Category: Gadgets

Just installed Eclipse and the Android SDK on my Mac Mini, plugged in the G1 that I bought in China, and built and debugged a couple of really simple apps – first in the emulator, then on the phone. That felt good.

I had been warned before coming to China that real coffee was hard to find, and quite expensive. Those who know me and my caffeine dependency might have wondered how I would survive.

I arrived here in Shenzhen with a pound of espresso-ground coffee from Starbucks in Santa Barbara and an Aerobie Aeropress. Unfortunately I left the measuring scoop behind, so I had to wait until breakfast this morning, when I was able to grab a few (disposable) soup spoons. Finally, before settling down to work back in the hotel this afternoon, I made the first cup of coffee that I’ve had since I arrived here.
The Aeropress works beautifully. I had calibrated the kettle, so that I knew how long it would take to get close to the magic 175°F. (They recommend “three-quarters of the time to bring to the boil”.) I think I used a bit less coffee than I should have (what’s “two scoops” in Chinese soup-spoons?), but I followed the directions exactly, and the result was excellent: smooth, great flavour, no bitterness, good colour, perfect crema. The trick is in keeping the pressure gentle, and not rushing it. And clean-up is trivial.
Highly recommended. With any luck, my blood-caffeine level should now be inching towards the “operating” range….

Here’s my latest Amazon product review, for the JVC Everio GZ-HM200 Dual SD High-Def Camcorder.

Plug and play HD for this Mac user

It’s been a number of years since I had a camcorder. It was a tape unit, and after the initial infatuation with the new toy, I found that I never used it. Recording was a chore (juggling tapes and batteries), uploading was tedious, and the quality wasn't all that good. For quick ad hoc recordings, my various digital still cameras could grab a few seconds of good-enough video. The camcorder disappeared from my life.

A few years later, things have really changed. I received the Everio GZ-HM200, snapped in a couple of 8GB SD cards, charged the battery, and I was ready to go. We took a day trip to Mount Rainier; the weather was perfect, and I took a lot of video of photogenic glaciers and waterfalls.

When I got home, I wanted to upload the video into my computer. The Everio comes with software for Windows PCs, and Mac users are hardly mentioned in the documentation. I had searched the various on-line discussions of Mac video, and there were many cautionary tales about compatibility issues with the Everios. I anticipated problems.

I was wrong. I connected the USB cable to my Mac Mini, started iMovie (part of iLife’09), and opened up the camcorder. The USB menu opened, and I chose the “Upload” option. iMovie detected the camera, asked me a few questions (video quality, destination, whether to check for stabilization issues), and then imported the video clips. It was trivially easy – just the way I like it.

The Everio has a “Snapshot” mode to take still images, and I had tried it out. This meant that while I was working with iMovie, iPhoto also started up and offered to import the photos I’d taken. My verdict: it’s OK for casual 1x use, but no substitute for a real digital camera. The problem is that the Everio’s autostabilization mode only works for video, not for still images. This meant that a couple of 20x zoomed images, while impressively magnified, were hopelessly blurred. I’ll stick with my Panasonic DMC-TZ4 for the still shots.

The JVC Everio is a tremendous little camera: compact, easy, light, and producing excellent HD video. (Yes, my Mac Mini feels a little underpowered for working with this.) The dual slot SD card design is excellent; the camera will automatically switch from one card to the next during recording, and you can swap cards on the fly. In XP mode (17 Mbps VBR 1920×1080) 16GB is good for 2 hours of recording, which feels about right. (You can crank it up to 24 Mbps, which will give you 1 hr. 20 min., or drop down to 5Mbps, at which point you can run for over 7 hours!) No more media juggling…..

There are tons of additional features in this camera, and sometime I may try them out. But for the basic job of plug-and-play HD video, this is hard to beat.

Recomended.

(And I gave it five stars.)

About a year ago I started having problems with my Powerbook. The most common pattern was that I would try to restart it (after, say, a software upgrade), and I’d be faced with a black screen, requiring me to reset the Power Management Unit. This was a hit-or-miss affair, and required at least one trip to the Genius Bar. My diagnosis:

The PMU is dying, slowly, and inducing a variety of failure modes. The trick is going to be inducing a hard failure, or at least a failure that the Genius will take seriously.

In March this year I bought myself a MacBook Air, intending to use the Powerbook as a remote CD, print server, iPhone backup, and media hub. Realizing that the PB might fail at any time, I shifted my iTunes and photo libraries to an external HD.
Last week, things took a turn for the worse. I installed some new software on the PB, the restart failed, I reset the PMU (with difficulty), and when it rebooted I decided to check the disk. There were lots of errors. I rebooted from the OS X DVD, repaired the disk, and restarted. A day later, the system failed again, and Disk Utility reported more errors. And this time, when I tried to repair them, I saw:

And just to make sure that I didn’t try anything rash, Disk Utility marked the HD as unbootable.
What to do? I had a complete backup on my Time Capsule, so I had the option of scrubbing the disk, reinstalling Leopard, and then restoring my backup. But how much could I trust the hardware? I decided that the time had come to replace the PB – but with what? I couldn’t really use the MacBook Air for all of those functions, but I didn’t want to spend much money.
At this point I remembered that I still had my Samsung monitor. When I first arrived in Seattle, I bought myself a nice SyncMaster 940MW that could work as a TV or a computer monitor. A few months later, I acquired a Sharp HDTV, and the SyncMaster was relegated to occasional use as a second screen for the PB. I had a mouse (plenty of them, actually), so the obvious solution was to get a Mac Mini and an Apple keyboard. I decided that I didn’t really need a DVD burner or extra RAM, which meant that I could get the basic Mac Mini (1.83 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 1 GB RAM, 80 GB Hard Drive, Combo Drive) and be up and running for around $700.
So I ordered the Mac Mini and an Apple Keyboard on Monday, and they arrived yesterday. Basic setup was a breeze, and it all just works – though I’m holding off for a couple of days before restoring stuff from the Time Capsule. I love the minimalist design of the keyboard – like the keyboard on the MacBook Air, it’s way ahead of what I was used to on the PB, and significantly better than the white MacBook I’m using for work. And the Samsung monitor works perfectly, via DVI. (No VGA nonsense here.) It’s looking good…..

I just uploaded a set of photographs to provide an apples-to-apples comparison between my three digital cameras: the Kodak P850, the Casio EX-S600, and the new Panasonic DMC-TZ4. All were taken from the same spot. I was concentrating on the zoom, but looking at the non-zoomed shots it’s clear that the Panasonic has a significantly wider field of view. (The Kodak and the Casio are pretty much the same in that area.)
I think that the Panasonic with its 8.1MP and 10x zoom is the ideal compromise. No, it won’t fit in a shirt pocket, but that’s about the only limitation. ((OK, I’d prefer a dockable design, like the Kodak and Casio, but I guess I’m in the minority.))

Since this has been a topic of some interest at work, I thought I’d let you know how the battery life on the iPhone 3G is going. I have three email accounts set up: my personal IMAP, a .Mac MobileMe account, and my Amazon.com Exchange account, which is syncing email, calendar, and contacts. I turned off Bluetooth and WiFi: I use a wired headset for both phone calls and music, and I find 3G is quite fast enough for data. I turned off “push” email, and instead opted for “pull every 15 minutes” on all three accounts. I used it in this configuration all day, making several phone calls, checking email and calendar every 45-90 minutes, and reading my RSS feeds through Google Reader while riding the shuttle bus between Amazon buildings. After work, I took an hour-long walk, listening to The Maria Dimension by the Legendary Pink Dots. After all this (about 13 hours), the battery was about 60% charged.
That works for me.

Gadget day here at Chez Geoff. First, I finally got my iPhone 3G this morning. After my frustrating wait in line a week or so ago, I spent an age on the phone with AT&T Customer Service to make sure that my account was unencumbered. All clear. Then last night I checked in at the iPhone availability page at Apple.com, and saw that the Bellevue was going to have inventory. According to the website, the store opened at 9:30, so I planned to arrive at 8:00. I did so, to find a dozen people in line ahead of me, and the store open for business! After an hour I reached the head of the line, got a 16GB white phone, and headed home. It took nearly half an hour to transfer the saved state of my old iPhone to the new one; while I was doing this, I was erasing all of the data on the old iPhone. (Apple finally realized that it was important to get this bit right: with the 2.0 software, erasing an 8GB iPhone takes over an hour! That’s thorough.)
Meanwhile, my new camera arrived. For the last couple of years I’ve used two cameras: a tiny Casio Exilim S600, and a bulky Kodak P850. Both are low-res by current standards (6MP and 5MP respectively), which is not necessarily a bad thing, and the Kodak does decent RAW and zooms to 12x. The trouble was the weight/bulk of the Kodak. Over the last two years I’ve relied almost exclusively on the Casio; yesterday I found myself literally “dusting off” the Kodak. And as a tourist camera, the Casio is far from ideal. Yes, it’s conveniently small, but the relatively narrow field and 3x zoom are really limiting. I think that my trip to Beijing was the final straw: I was continually frustrated while trying to capture the sweep and grandeur of the Forbidden City.
So yesterday I ordered myself a Panasonic DMC-TZ4 from Amazon, along with a spare battery and an 8GB(!) SD card. 8.1MP, 10x optical zoom, nice wide-angle Leica lens. It’s my seventh digital camera, and like all of them (except the Kodak) it cost under $300. Why not the DMC-TZ5? Partly to save a little money, and partly because I’m still not convinced that I need that many pixels. (The lower resolution means that I’ll get a couple of hundred more pictures on my SD card with the TZ4.)
Hopefully the weather in Chennai will give me the opportunity to put the camera through its paces.
UPDATE: Per dpreview, it appears that I need to update the firmware in my camera. Why am I not surprised?

Don’t you hate websites that only work with Internet Exploder? These days I only power up my old Windows laptop for two reasons: to play games (it’s a decent games launcher) and to navigate through sites designed by morons who don’t understand the importance of browser neutrality.
I love it when dumb companies that operate these broken websites wind up screwing themselves. Case in point:

Apple has an exclusive deal with network operator O2 in the U.K.—but O2’s Web-based activation system requires the use of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser to register a new phone: It won’t work with the Safari browser bundled in Apple’s Mac OS X.

More at Macworld.

Today I upgraded iTunes to 7.7, downloaded the iPhone 2.0 software, installed it on my iPhone, visited the App store, grabbed a handful of free applications, bought one (Bejeweled 2, natch), and hooked up my iPhone to the Amazon Exchange infrastructure.
And paused.
Everything seems to be working, except for the fact that all my calendar entries from Exchange are shifted 15 hours into the future. That’s weird, and I’m not quite sure how to troubleshoot it.
So the big question: do I want to buy an iPhone 3G tomorrow? Earlier this week I was determined to do so. Now I’m not sure; I think I may try spending a few days with the new software before making a decision. I’ve seen reports from colleagues that the push email from Exchange is doing a number on the iPhone’s battery life, and I’d like to see some comparative data for the new device.
Must-load free apps: Zipcodes, Facebook, Currency, Remote and NY Times. And for the unreconstructed retro-gamers among us, there is a port of the original “Colossal Cave” under the name Advent.
Obvious missing app: a WordPress blogging client. [UPDATE] It’s coming, soon. And it looks really nice.
UPDATE: Well, I’m really glad that I installed iTunes 7.7 and the iPhone 2.0 software yesterday (using the instructions at Macworld), because today looks like a freaking trainwreck. Maybe Apple should rent some EC2 capacity for its activation services….

I have some more business travel to India coming up, and I think I want to get a bit more efficient about my packing for this kind of trip. On my recent swing around the world, I took the wrong mix of stuff. There were some items that I wound up not wearing, but I still needed a mid-trip laundry drop for things that I’d under-provisioned or had got particularly dirty. Or wet. And that was another thing: I’ve found that a soft-sided roller isn’t particularly waterproof.
Anyway, I’m thinking of going rigid, and getting myself a couple of Pelican cases: a 1510 carry-on and a 1490 laptop case. Waterproof, o-rings, reputedly indestructible. However most of the reviews are from photo buffs and other gadget freaks who use these cases to transport cameras, lenses, and so forth. How are they for clothing, shoes and books? And how heavy or awkward is the 1490 compared with soft laptop bags? (I rather like the look of the new Belkin messenger bag…)