The Richter Scale^®

Okay - I know it’s been a while since my last blog entry. I’ve been traveling and on vacation, and then just overwhelmed with work. But I think I’m back for now. Expect to see some entries on some of the vacation things I did.

In the meantime, I’ve been catching up on some of the blogs I haven’t read in a month, and found the following at the Business2 Blog.

It’s a faucet with LEDs which shows blue for when cold water is running and red for hot water.

Boy, I need one of those. My wife always runs hot water in our master bath at night to wash her face, and if I’m not paying attention, I end up scalding my gums with the hot water I have used to dampen my toothbrush.

Most gadget blogs and reviews rave about first look reviews of new tech toys, but it’s rare that I’ve seen anyone look at the tech toys of yester-months after months of use (or non-use, as the case may be) to see how well they have fared.

So, over the next few days I will be reviewing some of the tech toys I have been using for the last few months, starting with the Creative Labs Zen Micro.

The Zen Micro is Creative’s effort to unseat the Apple iPod Mini. Based on market numbers they have not been particularly successful. Using man-on-the-street surveying and eavesdropping techniques I have counted exactly zero Zen Micros (or any other type of Creative MP3 player) on my travels since I acquired mine in the middle of January 2005. With one no-name exception every other MP3 player I have seen (and it’s well over a hundred at this point) it’s been Apple iPods of some flavor all the time.

My Zen Micro is a 5GB model, and while it comes in all sorts of colors, I chose white when I paid for it at the Consumer Electronics Show (along with a blue one for my wife). It plays MP3s just fine, has a built in radio (reception hasn’t been great in my experience though), records voice (haven’t had need to try that yet), and tells time (surprisingly useful when you don’t wear a wrist watch and when you’re in mid-flight and can’t check your cell phone for the current time).

The Zen Micro has two firmware choices as well - pure MP3/WMA playback, or DRM support in the form of Microsoft’s Plays For Sure. For those not familiar with DRM, it stands for Digital Rights Management and means that you are restricted in where you can play DRM-protected music - typically 3 to 5 systems, and a portable player, such as the Zen Micro.

The Plays For Sure thing works pretty well - a couple of weeks ago I signed up for a trial of Yahoo! Music Unlimited, and proceeded to download about 800 songs from artists Yahoo! Music recommended based on my music tastes to my notebook and then to my Zen Micro. Of course, I was on a high-speed U.S. DSL connection where I had a 2.5Mbps connection. Would have been impossible here on Bonaire.

In my nearly half year of using the Zen Micro, most of which has been on planes (and I have been on a lot of planes in that time!), I’m very pleased with the unit’s size, capacity, and battery life. My trips from Bonaire to the U.S. usually involve anywhere from 6 to 10 hours in flight, and the battery has lasted for the duration when I had charged it fully the night before. I’ve probably logged over 200 hours on my Zen Micro so far.

I paid $249 for it, and got as a show special, a set of Creative’s TravelSound 300 speakers (which sound tinny and flat to my ears). The same 5GB unit goes for $199.99 now. The Zen Micro also came with a belt clip - a flimsy clip which broke off about two months ago.

The controls take a bit to get used to - sliding one’s fingers up and down a non-moving control pad takes a bit of finesse when that same pad can be tapped quickly as well to perform a specific function (separate from the one from sliding one’s finger, that is).

Other than the belt clip, I have discovered only two real negatives with the Zen Micro.

First is that the 1/8” jack where I plug in my headphones in has started getting flaky. I have to position the headphone plug just right so that I don’t lose most of the sound. I’ve confirmed it’s not the connector on the head phones as those work fine on my notebook computer. And, not comfortingly, this problem appears to be getting worse, so I may have to send it in for service soon, and then who knows what will happen to my DRM’d music on the drive in the unit?

The second problem I have is that the Zen Micro seems to drain the battery even when I have turned it off. That means that if I don’t charge it right before I leave on a trip, I end up with drained batteries. It’s not a showstopper like the headphone jack problem, but it is annoying. I’d like to be able to have the thing shut off to a much lower power state (like off?) when I want, instead of being in this power-consuming, fast boot “sleep” mode that it seems to go into.

Would I recommend a Zen Micro to someone else? Probably, and only assuming that the head phone jack problem is a rarity instead of something common.

While I think all the various iPod accessories out there are cool, I don’t like the idea of being tied to a particular software program like iTunes for doing all my music synchronization. The Zen Micro looks just like a hard disk when I plug it in, making it very easy to copy music to it. I can also store data on it if I wish. The Zen Micro also comes with several applications, including a simple file manager which is not bound into a player that wants to take over my system.

So, after 5.5 months of use, I give the Creative Labs Zen Micro a 6.5 out of 10.0 on The Richter Scale.

I just posted a copy of my most recent TechWatch article, entitled Battling For The Sacred Living Room over on my articles site.

The article discusses the attempt by the big three game console makers - Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo - to justify having next generation consoles be the center piece of the living room, and why they still have a long way to go to make that happen, including still not understanding how to market to the people that really run the home, namely the wives, mothers, and other women co-residing with game-addled males.

If you’re like me - married, with two pre-teen kids whose hands never seem to be clean enough, and whose abilities to put things away without being asked are utterly lacking - you have undoubtedly seen your CDs or DVDs get damaged or even lost.

Further, if you travel a lot, while it’s nice that most notebook computers now have DVD drives, they suck a noticable amount of extra power if you want to play a movie while in flight and power jacks aren’t available.

For CDs, you can simply back them up by ripping them to your computer - my whole collection of hundreds of CDs is stored digitally on my system at home, and the original CDs are put in my storage room.

With DVDs no such simple option exists, or should I say, existed. That’s because the movie industry decided to encrypt DVDs, and then using its political clout, got the U.S. Congress to pass a bill (the Digital Millennium Copyright Act - the DMCA) which made it illegal to circumvent encryption. By doing that they technically robbed consumers of the right to make back-ups.

It didn’t take long for ingenious teenagers to figure out the encryption and break it, for the stated purpose of being able to play DVDs on Linux systems. While the simple code needed to break the CSS decryption spread over the Internet like wildfire, the movie industry and U.S. government worked hard to try and curtial this dissemination of information (and failed, in my opinion).

There are now dozens of programs which let one rip a DVD to one’s hard disk (one of the better ones, as I understand it is DVD Decrypter, but the problem is that the resulting files run 4.5-9GB on average, and even with today’s latest 500GB drives, it makes ripping a whole DVD collection (we have over 300 DVDs in ours here at home) unfeasible.

Enter a program called RatDVD, which will take a non-encrypted DVD image and produce a 1.3GB (on average) .ratDVD file which is the entire DVD movie with all menus and controls. The output quality is surprisingly good, with .ratDVD files playing back in Windows Media Player 10 on Windows-based machine.

It takes a couple of hours to convert a 4.7GB DVD to a .ratDVD file on a moderatly fast PC.

The only drawback I have found is that there appears to be no way to fast forward or rewind a movie.

One added bonus - you can take a RatDVD file and expand it to burn back onto a DVD should you want to have a physical back-up instead of one on your hard disk.

In any event, for a free piece of software it’s pretty good, and it meets a so-far unfulfilled need, namely making back-ups of DVDs in a reasonable amount of space. No doubt the movie industry will not be happy with RatDVD, but since it actually does not circumvent encryption, it’s unlikely they will have much ability to stop RatDVD from proliferating. Plus it can be used for archiving home-made DVDs.

I’ve already started using RatDVD to archive DVDs I have made from my own home videos and slide shows I have made of group vacations for friends. And yes, I am making back-ups of some of the movies I plan to watch during my next set of travels so I don’t have to waste power and face potential damage to my original DVDs in transit.

I give RatDVD an 8.5 out of 10.0 on The Richter Scale.

I’ve just posted two of my articles from the May 23, 2005 issue of Jon Peddie’s TechWatch (where I play the role of Contributing Editor and Senior Analyst) over on my Richter Scale Article Site:

- Next Generation Console Support Strong - Provides an overview of which games publishers were willing to publicly commit to providing for the next generation video game consoles from Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo.

- And Then There Were Ten... - An analysis of why the next generation game consoles and game pubishers might have problems meeting sales targets because of competition from older generation consoles as well as other home entertainment hardware and media.

As a point of reference, I only publish my articles from TechWatch online only after a newer edition of TechWatch has been released - thus, as today the June 6th issue was released to TechWatch subscribers, I’ve posted my articles from the May 23rd issue.

Okay, so it’s really not that new - Amazon.com has been pushing A9 for a few months now, but I’ve been so happy with Google I’ve not felt a need to sniff around another search engine.

But then I started checking out web sites listed in an article in the April 2005 issue of entitled The Great Giveaway (subscription required) about how eBay, Amazon, and Google are letting companies use their data in remarkable new ways.

Well, A9 was one of the sites listed as using Google’s data, as well as that from Alexa Web Crawl, Guru.net, IMDB, and more, in order to to provide search resorts in a novel form.

In particular, there’s a neat feature where you can click on a Site Info button for a search result and get information about the popularity of the site, what other sites people have looked at when looking at that site, and the response time of the site (note that for lightly trafficked sites, this information is not available).

In parallel to text results, A9 also produces thumbnails of images related to the search term - that was a bit eerie though - I searched on my own name and found dozens of images of my art, a photo of me, some of my photography, and a photo of myself with my wife and our gallery partner Avy.

In any event, the result rankings are pretty good, and the additional site information might helpful in doing research on related topics - the images are an added bonus.

A9 is owned by Amazon.com, incidentally.

I give the A9 search engine a 9.0 out of 10.0 on The Richter Scale.

One of the things that all of the new game consoles I saw at E3 had in common were wireless controllers for game play.

Having had experience with far too many wireless control devices over the years (e.g. remote controls, cordless phones, and real wireless game controllers), and now witnessing the intersection of such devices with children, I am convinced there’s a feature missing from these controllers.

I should point out that in the last few months, the remote control for my large screen TV has been found in three different bathrooms in the house, three bedrooms, the kitchen, and on occasion in the living room where the TV is. All thanks to distracted children or adults who wander off with it.

The feature I speak of is the “controller finder” - a mechanism where you can tell the game console hardware to go and make each controller, or a specific controller, provide some sort of audible tone to help you locate it. Making the controller rumble isn’t loud enough however. It needs to be higher pitched and unique - perhaps even a different tone for each controller so you can distinguish each of the, for example, seven in the case of the PS3, wireless controllers from each other. Heck, maybe you could even use the new Microsoft Xbox Marketplace to sell controller “ring tones” so each player can customize their controller!

I smell a patent application here…

I think I’ve gotten to the point where I want to step up to a digital SLR camera.

My conundrum is this - I have nearly a dozen lenses with a Nikon mount (mostly AF-D lenses) with a fair number of those being wide angle. Nikon doesn’t make a full frame sensor, which means my wide angle lenses (using the 1.5x multiplier for Nikon Digital SLR’s sensors) become non-wideangle.

So, if any of you are knowledgeable about Digital SLRs, here are my questions:

1) Does anyone make an optical converter from Nikon’s AF-D lenses to fill the frame of the new Nikon Digital SLRs?

2) Is there any reason to get a Nikon D100 over a D70? (I’m not ready to spend $5K on a Nikon D2x yet, but do like the 12MP resolution - the 6MP res of the Nikon SLRs seems a bit low, especially in contrast to my Sony F828’s 8MP)

3) Has anyone tried and gotten good results with a Canon full frame sensor and a Nikon->Canon mount converter?

4) Any idea if Nikon’s regular or Canon’s full frame sensors are better that one another, and if so, why?

5) What about Nikon vs. Canon digital SLR cameras in general? And if Canon is better, any model recommendations?

If anyone knows of another place where this all has been answered, please let me know!

When I was in Los Angeles a couple of weeks ago, I received a panic e-mail from Avy, one of my partners in the Cinnamon Art Gallery back on Bonaire - his power supply for his gargantuan Toshiba notebook had blown out and needed a replacement ASAP.

I contact Toshiba’s parts department, but they first did not have my billing zip code in their zip code database to take my order (the zip code was new about 4-5 years ago, but Toshiba had an older zip code database). Once they had worked around that, it turned out they don’t ship to hotels. Thirty minutes of aggravation for no result.

Because time was short until my departure back to Bonaire, I then searched on-line for a California based seller of such power supplies. I stumbled across one - L.A. Computer Center out of Inglewood, California - quite quickly. On CNET they seemed to have a pretty decent reputation, so I gave them a call (800-689-3933).

I ended up on the phone with Chad (x237), and he was great. He located the part I needed in Anaheim, so I agreed to ship the part UPS ground. He followed up with me by phone to indicate the order had gone through.

The next day, disaster struck - the part got shipped from the midwest, contrary to Chad’s request it be shipped from Anaheim, and there was no was it was going to make it to L.A. before I had to fly out.

I left a message for Chad about this, and within a couple of hours I received a call that the package had been upgraded to overnight service and I would have it the next day. Better yet, the next day I received it, along with another call from Chad to verify everything went okay.

With recent Internet shopping problems my wife and I had experienced with folks like Hallmark.com (they shipped a Mother’s Day present the Monday after Mother’s Day even though express shipping was paid for and they guaranteed it would arrive in time, and then had incredibly lousy service on top of all that - 2.0 out of 10.0 on The Richter Scale, and only because they did finally deliver) and Drugstore.com (they shipped a prescription via U.S. mail instead of the paid-for 2-day service, but at least they had better service - 4.5 out of 10.0 on The Richter Scale), dealing with Chad and LACC was great.

Sure, the order got screwed up, but Chad was extremely responsive, took responsibility, and remedied the problem - and all this for an $80 part.

L.A. Computer Center gets an 8.5 out of 10 on The Richter Scale. And if you order from them, make sure to ask for Chad - 800-689-3933 x237.

The second day of the E3 Expo exhibits was a bit disappointing. All I had left to cover was Kentia hall, which, as I discovered was basically the basement of the Los Angeles Convention Center (LACC).

And it was to there that lesser known companies were relegated.

The companies in the LACC Dungeon seemed to be a blend of foreign software developers (Asian and Russian for the most part), smaller distributors of video game software and hardware, companies which specialized in DVD and CD media repair (I never realized there were so many of them!), alternative game controller makers, and a few random entities thrown in between.

Among the alternative game controllers was a mouse replacement which looks like a handgun - once I figured out where all the mouse button equivalents were in the demo FPS they had set up, it was pretty easy to use, and certainly more intuitive than a mouse. Company is MonsterGecko and the product is known by the innovative name of “PistolMouse”. Just make sure you don’t pack it in your carry on if you’re planning on flying.

Speaking of fake weapons resulting in one’s arrest at TSA airport check points, THQ was giving out toy hand grenades in support of their forthcoming title, Company of Heroes.

If you pull the tab on the top it causes the hand grenade to rumble. I asked the booth staff about the wisdom of handing out toy weapons in this age of excess paranoia at airports, and they just laughed it off. In face, I was told that the THQ media rep had one in his carry on and the TSA staff, once they realized it was a toy, let him keep it. The TSA folks I’ve dealt with in the past haven’t seemed quite as lenient. So, erring in favor of safety and wanting to avoid potential incarceration, I think I’ll be leaving this little baby for the maid at the hotel to clean up.

I’ll be adding more E3 and video game related commentary here in the coming days as I work my way through my notes from the show. Of course, some of my more in depth work will show up as articles in Monday’s TechWatch.