is the ASUS A8N-SLI Deluxe (nForce4 SLI) Motherboard. Available for about $180. Its a dream motherboard if you want SLI, otherwise get the nForce3 and a AGP card and you'll be in good shape. Here's their net that adding as second graphics card increase performance by about 70% over a single one. That's pretty amazing scalability.

if you've only got $400 to spend on a card today you can't beat the 6800GT as a single card solution. Then, as the price of the 6800GT drops, it may become more attractive for you to upgrade to a second card rather than buying a next generation GPU. As long as we’re between DirectX cycles, SLI enables you to have the fastest most robust graphics setup out there without missing out on much.

You should be able to get the ASUS board and a Gigabyte board before Christmas. Drool ho!

Accurate Rip. An interesting idea works with either Exact Audio Copy (my favoriate freeware ripper) or with dBPowerAmp.

It collects a database of folks who have ripped and compares your rip to make sure that it is in fact good. Make sense since every CD should be identical.

Of course, one could ask why we couldn't just pay for and download CD quality music, but that's for another post.

Windows Support Forums - Restarts in middle of boot-up (WXP-Pro).

Proving once again how great the Internet is. Since I've installed SP2, I've been having all kinds of instability on two of my machines. I get hand the same symptoms where you'll get a hang or you'll be booting and get blown back to the BIOS. Folks on this thread a struggling too.

This is one area where power on self test doesn't help. Running Memtest86, the memory immediately begins failing. This is one hard area to figure out without a dedicated memory tester. Furthermore, with Memtest, if you disable the processor cache, you can see the memory stick is good, but the cache is not. One fried Pentium 4 2.43 Northwood. Sad to say so the machine is totalled since the architecture is obsolete. Can save the cd, etc., but the rest is not useful since it is a Shuttle mini machine, I don't know what to do with the case.

When you have a strange problem, it doesn't hurt to go back to first principles. Does the memory and CPU work properly. It is really rare for memory to fail. I have a dozen machines and its only happened once in 10 years as compared to 3 disk drives in five years or monthly software driver problems.

So this is another warning that one thing can cause failure in quite another. Happy Turkey day!

PodcastAlley.com -- the place to find podcasts. A good set of reviews on podcasting software.

The main ones seem to be iPodder and Doppler Radio.

It also looks like there are literally hundreds of Podcasts. Most are nerdy topics like Slashdot. Perhaps the most interesting for those of us who care about music is DownloadRadio.org. It uses the three magic technologies to bring you store-and-forward radio. That is RSS feeds to notify you of content, BitTorrent to bring you the bits over broadband and iPod/iTunes as a standard way to listen to it. Pretty cool.

a little ludwig goes a long way: I need a meta-guide for TV. A great tutorial on how to stick bittorrent and RSS together to find things.

Its much better than using a search engine like isohunt.com. Pealco.net explains how you never have to miss another show with RSS feeds.

Basically, you use Azureus and there is an RSS Import plugin that you connect to TVTorrents.

a little ludwig goes a long way: Ignition blog round up 11/23. Great idea by John to just round up our dozen or so blogs. I particularly like the comment about the marketing playbook. It really isn't marketing, don't tell anyone that. Its really about strategy but those books don't have a category on Amazon, so its a marketing book.

I met someone at the San Jose Mercury ask me how I defined marketing, I said, "its all about great companies." Name me a great marketing company that also isn't a great company with a vision, great people who believe and great products. Its all correlated.

Podcasting - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. One of the most amazing trends that literally has taken off in six months is this podcasting idea.

That is, there is audio on the web and it automagically downloads to an iPod. I'm stunned by how fast these platform shifts happen now. Literally overnight, judging by wikipedia. Boy am I glad I got an iPod, you can't understand this stuff unless you are rocking and rolling every night it seems. Its a whole new publishing medium. And it is very applicable to mobile phones that have storage.

Sony Unveils 3-Pound T-Series Ultra-Portable Notebook @ CHAITGEAR. This is pretty close to the perfect travel notebook. Its not the machine for everything. In fact, right now I think the dream combination is a fast and cheap desktop for office work that you can get for $1,000 or so now plus a light notebook that works on airplanes. I'm not a desktop replacement notebook kind of guy. For the office work I do machine performance isn't much of an issue anymore. Its not like Office has gotten any faster since 1997 literally based on processor performance.

The net is that for $1870 or so, it is pretty close to the perfect machine. You have to change a bunch of things, but it is pretty good. Check Pricegrabber for the latest prices.

PROS

Incredibly light at 3.1 pounds. You won't believe it, but it makes an amazing difference to go from 7 to 5 and then to three pounds. Also, the charger is very light, so it is fits just about anywhere. It connects to everything with Bluetooth, 802.11b/g, VGA output, USB 2.0 and 100Mpbs Ethernet all built in (there are no dongle required!)

I've had a bunch of ultraportables over the years and their achilles heel were poor screens, short battery life, and amazing amounts of hard disk swapping. The XBRITE screen on this baby has to be seen to be believed. It is cinema quality, yet you can get 5 hours of a battery life running at full power. Also, the disk is now big enough (40GB) that it doesn't fill up.

Finally, the processor, the 1.1GHz Dothan (aka Pentium M 733) is really fast. At full bore, it is the equivalent of a 2GHz Pentium 4 and with 512MB of memory, you don't swap all the time when running Office plus Outlook.

CONS

Nothing that can't be fixed, but it is aggravating, you have to reformat the hard drive, because Sony takes 5GB away for system recovery and the default screen fonts are way too small. Also, you need to buy a $20 PCMCIA card that has CF/MMC/SD card reader. Beware though that some cards won't work with 1GB MMC cards. For instance I bought one from Inside Computer and the Sony didn't recognize the controller. On another Toshiba, it recognized the card, but wouldn't read a 1GB card. I'm going to try a Sandisk 6-in-1 for $40 next to see if it works better.

Finally, the thing really should have a dedicated DVD chip so you don't have to boot Windows to watch a DVD. Some of the newer laptops do this. Some documentation said it did, but I can't find it. Finally, 40GB is a little small if you store all your music on it (but that is what an iPod is for :-).

Time once again for Rich to take charge and roast the turkey. As usual, here's a list of recipes that work:

Whole Foods. The local high end but fresh grocer around here. They have a basic recipe that includes brining the turkey.

The brine ratio:

2 gallons water 2 cups kosher salt
1 cup brown sugar
6–8 whole black peppercorns
1 tsp dried thyme
4–5 whole allspice berries

Remove the neck and giblets from the cavity. Soak it in the above solution, fully submerged, for 12 to 18 hours, refrigerated. Before roasting, remove it from the brine and rinse it thoroughly inside and out before proceeding. This works for smaller birds, less than 20 pounds.

It should take 3-4 hours for a 12-16 pound bird, but use an instant read thermometer. They are a few bucks and they really work.

|MG| Free Download - RockXP 3.0. Hey this is a great program.

Gives you the Windows XP PID and also the PIDs of other applications in case you lose them. Also recovers a bunch of other passwords as well.

Yahoo! Toolbar. YOu have to get this tool for the antispyware.

Been working through what's wrong with Connie's computer and despite the fact we run IE 6.0, Google Popup Blocker, Zonealarm, Norton Antivirus and Spybot Search and Destroy.

On running Lavasoft Ad-aware that I found zillions of spyware programs that weren't blocked.

However, it was only Yahoo that discovered our machine in fact was infected with a zombie (that means it was under the control of someone else!).

Maybe this will fix random crashes etc.

Now it makes sense why it is slow etc. It is all stuff into my personal directories so I must have navigated to a bad site.

Troubleshoot Windows XP Professional. Been getting an amazing number of hangs (e.g., mouse freezes) and random reboots (no blue screen, just blown to the restart).

Feels like there is instability in at least two machines at the driver level. As an old NT guy, I know that the only way this happens is if something dies at the kernel level. That is usually a device driver. Sigh.

The worst part is that when this happens, XP is so aggressive about caching the file system, that usually files get destroyed.

In any case, I'm debugging and found a great guide to blue screen and other crashes. My favorite and the one I see most often is

0X0000000A. IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL

My favorite advice is of course in System Recovery where they tell you you need to install a Recovery Console before you have a crash. Not super helpful really and you need to type the DOS command:

e:\i386\winnt32.exe /cmdcons

when you've insert the CD. Wow, that's friendly, but very necessary. This command console is basically a command line XP (I btw love the way the name of the setup utility is still winnt.exe since that's what the product was originally called before it became 2000/XP/2003 etc.)

Sniptools °| Tips/Tricks | Reinstall Windows XP without product activation. A bunch of my XP machines are getting random crashes. With the NTFS file system, it is easy to corrupt things and one machine is now dead.

Things chkdsk fine, but that doesn't mean the operating system files themselves aren't corrupt. So what to do. Reinstall is the classic first solution.

Here are some guidelines:

Symantec Support. Now that Microsoft is going to discontinue support for the "gold" XP, they are forcing everyone to upgrade to SP2.

Interesting, this is the hardest core shift I've seen lately, but it makes me worried about the machines I have that aren't SP2 yet. Here's a note on how Norton works with SP2. The short version is that Ignition's version of Norton doesn't quite work, but at least won't crash with it. It doesn't interact correctly with the new security manager. If you have Norton 2002 or later you are fine, but we are running Norton Corporate V7. Yikes, makes you want to go to the Mac!

dBpowerAMP. OK, after much experimenting, this looks like the best of the bunch for setup and also for quality.

First, it doesn't make a mystery what codecs you need. You can download the Windows Media 9 Codecs (confusing that Windows Media Player is version 10, but but the codecs are 9). The Microsoft site is incredibly confusing on this point.

It is a shareware product, but it also uses LAME MP3 encoding with the familiar presets for 3.93. I haven't learned the 3.96 and above presets yet.

Also has an easy selection system. When it starts, just asks you what files you want. Amazing how many of the other converteros don't do this.

It also knows about MPEG-4 format files and can encode and decode them. These MP4 files are what iTunes uses. It also can use Nero's HE AAC encoder too, so it is a dream product.

They also have a synchronizer that works with iPods and everything else. Might be more convenient than iTunes. It apparently will intelligently rip and then move to a device. Kind of cool. Call Svetaplayer.

WMA to MP3 converter, WMA MP3 converter, MP3 organizer, MP3 tagger, CD burner. I tried CDEX to convert from WMA to MP3, but it complains incessantly about a DLL missing even though I downloaded it.

Here is a whole site devote to WMA to MP3 etc. These are mainly shareware tools

Re: WMA to MP3 Transcoding Software? - MP3. Ages ago, I ripped a few CDs in WMA format, but MP3 is the standard. Here's a quick way to transcode so that in my core libraries I have complete portability.

Note, I also have songs in FLAC for archiving (it is lossless) and in HE AAC for portable music players (it is 8x smaller than MP3).

Gizmodo : Portable Media Archives. They seem to be most up on portable gadgets. Heard there are reviews of:

• Apple Flash iPod. This will be a lower cost and much slimmer version presumably the idea it is cheaper than the iPod Mini which has a hefty $250 price point. So Apple will move down market.
• Creative Zen Micro. This is the same price as an iPod Mini, but has 5GB and a scroll strip instead of a scroll wheel. Also have built in FM, calendar sync, so it is about the same. Don't know about the software though.

Vivid Light Photography Online. One of the more confusing topics for image fixing is this Unsharp Mask.

That has got to be one of the most confusing names for a feature. It actually means sharpening the image by wiggle it. Also confusing are the paramenters. There is percentage (between 100-250% with 100% as a starting point), radius (1 as a starting point) and threshold (1 as a starting point).

Scantips has a better explanation that has slightly different recommendations. Radius at 1.0 is common, but it says threshold tells you how smooth the image should be. Low values sharpent more, higher value are for things like faces (5 or more) with objects at 0 or 1 and general work at 3-4. Also says amount should be between 80-120

I've read the description three times and still can't figure out what it does.

OK, I admit it, I got addicted to this show last year when I blew my knee out. When you watch 3 years of episodes in a week, it does something to your head. The main thing is that soundtrack is just amazing. Maybe it is me, but I thought it wasn't so much the show, but the soundtrack.

Must be sort of true, since the Alias Season 1 and Season 2 are the top iMix'es on iTunes. Here's a run down of some of my favorites and there is even a fan site Alia-tv.com that keeps track of it all making it easy to buy for season 2:

• Michelle Featherstone - Band page with free MP3 music downloads on SoundClick. Here song Stay is just great. Also terrific in Episode 4 of Season 2. Amazing that this Alternative Indie artist is still unsigned. Born in England and now living in Hollywood, she's great
• Cornershop. Another alternative rock group. What a great song from their 1997 album.
• Boomkat. A brother and sister duo, I just love The Wreckoning. Like many others from the Alias list, they haven't produced much. Just that one track plus a hard to get album called
• Supreme Beings of Leisure. Can you believe their genre is called electronic pop/trip hop? Anyway very danceable stuff. Under the gun is great from their debut album in 2000. Produced by Palm Pictures whatever that is.
• The Cranberries . Somehow I missed this group in the 1990s when I loved R.E.M. Anyway, Never Grow Old is a cool tune.
• Stereo Mc's. A cool sound. Sofisticated is just a great sound. A great genre spinner, they are called hip hop, but don't sound like that to me. They've been around forever since 1985. Shame on me for not listening to them until now!
• Matthew Good. A classic canadian rocker.
• Coldplay. From their second album. A mellow tune, but the rest are really rocking.
• Jimmy Eat World. A great melo track called emo-rock.
• La Tour. An old song from 1991, this is electronica that still sounds pretty good. Song is called Blue.
• Josh Kelley. A new act did his first in 2003.
• The Breeders. They've been around a while since 1990
• The Lawyer. As far as I can tell they only ever did one track, "I want to mmm" and there is nothing on the Internet. A great dance track.

For Season 1, in some whats the hottest tracks and lots of variety

• Vertical Horizons. Another act I've don't know much about.
• Beth Orton. The song is "Ooh Child". "Ooh Child" was originally done by Chicago soul group The Five Stairsteps. All five members were actual brothers and sisters, and their somewhat odd name derives from the band's mother, Betty Burke, who remarked one day that her five musical offsprings resembled stair steps when they were lined-up next to each other according to age. In any case, it is on a rarities track, so you might want to try some of her other albums. Central Reservation is her most popular album on Amazon.com.

JanSport Moby - eBags. I've been using an old rolling backpack for long trips and got a $90 laptop convertible bag from ebags.

It is a nice bag if all you want to do is to carry a laptop and books. The problem is that its padding make it impossible to make it a daytripper. Also, it doesn't open wide enough to put everything inside.

Also the padding is really overkill with today's notebooks and takes up an amazing amount of space. Net, net, I woulnd't recommend this $90 thing.

I'm going to try a $50 Jansport Moby. This is closer to what I need. Has one large compartment so I can jam stuff in. With a 3 lb laptop, the padding issues really aren't as great.

It also has a water bottle holder and big wheels. Wish me luck!

I love the new Sony T-140, the main complaintis that it only has a Memory Stick card reader, so you have to spend $20 to get a PCMCIA adapter that reads other stuff.

I already have an adapter for Compact Flash, so the $20 part is the Sandisk PCMCIA Laptop Smartmedia, Sony Memory Stick, MMC and SD Adapter.

Its just $20 from memorysuppliers.com

My buddy Bert was asking about bike accessories and the best bike light in dark Arc Li-Ion. The light is just incredibly bright and with a lithium ion battery, it is less than a pound. Its about $450 at Colorado Cyclist

If you are going on epics they have Arc Li-Ion Ultra with a truly gigantic battery that goes for six hours. Just right for that six hour ride around the lake. They are expensive at $550 at Supergo

I actually never go on any bike ride in dark or light without one of these.

Joho the Blog: How to fold a shirt. Hat tip to John on this one. But a great

It is an amazing video. Very useful for the geek traveller. I love the Japanese commentary. Basically, you lay it flat and then somehow flip it so it fold perfectly.

PrintFIX profiling review and observations. if you dont use stock paper with a pinter you need a calibration program. Printfix is a scanner with calibrated images so that no matter what paper you use, you'll get what you paid for.

Right now Colorvision charges $400 SRP for Printfix plus the Spyder2PRO.

Spyder2PRO Getting back into scanning 35mm and doing photo editing.

The biggest frustration is this color matching problem. The ColorVision Spyder2 is finally out. Its the latest generation of color calibrators that will make sure it really is what you see is what you get with your monitor.

Pricey at $300 list, you can get for about $230 via pricegrabber.com.

Karen, Kathy and the Chinese School gang were asking their usual questions about cool gadget. Here are the latest recommendations for gadgets to buy:

• Sony T-140PL. This is $1850 from Techonweb. Its a great model. I'll post more later as it does have some drawbacks but it pretty near perfect. Three pounds, DVD-CD/RW drive, 1.1GHz Pentium-M, 512MB memory, five hours battery life. Awesome.

If you are looking for a PDA and phone, there doesn't seem to be a perfect combo PDA and phone, so here are the choices. I'd recommend buying them on Let's Talk. In Seattle, the best coverage seem to be T-mobile and Verizon right now in terms of coverage:

• Actual pics of the new Treo Ace/Treo 650 - Engadget - www.engadget.com. This is just coming out and will be expensive at say $4-500. It is a Palm-based system. Has a QWERTY keyboard and is very narrow. Its an OK phone and a nice PDA.
• Blackberry 7100. This is the hot up and comer. It is a real phone and has an incredible screen. I've notice that it is much more fashionable and easier on the eyes than the traditional PDA. Right now it is just T-mobile here. About $150 so much cheaper. It is a great phone and an OK Blackberry because instead of a full keyboard, it uses a half keyboard with predictive input.
• Blackberry 7290. This is an update to my favorite 7230 that I've been using for two years. It has a much brigheter screen and is quad band so will work just about anywhere. Also has bluetooth for headsets and connecting.

Net, net, if you use the phone more, get a Blackberry 7100, if you an email guy who does some mail, get a Blackberry 7290. If you want Palm applications, then its the Treo 650.

Tandems and Kids. Steve rode with his son when he was eleven. Almost time for Alex to ride 200 miles with Dad.

Here's a great piece on how to do it on a tandem. Here are some good models:

• Co-motion. They have a racing aluminum one that looks wonderful called the Roadster
• Precision Tandem. A huge selection of Tandems from this reseller here.

Beyond Compare - The file compare and directory compare utility from Scooter Software. I don't understand why file synchronization has to be so complicated. This Beyond Compare thing is nerdy, but it sure is straightforward.

Most depressing thing is that the iPod doesn't expose the files, so you have to use iTunes to synchronize. That means you can only sync with one PC. What you really want is to be able to sync a bunch of machines together.

Beyond Compare does this.

All About Symbian Forums - Good Freeware Applications NOT Warez/Cracks. Here are some good applications including:

• Fxplorer. A new file manager.

With this new Nokia 6620, the move obvious question is what firmware to load:

• All About Symbian Forums - To all MP3 player inquirers: The 6600 is not an MP3 player!. Also describes how to load symbian oggplay and also dbpoweramp to convert MP3 or WMA to OGG

Its reportedly a good format down to 64Kpbs, although HE AAC is good down to 24-32Kpbs.

Many folks think this is the ultimate phone. The geek specs basically say that it support every major codec particularly HE AAC (3GPP compliant).

ARM9 CPU
178×220 Pixel 16-Bit Color Main Display
MIDP 1.0.3
3GPP, 3GPP2, H.263 & MP4 Support (Streaming Video Codecs)
QCELP, AAC & AMR Audio Codec Support
Video Camera (25 FPS for Recording, 15 FPS for Streaming)