The Gadgets Page

Michael Moncur has been having trouble with the GPS feature on his brand new 3G iPhone. Compared to his old iPhone, the maps feature isn’t nearly as useful.

• figby.com » My iPhone Thinks I’m in Minnesota

Despite not having a GPS chip, [my old] iPhone would do an admirable job of finding my current location using cellphone towers, WiFi, and some sort of dark magic.

Although this was good, I was really looking forward to using the maps on the new iPhone 3G with true GPS. I brought a new 3G iPhone home last week, gleefully clicked on the Maps and “locate me” buttons, and instantly found myself on a map centered on Wayzata, Minnesota. I’m sure it’s a fine place, but unfortunately, I’m 1300 miles away in Utah.

I have had the exact same problem with my iPhone and I’m surprised that there is nothing in the Apple support pages about it. I guess that’s the price I pay for being an early adopter, but honestly, all those cool iPhone apps that use my location are USELESS when the phone thinks I’m in another state.

Update 09-01-08: After playing with it for two weeks, I’ve decided that Mike was right. It IS the 3G tower interfering with the GPS signal. When I turn 3G off, the iPhone can find EXACTLY where I am within a few seconds. All iPhone apps that use my location (like RunKeeper) use the correct location when I turn off 3G.

Last January at CES, we saw a booth for Mr. Clock Radio. Although entertaining, I never thought he might become available in the U.S., but it looks like you can now buy Mr. Clock Radio on Amazon.com, so I thought I would share what we saw at CES.

He looked like a fun little toy, like something you would give to your father-in-law to make him laugh. I’m glad Mr. Clock Radio finally made it to the states!

Back in January at CES, we showed you Ion’s prototype for a professional drum set:

• Gadgets Page » CES 2008: Professional Rock Band Drums

Ion has announced that it is accepting pre-orders for Drum Rocker, which will sell for $300 a set. There are additional cymbals that you can purchase to add to the set, but that’s the price for the base set.

You can see them in action here with Dan Amrich of the Official XBox Magazine, who was nice enough to play the drums while I filmed.

The two biggest questions I have been getting about these drums are WHEN will they be available and will they be able to be used as “real” drums. According to the Drum Rocker FAQ file from Ion, here are the answers:

If I pre-order on this website, when will my Drum Rocker be shipped?

Drum Rocker is expected to ship mid-September.

I want to use Drum Rocker as a real electronic drum set. What will I need to be able to do that?

While there are many “drum brains” that accept the 1/4″ outputs of the Drum Rocker drum pads and cymbals, Ion recommends using the Alesis DM5 drum module with Drum Rocker.

The DM5 is a professional drum module with (12) 1/4″ trigger inputs and more than 500 professional quality sounds. Its trigger inputs are well suited to handle the output levels of the Drum Rocker pads. If you decide to use a DM5 with Drum Rocker, you’ll also likely want to purchase a kick pad and regular kick pedal, which will let you take advantage of the increased control that the DM5 offers. The drum pedal that comes with Drum Rocker can then be used as a hi-hat pedal.

I am so glad that Ion made Drum Rocker compatible with drum machines so they can double as a game controller and real drums. Here’s to learning to play and playing to learn. I think Rock Band is the best catalyst for music education that we’ve had in a long time.

Via: Ion’s $300 “Drum Rocker” premium drum kit for Rock Band unveiled – Engadget

My friend, Jesse Stay, has finally given up on Twitter. He states all his reasons why he is leaving and why he thinks you should join him:

• My Hiatus From Twitter – Why You Should Join Me | Stay N’ Alive

I stopped really using Twitter several months ago and I basically agree with Jesse’s reasons for leaving, but I refuse to jump ship for just another social network like FriendFeed, Tumbler or indenti.ca. The reason why Twitter is more appealing than these other options is because I can use my cell phone to do an update. A simple SMS can keep me in touch and I can receive SMS updates of my favorite friends. THAT’S why Twitter is the killer app that people aren’t abandoning.

Honestly, I’ve been disappointed with Twitter. Instead of offering me a pay service that will turn my IM back on (along with other features), they have been putting out fires because of scaling issues. I still read my friend’s tweets to keep up-to-date on their lives, but if I have 140 characters to say, I’ve gone back to using Flickr’s post to blog feature. Then I can include a picture and say as little or as much as I want about my life.

With the advances in mobile options, Twitter’s killer app won’t be as important to me as it has been over the last two years. Until then, I’ll still read my friends’ Twitter feeds to keep up to date. Sadly, I fear that Twitter is just an intermediary technology. As soon as the cell phones increase their capabilities (or when there is an iPhone in every pocket), Twitter will no longer serve any use.

Saturday’s Sheldon comic attacked digital photo frames. You can see it here:

• Sheldonâ„¢ Comic Strip: Daily Webcomic by Dave Kellett

Since Sheldon’s grandpa doesn’t quite understand the concept, I thought I’d shed light on all the reasons why I LOVE my digital photo frame.

1. I don’t have to cover my wall with photos of my family: I love my family and I WANT to cover my walls with pictures of them, but with the digital photo frame, I can have ONE thing that shows me all my loved ones on a rotating schedule.

2. I can be impartial: If you think the kids and grandkids aren’t going around the house counting photos of themselves and comparing these counts to the number of photos of their siblings and cousins, then you’re fooling yourself. With my digital photo frame, I can easily see how many photos there are of each special person in my life.

3. I LOVE to sit and watch it: Sometimes, when I have a quiet moment in the house, I love to just sit at the kitchen table and watch my digital photo frame flip through the pictures of my loved ones. I find it enjoyable and almost meditative.

4. Kids love it: Even children who can barely speak will become vocal around my digital photo frame. The few words children learn at first are “Momma” and “Pappa.” When they see a picture of their parents or siblings they will light right up. Of course, the older children are casually trying to count their ratio of photographs, but they still will watch it for longer than any normal photo frame.

5. It will bring your mom into the digital age: We bought my mom a digital camera many years ago. It sat unused until we got her a digital photo frame. We gave it to her pre-loaded with some family photos, but she very quickly understood that if she took photos with her dusty digital camera that had been hanging around the house, she could add new photos to her snazzy new picture frame. The digital photo frame single-handedly brought my mother into the digital age.

6. It’s not just about photos: As the larger digital photo frames become affordable, I suspect that artists will use them to exhibit their artwork. Imagine being able to showcase EVERY piece of art you have created in one spot on your wall. Even after you have sold your work, you would be able to show it off on your wall at home. Additionally, you can have a photo frame that shows all of the greatest artwork of the centuries in one simple place.

In the end, I’ve found the digital photo frame to be FAR superior to the old school frames. It is one of the few technological devices that happens to be better than the thing it replaced.

Here is a video showcasing the Ford Comuta in 1962. They were hoping to bring it into production by 1977.

It took a little longer than that, but electric and hybrid cars are finally making it into the mainstream and not a moment too soon considering gas prices.

Via: Retro Futurism: Ford Says Electric Cars “Commercially Feasible” By 1977

Musikvatur has recreated a video game for his hamster to play. You can see it here:

The maze is a recreation of Monty on the Run. I had never heard of the game, but Games Yanks Can’t Wank was kind enough to tell me all about it. Apparently, it was never released in the states, so it’s no wonder I’ve never heard of it.

After seeing the screen shots, it looks like Musikvatur did a pretty good job recreating the old Commodore 64 video game.

It reads like a fake. Seriously, when I read this supposed email from Bill Gates to his team about the usability problems he encountered trying to download Windows Moviemaker for his computer, it felt like a fake. But it’s NOT. It was just one of hundreds of emails that were released into the public domain as part of the anti-trust suit that Microsoft was involved in.

• Full text: An epic Bill Gates e-mail rant

He encounters so many problems trying to download Moviemaker that he gives up:

So I give up on Moviemaker and decide to download the Digital Plus Package.

I get told I need to go enter a bunch of information about myself.

I enter it all in and because it decides I have mistyped something I have to try again. Of course it has cleared out most of what I typed.

I try (typing) the right stuff in 5 times and it just keeps clearing things out for me to type them in again.

So after more than an hour of craziness and making my programs list garbage and being scared and seeing that Microsoft.com is a terrible website I haven’t run Moviemaker and I haven’t got the plus package.

The lack of attention to usability represented by these experiences blows my mind.

To all the people who keep defending Microsoft, this is EXACTLY why I switched to a Mac. I had so much trouble just trying to edit a simple video on my PC that I bought a whole new computer, learned an entirely new operating system and it was still easier than trying to get Moviemaker to work.

Via: Sheldon: Sheldon Talk forum: As Bill Gates Exits…

I have an old Powerbook G4. It’s in great shape, but it’s on power adapter #4, battery #3, and hard disk #3 is failing as I write this article. It’s been deprecated to “Kid’s computer” but it serves its purpose well and there’s little point in replacing it. It would be nice if it could survive the weekly slide off the couch to the floor without loosing sectors, however. With this most recent hard disk replacement, I had the opportunity to consider going to a solid state flash drive. But would it make sense to put such an expensive drive into an old computer?

Solid State Disk

The newest small laptops, such as the Sony UX490 and the MacBook Air, come with Solid State Disk (SSD) technology. SSDs are flash memory with a hard disk drive interface and designed as a direct replacement for laptop hard disks. SSD has four primary advantages:

• There are no moving parts, so the drive lifetime is dramatically improved
• Much lower power consumption is reduced
• Seek time is eliminated to I/O operations like virtual memory are faster
• They are silent
• The next generation of SSD will be considerably faster than disk

The downsides is that SSDs cost 30 times as much per gigabyte as disk storage. At the time of this writing a 32GB SSD costs over $700 and a 64GB SSD costs over $1200 compared to $80 for a 120GB laptop hard drive. It made no sense to put a hard drive of that cost into a five year old computer.

CompactFlash to the Rescue

But there is another commonly available type of Flash memory that is much less expensive than a true SSD that can be used as a laptop hard disk replacement. Compact-Flash cards have an IDE interface exactly like a typical hard disk, but with a different pinout. Using an inexpensive passive adapter, a piece (or two) of Compact-Flash memory can make an effective laptop hard disk replacement, especially now that large sizes of CF are available off the shelf. A 32GB CF card costs just $170, compared to $600 in an SSD form factor–one quarter the price. The SSD may be faster, but a fast CF card works perfectly well as a primary hard disk.

Conversion Process

I converted my old Powerbook G4 to flash memory using an Addonics CF<>Mini-IDE adapter and a RiDATA 233X 32GB Compact-Flash card. A 16GB Compact-Flash card would have worked for half the price (OS X 10.5 Leopard takes 8GB of memory, so 16GB provides room for applications and virtual memory but no space for data). The cost for both the CF card and the adapter was $200. While I could have spent half as much on a larger disk, the extra space wasn’t a value because I didn’t need it, and the extra $100 was justified by eliminating disk-based failure.

The computer now uses reliable solid state memory, and has more than enough room for the operating system and all of its applications and data. It’s not enough disk space for my primary computer, but as a family computer its more than enough. Plus, with my kids using it, I no longer have to replace the hard disk when it slides off the couch. The computer is on its fourth (and last) hard disk now. Using the computer is almost exactly like it was before. Some operations take slightly longer to kick off, but others are faster. Overall, the usability is the same.

Compact Flash as a Boot Drive

A computer running from Compact-Flash will have slightly different performance characteristics than a hard disk drive based computer because the drive is slower for large operations but faster at random access because there is no head seek time. This means that long disk operations will take more time, but short disk operations will take less time. For example, virtual memory performance, which requires a lot of small operations, is dramatically better with CF than HDD, but file copies take about twice as long as with a real hard disk. Because small operations are fast, the computer is just as responsive to most user interaction, which is the most important factor.

To be honest, I was amazed how different the computer wasn’t. While there were the occasional moments where I noticed a half-second of delay, there were also operations that didn’t take longer, such as launching an application during a file copy–that didn’t take any longer than if a file copy hadn’t been going on, and it’s the sort of operation that normally lags quite a bit in that circumstance. Multitasking was easier and faster on CF even though bulk operations were about half the speed.

The process worked so well that I’m strongly considering a dual CF upgrade for my newer MacBook.

The Nitty Gritty Details

You need to be aware of how CF cards emulate hard disk drives. Older, slower CF cards emulate a simple “Programmed I/O” or PIO disk, which is very slow. Direct Memory Access (DMA) devices are much faster, with Ultra-DMA (UDMA) devices being the fastest. UDMA Flash cards will be listed as 120X or faster. You basically want the fastest memory you can afford, because it will affect all aspects of your computer’s operation. Also, some older non-UDMA cards cannot be reformatted to accept a boot loader, so be safe by sticking with UDMA CF cards only.

You also need a UDMA reader because the speed your disk runs at will be the lower of the speed of the drive and the adapter. I tested my Compact-Flash card in a typical PC Card to CF adapter in the PC Card slot and it was horribly slow because the PC Card I had was only a 16-bit card that forced the CF card into PIO mode. Putting the same card in a UDMA firewire adapter dramatically improved performance. Also, the Mac could not boot the PC Card adapter in 16-bit mode.

Addonics CF to PATA and SATA adapters

Addonics makes a completely line of single and dual flash adapter for both parallel (PATA) and Serial (SATA) hard disk drives. You can browse their complete line of flash readers at the following URL:

• DigiDrive/Flash Memory Reader from Addonics

All of their adapters are UDMA and will drive CF cards at their maximum performance ratings. Windows users will need this sort of adapter to work at all because Windows will not boot from removable media. If you own a Mac, you also have the option of booting Flash from a USB port (Intel Macs only), the CardBus or ExpressBus slot, or from a Firewire port. Keep in mind that if you boot from your slot, you can’t use it for anything else because the boot drive can never be unmounted.

There’s an important difference between the Addonics PATA and SATA dual CF adapters however; The PATA adapter mounts both cards as two separate drives (a master and a slave) so your computer sees both, whereas the SATA dual adapter bonds them together as either RAID-0 striped, RAID-1 mirrored, or combined. You will almost certainly want to use RAID-0 striped mode with this adapter because is splits all data across both devices, doubling the read and write performance.

Summary

With Addonics CF adapter, CardFlash is inexpensive enough to use now for any computer that doesn’t have to store bulk data. There’s more than enough room on a 16GB card for both your operating system and your applications. 32GB is enough for everything, presuming that you’re not working with virtual machines, storing your entire iTunes library, or editing video on the computer. For most people, CF based disks can be an effective upgrade for their next disk replacement even in existing laptops.

Shiny Shiny wants to know if I would geek out with binary nail polish.

• Shiny Shiny: Would you geek out with binary nail varnish?

To quote James Joyce’s Molly Bloom:

“…and [my] heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes.”

Via: ZADI DIAZ