Category: Gadgets

One of the British institutions that I miss by living in the States is snooker. Nobody over here knows anything about it; at least Americans have usually heard of cricket. So… no Pot Black on TV, no epic breaks played out while the opponent sits helplessly in the corner, and no snooker videogames. What’s an expat to do? So on my last trip to England, I visited a videogame store to examine the possibilities. They had a pre-owned copy of Sega’s World Snooker Challenge 2005 for the Sony PSP, which looked promising – the reviews at Amazon.co.uk are excellent. The only problem was that the back of the box had a “DVD Region 2” icon. Would it play in my US PSP? I decided to take the chance that it would, and bought the game. It turned out that it does work, and I’m rapidly finding that I have a personal time management problem with it….
😉
As I subsequently discovered, the PSP only enforces regional lockout for UMD movies, not for games. Printing a region code on the box was purely a scare tactic. I didn’t even bother to look at snooker games for the PlayStation, because I assumed that it would enforce lockout – but maybe that, too, is just an empty threat. Anyway, I’m hoping to replace my PS2 as soon as Outtastock.com shows that Nintendo Wiis are available!

[I just posted this review at Amazon.com.]
For the last couple of years I’ve carried around a pair of Bose QC2 noise cancelling headphones. They’ve gone all over the world with me, and have made long-haul air travel a much less stressful experience. The only flaw in the design is that if you turn off the noise cancelling system, the headphones don’t work. No battery, no audio. That’s dumb – and most of the competition figured that out.
Last Sunday, while on a trip to Silicon Valley, I started to get an annoying buzz in the right earpiece. I changed batteries, but it got steadily worse. Out of warranty. Time to replace.
I mostly use my headphones for two purposes: to listen to my iPod while walking or travelling in a bus or plane, and to listen to channel 9 on United flights. No jogging or energetic exercising.
I picked up a pair of these Philips earbuds at Fry’s in Palo Alto (and paid much more than Amazon – sigh!). They worked flawlessly in my hotel room, listening to a movie on my laptop, and on the flight back from SFO to SEA. Ignore the negative reviews above: the noise cancelling circuitry does an excellent job at attenuating aircraft noise, especially the lower frequencies. With noise cancellation turned off, the in-ear design certainly reduces the high frequencies but does nothing for the roar of an aircraft engine just outside the window. It feels like a nicely balanced design.
As for audio quality, I’m no audiophile, but it sounded about the same as my iPod’s factory-supplied earbuds. Not outstanding, but perfectly acceptable.

I was thinking about blogging on the subject of HDTV, but Andrew beat me to the punch with a piece that says pretty much everything I was going to say. Some of the content on the Discovery Channel is mesmerising in its beauty.
And despite the fact that the set-top box, TV, home theatre, and game console all come from different vendors, it all plays together tolerably well. In fact my only complaint is with the RCA home theatre box: when I’m watching cable TV, I route the audio through the AUX1 input of the home theatre, so I’m regularly switching the unit between DVD and AUX1 modes. Every time I do this, the box forgets its settings! This means that the next time I want to watch a DVD I have to remember to wait until the disc is loaded and then reconfigure from the default (4:3/480i) to 16:9/1080i. Oh, well. At least it plays both NTSC and PAL DVDs.

What’s worse than heavy-handed DRM on downloaded music? How about various levels of heavy-handed DRM from a supplier who won’t tell you whether or not a track you’re going to buy is “extra-crippled”. In a sane society, this would violate all sorts of trading standards – as it is, it’s probably one more nail in the Zune’s coffin.

Perhaps this will help.

Just over a week ago I reported that I was having problems with my WiFi network here in the apartment. I think I may have solved the problem. I bought myself a Griffin Technology AirBase, and since then I’ve been getting a consistently good signal.

Basically it’s just a heavy base with a power cord and a slot that the Airport Express snaps into. According to Griffin, it “increases effective range and signal efficiency for your network and AirTunes by raising the base station up into the room. It also makes it easier to check the network status light at a glance.” And it seems to work. I guess that hiding the Airport Express unit away, plugged into a power strip behind the set-top box and DVD player, wasn’t such a good idea….
(Even though the Griffin Technology website will sell the AirBase for $24.99, you can do better. I paid $13.83 at Amazon.com, and some places have it even cheaper.)

I’ve been experiencing some odd WiFi behaviour over the last week or so. The main symptom is that at random intervals my signal strength will fade away to almost nothing; in addition I’ve experienced spells when my signal looks OK but bandwidth to the Internet is lousy. At times things are so bad that I can’t even stream audio from my PowerBook to the Airport Express (which is connected to my home theatre). The distance shouldn’t be an issue: 12 feet through a thin wall. (And it’s not the Mac: I see the same problems from my Amazon-supplied Compaq nc6000 when I use it at home.)
I downloaded a WiFi monitoring tool called iStumbler to see what was going on. Here’s part of the screen:

My network is chaucer (hat tip to Kate), and the base station is easily the nearest. But there are a lot of networks, as you can see (12 right now, at 1 A.M. – at 9 P.M. there are 15-20 active). Most access points try to use channels 1, 6 and 11 to minimize overlap; I’m guessing that my occasional signal loss occurs when my Airport Express decides that the channel it’s using is too crowded, and switches to another one.
The other odd thing is the presence of two networks crackhouse and ACTIONTEC. I think they’re relatively new. What’s distinctive about them is that they are always the strongest signals, and they run almost flat out all the time. I don’t know what the units are on the “signal” and “noise” columns, but chaucer‘s signal is typically in the range 35-45, crackhouse and ACTIONTEC are 55-65, and everybody else is under 35 (most under 30).
From the constant 24/7 load, I imagine that both those networks are being used for P2P file sharing or media download. If they’re connected to the Internet using the building’s cable service, this might explain the bandwidth issues too. But are the high signal levels significant? Should I try to find out who owns them and ask them to reconfigure? Hard to tell.
In any case, things seem to be working well right now…..

No sooner do I get a Blackberry 8700c than reports appear of the Blackberry 8800, with several of the things that I really miss from my Treo 650 (camera, joystick trackball rather than thumbwheel, swappable memory card) and one feature whose time has come (WiFi). Plus it’s even thinner…. Oh well.

Here are five pictures that I took yesterday, in part to test my new shirt-pocket camera. You can see how arduous my “commute” is going to be….

It turns out that both of the batteries (primary and spare) for my PowerBook are covered by Apple’s Battery Exchange Program. Let’s see how quickly they can get me replacements. The only question is… until they do, should I run the machine with or without a battery installed?
[UPDATE] According to the email I just received from Apple confirming my order, the answer to the first question is “four to six weeks…” maybe. Which settles the second question: I can’t go without instant-on-from-sleep for a month.
[UPDATE] There are reports on various mailing lists and websites of people having problems with the Battery Exchange Program web site. My own experience was certainly confusing. I entered the serial numbers of my PowerBook and both batteries, and clicked Continue. All three serial numbers were rejected. I clicked Back in my browser, double-checked that I’d correctly (a) written the numbers down and (b) typed them in. Then, without changing anything, I clicked Continue again. This time all three numbers were accepted.
If at first you don’t succeed…..