The Richter Scale^®

Back at CES earlier this year I was loaned a novel portable scanner by Planon - the DocuPen RC800 Color, which I will refer to as the “DocuPen” in the rest of this post.

I have since returned the DocuPen, but with a bit of remorse. Not because I was putting it to ample use (I only used it for testing, and nothing more), but more because I keep thinking I might need it at some point and miss having it available for some special occasion.

The $299 DocuPen RC800 looks like a pen on steroids, although perhaps the term “wand” might be more appropriate. The DocuPen needs to be bigger than a pen though, so it can scan an 8.5” wide piece of paper in one pass. The DocuPen is lightweight, has an integrated battery, takes microSD cards for memory storage, and pretty easy to use.

To use it, you press one of the buttons on the device, use another button to cycle through your scanning options (black & white or color; resolution; etc.) and then slowly drag it across the surface you want to scan. It doesn’t have to be a paper - it could be a painting, a poster on a wall, or any subject that is flat and smooth, in any orientation (horizontal on a table or the ground or vertical on a wall, for example).

The maximum speed of dragging is determined by the amount of data being scanned - color, high resolution scans necessarily take longer than low resolution blank & white scans. The number of pages of scans is also determined by the content, as well as the size of the memory card installed in the device.

You can transfer the data from the DocuPen to a PC using either the included super-mini USB cable (smaller than mini-USB) or by removing the memory card and using the supplied external USB reader to read it. I had problems doing the latter on a system without the proper DocuPen software installed even though, theoretically, the memory card should show up as a memory device, but it was also easier to just plug in the cable instead of remove the memory card).

Scans were of good quality, and the software supplied by Planon simple to use. A copy of PaperPort was also included in the distribution I received.

Another cool idea was including something along the lines of a universal charger in the box (which is a nice metal box, incidentally). You use a wall outlet to charge a small battery pack and then use the battery pack to charge the DocuPen. It sounds a bit odd, but once I had this explained to me by Planon’s staff at CES, I was up and running. The box also includes a few additional charger tips for other popular portable electronics devices.

Overall the DocuPen RC800 is a nice, well-featured product.

But, being in my office most of the time, I found my Fujitsu SnapScan to be so much more convenient to use that I never used the DocuPen outside my testing, which reminded me that each thing has its place in the world, and for me, the DocuPen was not an office scanning tool.

What the DocuPen RC800 color is, is an on-the-go scanning tool, and hence my remorse. I’m going on several multi-week trips with my family in the coming 12-18 months, in some cases to rather remote locations (no so remote there’s not a real bathroom present, but remote enough that technology to scan may not be readily available. And in those cases, the DocuPen may well come in handy. Although, even that said, I have found it relatively easy to take digital photos of documents, plaques, etc., for later use. The resolution of a digital camera is not nearly as good as that of the DocuPen, but convenience is an issue.

Even so, the DocuPen RC800 could still have a place - albeit a small one - in my carry-on, just in case.

In an update to the post below, Microsoft has announced that Halo 3 will ship commercially on September 25, 2007. By all accounts, this is anticipated to be the biggest game title launch of the year, if not of the industry.

In conjunction with the ramp up for Halo 3, the open multiplayer Beta of Halo 3 kicked off today. For those who had early access, there was a patch issued this morning for the game - content unknown (at least to me).

Incidentally, I did notice that in single user (non-splitscreen) mode, I was getting full width display this morning (in contrast to my observations in the post below about Halo 3 using a smaller screen size, at least in dual-user mode). Game play also felt more responsive than previously, but that could just be luck of the draw with respect to hosting servers at it having been 5am EDT that I was playing the Halo 3 Multiplayer Beta.

The Beta ends on June 6th, so those of you able to participate should do so soon. If you don’t already have a Beta access key or method, then Microsoft kindly reminded us this morning that it’s still possible to buy Crackdown, another Xbox 360 shooter game, to get access to the Halo 3 Beta. Nice of them to offer that (and sell more copies of Crackdown, of course).

On a related note, Microsoft will also be cross marketing Halo 3 with a Halo 3 Edition of their Zune media player. That will be available as of June 15th for an estimated retail price of $249, exclusively at GameStop.

Thanks to a PC-centric (and console averse) friend who attended one of the two Halo 3 launch events this past weekend, I ended up with an early Halo 3 Beta access key for my Xbox 360. The public Beta kicks off tomorrow morning for people who purchased a special version of Crackdown.

The kids and I have now spent a few hours with Halo 3, to mixed reviews. The Beta of Halo 3, which consists of a 941MB download, only features three levels (but so far we’ve only managed to play two of them - no idea what the third level looks like), and is only playable via Xbox Live - you need an Xbox Live Gold account to use it.

It’s also possible to play split-screen with a second local player in one of the training modes offered through the Xbox Live set-up. Playing with more than two local players in an on-line game is not enabled.

The Xbox Live live lobby set-up is a bit tedious, as you spend precious minutes waiting to fill out a roster of six players, although if six players are not found after some time, the game will start with less. We also found that a number of times the screen would blank out during play, and then inform us that the system was uploading (not sure what it was uploading), and after about a minute game play would resume - it appears this happened when existing players dropped out, so perhaps it was a swap to a new server to continue the match. The other thing was that on-line game response was all over the board for us - mind you, we’re down in the Caribbean, and have a not insubstantial delay (80-100ms) for data traffic to most U.S. servers - but in some sessions things were responsive, while in others it felt like we were in a small time shift. In the “slow” games it was well nigh impossible to beat down an opponent unless you struck before you reached them, which in turn assumed they were not also moving. Very frustrating.

Halo 3’s graphics are a definite improvement over those of Halo and Halo 2 played on an Xbox 360, but that’s no surprise considering the game is designed for the Xbox 360’s graphics engine, which is a real improvement over that of the original Xbox. However, the graphics are not nearly as good as I had imagined them, perhaps being jaded by things like Gears of War. The other odd thing is that although I have my Xbox 360 set up for 1920x1080 resolution, Halo 3 plays at a reduced horizontal resolution (closer to a 4:3 aspect ratio than the 16:9 my display is configured for), resulting in a lot of visual real estate that is not even put to use. I hope the released version of the game will allow for proper wide screen aspect ratios.

Controls are a bit different too, in that the Right Button on the Xbox 360 controller is what is now used to pick up weapons, ride vehicles, and reload (for Halo 2 it was the X button). The X button now allows you to drop and deploy special objects you pick up along the way, such as the bubble shield (protects you from attack outside the shield but opponents can still walk through the shield and nail you), a gravity lift (emits a blue anti-grav beam you can ride up one “level” of height - can also be used to upset vehicles when they drive over it), and an energy drain bomb. You can only carry one special object at any one time.

Weapons have changed a bit too, with the addition of a red laser gun, and the ability to remove a mounted machine gun from its post and walk around with it - albeit much more slowly. Existing weapons also respond a bit differently in terms of power and control.

Having played mostly Halo 2 in the last 18 months on the Xbox 360, I was not able to draw real comparisons to the original Halo, but my 10 year old son claims (and this appears to be backed up by comments in other media sources) that Halo 3 is more similar to the original Halo than Halo 2. He wasn’t able to quantify his observation. As he put it, “it just is”.

The Halo 3 Beta has been mostly enjoyable so far, but it seems to me that the folks at Bungie still have a ways to go to make game play smoother and more engrossing. But that’s what a Beta test period is all about - get the software tested, get bugs and usability feedback, and hopefully release an improved product. I personally am looking forward to the campaign mode and hope it is better than that in Halo 2, which was disappointingly short and simple compared to the original Halo. We’ll see later this year what Bungie actually delivers.

In case any of my readers, family, and friends were planning on visiting with Linda and myself for our traditional annual New Year’s Day pot-luck event, to which one and all have always been openly invited, I regretfully hereby inform you that Linda and I have decided to cancel this event, indefinitely.

This past New Year’s Day pot-luck marked our 22nd year of having an annual pot luck event. It first originated as the Wing-Ding-A-Thon (due to my addiction to Buffalo Wings) held each October starting in 1985 for a few years, and then evolved into the “Yeah! It’s Summer Party” (and potluck). That continued until 1997 when Linda and I moved to Bonaire. The first year the party was held on January 1st was in 1998, and it has continued to be held that day without fail, even when we had to struggle to get back on-island in time to finalize our shopping for the party, or when, like in 2006, I had to leave early the next morning to attend a conference in the U.S.

Our lives have slowly been changing, and with a recent decision to home school our children starting this summer and Linda’s recent knee replacement surgery, we find ourselves in need of some other changes, among them ones which include the flexibility of possibly missing our first Bonaire New Year’s Eve in the coming year or two because we’re off doing something interesting and unusual with the children in some exotic location.

We figured it would be better to give a lot of advanced notice on this subject since there are folks on BT and elsewhere that have planned their vacations to Bonaire in order to join us on that nice day. Bless them.

We have enjoyed the company of many of you, both at the potluck as well as various BBQs we hosted over the years, never mind dinner’s at Gibi’s and elsewhere, but it’s time for us to move on from the big party into a more sedate socializing mode, like small dinners out.

We are also looking forward to opening a small private art gallery in our home here on Bonaire to show off Linda’s and my art and will have small wine & cheese-type gatherings there on occasion between travels and other commitments. Construction is going on as we speak - see the image below from our private WebCam:

Jake’s Construction Cam

At some point we may resume some sort of annual event, but until we fully understand and embrace all the challenges of schooling both kids at home (which we expect to take the equivalent of at least one person working full time) we are hesitant to make any further or future commitments to a regular event like that now.

Our apologies to any folks that have already made plans, but if we’re home on January 1st, feel free to drop in and say hi but don’t expect a party to be going on