On a RoadTrip with my iPod
Mon 3 Sep 07 13:58 | Tags: Hardware, Reviews, iPod
My adventures with car transmitters for my iPod continue.
Recently I stumbled upon a great deal at Overstock.com - they're selling the Griffin RoadTrip transmitters for only $20. Granted, they're refurbished, but for less than a quarter of Griffin's original price, I decided to take my chances on used goods. (If you're not as brave, you can get it from Amazon for only $43.34.)
I think I got a pretty good deal. The sound quality of the RoadTrip is pretty good. It's been too long since I've used the NewerTech TRAFFICJamz to do a fair sound comparison, but I had no complaints sound-wise.
The RoadTrip is hangin' out. This photo shows it with all three arm segments connected; for regular use, I just use two of them.
The hardware of the device itself, however, is another issue. The TRAFFICJamz was a small stick-like module which plugged into the car power adapter socket (known in less PC times as the cigarette lighter) and had a cable a few feet long coming out the end with an iPod connector at the end. The RoadTrip, however, is like an iPod caddy with a bendable segmented arm on the back, with the power adapter at the end of the arm. The device comes unassembled, so you actually have to connect the arm segments together. You have the option of using just two arm segments, or putting a third segment between the two for added length and bending angle-age. All this means that the RoadTrip is significantly larger, heavier and more complicated than the TRAFFICJamz.
This is a bit of a serious concern. While parked, I would often stow the TRAFFICJamz in my glove compartment in order to hide the easily-stealable expensive electronics products from sight; with the RoadTrip, I have to cram it under my seat. More serious, though, is that the awkward weight and length of the RoadTrip means that it's prone to wiggling loose from the power socket when driving on not-so-smooth roads or over train tracks. This means I have to pull over and readjust the RoadTrip in my car's cheap-ish power socket, which leads to much cursing and frustration.
The larger screen and controls on the RoadTrip compared to the TRAFFICJamz are appreciated, though I find it strange that I have to manually push a button every time I start my car in order to make the RoadTrip start transmitting. The TRAFFICJamz would just start transmitting automatically.
I guess I can just mark up these concerns to just getting what I paid for, though, and in those terms I still think I got a pretty good deal. Just so long as this thing doesn't short out my iPod again, I'll be pretty happy with it.
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The missing Linimo photos
Wed 22 Aug 07 01:38 | Tags: Hardware, Japan
Way the heck back in March, I wrote an article entitled "Riding the Linimo: The train tech of tomorrow." It was about my experience on the Linimo, a maglev train line near the city of Nagoya, Japan. At the time, I lamented the fact that the photos I had taken had fallen into a digital black hole, never to be seen again… It turns out that they, along with almost all my other photos in Japan, were actually safe and cozy on the hard drive inside my old, dead laptop. When I recently bought a 2.5-inch drive enclosure and put my laptop drive in it to use as a back-up drive, I was more than a little pleased to rediscover those pictures, tucked away and patiently waiting for me to find them. Please allow me to share them with you here. (But be sure to go back and read the original article first, if you haven't already.)
Click on the thumbnails for larger images. The images have been downscaled somewhat for faster downloading. If you're a train nerd and want some higher-res versions of these photos, just let me know and I'll pass 'em on to you.
Here's a train pulling into the station. Note that the rails are elevated quite high above the ground, so the stations are often more vertical than horizontal; you buy your ticket on the ground floor, then take the stairs or elevator to the tracks up above. It's kind of backwards from how a subway works.
Now the train is pulling out of the station. The Ferris wheel in the background is a left-over from the 2005 World's Fair, which the line was built to service.
The entrance to one of the stations, and a ticket vending area. The chart on the right shows the prices for a ticket to the various stations. Each station is badged with a symbol colored in boring grey and some other color - rather ugly, in my opinion.
A close-up of the tracks, such as they are, and a shot of the tracks going off into the distance. (Note that it had been raining recently.) If I hadn't known better, I would have had a hard time identifying them as train tracks; they're flat like boards. Very strange.
Finally, a shot of the interior of a very empty station. As I said in the original article, everything looks very new and modern compared to older stations, for obvious reasons. The bright lighting is also a welcome change from your standard subway station.
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This post is not about the iPhone.
Sun 1 Jul 07 00:59 | Tags: Hardware
The weekend has come, so I spent some time today catching up on the 500-plus unread articles in my feed reader. It seems that at least two thirds of these articles have something to do with the iPhone, which was released to the public on Friday; for the Apple-centric feeds, that count rises to a good 90%. It's a twenty-first century media circus.
Well, I don't have one. I'm not writing this post with an on-screen keyboard. 
I didn't wait in line at the Apple Store for three days; the nearest Apple Store is nearly 200 miles away, actually. And I didn't hire anyone to wait in line for me either. This post will not be full of my zero-day impressions of the device; that's what sites like Daring Fireball (whose logo is currently sporting the subtitle "iPhone iPhone iPhone") is for.
If the iPhone is a "smart phone," then I guess I will continue to content myself with my dumb phone, a Nokia 6265. It doesn't have a touch screen or support WiFi or have a web browser of any notable substance; its internal memory limitations preclude its use as a serious portable media player. However, I use the phone only to make calls, take the occasional impromptu digital picture and rarely send a text message or two, and it does these jobs acceptably. At this point in my life, the $500 or $600 cost for the iPhone would be better spent on rent.
Don't get me wrong; I'm not a hater. If someone else bought one of these for me (and also bought out of my current cell phone contract), I would use it, and probably enjoy it. However, at this point in time, I think I'm starting to get a little bit sick about hearing about this thing from the press, mainstream, trade and otherwise. In fact, I almost wish they'd just shut up and go back to talking about Paris Hilton again.
Almost.
Check out these people waiting in line at the Apple Store in New York City. What are they waiting in line for? To see the President? To meet a celebrity? No; to plunk down at least half a grand plus sixty bucks a month for two years to purchase and use a cellular phone. The difference is that the phone in question was made by Apple. Having been dragged along with my old roomie to wait in line for hours at the premiere of one of the Star Wars movies, I understand that the act of waiting in line like this is just as much about socializing with like-minded people as it is about actually waiting in line; still, I think photos like this prove that the phenomenon of Apple fanaticism is not only alive and well, but experiencing a renaissance right alongside Apple itself.
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Have you backed up your data recently?
Sun 6 May 07 20:33 | Tags: Hardware, Software
A few days ago, I stumbled across this article about the poor back-up habits of the print magazine Business 2.0. The magazine's servers failed on the 23rd of April, taking out all of the work to date on the June issue. They had a back-up system for their server, but it turns out the system was non-functional for some reason; nobody bothered to check up on the system to see if it was correctly working because, well, until stuff failed, it didn't really have to work.
Then today, I had a bit of a scare myself. I woke up to discover that Ray Gun Robot wasn't working; trying to load any page just displayed a blank page. It turns out the problem was that the main template file somehow got blanked out; it was nothing but an empty file. Perhaps something strange happened on the server, or perhaps I did it myself when I was tweaking the template yesterday afternoon and I'm just now noticing it; either way, I was pretty bummed.
But then I remembered that my web host, asmallorange, has an automatic back-up system in place; it uses the totally excellent name of Righteous Backup. So I went into the backup section of the control panel dealy-thing and looked through the back-ups. It turns out they only had two versions available, and the oldest one was still recent enough that it had the blanked-out template in it. Arg, I wish they had some back-ups that were more than a few hours old…
At this moment I was beginning to sweat a bit, because the thought of trying to re-build my main template from memory wasn't looking so appealing to me. But I kept a cool head and remembered that, some time ago, I had copied all of Ray Gun Robot's files to my local hard drive, in anticipation of a tragic (well… annoying, at least) thing like this happening. I poked around and sure enough, there it was, in my Sites directory. It was dated way back from April 1st, so I had to re-do all the changes I had made to it since then, but that took ten minutes at most. Thank goodness I wasn't an April fool and backed up my site! After fixing the template, I promptly downloaded a new copy of all of Ray Gun Robot's files and resolved to do so more often.
I back up my own computer, as well. I have an external hard drive with the same 120GB size as my laptop's hard drive. I irregularly back up the latter to the former using a handy utility called SuperDuper!, a disk back-up program for OS X which has some nice features, such as scheduling and incremental back-ups - that is, if you're not making a back-up for the first time, it can compare the files on the original disk and on the older back-up disk and only copy the files which have changed, which saves a lot of time compared to copying all files every single time. SuperDuper! is shareware and costs $27.95, but I know that as soon as I have another catastrophic main hard drive failure (I'm up to two in this lifetime so far), it will pay for itself in the time I will have saved from not having to reconfigure and reinstall my entire system and all my apps again. Another popular Mac back-up tool is Carbon Copy Cloner, which is donation-ware but doesn't have incremental back-up or scheduling features (though it looks like the latter is making an appearance in the most recent beta).
It's not a matter of if your hard drive will fail; it's a matter of when. Do you have a solid back-up solution in place for your hard drive and important web sites? I highly suggest you look into it now, or, like Business 2.0, you will eventually regret it later.
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21st-century laws ban 19th-century lighting tech
Fri 27 Apr 07 06:50 | Tags: Green, Hardware
On Wednesday, Ottawa announced that the sale of standard incandescent light bulbs would be banned in Canada by 2012. This follows a similar announcement made by Australia's government back in February; they're going to eighty-six Edison's old invention by 2010.
The logic behind these decisions has to do with the inefficiencies of incandescent bulbs. By their design, a great deal of the energy used to power these bulbs gets converted to heat, not light; a fact readily apparent to anyone who's ever touched a standard light bulb after it's been on for a while. In terms of the efficiency of creating light from energy, or "luminous efficacy" in high-falutin' terms, incandescent bulbs are at the bottom of the charts in terms of methods of creating power with electricity. (They're still more efficient than candles or gas lanterns.)
The legislature of my own state, California, is considering a similar ban. The bill is working its way through committees of the Assembly, the lower house of California's bicameral legislature; so far, support for it seems to be falling along party lines with the Democrats in favor, and as Democrats dominate the California legislature and governor's mansion, I'd say it stands a pretty good chance of passing as long as that holds true. The bill's text makes plenty of exceptions for lamps for appliances and colored bulbs (presumably so that one can still buy replacement bulbs for outdoor Christmas lights).
The most common replacements for incandescent bulbs in Canada, Australia and other places in the world that ride the anti-incandescent wave will be fuorescent bulbs. Fluorescent power fixtures create less heat, and are therefore more efficient if light is the desired effect. And special "self-contained" fluorescent bulbs can be used in standard lighting fixtures designed for incandescent bulbs.
The downsides for fluorescent bulbs include the fact that both the bulbs and the lighting fixtures themselves are more expensive in the short term – the energy cost savings and longer life of fluorescent bulbs quickly offset the initial cost, however. Also, the nature of fluorescent bulbs require that they be in the form of a long tube. The aforementioned self-contained bulbs work around this by coiling or bending the tube so that they can still fit standard lighting fixtures. The tube may then be cased in a glass bulb so that it resembles an incandescent bulb in external appearance, though this decreases efficiency.
From left to right: A "standard" compact fluorescent bulb, an incandescent bulb, and two fluorescent bulbs which give a warm light color similar to the incandescent bulb. (image source)
The fluorescent bulb also faces a bit of a public relations battle by those who see fluorescent lighting as "cold" or "harsh" compared to the familiar incandescent bulb. The problem has been somewhat remedied by bulb makers, however, as illustrated by the picture to the right. The left-most bulb is a fluorescent bulb which gives off a relatively gives off a cold, bluish light; the second bulb is a standard incandescent bulb for comparison. However, the two bulbs on the right are also fluorescent bulbs, and are giving off a warm yellowish light very similar to that of the incandescent bulb. There's also the fact that people of modern generations are more used to fluorescent lighting from its near omnipresence in business; when was the last time you were in a bank, grocery store or classroom lit by incandescent lamps?
A bigger problem, though, is one that most people wouldn't immediately consider when thinking of fluorescent bulbs. The bulbs contain a substantial amount of mercury. Anti-incandescent advocates are quick to point out that the mercury contained by the fluorescent bulb is actually less than the mercury created as a by-product to operating a coal power plant to provide the extra power that incandescent bulbs require, so that there is actually a net decrease in mercury by using fluorescent bulbs, but that's not the bigger problem. The problem is that mercury is a hazardous chemical subject to government regulation in many parts of the world, including California; that means that we must dispose of used fluorescent bulbs as hazardous waste, and it is illegal to simply throw them in the trash (though many people and business still do anyway, just as with batteries). California does not really have the infrastructure in place to handle this sort of thing, and if the general public at large is going to have to switch away from incandescent bulbs, it's going to be a problem. Hopefully, if this bill is going to pass in California, programs to make disposal of fluorescent bulbs as easy as taking them down to the recycling center will also materialize. Otherwise, we're going to be seeing a lot of these things in with the regular trash, as people can't be troubled to dispose of them properly when it is costly or a nuisance to do so.
As I've mentioned before, I'm all for pro-environmental, energy-saving products and methods when they end up saving you money as well, and this would be a very good example of that. I'm not usually too keen on forced change, however; on saving the planet through legislation. Opponents of bans on incandescent lamps point out that almost all businesses, which use more power than homes, are already using fluorescent lighting due to their lower long-term cost, so these bans will affect individuals much more harshly than businesses.
Perhaps better policy would be to start a media campaign touting the benefits (and rebutting the perceived downsides) of fluorescent lighting in homes, or a gradual tax on incandescent bulbs and fixtures and/or subsidy for fluorescent bulbs and fixtures in order to offset initial costs; after all, what does the government love to do more than tax and spend?
Legislation or no, it looks like it's going to soon be lights out for the incandescent bulb of the 1800s; fluorescent bulbs in the home have a bright future ahead of them. (I managed to make it through the whole article – including the headline – without a corny pun; please allow me to indulge in the last paragraph.)
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