My Suburban Destiny

They work better together because the DS can get game demos from the Nintendo Channel on the Wii.

The DS is a game for the far ends of the age spectrum– adults and younger kids, although there are plenty of in between games, too.

The built in application, Picto-chat is a missed opportunity. You can’t chat beyond 30 feet, you have to communicate with the other person by a separate channel before starting a conversation, if the other user is playing a game, you can’t signal that you’d like to chat (unless you walk over and tap them on the shoulder). If you are that close to each other, why not just talk? The only use I can think of for this is so that kids can communicate when situations dictate that they must not, e.g. in church pews, during lecture or when the parents are willing to put up with the noise.

As for adult games, I got the My Word Coach, My French Coach and My Spanish Coach. Several people tried out the games for a non-trivial amount of time, so they were unusually successful for essentially flashcard software. I want to get left-brain/right-brain to train my self to stop using my right hand so much, on account of my repetitive strain injury. I will probably order Brain Age next.

Internet was another missed opportunity. Setting up wireless is too hard. 5 year olds can’t be expected to type in a SSID. If an app was going to be built in, it should have been the Lynx text browser. Trying to implement Opera, a graphical browser on a DS was a fit of megalomania on Nintendo’s part.

A few weeks ago I swore I would unsubscribe from every email I got.  I know get less than 10, sometimes less than 5 emails a day, down from a flood of 100+ emails a day.  None of this is counting spam that gmail filters out.

If you are overwhelmed by the amount of email you get, take the Unsubscription pledge and free up enough mind space to answer the mail that does matter.

“I swear to unsubscribe from all mailing lists with an unsubscribe button and mark the rest as spam.  If I fail may I be struck down and turned into a clay zombie.”

I search the internet for a long time on this one.

Blu ray over component cables give both sound and image, but it is disappointing quality.  To get image quality you have to use an HDMI cable.  So I got a Dynex cable from Best Buy,  and got sound but no image.

It is not the HDMI cable that is broke.  “Most” cables now are 1.3 compliant and only the bionic man can tell the difference between the image from a good and a worse cable.  Cable quality appears to only matter with 10ft plus cables.

The problem is that you need to go into the PS3’s settings and enable the higher resolutions.  This was programmed by engineers who are wiz’s at selecting settings on the PS3, then switching over to the digital TV and switching sources, so you can verify that the resolutoin is something your TV can deal with.

You got 30 seconds.  Go!

Grandma is screwed.  Unless she’s the sort of Grandma that kicks your ass in Metal Gear Solid.  Sony should provide an update that makes this minigame easier, maybe give users 2 minutes to change the resolution, or let the user decide how long he wants for the switch over.

(BTW, if this doesn’t work for  you, then odds are it is a bad circuit board in the TV, or bad sockets/connectors for the HDMI- try a different port or wiggle the cables.  If you are using a low quality cable 10+ feet or longer, that might be a problem, too.  I was using a puny 3 ft cable.)

My singular economically rational goal in buying a mac was to make the time on the bus productive. I’m not there yet, but I’m closer. So far I’ve done these productive tasks:

* write a blog entry, using NeoOffice– tomorrow I try out a blog specific editor. [Update: this is being posted with Qumana a free mac blog editor, more on Qumana in a future post]
* read blogs (at least those with feeds that contain full entries) using Vienna
* read a user manual in PDF format for work related software
* used my mac as an ad hoc cell phone

Some other stuff I’ve done of questionable value include watching movies, trying out new software.

Update work documents. I gotta figure out how to get documents to and from my laptop without having to think about it twice a day. In my opinion, any twice a day synching tasks are completely unacceptable, because I already have too many setup and tear down chores. Current most likely candidate: Google Gears apps, like the google word processor and the Remember the Milk application. [Update: Google gears didn't help. I couldn't export a word document from the browser when in disconnected mode! Plus, I can't connect my laptop to the internet at work so while at work I'd be isolated from my documents.]

Software development. I gotta get an IDE and portable SVN working directories set up). The synching chores here may be too great to practically use it for work code, but maybe not to severe to use it for my personal web projects. [Update: .NET development on a mac still looks like an advance user scenario, so I'm just going to set up my dev-environment in Parallels.]

Mail. Simple one, but I still haven’t got it set up. [Update: I got it set up. Apple mail is perfectly serviceable.]

Disconnected. The lack of a network really cuts into a lot of applications and not just the web-browser. For example a blog editor can’t get past the set up page.

Temperature. The MacBook runs hot sitting on a lap for 40 minutes. I’ve installed a fan speed control (smcFanControl) and bumped up the minimum speed. Even with that, the computer says the CPU is 41 C.

Powered by Qumana (The blog editor that somes likes to post blogs full of \ and \n escape codes)

I just bought a MacBook. I also just watched a video about a social scientist marshaling the evidence that us humans do a lousy job of predicting what makes us happy. So while I suspect my MacBook will be useful and make for a happier commute, does my history of buying personal technology bode well for me?

iPod Video: This device completely replaced my pocket computer. The user interface and the iTunes software fixed everything that was wrong with the Palm Tungsten which I’d used a lot of MP3s previously. Used daily, this device was worth the price premium paid for it over what I know Apple paid for the 60GB hard drive.

Conclusion. Paid a lot, worth every penny. I hope the money went to the engineers and designers.
Dell Latitude D800 Laptop. It runs fantastically hot and is heavy as sin. The windows operating system can’t be trusted to reliably sleep or hybernate, so there is a heavy startup to pay when trying to stop or start using the thing. I used it a lot for software development, especially remote desktop session, for which it excelled at.
Conclusion. I didn’t buy this one, I got it from work. Social science says when you get things–and don’t a choice in the matter–you will adjust by creating “artificial happiness”. This dell made me happiest when I was using it for getting a narrow task done (connecting to a corporate network), outside of that, the designers didn’t really put much thought into it. The realization that I could do something about this laptops short comings (like buy my own), probably exacerbated my unhappiness with it. Moral of story, if you have a mediocre device, don’t, don’t, don’t read PC Magazine about the latest devices.

Caesar IV. I’m at play session #3. I like these kind of games, my son not so much. The graphics are beautiful. The controls camera are still unpredictable, but I have that problem in most 3-D games.

Conclusion. I thought it would be a good game and for the most part I was right. But I had the advantage of playing Pharaoh and Children of the Nile, two games by the same company with the same sort of theme.

World of Warcraft. My son loves this game. I only like to play it in two player mode. Since my son is rotating through playing each combination of race and class possible and I just don’t play enough, we both are stuck questing from level 1 to 10 over and over.

What I find most disappointing in WoW is the clunky back story. Blizzard’s writing guidelines make long awkward sentences mandatory. Also, the questing system doesn’t really lend itself to the unfolding of a story. In this respect, a mechanically clunkier game–Pirates of the Caribbean beats WoW.

Home brew PC. I suppose I should go component by component and decide if each part made me happy as I thought it would.

Nokia some number or other. It had a fold open keyboard. The smart phone feature was a dud. I sorely misjudged this device.

T-Mobile SDA. This was a mixed bag. I have successfully read books on this phone, used it for pictures that I didn’t immediately throw away, played a game or two on it. However, because it fell so far short of it’s promise, I was disappointed that it was only a modest improvement over the last smart phone I owned.

The T-Mobile SDA can’t play music or video worth $#!+ because of the lame @$$ Windows Media player (really Microsoft, you should buy iTunes from Apple and put it on the Windows Mobile phones and shoot all Windows Media Player developers, or demote them to rewriting notepad.) Likewise, the T-Mobile SDA can’t browse the internet due to a combination of all phone companies making internet over a phone uneconomical and MS not having the sense to write a small form factor web browser. Pocket IE is unusable crap. Maybe MS could see about getting Safari for Windows Mobile? Don’t get me wrong, on my desktop I never use Safari– I’m a firefox guy. I just don’t think a desktop browser on a phone will make anyone happy.

Conclusion. High hopes got in the way of happiness.

SynchMaster 226BW 22 inch widescreen monitor. This did make me happier. The screen has enough real estate that I actually use windows. For the first decade of using windows, 99% of the time I always maximized windows, so the OS might as well have been a single screen task switcher. A widescreen is a poormans dual monitor system. So far my only annoyance is that I can’t be too high or too low, else the screen looks wrong. Well, my old CRT wasn’t without design flaws either, which I’m sure I’ve blogged about elsewhere.

Conclusion. Buying a LCD widescreen monitor was a good idea.

Citizen Eco Drive Watch. I love my Citizen Eco Drive watch. It runs on sunlight and has this spinning wheel that I can use a low tech time “book mark” The fact that it has *fewer* features than the typical watch turned out to be a good thing. I bought it because I want a watch that looked good, thinking that someday I’d buy a slide rule Chronometer or the Palm OS watch.

Conclusion. My feature poor, but good looking watch has made me happier than I expected.

Alphasmart Dana. This is hard to evaluate, because I only use it when I’m in a burst of writing– particularly writing away from my apartment. I didn’t over underestimate how much I write (just look at the length of this post), but I did over estimate how much writing I did that is suitable for the Dana– specifically long document writing. [Also, unexpectedly, file loss due to battery power management was a bigger head ache than I expected] If I do resume writing, I know I won’t use my desktop or MacBook, I’ll use a Dana. To write, you have to focus and an internet enable device doesn’t allow for that.

Final conclusion. The key to being happy about buying tech is to have low expectations and focus on things that have an extremely high chance of being used a lot.

Facebook is kind of like a blog for people who don’t blog. It has a big social resume section, something analogous to a blogroll. It also has something analogous to wordpress plug-ins. You can create a consolidated RSS Feed for all the events being generated by your friends on Facebook.

I think where Facebook is the weakest is in the way you can’t project multiple personas. I don’t want to list in the same resume my personal life and my work life. In my personal life I might be trying to date, but I wouldn’t want that to distract people who are trying to figure out who I am as a programmer.

Wow. I never thought being a music fan could be such a legal quagmire.

Last.FM
I can join Last.fm and wait for the record companies to show up at my door and ask to see the legal title to the music that has been scrobbled off my machine. Scrobbling is posting a running list of the music you are playing on your media player.

Creative Smart Recorder + XM Radio
I have no idea if it is legal or not, but my X-Fi came with the Creative Smart Recorder, which will record all the songs you play on internet radio and split them into individual Mp3’s. The level of effort here is still pretty high and there is a price to be paid in quality, but the end result is pretty similar to file sharing. I just checked, streaming 44Khz sounds like sh*t compared to a real XM radio, 64Kbps, not much better. Streaming makes XM sound like a flat Pepsi. Maybe if I used my XM radio receiver as audio input to the X-Fi–

LaLa.com
Or, I can join LaLa, and trade physical CDs. However, after shipping, I will wait for the record companies to show up at my door and ask to prove that I have destroyed all the bits from my MP3 player for the CD’s I shipped.

If I really like tempting legal fate, I can store my MP3’s online with Lala. Then the record companies can try to get the list of people who’ve traded CD’s but still have them in their Lala Mp3 account. It seems like MP3.com a long time ago offered a similar service and got sued for it. I’m not sure if record companies would like to sue users for the same.

I have signed up with LaLa.com and for the first time in a long time got a strong urge to buy some music, so that I would have some trading material.

AllOfMp3.com
This isn’t really an option anymore, since AllOfMp3 lost their merchant account and can’t accept credit cards. I think they had the model about right, they charged proportionate to bandwidth and tried to treat the transmissions under the same rules as radio in Russia.

File Sharing
Or I can sign up with AT&T, who is currently giving the RIAA records of who has been transmitting MP3s. Then I can run some undetermined chance of being sued for $10,000 and up.

Now there is a lot of legal file sharing, usually indie bands that post MP3’s on music blogs. Still, how am I going to prove I have legal title to these MP3’s when the RIAA is knocking on the door?

Itunes
Or I can rent DRM’d media, which will all disappear at the next upgrade cycle, when the license servers are shut down or when I get a new media player. No thank you, I’ll stick with MP3’s or physical CDs. I’ve already bought DRM’d Audible.com media, which is almost OK. I rarely read or listen to a book twice.

Half.com
Reselling music on Half.com is still pretty unassailably legal, unless it is a promotional disk. Or it was a counterfeit. In fact, I happen to have some of those. The promo disk I got from Half.com. Selling and trading promo disks are against the rules on LaLa.com and Half.com, but once you get one, what am I supposed to do? I can’t sell it and I’m not about to invest any time in returning the CD, reporting the shipper. I probably won’t ship these, on the off hand chance there is some used CD music fan with nothing better to do but to enforce IP laws.

Conclusion

No matter how you look at it, the price of music has fallen. Just like farmers can never bring back the staggering price of food we saw in 1920, the music companies will never be able to bring back the staggering price of music from the pre-digital age. The future is selling large volumes of music at low prices.

Don’t research your material. Half remember facts and made up sh*t is what citizen journalism is all about.

Put the microphone down your trachea. I want to hear you breathing. Every exhalation.

Chew gum. The medium isn’t the message. The podcast isn’t the message. The message is about how boring this podcast is and how you need to spend an hour making gum chewing noises to entertain yourself. And hey, if chewing gum helps relieve the podcaster’s boredom, it’s got to be doing a world of good for the listeners.

Type on the keyboard while broadcasting. It is important to put listeners in their place, about 10th in the list of important things, somewhere below gum chewing and responding to email.

Make no effort to level the volume. Listeners really do want to be jolted by sudden increases in volume, and obviously the part where the volume dropped was only meant for the inner circle listeners.

Make no effort to edit yourself. An hour podcast needs to be filled with something, why not fluff about the weather, rambling introductions, weekly segments included because it is a regular segment (and not because you have any actual content for it).

Never throw out a recording. No matter how bad it is, people want to waste megabytes of bandwidth, harddrive space and potentially very scarce iPod space to hold your incredibly interesting, but inaudible podcast. Skype removed 75% of your interviews words? 500 people in the background talking as loud as they can? Ha! People enjoy the challenge of straining to split the podcast into message and noise.

On the other hand, if you want to hear a good podcast, go listen to Scott Hanselman. Even if you’d rather listen to a podcast about French cooking–trust me, it is better to listen to a podcast about software development than to listen to a podcast full of the above.

I just got out of the public hearing and it looks like Earthlink will be the municiple wi-fi provider. Earthlink gets co-operation in setting up their gear on building tops, poles. The county chips in hardly any cash, but the county gets cheap subscriptions for their field workers, free hot spots at all the community centers.

What do I get? I get a subscription in the low $20 for symmetric broadband–promised 1MB, we’ll see what that translates into, but it sounds at least as fast as my current provider and much faster than current for uploading. My current DSL through verzon has a lousy 36KB up rate. That is much less than the 180kb+ down I get from a good sending server. Once in place, I will be saving $360 a year in internet fees. AND I will be able to log on from all over Arlington. I will be able to sit in starbucks, get a good signal and tell t-mobile to stick their expensive hot spot service up their nose.

Despite all the things that could go wrong with a government project, I think Arlington will get this right. They are relying almost entirely on the private sector to bring municipal wireless to the public and are getting something in return, in terms of being able to bring the internet to the internet have-nots.

Anyhow, go get on the Wi-Fi wait list.

The media player is not really optimized for the device. It is not very intuitive and is just plain clunky. Who ever did the configuration gave up early. This is surprising because THREE dedicated buttons, and large ones at that, are give over to the media player.

The media player is not smart enough to look at the SD mini card when updating the library. (Update, you have to do a menu navigation to get the library to show SD files. Also, if a file disappears from the SD card, you have to manually run an ‘Update’ library command. Ugh.)

Putting a movie on the device is a real challenge. You have to get a non DRM’d movie, not easy. Then you have to re-encode it, using something like Nero Recode. Then you have to fiddle with the settings on Nero Recode. The process is rather slow. Re-encoding takes 15+ minutes, copying 1/2 GB to the device can take another 15-20 minutes. That is about 1 hour of media. So a day or two worth of train rides takes 1/2 an hour (a train rides worth) of time. These ratios are out of whack. Who is going to spend 1/2 an hour loading a media player with 1/2 hour of media play time? My iPod can snag me a week’s worth of podcasts in less than five minutes. Even the iPod’s downloading is easier, since the downloads are done overnight without me infront of the computer.

First I tried the default and a tiny picture, but flawless playback. I resized and re-encode to fill the 320×240 screen, and got good resolution, but lots of stops and starts. The device can’t read data off the card fast enough. So I tried again, 320×240, but a lower Kbps (lower quality settings). The quality was awful, the playback much less choppy, but still choppy. I’m thinking that the likely final solution will be using only a small patch of the screen to replay high quality, smooth playback, something like the default re-encoding settings. This is rather disappointing. What good is a big screen if you can’t replay media that uses the whole screen?

The other odd thing about the SDA is that each eye sees a different level of light from the screen. This must be the case all the time, but when watching moving images, it is really noticable.

I installed Windows Media Player 10 on my PC in the hopes that it would give me media synch capabilities, since I read someone had some success doing so. Unfortunately, WMP10 didn’t notice that my device was plugged in, although ActivieSynch knows it is plugged in. Grrr!