March 2005 Archives

Sony HDR-FX1 Camcorder

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HEXUS.net : Review : DVdoctor Column: March 2005 : Page - 1/1. [At the] tail end of 2004 when Sony introduced its amazing new FX1 HDV camcorder. This is a genuinely revolutionary product. Along with its companion model the Z1, the FX1 is set to seriously shake up the world of DV camcorders. It's impact may be akin to that of Sony's VX1000 MiniDV model which sounded the death knell for analogue camcorders.

But Sony - of all companies - seems to have forgotten the problems that its incompatible tape formulations caused in the early days of DV, judging by what we're seeing happen right now with HDV tape.

Basically, these are HDTV camcorders, I'm lusting for one. The problem is that they will clog and die if you use Sony's new specific tape and then put in someone elses. Something about the formulation of the tape lubricants, so beware if you get one

See Global-dvc.org for more information to drool over. It does list for $3700 (the professional one is a cool $4900 and is called the HVR-Z1). For you techno geeks, it records in 1080i so it is incredilby high quality and is big and bulky too, but who cares, HD for your kids birthday party.

Samsung 920T

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X-bit labs - Closer Look at the 19" Monitor Features. Part III (page 24) - Samsung 920T. I got a Samsung 193P as a result of Xbitlabs reviews, here's an update for newer models.

Again, they liked the Samsung units quite a bit. In this case, they liked the color reproduction of the Samsung 920T. These models seem to change every 10 minutes, but this is the nicest one right now.

For you techno-geeks, it uses a PVA matrix for the LCD screen so it is got great color, contract and backlighting, but isn't going to be really great for gaming which requires a very fast changing of the pixels.

THey also reviewed the 193P which is an earlier release. Main things to note are that it is probably overblown at its defaults of 80% brightness and 50% contrast, so he turned it down to 39% brightness and 40% contrast to get to a lower luminance of 100nit (so the color reproduction is better). Basically, it is very good, but the new 920T is slightly better.

50K page views

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Site Meter - Counter and Statistics Tracker. What the heck is going on with the site. We've been at a consistent 35,000 page views (there are some anomolies in Nov-Jan reporting because I broke the template but didn't realize it).

But this month, we are north of 50K views. Wow.

Office for the home

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JR.com: MICROSOFT Office 2003 Student and Teacher Edition in Office Productivity Suites:. Hoops was asking what he does for his wife's Sony VAIO. They include an introductory version of Office Small Business Edition, but paying $250 seems a little strange for a machine that only cost $1800.

A couple of solutions. Brad, John and I all use the Office Student and Teachers Edition. $127 including shipping from J&R Music World. Legally licenses you to three machines for non-business purposes. It is really the standard edition of Office, so everything except Access. Good for most folks. That is even cheaper than the legal version from the Microsoft Company Store.

Another is that if you really just need to look at things and don't use every feature of Word, etc and don't need Outlook, then I've been trying OpenOffice 2.0 Beta. Its free and probably good enough for the folks who are just doing small sheets, etc. The main issue is that their PowerPoint equivalent is hard for me to use and they don't have an Outlook that hooks to Exchange.

Microwave Oven Reviews

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GE Spacemaker II 1 cu ft 800 watts stainless steel JEM31SF. It figures that 18 months after we buy a microwave that it dies.

We are stuck on GE mainly because they haven't change the user interface and the thought of learning more than one is terrifying. Lists for $249 (stainless), but the regular colors (white, black and bisque) are $199 list.

The cool features on this one are that if you press the 1 button, it just turns on for one minute, etc. There is also an add 30 seconds button. Most hilarious is that there is a child lock that only Alex knows how to use :-)

Main gotcha is that it is very easy to make a mistake and reset the clock (you press clock, then clear then a number and then clock and you've reset it).

This one is only 1 cubic foot and 800 watts, but that is all we really need, don't do roasts in ours. Having it spin inside is nice too, but we don't have that. It is very small and compact.

I'm sure there are cheaper ones, but Pricegrabber shows that Sears has it for $199 and shipping is very expensive for these. This is actually the cheapest price that pricegrabber shows. Another review mentions that theirs died too, I guess too many parts made by my cousins in China :-)

Now if you don't want the same interface, there are certainly cheaper ones. For instanct the Panasonic NN-T654SF is silver, costs just $100. It is alos 1300 watts and still pretty small at 16"×21×12". The main issue is that one review on Amazon notes the thing dies in a couple of months. Not surprising. That is really cheap.

These things are pretty much commodities where reliability matters. It is amazing to me that epinions et al just have nothing on them. Are there no general reviews of things like this on the web? If so, google can't find them. The only one I saw was from about.com where busycooks picks out a few models. Most interesting piece was about Panasonics inverter technology. Where instead of running 50 percent power by turning off half the time (that's what all those fancy power setting really do, the things runs full bore but shuts off part of the time), apparently, they actually turn the microwave power down. She says that the cooking works better (makes sense to me) so there are fewer cold spots and burnt edges.

The Panasonic NNS564SF has this is is about $120 direct in stainless steel. 21"×12"X16" and is 1300 watts. Costco, Target and Sears all apparently stock Panasonic, but I'll bet they don't have every model :-). The direct price doesn't look too bad either. The main problem is the GE is 17×9x13 so it is much narrower and will fit into our narrow counter.

Ski now

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Crystal Mountain, Washington - Closer than you think.. Yup, there is finally snow in Washington!

Mount Baker got 30 inches of powder. Crystal will open this weekend. A good chance to get a last bit of skiing in!

Great Customer Service

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I spent most of my time essentially documenting bugs, so in talking with Jan and Robbie, I realized that's kind of unfair. I've had a couple of great customer experiences when things break and kudos to those companies that are using the web and just plain hard work to make it happen. Electronics are going to break and it means that it sometimes makes sens to pay more to get service, so in no particular order:

VAIO Â Notebook Computers. These guys have a great product in the T series. Every power geek is getting one. My T-140P/L died with a motherboard failure. Very hard to get a hold of someone, but (tip to everyone), if you are patient calling their 800 number, then you can get some great people. The woman I finally got fedexed me a recovery DVD and then the next day fedexed a box to put the notebook in. I sent it and within 48 hours, I had it back with a nice note from a technician in San Diego saying he replaced the motherboard. Wow, that's service!

Apple. My buddy John had his iPod Photo fail to boot, he took it to the store and they replaced it without question. My iPod Shuffle had a crooked USB pin, even though the store was jammed, the Apple Genius at the Genius Bar (that's a great name!) replaced it in 15 minutes while he was simultaenously showing someone on a PC (!!) how to rip a CD and also reinstalling SP2 for some poor soul trying to get an old IBM Pentium 2 laptop to work with a brand new iPod Mini. Another guy had ripped his headphones up and was getting that replaced. Wow. Go customer service. Another soul was sending her iBook back and they were going to get the personal data off the hard drive for her.

Nextlink Bluespoon. They make just the smallest, coolest, lightest bluetooth headsets. Weighs 10 grams if you can believe that. The AX initial models had plastics that broke, called the dealer, they said yes, sent email and an actual human names Magnuson sent me back personal mail saying yes and could I have your address. It doesn't have to be a big company that has great service.

"JBL On Stage": . The early model On Stage's had lots of problems with static electricity and a sensitive part. Caused a huge storm on the Internet but they are using the web well. First, they put an FAQ on their main site that was actually easy to find. Then they put a dedicated site called jblonstagesupport.com where you can check your serial number and automatically get an RMA and a box shipped to you. No human intervention at all. Pretty neat!

Spyder2Pro and SiS 651 video

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ColorVision - FAQs. Been color matching all my computers at home. Seems to work fine for two machines, but two of them have a startup crash problem. Actually version 1.0 doesn't seem to but the one on the web 1.0.5 does.

The Spyderpro2 faults and it is not clear why. The FAQ says its a video card problem. Kind of sad that that would happen. I have the latest driver, although it is a little bit of a strange card. Its the SIS embedded graphics card.

Also, the SIS VGA utility also crashes, so something strange is wrong with the driver. Time to reinstall and see what happens

Please update the video card driver on your computer. The latest video
card drivers may be necessary for our software to work properly.

MS Walk

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Adrian's MS Walk. Hey Adrian is going to walk for MS. A great cause. Contribute if you can. This online stuff is neat. Kind of cool to have a home page rather than the paper form folks have used before.

STP 2005

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Group Health Seattle to Portland Bicycle Classic: Registration. It's getting close enough that folks should start registering. $70 and you can do it online too.

Passively cooled video cards

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X-bit labs - Articles - X-bit labs CeBIT 2005 Coverage: Day 7 (page 2). The video cards are so loud, its nice to see folks working on making them quieter. I have a nVidia 6800GT with an NV5 silencer, but while not a vacuum cleaner, it is not exactly quiet.

Well, other folks have been working on this. Most notable is Gigabytes Radeon X800XL with a passive cooler. Got to give that one a try. Particularly with the XL coming out.

Pentium M plus ASUS CT-479 and

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AnandTech: Intel's Pentium M Desktop Part II: ASUS' Pentium M to Pentium 4 Socket Adapter. If I build more Pentium M systems, getting the CT-479 plus P4P800-SE bundle is mandatory. Makes most sense for gaming applications.

Currently, ASUS is listing the CT-479 as a part of a bundle with the P4P800-SE, priced at $130. At that price, the solution is almost half the price of the DFI 855GME motherboards, and you get all of the benefits of the 865 chipset.

With the CT-479, ASUS has effectively demolished all other desktop Pentium M solutions. There's no reason to even consider a 855GME motherboard from AOpen or DFI; the ASUS solution is cheaper, better performing and is even a much more stable overclocker. Kudos to ASUS for a job extremely well done with the CT-479. It's the only option that we'd recommend for those interested in a desktop Pentium M system.

That being said, despite being paired with enough memory bandwidth, the Pentium M continues to fall behind in desktop performance. As a gaming platform and as a general purpose/office machine, the Pentium M does fairly well, but it is in content creation, workstation and media encoding applications that the Pentium M continues to fall behind.

DDR 600 on DFI nForce4

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MADSHRIMPS - Hardware Reviews ,Crazy Projects, Modding Tutorials and Overclocking. Here's what I'll ultimately do when the new Venus chips come out next month, its a way to get your Athlon to run memory at 300 MHz!

Recently G.Skill PC4400/4800 became the hottest memory on the market together with OCZ PC4800 based on Samsung TCCD...Soon AMD will launch two new cores named “Venice and San Diego” (revision E3 and E4). These cores have an upgraded instruction set (SSE3) and a better memory controller. The chance that you will have a “bad” memory controller on the Winchester core is 6 of 10. When you have a good controller, this does not mean you will reach those speeds 100% around DDR500~600. The RAM must be tuned, that’s why I've created this guide.

Athlon 64 Overclocking Tools

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ABXZone.com Forums - A64 overclocking tools. Here's a great guide. I've used them all, but Clockgen can be very unstable. Haven't tried the other two.

Scion xB

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2004 Scion xB - Test drive and new car review - 2004 Scion xB. This car is just about everywhere at our school. It sure is practical and I love the price. As Alex says, just about as ugly as sin, but maybe right for Dad. Ironically, it was supposed to be for youth, but middle aged practical folks actually buy it. Much like the Honda Element.

Young, hip and different? Or practical fuel-efficient micro-SUV? When Toyota launched the Scion brand, it intended the xB as the former. But in the year since going on sale, the xB has found a fan base with folks in their mid-30s. Sure, it's shaped like a packing crate, but so are most refrigerators, dressers, and, well, packing crates, all objects designed for maximum space efficiency. Come on, people. Love the box. $13,680 is all. Gets 31-35mpg and comes in a five speed. I'm in heaven!

Only seats five though.

Trackbacks are killing me

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Learning Movable Type: Trackback Spam. Another example of how anything popular is going to get spammed. Trackbacks are now the disease for me. Instead of just shutting them off, they are at least moderated with MT-Moderate so they don't appear, but they are still very annoying. A new one gets through every day and there is way to throttle. Some great suggestions on this post.

I use Blacklist which works well, but new attacks come just about every day. MT-DSBL blocks comments from open proxies and there is one that blocks from open SMTP servers. I'm going to install that.

There is also the path of rotating the script names around that I'm pretty sure won't work well. But MT-Antispam-Rename is not a bad short term defense.

Conway's Law

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Conway's Law

Conway's Law: prov.

The rule that the organization of the software and the organization of the software team will be congruent; commonly stated as “If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler”. The original statement was more general, “Organizations which design systems are constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication structures of these organizations.” This first appeared in the April 1968 issue of Datamation. Compare SNAFU principle.

more true than you know

Windows History

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windows history and Computerhope Someone just asked me, when were you at Microsoft and what were you doing. I'm completely embarassed to admit that I know I joined in 1988 and left in 2000, but the intervening twelve years is a blur. Thank god for the Internet. Reminded me of some of the good old products

Windows 2.0. Dec 9, 1987

Windows/386. Dec 9, 1987

Windows 2.0 is renamed Windows/286. June 1988

Windows 3.0. May 22, 1990. I was in San Francisco I think watching one of the first multicity launches. That was a big deal back then.

Windows 3.0a (don't ask ask me, ask Jon Roberts about this one) Oct 1991

Windows 3.1. April 1992. Main thing I remember was the incredible cameraderie and a Jamie Lewis quote about what an incredible synchronized launch it was.

Windows for Workgroups 3.1. October 1992. I try to forget this one.

Windows NT 3.1. August 1993

Windows NT 3.5. September 1994

Windows NT 3.51. June 1995

Windows NT 4.0. August 1996

The main thing I had forgotten was working with Jim Allchin how we just pumped releases out. Basically a release a year of Windows NT for 4 years. Whew, no wonder I was tired and fat then!

Connectors

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Now that Grace has a Sumicom S600, I can finally get my DFI 855GME to be a home theater PC. The main missing step is connecting my old HDTV monitor that only accepts component input. Fortunately, the HTI and NVIDIA Video Card Buyer's Guide summarize very well what I need. That is essentially my 6800GT (!!!) won't work, but the later but less powerful 6600GT will or I can use my older ATI 9800 Pro with a $24 connector.

If you are going to use an ATI component adapter you need a Radeon 8500 or a Radeon 9500 or higher (this includes the 9550, which is really a 9600 GPU clocked lower), this also includes the x300 and x600 series for PCI Express. For the 8500 or 9600 All-in-Wonder cards you need the VGA to Component adapter, for all others ATI requires the DVI to Component adapter. For quick guide on using the ATI adapter see this guide.

The All-in-Wonder 9700 series, 9800 series and the newest generation of ATI cards (x700 and x800) have a multipurpose DIN connector that can carry s-video or component via a breakout cable, so the aftermarket adapter is not needed. Be aware that not all manufacturers choose to enable the component output, the DIN may be s-video only.

NVIDIA is now shipping cards with native component output. The most common cards are GeForce 6600 or 6600GT based cards. They have a multipurpose DIN connector that can carry s-video or component video via a dongle. Be aware that not all manufacturers choose to enable the component output, the DIN may be s-video only. XFX 6600GT and all ASUS cards are known to NOT have the component output. Some models by AOpen, Chaintech, Gigabyte, and Jaton may also not include the output adapter. So please double check!

Sumicom S600 is Loud

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Who would have ever thought such a small box could be so loud. This is mainly because I have an old Western Digital WD120BB in it and it sounds like a vacuum cleaner. So, the next step is a $105 investment in an ultraquiet hard drive. These are mainly identical, so I mainly shopped by warranty. The Samsung has a three year warranty for about $5 more than the Western Digital or Seagate models...

Newegg.com - SAMSUNG - Storage/Hard Drive MP0603H

I also need a 2.5" to 3.5" adapter so I'll order two because shipping is the big charge and Cables for Less has them.

Sumicom S350

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SUMICOM S350 Wow, they just shipped this, this is a Intel 865GV system that is the size of a standard CD-ROM. A whole PC in 6×10x1.65" if you can imagine that.

Only takes Celeron CPUs and requires a slim disk drive and 2.5" hard disk, but pretty amazing. It is $290 from Cappuccino PC.

They actually run the Celeron at 66MHz and you can actually put a very hot Pentium in there as well which runs at 100MHz.

Personally, if money were no object, I'd get the fanless Sumicom S625F fanless and uses the very low power consumption Pentium M. CappucinoPC carries it but not as a barebones thing.

Windows Key Finders

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Windows Key Finders. A super useful site, helps you to find those missing product keys in your installation.

Finally getting my really tiny PC (6×10x3") together from Cappuccino PC called the SlimPro SP620 which is really the Sumicom S620 underneath.

It uses the older Northwood Pentium, so was a good way to still get use out of my old Shuttle SS-51G with a dead motherboard. But, as I assemble it, the slim DVD drive NEC ND-6500A comes up as a slave drive, so off to figure this out but the main problem is that the bezel of the ND-6500A is about 1/4" inch too the left of the opening of the Sumicom S620 so there needs to be a little sawing off to make it work.

  • NEC ND-6500A official firmware overview. There is an amazing number of folks who have worked on patching the firmware to allow region-free (any region DVD), riplock (removing the 6x reading limitation on DVDs) and higher performance writing. Here's a good guide.
  • Slave instead of Master. A number of laptops with the ND-6500A come up as slave instead of master, you have to solder two pins together to force the thing into master mode, or with this 120, I think it is because the cable is set to slave or something. 2.24 is latest NEC firmware, if you use version 4.xx, these fool the drive without needing to solder to do reverse-ATA. That is, if the cable says master, actually be the slave.
  • All Firmwares. Check for your DVD drive, but I bet there is a firmware version out there for you.

Nokia 6620 PC Suite

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Nokia USA: Nokia 6620 PC Applications. I've had a boatload of trouble trying to get my contacts into my 6620. I know I have 5,400 contacts, so that is more than the average bear, but really. The original software CD has version 6.1 and it spend about an hour trying to synchronize and then would fail with an "Unknown" PC Sync error.

After much trial and error, I found the Nokia application page and downloaded 6.41, now it seems to work fine, although I notice that my Sony has trouble finding my 6620. It is supposed to autodiscover over Bluetooth, but that is unreliable.

Castelli Ypro3 Bib Short

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Castelli YPro3 Bib Short. These are just the finest biking shorts that I know. I've had three for the last five years and although I have just about every other brands, these are the best. Actually wore one out so time for another. Super expensive, but next to getting fit for a bike, buying great shorts is the most important thing you can do. They list for $175 and Excelsports , World Sports and Colorado Cyclist all carry them.

For 2005, Castelli introduces a different scheme where they still have the YPro3 short, but also introduce something called the Y5 which is a cross between the YFuso (which doesn't have seams) and the Ypro3 (which does have seams, but is thinner)

Many folks don't seem to like the YFuso. Personally I've had great luck with the older Y2Pro with three bib shorts that have worked well, although the last one that I got has its seams fall out (a common complaint it seems for both Castelli and Assos).

Primal Wear

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Primal Wear. I've been wearing Primal Wear biking stuff straight for five years now and they are just now wearing out. Great jerseys but expensive (regularly $70), but Primal has an online outlet, so if you don't mind the fashions, you can get them for $50 and if you buy two, you get free shipping too!

Campagnolo and FSA Compact

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Groupsets - The official Campagnolo web site - Bicycle Parts and Components Cycling. I really should just replace my bottom bracket with an integrated FSA system, but in lieu of that, there's always the compact update from Campy. BTW, compact basically means you don't need a triple, it is easier for old guys like us

Campagnolo has decided to go a step further than the simple compact crankset, and develop a fully integrated 10-speed drivetrain so that there are no half measures where safety, performance and longevity are concerned.
This project has resulted in the new CT crankset and CT derailleur.

Interesting to see how little price weight difference there now is between Record and Chorus, but a big price difference (prices are from Lick's):

ComponentWeightPrice
Record Crank CT540g$595
Chorus Crank CT551g$495
Record Front Derailleur CT75g$107
Chorus CT Front derailleur78g$85

So basically, you are paying in excess of $10/gram saved and the total savings vs. the standard Record which is 632g for aluminum and 500g for a standard Record crank.

Now if you get FSA, then they say you just lower the front derailleur by 10mm and you should be OK. This does require a swap out of the bottom bracket, so if more major surgery. They have a complex product line that looks like this (thanks to Glory Cycles), note that this includes a bottom bracket which weighs 190 grams in addition to the weight above, so you should compare the weights below to (190g+551g= 741 grams for carbon compact) and (190g + 632g = 822g).

ComponentWeightPrice
FSA Gossamer Compact860g$180
FSA SL-K Compact MegaExo765g$330

The net is that that going to a FSA SL-K is $330-350 or so and saves about 57 grams but most important gives you a much lower gearing for old guys. Alternatively if you are a weight weenie with more money (than sense?), you can get the $500 Campy Chorus CT and save an additional 20 grams (price is $5/gram incrementally). Then you'd probably want the new front derailleur too to get the absolute best shifts in either case.

Rechargeable Batteries

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Thomas-Distributing - Rechargeable Battery Supply, Chargers for Rechargeable Batteries, Digital Camera Batteries, Lithium Batteries And Testers. _A bump on the topic, my two year old NiMh batteries are finally showing their age. Used to get 2 hours of life, now just an hour. Time for an upgrade. Things have moved quickly with this stuff.

Two years ago a battery had 1700mAH and now that is much bigger at 2500 mAh so that is nearly 1/3 more charge. Still no Lithiums that are AAs though yet :-(

They also have rechargeable CR-123A tablet batteries as well now for $27

eBags Messenger

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eBags Lightning Messenger - eBags. eBags has their knockoff messenger bag for $30 with free shipping, so tempting for all of us bargain hunters. I don't think it is waterproof though like the high end Timbuk2 or Chrome bags.

Timbuk2

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Timbuk2 -- Messenger Bags. Since we are on the topic, I've used dozens of bags and none quite compares in comfort to a bike messenger bag. I use a small one from Nike just about every day. It is just so much more comfortable than carry to have it go over one shoulder.

Timbuk2 even lets you build a custom bag. So a great combo is a messenger bag from timbuk2 and accessory stuff from waterfield.

iPod Case Reviews

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Playlist Cases. Another review of cases. I like their format at a glance.

They give five stars to these cases (all have a belt clip important for Dad and me):

  • Contour Showcase. $40. Rubber and clear plastic.
  • Covertec iPod Case, $40. This has a leather cover so not that greaet for instant access but nice leather. Has a belt clip.
  • RadTech PodSleevz, $20. This is just microfiber cover to prevent scratches, no belt loop though.
  • Speck ToughSkin, $35. This is a heavy duty rubber thingy so when you drop it itthe iPod stay safe. Very bulky though.
  • Vaja i-Volution. $50. A slip-on hardshell case.

The one I found through them though is the Waterfield iPod case for $40. Love that one. And the Altec-Lansing InMotion holder. They are just so clever with bag designs.

Waterfield

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Waterfield are ex-bike messengers and make custom bags in San Francisco. Expensive, but checkout the Sleevecase which is a totally custom holder for a laptop. Perfect for my minute Sony TR-140 for which common laptop bags are just too big.
to see how well made they are. Rather have one good bag than a zillion giveaway IMHO.

Another great bag is the iPod case. It is the only one that I've found with a belt loop and which also lets you use the dock easily plus it holds your headphones too. They have another version for holding the Altec Lansing InMotions and also a general junk bag. Check them out.

iPod Mini or tweener

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Good review of the iPod Mini, as they say, with iPod Shuffles at $99 and $149, and the 20GB iPod at $299, the niche between them is pretty small. The 2G iPod Mini is the one to hold out for although the main diffference is "decent" battery life (double the nominal 8 hours).

iPodlounge Review: Apple iPod mini 4GB/6GB (Second-Generation)

Model Capacity Price Ratio
shuffle 512MB $99 $198/Gbshuffle 1GB $149 $149/Gb
mini 4GB $199 $49.77/GB
mini 6GB $249 $41.50/GB
iPod 4G 20GB $299 $14.95/GB
iPod photo 30GB $349 $11.63/GB
iPod photo60GB $449 $7.48/GB

Leaving size, case colorings, and battery power entirely aside, there's little doubt that neither iPod mini represents nearly as good a value for the dollar as the 20GB iPod at $299, a factor now compounded by the iPod mini's omission of a FireWire cable and Power Adapter. Toss both of them into the equation and a 6GB iPod mini jumps in price to $297; omit the FireWire cable and it falls to $278, still a trivial price difference, unless size, color, or battery power is a major consideration.

All things considered, we think the new iPod mini rates just as it did last year - a B+ - given that its new benefits are offset by new issues. The black-and-white iPod mini line will continue to have its strong fans - particularly younger users and the fashion-conscious - and we'll continue to like them for what they are: middle-of-the-road compromises with just enough horsepower to attract the attention of new mainstream iPod owners. We do believe, however, that many people who seriously consider the iPod minis alongside Apple's other options will find even more to like in the company's bigger and better offerings.

Pacific Rim Cube

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iPodlounge Review: Pacific Rim Cube Travel Speakers

On the spectrum of iPod-specific speaker options we’ve previously identified, the Cube Travel Speakers generally fit into the ultra-portable category. They're pocketable – on baggy pants, at least - with the option of using batteries or AC power from an optional power supply ($5.00) if you so desire.

JBL On Tour

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iPodlounge Review: JBL On Tour Portable Speakers. On Tour's sound is almost perfect - given its size and price. Compared against other options in the portable category, it's clear, has good highs and mids, and is acceptable though not great in bass. There's little to no thump at typical listening levels, but bass notes (and mids) are audible, and not flattened or compressed like they are in Altec's inMotions, iM3s and iM4s.

Hopefully this one won't break like the On Stage, but this seems like it will sound better and is prettier than the iM3s I have, but it doesn't have a dock so doesn't look as neat.

eBooks Checkout

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A brilliant idea, copy-protected digital library, just need a King County Library card and you can checkout lots of books

King County Library System - Digital Books - Home King County Library System is proud to announce the full integration of hundreds of downloadable digital audio books to this collection for your enjoyment. Browse or search for your favorite titles in OverDrive Audio Book format as you browse the already established Adobe and Mobipocket eBooks catalog. Choose, checkout, and download audio books to your computer, burn to a CD, or transfer to your portable device. The future is here today!

Athlon 64 overclocking tools

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Some I've heard of, others I haven't...

ABXZone.com Forums - A64 overclocking tools. There are several utilities that make it much easier to overclock and tweak an A64 system.

Clockgen - Allows you to change HTT (FSB), CPU multiplier and AGP/PCIe frequency in Windows. This works but you can crash your system very easily.

A64 Tweaker - A program written by Australian overclocker CodeRed. Allows you to change memory settings in Windows. There are also two beta versions: 0.5 and 0.6. CodeRed recommends using the first version (0.31).

MemFreq 1.1 - Program written by German overclocker goddh0r. Will calculate your memory speed, depending on which divider you're using.

Appliances, etc.

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VC Mom.com: Home appliance etc. chat forums. Hat tip to Michelle, a great site on questions and information on not just gardening, but kitchens and everything else.

Exact Audio Copy and Taiwanese CDs

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_My Dad had a bunch of CDs from Taiwan he wanted to rip to his iPod. What a mess figuring out how to do this. Essentially, we are back in the days of code pages. The CDs don't store unicode (unicode was invented after CDs), so you have to know how to set the code pages to Taiwan. Also only Exact Audio Copy and dbPowerAmp and iTunes appear to support this. Musicmatch doesn't like things with different languages. Here's how to set it

Windows XP Internationalization Tips

  1. "Language for non-Unicode applications" is the key phrase, and the dialog goes on to say:

This system setting enables non-Unicode programs to display menus
and dialogs in their native language. It does not affect Unicode
programs, but it does apply to all users of this computer.

Select a language to match the language version of the non-Unicode
programs you want to use:

This is a very important concept, and it will save a lot of grief when you want to look at legacy applications (or brain-damaged applications) that do not handle Unicode.
How it works
In general, it is not possible to know which programs support Unicode and which do not. Therefore, if you are working in Korean:
# some of your programs will show Korean just fine (e.g. Microsoft Office, Notepad).
# other programs will show either question marks or garbage, whenever a Korean character is displayed.

The solution is to set the "System default code page" to Korean, which is the Windows 2000 terminology that describes this dialog box. In Windows XP you set the "Language for non-Unicode programs" to Korean, as shown above, and then Korean will show up correctly in all applications (assuming you have installed Asian support).

This setting is required for Arabic, Hebrew, Asian languages, Russian, and any language whose alphabet is different from Western European

iPod Cases

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My dad loves his iPod 20GB 4G so much he uses it all the time, now he just wants a case that won't blow out the bank. Here are some choices:

Just a Ride

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As the kids use the iPod, its interesting to see musical tastes evolve, here mine and Alex's intersect perfectly with JEM's Just a ride

Jem Reviews on Yahoo! Music Finally Woken, Jem's full-length debut, fleshes out the It All Starts Here EP with six additional tracks. It features the addicting title track, the one that blew away KCRW and Nic Harcourt and got her signed to ATO, and it really is quite brilliant. With a dizzy main loop and loping percussion that undulates slyly beneath Jem's dusky vocal detachment, it sounds like what would happen if Beth Orton started bouncing ideas off of Super Furry Animals' hard drive.

MT-Ban-Numeric-Entities

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a-giâu: MT-Ban-Numeric-Entities. Very clever, this plug-in blogs HTML that uses numerics to disguise spam. Pretty smart.

Another thing to load and also once again proves the value of having a platform on the open internet.

Anti-Spam Plugins

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MT-Blacklist/Comment Spam Clearinghouse: New anti-spam plugins. Jay Allen notes that there are some great additional tools besides MT-Blacklist.

Ones I have to load right away are:

  • MT-Moderate. This moderates all trackbacks. I really need this. With this, I can turn TrackBacks back on!

JBL Onstage breaks

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JBL - Home Audio. I think I'm one of the unlucky ones. If you have an Onstage speaker system from JBL, then the thing either breaks or volume gets stuck. For me, it just doesn't work.

What happens is that there is a chip gets zapped. The conditions are:

a) you have both the on stage and the iPod on at the same time. So its the hot dock scenario.
b) There is a static charge that hits the volume control
c) You are unlucky enough to have the bad chip.

The bad news is that the only way to tell if you have this before it breaks is to go to a special onstagesupport.com and check the serial number.

JBL will fix the thing and you pay shipping.

You've been warned!

Flexible Date Travel

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Flexible Dates. Here is Dad's tool for flexible travel. YOu just select the length of stay to say San Francisco and then it shows you want the cheapest dates are. Pretty neat. The current lowest fare to San Jose for instance is $144 roundtrip!

Europe Travel. These are their special fares from Seattle to London. Good to check since flexible dates doesn't work there.

Airfares

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It has gotten incredibly complicated (vs. easier) to find the lowest fares. The days of just typing into Expedia are over. Here's how we do it and ironically, we ended up on Expedia but who knows:

  • Expedia. This is the place to start for vacation travel mainly because they let you choose each leg in turn the other engines for whatever reason bundle the outbound and inbound legs so you can't mix and match. That's a real pain, for instance, the lowest fares are usually redeyes and there is no way to unselect red eyes. Also they have a relatively strange flexible travel. They are very good at multihop though.
  • Orbitz. Pretty much a subset of Expedia in terms of search flexibility, but sometimes finds unique fares.
  • Farechase. The best thing about this multisite search engine is that you can tell it when you want to depart and it has Javascript so that you can dynamically see how the fares change depending on when you leave.
  • Kayak. This just searches the big engines. The UI is OK in that it lets you pick the search windows and then just launches you to the other site.
  • Individual sites. Sad to say, but many times, going to the underlying site gives the best price like Alaska Air or Northwest

Great Books

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Alex has just been reading up a storm. Here are some of his quick reviews of good books to read. He's been tending towards fantasy and dragons and I have to say these are terrific if not already widely read, here are his most recently read with reviews:

 

The Sims

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TheSims2.com - Home. finally a modern game that Grace can love. This lets you basically play "dress up" on the computer. You can give clothes to a family, plan a picnic, etc. The neatest thing is that The Sims plugs into Sim City, so that they can live in a town.

As Connie says soon, you could synthesize a whole animated movie from choices like this. A great point about the future on entertainment.

Via Luke

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mini-itx.com - news - VIA launches "Luke" Platform

VIA today launched their "Luke" Corefusion Processing Platform at the Embedded Systems Conference 2005 in San Francisco, California. Luke combines both an EdenT-N CPU and CN400 Northbridge into one convenient aluminium package, reducing board real estate beyond Nano-ITX dimensions.

This thing would make a great PC Mini. Its tiny and can run at 1GHz, has MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 decoding. It is really tiny.

AMD Venice and San Diego next month

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X-bit labs - Hardware news - Venice and San Diego Already around the Corner.

The first announcement stated that the current D0 revision will be replaced with the new E3 revision for the following CPUs that are the transition from Newcastle -> Venice that will start shipping April 4:

* Athlon 64 3000+ (ADA3000BIBOX) -> Athlon 64 3000+ (ADA3000BPBOX);
* Athlon 64 3200+ (ADA3200BIBOX) -> Athlon 64 3200+ (ADA3200BPBOX);
* Athlon 64 3500+ (ADA3500BIBOX) -> Athlon 64 3500+ (ADA3500BPBOX).

Here I would like to stress that this core stepping used to be called E0 by many sources, although AMD decided to stay with E3 index. The idea of this core stepping remains the same independent of the name: new CPUs on Venice core with 512MB L2 cache will acquire SSE3 support and enhanced memory controller, and the most important thing will be much higher frequency potential.

Then on April 15, we have a Athlon 4200+ (the renamed FX line) that is codenamed San Diego that is like Venice but has a 1MB cache instead of 512MB.

These will all ship in mid April.

Lance out Paris-Nice

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ThePaceline.com - Lance News Item

Following the conclusion of today's third stage of Paris-Nice, Johan Bruyneel, the sports manager of the Discovery Channel pro cycling team, announced that Lance Armstrong will not start Thursday's fourth stage of the race.

"Lance woke up this morning with a sore throat and with the cold weather, he began to feel worse throughout the day," said Bruyneel. "When we returned to the hotel, he began to show signs of a fever and appeared to be getting worse so we decided he should return to (his home in) Girona (Spain) immediately.

Machine Check

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STOP: 0x0000009C (0x00000004, 0x00000000, 0xb2000000, 0x00020151) .... Once I turned off automatic reboot, this is the error I got on the DFI GME855-MGF.

What it means in short is that the Pentium processor threw a specific exception (Machine Check Exception) meaning that it detected there was an internal CPU-specific error.

The most frequent reason is overclocking (yup, I'm overclocked from 1.8GHz to 2.15GHz), bad or over stressed power supply (so voltages fluctuate), fan failure or bad memory.

Net, net, I turned down the overclocking from a 18x multiplier to 17x against a 200MHz data bus and things seem very stable.

Interesting that this machine check then causes a continuous failure to boot with a different exception in the nVidia driver.

Any way, you are warned, if you get this, on a Pentium M 735, then turn down the overclocking.

Summer Camps

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There are as many camps as there are kids. Right now, I'd say that you are just missing the summer camp season. The main resource for this is the annual open house at St. Thomas. Was last month though. You can also find this post at http://tongfamily.com

Connie's approach to this BTW is pretty cool. She lets the kids pick three weeks worth of camps and they can thus decide and she tries to get them to pick different things. Try to pick one thing you've liked from last time and one thing that is new.

I don't know the ages of your kids, so maybe I'll hit the high points for kids 4-10 and which aren't too expensive:

  • Seattle Zoo Camp. These are great for the younger kids mainly. They do half and full day. Who wouldn't love the zoo after all. A good program that's been running for a while. Not hard to get into. _BTW, can you believe they have the URL zoo.org???
  • Museum of Flight Camp. This is mainly for boys (not to best sexist, but observational). They do a day long. The kids seem to love the experiments and building a rocket. Lots of different camps. The highlight for older kids is that you can fly a real play and run a space shuttle mission from their NASA look alike

For the more nerdy:

  • Chess Camp. Believe it or not the average kid ends up loving this. George Orlov runs a great one. Sounds like, why would people want to stay inside, but most kids (again boys) seem to just love it because they play outside, play games, etc.
  • Seattle Camps. The Seattle city runs the most incredible camps. Alex has done track. Calvin has done golf which he loved. They are more mellow and well run. Montlake for instance has a very strong program. Baseball camp for instance is very fun.
  • SYC Sailing Camp. More for older kids, but the boys really loved this one. You really sail all the time and it is a wonderful location. It is for members only, but they do allow folks outside to register after the members have their dibs.

School Survey

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They are a really great bunch. Andy and Chris are working hard to make the world a better place for parents. They've got a cool new site.

They are doing a survey of schools something really needed as folks try to figure out where to go preschool, elementary school, etc. Take the survey now.

OK, Jennie installed iTunes and the next thing I know, I start getting a strange stop code, the machine just blue screens and then on every subsequent restart has the same problem called the NO_MORE_IRP_STACK_LOCATIONS Stop 0x00000035. Lots of digging to figure out why, the long and short of it is that I can boot to safe mode, uninstall the nVidia 6800GT driver and then the machine boots and you can reinstall the driver.

This happens mainly when playing games, so it feels like I've found some bug somehow and I'm not sure how iTunes caused it, but it does seem like that is a coincidence.

Not clear how to fix, but installed the 71.x beta drivers and that did not help.

Other possible causes are noted below:

Common Stop Codes. NO_MORE_IRP_STACK_LOCATIONS 0x35 With this code, if you've added a new virus scanner or someone has accessed a shared volume over the network for the first time on the machine, the Server device driver can be at fault. The Server device driver constructs I/O request packets with a slot for every device driver on the path to the disk. Sometimes the number of I/O request packets the Server device driver allocates is insufficient, resulting in this Stop Code. Try increasing the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\ServicesLanmanServer\IrpStackSize setting to a number higher than 4 (or whatever it's set to) and see whether the problem goes away.
* USB Device plugged in. It's a uncommon error that you'll likely to get if you have any sort of USB device plugged in during the installation. the problem is caused by the invalid IO driving loading paremeter for the certain USB device. Also if you have a copy of "GO BACK" installed on the current HDD get rid of it. If none of these two solutions fixes your problem i would try a complete reformat of the HDD from a bootup disk.
* Bad Memory or driver. Like me this fellow found out that it was a bad video driver. With me, something keeps corrupting it for once I reinstall the nVidia driver, the problem returns. Other alternative is bad ram or too much overclocking (right now my 1.8GHz Pentium M is overclocked to 2.15GHz and the memory from DDR333 to DDR400).

So that something fun to try, fixing some mysterious registry setting.

Other folks have found the bug with Norton Ghost and USB 2.0 flash drives, but that doesn't seem related. There is also an old post on Windows NT having to do with Intellitype 2.0 but that doesn't seem related either.

Sim City 4 fixed

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SimCity™ 4 - SimCity.com. Finally got this to work on an ASUS A7N8X-X motherboard by vI had the same problem. It was the nVidia sound driver. Loading the latest driver (the 5.10 unified) helped but still crashed every hour or so vs. every five minutes.

Finally solved by going to the Realtek.com.tw site and downloading the sound driver for the 650ALC and removing the nVidia sound driver.

Trackback Spam

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Is anyone else getting mountains of trackback spam. With comment moderation and Typekey authentication for comments, those aren't a problem. (Of course with IE, most folks can't even make a comment because of cookie problems, you have to delete all cookies to make typekey.com work).

But, the trackback stuff is completely unmoderated except for keyword searching. Right now I'm getting probably 20 trackback spam per day across all sites and the number is increasing exponentially.

So...trackbacks are going to get turned off for all new entries by default. Sorry all. Most folks aren't using trackbacks anyway, they are kind of a power feature.

OCZ 4000 VX

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AnandTech: OCZ VX Memory + DFI nForce4 = DDR533 at 2-2-2

OCZ VX Gold is the best performing memory that we have tested on the Athlon 64 platform. At the same speed and same timings, it significantly outperforms any other memory that we have tested on A64. VX does not run at the fastest memory speeds that we have found in our benchmarks - quite a few memories based on Samsung TCCD or Hynix memory chips reach significantly higher speeds than the DDR538 of OCZ VX Gold. However, at DDR534 2-2-2-6 timings, no memory that we have tested outperforms VX. VX is so fast that 533 actually outperforms memory that have achieved DDR600 or more in our memory tests.

If you are a raving enthusiast, you will have to have OCZ VX memory. If you are considering a DFI nForce4 purchase, then VX should be at the top of your memory list.

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