The Richter Scale^®

Everyone in our family of four has their own Nintendo DS Lite. My wife has a pink one, my son and I have black (Onyx) DS Lites, and my daughter has my wife’s white DS Lite hand-me-down.

My wife generally uses hers for playing Sudoku and Brain Age, the kids play Nintendogs, Pokemon, and a bevy of other games, and I use mine mostly for Age of Empires while exercising on our recumbent stationary bicycle.

However, last week while on a partial vacation in Santa Fe, New Mexico (where we had three wonderful dinners with with old friend Ed Bott (a CNET blogger and author of one of Amazon.com’s top selling computer books, Windows Vista Inside Out) and his wife Judy), we discovered a new DS title (new for us) from Destination Software - Uno / Skipbo / Uno Freefall. Uno and Skipbo are family favorites in traditional card games when we travel, and the idea that we could do away with the cards themselves, and play together electronically was just too tough to resist.

We had to buy four copies of the game at $19.99 a pop, but boy what fun it was. First, it prevented my son from trying to cheat (which he sometimes tries when things aren’t going his way), and second, it let us play while non-adjacent (or at least not near a flat surface). See photo above of Linda and the kids in a 3-player Uno game at the Albuquerque airport last Friday.

The coolest thing, though, was when we were playing during a ground delay on the plane. My daughter and I had been upgraded to first class and were in row 3, while Linda and our son were back in row 9 in coach, and we were all playing together. The only downer was when they told us to turn off all electronic devices in preparation for take-off. You can’t play with networked DSes (or PSPs) in flight, sadly.

There are a bunch of variations of Uno and Skipbo in the cartridges, and the person who is hosting the game gets to choose which variations to apply. I tend to be a traditionalist and select all the defaults, whereas my son turns on all the different wild cards (many of which we have no idea what they do, and have to learn by observing their effects when they are played).

I also picked up an extra copy of Mario Kart DS so I could race wirelessly against my kids (you can play with multiple people if there’s only a single cartridge via a game download function, but you have to wait a while for the download, and then only have a couple of tracks to choose from). We played at Macy’s in San Juan waiting for the girls to shop. That was a fun way to while away the time too.

The extra bonus of all this wireless Nintendo DS Lite gaming, besides being able to play video games as a family, is getting my wife, who is typically video game averse, into the action.

I highly recommend the Nintendo DS Lite be provided to all family members, not just the young ones you want to distract during a nice meal out (which we do as well).

And then take a look at Destination Software’s Uno-related titles, as well as the various multi-player Mario games, such Mario Kart DS, for some more fun.

As some of you know, my wife Linda suffers from Rheumatoid Arthritis in her right knee. During her recent semi-annual visit back to New Hampshire to see her Rheumatologist, it was decided that it was time for her to get her knee completely replaced. That much needed surgery has now been scheduled for April 5th - just about 5 weeks from now, back in New Hampshire.

The net result is that Linda will be off-island for about 2 months for pre-surgery, surgery, recovery, and physical therapy.

And during that time, I will be both mom and dad to the kids, providing the chauffeur services that Linda normally provides (to/from school and activities).

During the week that Linda was gone in January, I learned quickly that I could manage about 3-4 hours of working time during the average day, and the rest of it was shot. And working late at night is not an option because I need to be up at 6:30am to get the kids ready and off to school.

So, in anticipation of not being able to get a lot of work done when Linda leaves towards the end of March, I had to cancel my planned press trips to attend the Game Developer’s Conference (GDC) in San Francisco and the Photo Marketing Association (PMA) show in Las Vegas, both starting next week. As such, I will necessarily be reporting from afar. And I still have a huge backlog of blog items and other projects to work on too, so maybe it’s good that I’m not going.

I am not sure how soon I will be able to travel after Linda (our very own Bionic Woman after surgery) returns to Bonaire in late May - a lot depends on how mobile she is, and whether she can drive, but I suspect I will be staying with the kids (and home with Linda) through the end of June, which is when school ends here on Bonaire. That’s a good thing though, as I am already starting to spend part of my afternoons getting our daughter ready for home schooling (she starts 7th grade as a home schooler in August), and doing projects with our son as well. This will also be the longest contiguous stretch I have spent with the kids since 2001 or so. That part’s a bit sad in retrospect - the last few years have been a whirlwind of travel, with me typically being away more often than not, although last year we did manage to spend almost three months traveling with the kids.

Before I launch into my latest Tech Annoyance, let me say some of this is probably my own fault for not researching as thoroughly as I should have had I been more cognizant of the potential pitfalls. The annoyance is two-fold, stemming from a combination of Dell’s design-your-own system options, and a lack of easily locatable documentation.

Part one of this is that I ordered a Dell system with 4GB of RAM, but because the system also has the NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GX2 Quad-SLI hardware (which requires 2GB of memory mapped address space) I only get to use 2GB of RAM, and have the other 2GB just sitting there collecting dust. Dell’s on-line system creation system should have warned me of this, as should have the sales person I spoke with. Interestingly, the order system did warn me that I had no more PCIe slots left when I wanted to add the AGEIA physics accelerator to the system, so it works properly for some combinations of things.

A Dell technical support representative indicated that as my Dell XPS 710’s quad core Intel CPU also had 64-bit support, should I get a 64-bit version of, say, Vista, then I would have full access to all 4GB of RAM I purchased. Nice to know that, but not very helpful as 64-bit OSes were not offered by Dell during the system configuration on-line. I am using Windows XP Media Center Edition at present.

The other technology annoyance was that this great QuadSLI NVIDIA GeForce 7950 GX2 dual-board set will not allow for dual display monitors when the SLI-acceleration is enabled. So I have to choose between running really fast graphics for games on one screen, and my more regular day-to-day work on two screens as I am used to. If I could dynamically switch between the two modes, it might not be so bad, but going from non-SLI to SLI mode requires a reboot of the system, and that is truly annoying.

So in the meantime, my second 24” Dell LCD panel is being used as the display for my office Xbox 360. Not ideal, but at least I don’t feel like I have completely wasted my money on the second display. Now I only need time to actually play games on the Dell XPS 710 and the Xbox 360.

At last month’s CES show, I had an opportunity to obtain samples of two products to help us mere mortals keep our notebook computer, smart phone, and PDA displays clean and crisp, without all those finger print smudges. Those products were Bart 1 Products’ “Peel & Clean” and Monster Cable’s Travel-Size ScreenClean.

The products serve a similar function in keep LCD screens clean, but Peel & Clean provides an additional function, namely cleaning the keyboard of the respective device. Peel & Clean works via a foam pad with adhesive on both sides. You peel a non-stick liner off one side, apply it to the keyboard of the notebook computer, peel the liner off the other side, and then close the notebook. And while not in the written instructions, Bart 1’s owner, Paulette Bartone (hence the name of the company), showed me that you could turn your notebook upside down, tap on the bottom to loosen any food, dirt, crumbs, hair, etc. that was in the keyboard so that it too would get stuck to the adhesive and be removed. The adhesive coating is supposed to remove all debris from the keys of the keyboard and the display. Once you open up the notebook, you remove it, and if your adhesive pad is not too dirty, you can reapply the liners and use it again at a later date (or on another notebook).

I followed the instructions, and while it removed all the dirt I could see, the results were not nearly as spectular as during the demo at CES (which featured a really grubby keyboard). But then again, I tend not to eat above my notebook keyboard. It should be noted that at least in the cases I have observed, the predominant cause of messy notebook screens is when human body oils left by fingers on the keyboard are transferred to the display when the lid is closed. The idea behind Peel & Clean is to reduce or even remove those oil/dirt deposits, but they go a step further and also provide this great “non-adhesive daily liner”, which provides both cushioning of the display, and a barrier separating the keyboard and display when the screen is down. For me, that’s probably the best feature of the Peel & Clean product.

Also provided is a “Smudgy” cloth intended to allow you to clean and buff your LCD display, but I found in my case it actually smeared the smudges on my screen more than it cleaned them.

Enter Monster’s ScreenClean product. It includes a LCD/display safe spray (doesn’t contain any alcohol either) which stays where you spray it, and you then use the included non-abrasive MicroFiber cloth to clean the display onto which one previously sprayed the ScreenClean fluid. And I must say it works great - better than any other screen cleaner I have ever tried on my LCD. No streaking, no staining, very fast to use and clean with. And it is also available in a big size for use on large screen TVs.

I liked the idea behind the Peel & Clean product, but perhaps because I am reasonably fastidious, my notebook doesn’t seem to get dirty enough to benefit from the cleaning power of the adhesive sheets. But the protective liner alone is probably worth the price of the product. As such I give Bart 1’s Peel & Clean a 6.5 out of 10.0 on The Richter Scale. Peel & Clean for Laptops is $15.99 and for PDAs and smart phones it’s $8.99, ordered directly from Bart 1 Products.

Monster Cable has a reputation for solid, but expensive products, but Monster ScreenClean in the travel size is $17.33 from Amazon.com, and even less from a few other outline outlets I looked at. That’s the cheapest Monster product I am aware of. However that may be, it does an excellent job on my number one notebook dirt problem, which is a dirty screen (and my Sony VAIOs use highly reflective XBrite displays, so fingerprints can be very noticeable). I give Monster Cable’s Travel Size ScreenClean a very rare 10.0 out of 10.0 on The Richter Scale. What pushed it to the top is that the Travel Size is 1.52 fl. oz., and non-flammable and can therefore even be taken in one’s airplane carry-on (even as part of the TSA’s 3-1-1 requirements for liquids), so you really can travel with it.

I have just posted a handful of my articles and commentaries from Jon Peddie’s TechWatch, an industry newsletter I write for regularly over on my Richter Scale Articles site.

Those articles/commentaries are as follows:

From the December 11, 2006 issue of TechWatch:

- What Was Significant in 2006
- Forecasts for 2007

From the January 8, 2007 issue of TechWatch:
- Bill Gates’ Digital Lifestyle Vision - Putting the Pieces Together
- LG’s New BH100 Super Multi Blue Player for HD-DVD and Blu-ray
- One size fits all, says Warner Bros. - New THD disc is both HD-DVD and Blu-ray Disc
- To HD, Or Not To HD, That Is The Question

Hope you enjoy them even if they are a little dated (I only repost articles after the issue the articles are in has been superceded by a newer issue).

Sunday was a pretty miserable day for me. The Terabyte RAID disk array in my Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4-based file server I use here at home suffered a major drive problem that was not resolvable using the RAID system. In plain English, I had a system crash and data loss. I discovered this around noon, and had to cancel my plans to attend a Superbowl party hosted by a Colts fans here on Bonaire, as well as another social engagement later that evening. Instead I spent the day downloading new Red Hat install CDs, backing up my backup (I only lost about a day’s worth of data), setting up a temporary replacement file server, and building the RAID-based server from scratch. I ultimately had to rebuild it yet a second time, as the drive that was causing the crash was not the one I originally thought. By the time I was mildly operational it was 5am on Monday.

At which point I realized I had completely missed the Superbowl and, more importantly to me, the Superbowl commercials, one of my annual guilty pleasures.

Well, I spent yesterday in additional recovery mode, and am now catching up on my e-mail and work, again, but thanks to iFilm, I have been able to watch all the 2007 Superbowl commercials without the long gaps of football in between. My favorite is the Blockbuster Mouse Ad. The Snickers Kiss and Bud Light Auctioneer ones are pretty good too.

So here’s another one of my current TechAnnoyances. And this one is probably all Microsoft’s fault too. Late last year I bought a Hewlett-Packard z565 Digital Entertainment Computer (DEC). That’s a fully loaded Windows XP Media Center Edition PC designed to reside in one’s living room among all the other A/V toys one has (never mind that it’s very deep and wouldn’t fit on the shelf under my TV).

The Microsoft weltanschau (world view) is that all media should pass through a media PC, incidentally, which doesn’t work very well with a family that just wants to be able to turn on the TV and watch it without having to also boot or wake-up a PC and Media Center software to do that. But that’s a separate annoyance.

My particular gripe is that the remote control for the HP DEC’s media center functionality happens to emit a number of the same coded commands as the remote for the Xbox 360. And in my living room, both of these devices are situated close to each other (not that moving one a few feet would make much difference).

The one remote control button which really causes me grief is the On/Off button, as when I power off the HP DEC (which puts it into standby mode), on comes my Xbox 360. Conversely, if I use the remote to power on my Xbox 360, the power state on the HP DEC changes too. I’ve taken to burning the extra calories it takes - all two of them, to go and manually switch on or off the HP DEC and Xbox 360 just to avoid this Tech Annoyance. But sometimes I forget (or my kids do), and on comes the Xbox 360 when you don’t need it…

This morning a friend called to say that humpback whales had been spotted in the water off Bonaire’s Pink Beach area, which is only about a 10 minute drive from my house. Humpbacks are exceedingly rare here, so I grabbed Linda, a tripod, and a camera with a big lens, and headed out.

We saw two whales breach right as we arrived, but did not get a chance to take pictures - they went back under too quickly.

So while waiting for them to resurface (they didn’t do that where we could see them, and we had to leave after about 25 minutes), I spotted the above pictured special denizens of Bonaire, Caribbean Flamingos - more exactly a flight of them - coming back from feeding in nearby Venezuela to nest here on Bonaire.

The wide shot is what I shot with my Nikon D2x with a Nikon 80-400mm VR lens at 400mm. The close-up is a crop of that same image. Note the nice Bonaire scene in the cropped shot - blue and turquoise waters, sunny skies, a dive boat in the background, and of course, flamingos.

Living in the modern age we do, we become dependent on our technological tools working properly. And when they don’t work like we expect them to, we get annoyed. Case in point - Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0 and capturing HDV (high definition digital video) content with scene detections.

As part of my raft of technology investments last year, I bought a Sony HDR-HC3 Handycam - a very nice and compact HD camcorder. I also upgraded my years old copy of Adobe Premiere (a top of the line video editing tool) so that I could attempt to edit my high definition video content.

One key requirement of being able to edit video on a computer is getting it into the computer in the first place. And Premiere Pro 2.0 has a very nice Capture utility that allows one to connect a FireWire (IEEE 1384) cable to one’s camcorder, and digitally capture the video off the tape. Another nice feature Premiere Pro 2.0 has is something called “Scene Detect”, which looks at the time codes your camcorder records onto the tape and when it detects a time shift, it ends one clip and starts a new one. This is a lot easier that the old way, which was to manually figure out where each clip’s in and out (start and end) points are and manually feed them into the software. Scene detection is nothing very new, but it is very useful.

However, here’s where the annoyance part comes it - Premiere Pro 2.0’s scene detection doesn’t work with HDV input. After scouring the Web, I found two solutions:

1) Use an external program to do the capture, like the free HDVSplit (I tried that and it worked for about 10 minutes before crashing, but it did work, and I’m sure I could have tweaked some settings to make it not crash); or

2) Switch the camcorder into DV (non-HD) output mode, use Premier Pro in DV capture mode where scene detect works to capture all the scenes on the tape, export a batch list of all the start and stop times of the DV captures, switch the camera into HDV output mode and then import the batch list of clips to use for recapturing all the HDV content in HDV resolution and format (see here for details). This approach, which is really more than twice the work (and time) than being able to do the HDV scene detect capture normally, does work. However, I found that you need to leave a dummy clip at the front of your tape, and a dummy clip at the end (otherwise you have to manually capture the first and last clips, based at least on the two tapes I captured this way).

Now, I ask you… Does this make sense? That a multi-hundred dollar piece of software which offers this scene detect capability in one older (DV) mode of operation can’t do it in the current mode (HDV), but a free piece of software can? Damn, I’m annoyed.

I’ll be back soon with more recent Tech Annoyances.

Last night I tried an experiment to see if I could get relatively inexpensive (sub-$300) HD-DVD playback going on my PC. The components of this experiment, other than the PC, involved an Xbox 360 HD-DVD Player and Cyberlink’s PowerDVD Ultra software.

I’m pleased to say the experiment worked. The $199.99 Xbox 360 HD-DVD Player (which I raved about here) is a USB 2.0 device. I merely plugged in the HD-DVD drive, waited for Windows XP to recognize it (I allowed Windows to go to the Windows web site to look for drivers too), and after around a minute or two, the drive was fully installed and usable as a DVD drive.

The next step was to install the $99.95 Cyberlink PowerDVD Ultra software. The current version of the software (pictured above) installs for either HD-DVD or Blu-ray Disc support - you have to choose, although company officials tell me that as soon as next month, a free upgrade will be made available to all purchasers of the current version which will support both versions for folks fortunate enough to have both HD-DVD and Blu-ray Disc drives in their PC.

The PowerDVD Ultra software comes with a tool called HD Advisor, which scans your system for compatible drives and to ensure your system is powerful enough to do a real-time decode of the high definition formats. The minimum requirements are actually not insubstantial, as processing high definition content requires a lot of CPU and graphics horsepower. However, if you do have a suitable system, it works very well. The only minor annoyance I found was the inability to turn off subtitles, but I suspect that is user error (or at least a lack of reading relevant documentation).

The other nice thing about this combo is that you get a free copy of the remake of King Kong in HD-DVD (at least as of last week), and a spare Xbox 360 remote control (not much use on your PC, but maybe you can sell it on eBay or use it with your Xbox 360 if you have one).

So, for $299.94 (not including any possible shipping costs or sales tax), you can watch HD-DVD movies on your PC. Not a bad deal at all (assuming your PC is powerful enough, of course).