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Well, its time of year, if a run to the Target isn’t satisfying enough, it is amazing

Check out toysplash.com which might not have the best prices, but the simplest selection and shipping is free too

If you have glasses, then aquagoggles.com has presciption lense up to -10 diopters. Plus a sale on pro goggles for $5.

Nerf guns as reviewed by Popular Mechanics is really terrific and accurate. The upcopming Nerf N-Strike Raider with a 35 round magazine looks amazing with the Vulcan belt fed being pretty cool but it jams easily. And the Maverick is really fun. Calvin recommends the Nerf Longshot. Alex says the Magstrike is absolutely amazing. I agree. Amazon has it all. The Magstrike is now just $17 from Target.

Well, been laboring away for a week on this. It has never been easier with iPhoto, iMovie and iDVD to do this. Remarkable really. Here are some notes:

1. Import the movie with iMovie, it supports lots and lots of formats. Only bummer is that older camcorders need Firewire. You have to either find a Firewire to USB adapter which is pretty expensive at $119. If you hve a MacBook Pro, you can get a $15 FireWire to CardBus adapter.
2. iMovie makes it easy to take any iPhoto collection and then when you drag it, it makes a slideshow. Usually, the Ken Burns effect is on and isn’t right, so you have tweak that particularly for portrait
3. Adding a soundtrack isn’t super well documented. You create a playlist with iTunes, iMovie can see it, but if you drag it to the background, it is background, if you drag the sound to a clip, then it is tied to the clip. There are a bunch of parameters for “ducking” which means turning down one sound track for another.
4. iMovie has a strange way of saving projects. First, when you import, it puts it in a magic directory in your Home directory called ~/Movies/iMovie Events. This is where all the raw video is kept. iMovie is wonderful because all edits are non-destructive, you can always get back to your original clips. The edit data is actually stored in ~/Movies/iMovie Projects.
5. If you want to make a backup, iMovie doesn’t have any Save As. Instead, you have to choose File/Duplicate Projects and then click on the name to rename it. By default, it adds, “1, 2, 3…” to the end everytime you do this so that works.
6. When it is time to export, there are million different ways. The easiest is Share to iTunes which makes a nice compressed. m4v file. If you want to create a DVD and it is only one moive, then choose Send to iDVD. If you have lots of clips, don’t do that. Instead, you have to save to something called Media Browser which is a shared space that iDVD has for putting lots of clips in.
7. When you start iDVD, you get a them, then you can browse through Media and you should see your movies there. To put a button on to start the movie, just drag and drop the movie onto the main menu on the left. It is that easy.
8. If you are making lots of copies, you want to tell iDVD to make an image file. This is called a .iso and is just the flat version of the DVD. Then you use Disk Utility (how unintuitive, it feels like the thing that is for looking at hard drive repair), but it also lets you File/Open Image and then from there, you can burn DVDs to your hearts content.

Finally decided after two TomTom’s have been stolen (one smash and grab in the front of the house and one from the glove compartment when I left the car accidentally unlocked), I would look to see what else is out there. They are all pretty close now Magellan, TomTom and Garmin. But, Garmin according to one review has a better routing engine while TomTom is worse. The other thing is that I wished I’d locked the devices like the Garmin because once they are stolen, they know where you live and where you go! http://www.sciuridae.co.uk/understanding_garmin_lock.htm points out they have a cool lock feature. You either have to be in a particular spot to reset or know the PIN number.

OTOH the Garmin my brother uses, locks up when you are moving. Ugh, really pretty useless. This is called Safe Mode and apparently you can disable it.

So the only question is which Garmin to get. That’s a little bit complicated. If you want one that does real-time traffice via MSN Direct (TomTom and Magellan do this via the Internet and 3G, while Garmin uses the Microsoft proprietary network). So what’s the best model, in comparing the nuvi 785T, 885T and the 1350T at $500 list and $350 list, they look confusingly similar. Same size screen etc.

Here are the differences:

The cheaper Nuvi 1350T is newer, its thinner 0.6″ thick vs. 0.8″ thick and designed for portability, its main drawback is that it doesn’t store routes in it, so isn’t that useful for everyday use. It deleted the MP3 and audio book player and the FM transmitter. I’ve actually found these pretty useless because most of the time there isn’t a free station.

The Nuvi 885T has voice input, but doesn’t have ecoRoutes which tries to find routes that use less gas.

The Nuvi 775T is another puzzle, it has 3-D buildings compared with 885T and has more advanced Bluetooth (A2DP).

Net, net, for regular car use, the 1350T is nearly wonderful and much cheaper, but they obviously crippled the storing of routes. Does that really matter? Personally, I don’t use routes that much. That is, normally, I just go from one point to another

please call after 10:30 AM the next business day to check on your item.

When contacting the lost and found, it would be helpful to know the:

Description of article lost color, brand name, fabric

Route number of the bus

Date and Time item was lost

Where you boarded the bus

Where you were seated on the bus

General Lost & Found information

Location: 1st floor of King Street Center, at 201 S. Jackson Street, Seattle, WA 98104-3856.

Office hours: Monday – Friday 9:00 AM-5:00 PM; closed 1:00 PM – 2:00 PM each day

Phone number: 206-553-3000; TTY: Washington State Relay Service at 711

All items lost today, if found, will be received by the Lost and Found the following business day-please call after 10:30 to allow time to sort newly received items.

Found items are held for 30 days from the date of loss.

via Metro’s Lost & Found.

This eSATA adapter now seems to work on the Mac. So you need to download the latest drivers from http://www.rosewill.com/products/d_814/productDetail.htm

Rosewill RC-605 problems | Tongfamily Website

I got this Rosewill eSATA so I could plug fast drives into my MacBook Pro. Well, like lots of third party stuff it doesn’t really work. It is faster though, but you can only plug one drive in

Find local network devices using ping | Networking | Mac OS X Hints | Macworld

The command line ping command on Mac OS X allows you to find all the network devices in your home; just send a normal ping to a special IP address on your network. First figure out your TCP/IP address for your computer, go to System Preferences/Network and see it, normally it is something like 192.168.1.xxx. start Terminal (easiest way is to go to Spotlight on the upper left and type in)

terminal

In order to do this, you need to know two things—your network’s IP address setup and the subnet mask value. Both of these values are easily seen in the Network control panel, in the IP Address and Subnet Mask fields, respectively. In my case, my Mac’s IP address is 192.168.1.77, so the network is using a 192.168.1.xxx sequence, and the subnet mask is 255.255.255.0. The special ping address can be figured out by taking any zero values from the subnet mask, changing them to 255, and then putting them into the same relative position in the IP address field. In my case, the last digit of my subnet mask is zero, so I change that to 255, and put it into the last position of my IP address, then ping that address:

ping 192.168.1.255

Press Control-C to stop it. But what if that’s not enough? What if you’ve got a lot of devices, and you can’t really be sure which is which? After running the broadcast ping, you can then run the arp (which is short for Address Resolution Protocol ) command. If you use arp with the -a option, it will show everything that it knows about. In my case, it looks like this:

arp -a


I’m actually at a computer typing. Which I never do anymore. Too much time reading everything on the the iPhone, but here are some quick reviews of things:

Nightlife in Seattle. A buddy asked me about this, it sure ain’t NYC or LA and there are no online reviews, but it looks like the dance club trio are Venom, Trinity and Ibiza and the order really seems to vary.

Digital photo frames. These are too ubiquitous to review. I got a set for $50 each at Costco and they were terrible. Screens were so dim, you couldn’t see a thing. Samsung SPF-87H might be better. 1GB internal memory, powered by USB cable, 8″ screen and 500:1 contrast for $130. To me, I’d pay a little more. Also, it can be a secondary monitor for your computer.

Compact projectors. BenQ GP1 Mini Projector is the first one that uses LEDs and no lamps. It is just 1.4lb and is $500. So great for the office for portable movie watching! At these prices, just buy one.

Wireless router. Verizon MiFi 2200 for $100 and then $60/month you get 5GB of bandwidth on the Verizon network. The little credit card thing is a Wifi hotspot that let’s you have wifi just about anywhere and you don’t need to put a goofy card in your laptop. Just turn the thing on and keep it in your backpack. Amazing device in that it is battery powered and amazingly it really works.

Final aside for a digital movie project, I had to go back to an old 15″ MacBook Pro. I had forgotten how much I really like the higher quality screen that are on the MBPs and MBAs vs. the MacBook. Sign. The 13″ screen is OK and great for normal use, but once you get use to the brightness and color quality of the higher end ones, it is hard to go back. Still, the MB is better than 99% of other notebooks out there

Arrgh I knew I shouldn’t have put it in, but got a mini-CD with a copy of Photo Rescue (a $29 value!) which I need, so I just stuck it into the MacBook and it is stuck. http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=406613 says never do this. But how was I to know?

The solution is ridiculous. Turn off your MacBook and then give it a good shake the mini CD comes out.

I lost a Transcend 16GB 300x card. I’m sooo sad. Not only did it cost $$$, but it was absolutely filled with photos I had not yet downloaded.

Sportsphotoguy is one of the few folks who are actually texting these high end cards. These very fast cards do make a difference in performance. And most of the manufacturers specs are meaningless, so here are his tests, so here is his list. I had previously used the San Disk Extreme III which is a 20MBps card and the Transcend which is a 24MBps card.

In my Canon 5D Mark II, the question is what transfer mode it is using. These are with the fast UDMA 4.0. Here is a list of the card, their maximum frames per second on a Nikon D300 and the overall throughput when connected to a computer:

• San Disk Extreme IV.  6.3 fps, 28MBps
• Sony UDMA 300x. 5.5 fps, 24MBps
• PNY Optima Pro.  5,  24.
• Transcend 300x UDMA. 5,  24.
• Lexar Pro UDMA. 6, 23.
• Pretec 433x. 5.5fps,  23
• ATP Pro Max II UDMA. 5, 22.
• Pretec 333x. 5, 22
• Lexar Professional 233x. 5,  21
• A-Data Turbo 350x. 5, 20

The SanDisk Extreme IV is the best quality at $203, for a limited time a buydig you get a $60 rebate in the form of a visa card that is prepaid. But you have to mail it in etc.

I’m so depressed. I must have left the car unlocked, but got back and the glove compartment was missing my TomTom 720 and Escort 9500i. So sad! But, I can’t prove it was stolen, maybe I’m just absent minded. I need both in this car, so what is the state of the art. Well, quite a bit has changed in the last 2 years:

In GPS, the big news is that Magellan is out of the business and now all the big guys have a GPS Map Subscription so that you can now for about $4/month get updated maps. Really welcome.

The second is that the latest ones have a cellular modem builtin, so you can get real time traffic updates, you can use a real search engine like Google. And you can go on the web, find something and then send it to your GPS. So you have the really cutting edge and cheap in the TeleNav, the more expensive but cutting edge with cellular interconnection in the 740 LIVE and then the polished 855T with MSN Direct and not cellular so less of a growth path.

TomTom 740 LIVE vs TeleNav Shotgun are the two with them. The TomTom GO 740 LIVE Review has a user interface I like, but of course it is the most expensive. You pay $10/month for the traffic and then about $4/month for the GPS map updates. Plus $400 for the base unit. They have figured out how to get into the subscription business. The best choice for ease of use. It also has this feature called IQ Routes which uses the real world estimated speeds. Won the Best of CES 2009 because of its interconnection.

The TeleNav Shotgun is hardware that comes directly from the map vendor. Kind of continues the trend where the actual content people are building hardware like Amazon is with the Kindle. It is risky in that it is version one, but it is much cheaper. $300 direct from Telenav but most importantly map updates are free and the traffic service is $12/month ($10/month for two years). However in terms of usability, it certainly is version one. GPS Magazine sums it up well by saying it is slow to update

GPS Magazine really likes Garmin. It has the Nuvi 885T which has voice recognition that apparently really works. Nuvi 765T is best all around (775T doesn’t have bluetooth hands-free, personally, I’ve found hands-free to not work well, too noisy). Its biggest deal is a lifetime udpate for maps. 4 times per year for a single price. Cool. They have a ton of models, but the high end ones are 7×5Ts. It doesn’t have an internet connected device, but the Nuvi 880for instance is more polished in terms of user interface, etc. It is also brighter than the TomTom. Also the TomTom’s routing engine was worst compared with the nuvi 780. Garmin BTW uses MSN special traffic service instead of a general mobile phone connection.

Radartest Things are little easier with radar detectors as they are evolving less slowly. The big change is the move to having a database of speed cameras so you can get alerts and also noticing point sources that are falsing all the time. The 9500i got phenomenal reviews, now the 9500 ix seems just as good particularly with Southern car parts mount. I’ve found the suction cups are really bad on this thing. They have a bundle for $500 that include all this stuff. BTW if you have a 9500i (still!), Veilguy says for $90 you can upgrade it.

And if you are worried about laser, which is too fast, then you can get Veil to reduce reflections on your license plate and headlights or you can even get a …New Escort Passport 9500ix

The Blinder Xtreme units have proven to me to be an extremely reliable and dependable protection. The latest J16 versions of the M25 family have only improved over the original M10s and M20s and are very reasonably priced, IMO.

If you wish to have direct integration into your existing Passport 9500ix, perhaps you would be well to consider the Laser Shifter ZR4 [which also adds a rear shifter (ie; laser jammer head]. This unit is also reasonably priced and if its reliability proves similar to its predecessor, the Shifter ZR3, you won’t be disappointed, either.