Category: Tech

While many people were apathetic toward iPhone 4S because of unsubstantiated rumors of the iPhone 5 that propelled the unrealistic expectations, Karen and I waited enthusiastically at University Village (Seattle) to pay our respects to Apple. The reason was simple. Karen packed in her purse an iPhone 3GS and a trusty old Canon SD870 IS, which acted as our portable “camcorder”, and we yearned for saving money and weight by consolidating the two devices into one.

No such luck.

Either my hands exhibited a natural alcoholics shake, or I had too much booze last night, but despite the selling point of having image stabilization, the videos from the iPhone 4S taken by my excruciatingly careful hold resembled videos shot during a 7.0 earthquake.

Moreover, The 4S was portrayed as capable of being taken out and snapping a picture before I could say “foo bar”, but in practice, the camera app locked up for upwards of 20 seconds while my subjects stared in boredom. By the time the phone was ready, the smile had turned into a frown, which typically do not make great photography unless you’re in the morgue. In addition, my finger regularly, unintentionally acted as a lens cap as well as a wind-cover for the mic, resulting in artistic mime-like movies. To top it off, the new antenna design worked so well that while my 3GS was showing “3G” and browsing with ease, my 4S was showing “Searching…” for quite a while.

Could I have just hit the jackpot of a detective phone, or is it all user error? Either way, this one is going back.

A while ago I blogged about my dream laptop.  Well, recently I purchased a Sony Z.

This laptop is really nice.  It has a nice fast 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo 2 on the new Montevina chipset.  It comes with 3 GB of very fast (and expensive) DDR3 RAM.  It has dual video card, which allows me to use the integrated Intel graphics to save battery while switching to nVidia 9300M for gaming, all without needing to reboot.  It also has HDMI out at 1080p resolution as well as the old VGA port.  The colors of the screen is something to behold with 100% saturation.  It comes with a WebCam wth Mic built-in and a Fingerprint scanner which is surprisingly useful.  Firewire connection.  3.3 lbs.  3-6 hours of battery life.  Made in Japan.

However, there are a few problems that’s making me second guess whether I should keep this.  The biggest issue is the keyboard.  It’s got the MacBook style keyboard with a bigger pitch, but somehow I find myself keep missing keys as I type.  I can type as fast as 100 wpm, but even when I cruise at a slow pace, sometimes i find that either my fingers are missing some keys or that when I hit a certain key nothing appears.  Even as I type this blog, I find that I need to go back and correct more things that I typically do, which is highly annoying.

Then there’s the issue of the nVidia graphics card, which may have a defective soldering issue. This effectively makes my laptop a timebomb because at any time, the video card can fail.  Now when it fails, I can always switch to the integrated graphics, but then why pay so much for a Z?

I also heard about the battery drain problem where the battey drains even if the laptop is shut down.  I decided to try it last night and started with the battery at 49%.  After shutting down completely last night and rebooting it this morning, the battery lost 14%.  Now granted booting up takes some battery power (I should have plugged in the AC), but there obviously is a battery drain issue when the laptp is completely off.

Then there are a few minor things, such as the screen being 13.1 instead of 13.3 like my old S360.  There’s a built-in SD card reader, but it’s completely useless for me.   I have an 8 GB SDHC card, and last night I tried to download some videos I took off it last night and it estimated over 20 minutes!  With my SDHC SanDisk reader, it estimated 5 minutes.  Guess which one I’ll be using.  The WebCam is only VGA resolution.  There’s the Sprint WWAN which I have no intention of ever using but nevertheless paid for. The BIOS is a bare bones BIOS that doesn’t even have the option to turn on hardware virtualization from the Intel CPU! Lastly, for some reason there are some connectivity problems when I use this laptop with my work’s network, and even after calling helpdesk, they couldn’t resolve the issue.

The thing is, I’m not sure there are better alternatives, and I really want to have my own laptop instead of hogging Karen’s MacBook and making her go to the iPhone.  Decisions, decisions.

We’ve tried many times to cut out the monthly recurring home phone charge, now that almost everyone has a cell phone. At one point, we went as far as to schedule cancellation of our Comcast Phone Service, but after calling Karen from my cell phone the next day only to hear ceaseless ringing and voicemail, I abandoned the thought. Karen was pregnant at that time, so it was too important for me to be able to reach her at home at all times.

Now that Odelia is born, once again I investigate home phone alternatives. At first, I thought about getting the VTech Cordless phone with bluetooth convergence:

Essentially it is a cordless phone that acts as a bluetooth headset piped through thephone. It looked stylish, but after research, I found that people have had problems connecting to it. Also, I didn’t want to limit myself to only a few models and be locked into the brand. I wanted a solution that will work with my existing phone. So I found…

XLink Gateway. This little gadget connects up to three cell phones using bluetooth, and this version also connects a landline as well. The nice thing is that our cell phones automatically connect with the XLink gateway, even if it’s still sitting in the pocket of my American Eagle jeans or if the phone is in another room or on a different floor!

Over time, the money we saved from not having a home phone will pay for this device and more, so we’re glad we finally have a way to cut out the home phone once and for all!

For a while, I enjoyed the company of my laptop, the Sony S360. It was a great laptop with a slim profile, light weight, great 13.3 screen, and powerful ATI Radeon 9700 graphics card. Unfortunately one day it took a head-dive down the stairs and was never the same. Occasionally it would throw a fit and completely freeze up. Well, recently it has been throwing these tantrums more frequently, as any slight movement to the laptop would render it useless.

However, as I looked into a placement laptop, I’m looking for:

• Intel Core 2 Duo 2.0 GHz+
• LED 13.3″ screen
• Lightweight, around 4 lbs or less
• HDMI or DVI port
• Bluetooth
• 802.11n
• Fingerprint scanner, fun to have

In the end, I found two laptops that fit my bill, the Dell XPS M1330 and Sony SZ750. I looked at the M1330, which is cheaper, and even though it is LED, seems to have poor viewing angle. There have also been many complaints about build quality. The Sony, on the other hand, has dual graphics card switch uses one to save power but the other one for serious gaming, but it does not have a built-in HDMI port. It does have a docking station with a DVI port, so I was almost about to pull the trigger on it when it became discontinued! What?!

Apparently the new Intel processor and chipset, Montevina, is coming out this summer, and everyone’s saying to wait for it. So what do I do in the mean time? Well, the laptop is pretty useless at the current moment, so I decided to do a little handiwork…

And transform it into a “desktop”… without the expandability and possibly dangerous to the touch, but this will have to do until the new laptops come out.

And yes, I did write this blog on that thing.

A while back I shared about my backup solution, where I use a DLink DNS-323 to make backups from one drive to another, once per night.  This prevents me from accidentally deleting a file and loosing it forever.  Unfortunately, the safety net is only for one day, because if you need to recover it the next day, the data from the day before is overwritten and the data is gone forever.

However, Mac has the concept of Time Machine, where you can go back to any point in time and recover any of the old versions of files that you’ve ever had.  It’s an interesting concept, but making a full copy everyday will run out of storage after 2-3 backups!  Fortunately, I have learned that using rsync, which is how I’ve been backing up from one drive to another, you can actually make a full backup every day, without wasting space for files that haven’t changed.

So with a full backup everyday, I don’t have to worry about overwriting a file and not being able to recover it, because I can go to any version of any file on any day.  Now that’s a backup solution!

Now with the new Network Storage device I purchased, I want a fast way of accessing my pictures and videos. Our typical wireless networks run at 54 Mbps, which is sluggish when it comes to browsing network data. There are times when I would wait my life away for that RAW picture to load, and it certainly can be frustrating.

Enter the gigabit network. The gigabet ethernet runs at 1000 Mbps, which is faster than the computer itself, but the only way I can connect the computers together is to run a forest of ethernet wires around the house, reminiscent of the college days when wireless was not pervasive and hubs were everwhere.

But then a light bulb turned on. I recall that my phone wiring was done using CAT5 cables, so why not rewire it for ethernet? With the cordless and cell phones, who needs phone jacks all over the house anyway? So I ran to the nearest Lowe’s and bought some modular jacks, in case I want to change the ports in the future. I unscrewed all the phone jacks and realized that there’s only a single CAT5 cable that runs throughout the house, which means I cannot have a central switch and there will need to be a switch for every room that needs gigabit access. For now, I just have one other room I need connection for, so I’m fine for now. After mapping out where the cable went, I began replacing the wall plates…

So now most of my plates are this simple, just a plain ol’ Ethernet jack for the gigabit network. The only caveat is that the house is wired with CAT5, but to access gigabit speeds, I need CAT 5e or CAT6 cables. Fortunately, they’re more specs than anything else, so at short distances, I can still access just about as fast as the computers can go. Now I can connect our laptops via gigabit ethernet when accessing the Network Access Storage device, and transfer at as fast as the hard drives/computers would go without running a ethernet cable along the hallways!

Have you ever lost a file you really wanted to keep? With so many Odelia pictures and videos, I needed some storage and backup solution that I can feel safe about. Many people store their pictures on just one computer, but if that hard drive crashes, there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

So I started with the 1TB MyBook Studio Edition. Initially everything worked fine, but unfortunately when used with the MacBook Pro, MyBook would fall asleep and never wake up, freezing up both itself and the MacBook. One time when this happened, I had no choice but to pull the Firewire connection, and the Pictures folder disappeared! Yikes! Good thing I had the original copy on another computer. It’s going back.

Next I tried a Thermallake external hard drive enclosure. The design was immediately alarming because it lacked a fan or ventilation openings, which can cause the drive to fail sooner. While this enclosure worked with the PC, it actually corrupted some files I touched when accessed from the Mac!

Finally, I decided to fork out a little more money and got a DLink DNS-323 Dual-Bay Network Access Storage and stacked them with two Seagate 1TB hard drives. It comes with a Gigabit connection, so I can access the files quickly or have it always available over wireless. Every night it backs up the primary drive onto the secondary drive automatically and incrementally. It saves a whole lot of hassle and gives me a peace of mind. Now I have 1 TB of backed up storage, a perfect solution! In addition, the DNS-323 is essentially a small linux machine that uses 20% of the power of a traditional computer, it provides the added bonus of being a iTunes server and a print server (USB port). After reading a dedicated web site on how to add plugins and hacks, I’ve learned you can add telnet, bittorrent, ftp server, appletalk, scheduled downloads, and more. Performance is also great.

So now I have a place I can store all the precious Odelia pictures and videos, all the Europe photos, and all the other goofy stuff I’ve saved in the past. And best of all, I have a peace of mind that if Murphy’s Law strikes one of the hard drives, my data is still intact. Looks like this unit is a winner, but only time will tell.

Update: I did some tests and noticed that this device is runs at 25 watts while active and 8 watts in “standby” mode. Definitely much better than the typical desktop.

Over Christmas I bought Karen an iPod but quickly we realized one problem–we couldn’t play the music in the car! Short of purchasing a BMW with built-in iPod support, I explored the internet for various options and came up with three different solutions:

1. Purchase a device that will broadcast a radio signal over FM for $50+, but it’s radio quality and is prone to static and interference.
2. Use an FM wired modulator, which connects the FM signal directly to the line, but it’s still inferior to even a cassette adapter.
3. Connect directly to the CD Changer port using a special device called Blitzsafe.

Of course, I opted for the third option.

I purchased the Blitzsafe Honda-To-iPod interface from LogJam, which came with an iPod connector that also charges the iPod, a nice feature if the iPod isn’t charged. Unfortunately taking my car apart wasn’t as straight forward as portrayed on the web. My model has a cup holder, which makes it harder than the regular model, so I carefully spent an hour and made no progress. Hoping not to damage my car, I thought about professional installation, but they all charged $50+ and has a wait of a week. That was too much–I need it NOW! So I met up with my friend John, a Honda Mechanic, and he handed me some diagrams of the lower panel. I came home, took the panel apart, plugged in the cable, and in less than an hour, had the iPod playing over the car stereo in CD quality.

In the end, it was more work than expected, but totally worth it!

After some professional photo gigs for Erick and Huey’s weddings, I took a leave of absence from the world of photography (I took a break from the world of blogging too, but that’s a different story).  Right before Christmas, I decided to vent out the photo bag when I discovered that my family room is filled with snow!

Oh wait… no… my camera just kept overexposing shots!  For the Fuzzy shots, I had to resort to using Full Manual mode, taking 427 tries to get 2 good shots!  I suppose to look on the bright side, we were planning to go to Europe, and finding this problem out in Italy would have been… most unpleasant.

So I headed where everyone else would when they encounter problems like this–the internet.  After a little research, it was apparent this is the precursor to the BLOG problem.  Wait?  BLOG?  No, BGLOD.  It stands for “Blinking Green Light Of Death”.  Apparently all Nikon D70’s shipped in the first 4 months of the product was prone to this issue, even if the camera is sitting untouched collecting dust in its original box.  There’s a recall service advisory for this, but with a catch–to qualify for the free service, the green light has to be blinking.  Unfortunately mine wasn’t blinking.  I had all the symptoms leading up to it, but not the problem itself.

Knowing that this will eventually deteriorate into BGLOD, I placed it back in its bag and went on our Christmas vacation with our old Canon S400.  Of course, having used a D70 for so long, this was like getting used to driving a BMW and then being forced to drive a Corolla (no disrespect to you Corolla owners…  I’m sure it’s a… um…  respectable car).  When I came back…  lo and behold!  Blinking Green Light of Death!  Yes!!!

I promptly sent it in for service, and that was two weeks ago.  I just got my camera back today and we’ll give it some time to see if everything is fixed.  However, for how much I paid for this thing, I expected a little more than a timebomb…  oh well.  At least it’s working now.