Movies are a great source for finding good music. The Devil Wears Prada (Widescreen Edition)
KT grew up in St Andrews (golf course fame) Scotland to her adopted academic parents. Her first album, “eye to the Telescope”’s name pays homage to her father. She later found her birth mother who is Chinese and learn that her father is Irish, and is a folk musician.
News from International Herald Tribune – Ford Sells Aston Martin. Maybe it’s growing up with James Bond, but Aston Martin will always be one of my fav brand. Has anyone notice the inside joke in Casino Royale
While we are talking about Bond, this new Bond movie has to go down as one of the best. Almost no gadgets, good stunt work, back to the real bond!
Blogging online directly sometimes deter writing longer posts. After some research I am going to give BlogJet a try. First thing first, configuration is not as easy as it seems. I have my own server installation of wordpress. BlogJet will not auto detect my server. I need to manually configure the account by specifying:
Turned out, I also have to edit my .htaccess file to add the following:
<Files xmlrpc.php>SecFilterInheritance Off</Files>
First Impression
As I am typing this post — I like the very simple interface. Just type! One minor gripe — When you need to insert a link, you have to:
Why can’t BlogJet default the URL to what’s on the clipboard?
I rented Transporter 2 because I liked Transporter 1. The first one has a great premise, and started one of my fav Chinese Actress Shu Qi. A guy, a girl, tricked out Audi. What more do you want? I really did not expect too much from Transporter 2, but minutes into the movie, the fight sequences lite up the screen. Turned out Corey Yuen is the martial arts choreographer. Besides all the big Hong Kong movies, he also action directed many hollywood action movies for Jet Li includnig Romeo must Die and others. The final big fight sequence in fact is as innovative as any current Hong Kong action movie. The movie does not take itself too seriously, and has lots of funny lines. Look past the impossible "walking thru machine gun fires without being hit" and "flipping a car in the air to hit a hook to dislodge a boom then land the right side up without a single scratch", and enjoy the movie! One thought, Transporter 1 saves the girl. Transporter 2 saves the kid. Transporter 3 coming? saving the...?
Fountain pen is not big in the US. So I only discover new cool pens when I am traveling else where in the globe or read other pen enthusiasts blog, like this entry over at DYI Planner. There is a new affordable fountain pen from one of my fav manufacturer, Pilot, called the Pilot Knight. About $40 for a well made all metal pen with a steel nib.
I have written up my review of ZWave before. It is a wireless messed type home control system that allow easy retrofiting of lighting and appliance controls in a home. It also works great in condo and apartment buildings because commercial wiring does not work well with powerline systems like X10 and UPB. This year since I put up some holiday lights on our balcony, I took the opportunity to order a few more controllers and an outdoor appliance control for the lights. Now we have a wireless keypad almost everywhere in the loft!
I was never impressed with these digital photo frame products. While it sounds great initial, especially for a gadget fan like me, I always think that it is the wrong way to enjoy personal photographs. Isn't the screen too small? Isn't it too painful to setup? Aren't they too expensive? Well, after some research, I bought a few Philips 6.5 inch digital photo frame as Christmas presents for family members. The reasons for choosing this particular frame are:
I wanted to load up some pictures for them before I give them the frame at Christmas, so I opened one today and played with it. I was, impressed.
This particular frame is very well designed. Now I understand why it always had good reviews. Some good points are:
Now some bad points, or tips:
Finally, we don't have to suffer the not very useful mapquest smartphone interface. Go to Google here right on the treo to download and install the software. You can see satellite view (glad we have EVDO speed) and traffic condition. Very cool app for the Treo.
Since I got my Treo 700p, I started lots of research on the web for reviews, tips and tricks, and products. After a while I notice some thing strange. A lot of the online retailers are related or backed by the same company. I dug deeper. What I found is pretty "interesting".
Starting with TreoCentral. It is owned by Palm. From their website's disclaimer at the page bottom:
TREO and TreoCentral are trademarks or registered trademarks of palm, Inc. in the United States and other countries; the TreoCentral mark and domain name are used under license from palm, Inc. The views expressed on this website are solely those of the proprietor, or contributors to the site, and do not necessarily reflect the views of palm, Inc.
Look under their "about" page, it confirmed what I thought -- the Smartphone Experts brand of products are behind the store front as well:
Today, the infrastructure created for the TreoCentral stores powers a wide variety of Smartphone stores under the umbrella organization Smartphone Experts.
Checking on the Smartphone Experts website confirms that they powered the store part of most of the treo sites out there:
So when these Treo sites review products, are they truly independent of the Smartphone Expert brand? You thought it matters which site to buy stuff from, but it really doesn't since they are all the same store? What do you think?
I made the switch. I am ebaying my Nokia 9300 smartphone and switched over to a Treo 700p on Verizon Wireless.You can read my full review here.
Why switch? Two reasons:
Same old story -- not enough storage in the loft. I put together the IKEA Malm 6 chest of drawers this weekend. Took me two hours. This IKEA piece is a little different from the other pieces that I put together. Some notables are:
How often do you buy a new indoor trash can? I don't think I have bought more than five or six in my life. When I move I tend to get a new one that fits the deco. After moving to the new loft and moving the old stainless steel one over for a few months, I've decided that this old cheap one is not up to the job. Reason? It slides on the floor, and when it opens, the top scrape against whatever the can's is touching, which is my nice new cabinets. Enter Simple Human. They were famous for those butterfly openning trash can that needs special trash bag. Not so good an idea. But they have kept up with their innovation. Enters the semi-round trash can:
This one really works well. I put it against the side of my kitchen cabinet. It stays there. The openning mechanism (flip up plastic top) swings up but does not move too much pass the back so that it does not scrape/push against the cabinet. The bottom is rubber and a little "sticky", so the can does not slip. With the flat back against the cabinet wall, it stays put very well. The large foot pedal also makes openning the top easier.
The only thing that I wish it has is a damper mechanism when the top closes. That would make it the perfect trash can.
When I bought my Thinkpad X31 (X31 model 2672REU), I ordered it with a 40G drive. I thought I would never ran out of space. Then came iTunes with Apple Lossless encoded music, and my Nikon D70 which generates thousands of pictures at 3 meg each, my 40G drive went down to 1G free for months. After some research, I ordered my hard drive upgrade components from Drive Solutions. They are reasonably priced and shipping was fast. I ordered a Hitachi 100G 7200 RPM Travelstar drive at $205. The 80G drive at $165 is actually better bang for the buck, but I figure I will only upgrade my harddrive once on this laptop, so might as well go for the largest drive. The travelstar is highly rated for speed and quality. I also ordered the EZ Upgrade Universal Hard Drive Upgrade Kit USB 2.0 by Apricorn. This software and case combination lets one clone the existing drive over to the new drive via USB.
I have outline my successful upgrade steps below. I did run into a problem at the beginning, when the EZ-GIG software failed with a read error from my original drive. After some research, I determined that the error is due to some disk corruption/bad sector on the drive. I ran the XP version of "scandisk" and fixed the source drive.
This is the only smart phone that has a 640 x 200 (yes, 640 pixel wide) screen and a very usable keyboard. It is heavier and bulkier than most newer smartphones. Is it worth it for about $350 from Ebay? It is for me, your mileage may varies. Read on for more details. I have owned this phone for five days. I will update this review as I discover more things.
My second Sony Ericsson phone broke. Same thing—the charging connector got dirty enough that it is not longer charging. It’s not so bad if SE has a separate battery charger that I can use to charge a battery outside of the phone, but they do not. In my old Nokia 8900 days, I have an desktop charger that charges a second standalone battery.
I also am increasingly mobile but without my laptop, i.e. in my car, in between meetings, etc. The new biz requires lots of immediate email interaction, so it’s time for a good email phone. I would have gone for , and in fact waited for, the new blackberry 8700 but it kept getting delayed (for the T-Mobile, my carrier) launch. I would have switched to Cingular, but their data plan is a lot more expensive. For T-Mobile
Nokia just came out witht the 9300i. The "i" version is identical to the old version except it has wifi. Normally wifi would be a good thing, but from all the reviews that I read, the 9300 CPU is slow enough that the browsing via wifi is not faster than using Edge. With my T-Mobile $19.95 unlimited data plan, I can stay on Edge all day. Also, since the 9300i is new, it is much more expensive. Where-as the 9300 can be had on E-Bay for $350 or less.
If you look around, the 9300 still sells for about $450 on the web. I got mine from E-Bay for $320. However, when it arrived, it turned out to have a Italian or Spanish keyboard. I contacted the seller and they were willing to give me a full refund, but I ended up keeping it because of the price. The keyboard is ok except for a few of the critical puntuation keys, the "@", the ":" etc are in the wrong place. So buyer beware.
Besides the keyboard differences, there are actually two versions of the 9300 available. One is for the world GSM frequencies 900/900/19000, the other one is for US GSM frequencies 850/1800/1900. You can tell by the FCC ID label on the back of the phone:
PDN RA-2 : 9500 (900/1800/1900) PDN RA-3 : 9500 (850/1800/1900) PYA RAE-6 : 9300 (900/1800/1900) PYA RA-4 : 9300 (850/1800/1900)
The phone that I got from EBay turned out to be the US GSM version.
Up to this point I have always rely on storing my phone book on my SIM card. I do not sync my phones with Outlook. For the 9300, the SIM Card based phone book does not really work, since there is no “load from SIM card to memory” option, and all the multiple phone numbers on the SIM card are split into individual entries. The SIM card phone numbers are available as a separate "database", but to make it works well, you really have to use the smartphone’s contact database as the source after syncing it with Outlook.
Also, the contact database is also the only allowable source for 1-touch dial on the phone. So after syncing my full Outlook contact list with the phone, I can assign 1-touch dialing to contacts in the database.
One Touch Dialing Not available in Telephone Application
One annoying thing -- 1 touch dialing is only available on the cover phone. Since there are a few numbers I call often, if I want to use the speaker phone, I have to
Another way is to:
It is not too difficult, but I'd prefer a 1-touch/1-key calling on the keyboard telephone app. Maybe I'll go write an OPL app later to do this.
Telephone Application does not easily allow direct numeric dialing
Yet another lack of feature. You cannot easily just dial a phone number in the telephone application that is not part of your contact database. You have to enter the number, search will fail, and you click dial, then it will dial what you entered. The alternative is to close the communicator and use the cover phone. There really is no excuse for having such a poor telephone application on the PDA side !!
These are the things that I did to setup my phone:
I tested out the connection speed using DSL Reports mobile speed test. The faster I got was about 120k. So it's probably an Edge connection, but not really very fast.
The email client and the web browser will default to stay connected to the internet once used. I discovered this when I noticed that the GPRS indicator shows connected all the time on the cover phone. I can expect the email client to default to stay online to check emails, but the web browser? Press ctrl-u to go offline for either one.
I never thought of Boston as a hot area for mobile phone and service vendors. That would be NYC. Many of the the mail order, unlocking, global GSM phones are based NYC. Almost by luck I ran into this little kiosk shop at Boston's Prudential Mall -- Warlox Wireless. Evan, probably the owner, handles unlocking and repairing and flashing phones. It's great to find a knowledgable and friendly and local vendor like this, especially if you want to hand over your, probably expensive, cellphone for "modding". For me I was trying to get a pretty much damaged SE phone repaired. He tried very hard to fix it for me, but it was beyond repair at the end. He did not charged me for the attempt, and we also had a great conversation on phones and phone techs. The only "bad news" is that he might have talked me into upgrading (not from him because he does not carry that particular model) to a more expensive phone. If you need some phone repair, flashing, or unlocking, pay them a visit.
I use basecamp. I like basecamp. I like the 37Signal designs. I read their blog. They are certainly pioneer in the newly revitalized ASP + Web2.0 biz. But I also find basecamp inadequate, as a paid user. Specifically:
I was all excited when I found Insteon products made by Smarthome. It is basically X-10 improved. It is a powerline system that has two way communication (and other technical improvement). What that means is that when a controller sends a command to a device, it will make sure that the device got it, and you can also find out about the state of each device (lamps, etc). It also has a very nicely priced keypad that you can mount in standard switch boxes. So, what's wrong with it? In short, it will not work with 3 phase electric systems. Most commercial grade building uses 3 phase systems. Our loft building is one. So it just won't work well.
If you have a house, I think this system is great. But for me, we have to go back to either Z-Wave which is radio based, new, and have a very poor and ugly selection of controllers and devices, or Lutron RadioRA. Stay tune.
Taking advantage of my moving lofts, I have finally decided to upgrade video equipments. Under the general direction of upgrading to HDTV, I bought the Sony Grand Wega 50 inch LCD rear projection TV KDF-E50A10, and got hooked up to HD and DVR service from Comcast with a Motorola 3412 set top DVR cable box. From a user point of view, I am getting three new things:
The TV is beautiful, of course. It measures 47 inch x 33 inch x 17 inch (rounded up) in size, and 73 pounds in weight. It managed to fit into my Sienna with the back row folded down and the middle seat pushed all the way forward.
I was choosing between this LCD rear projection and the Samsung DLP projection sets. At the end, I decided to try the newer technology of LCD rear projection. Most review raves about this Sony set. The price is similar, the look is slightly better on the Sony (a personal opinion). However, the Sony does have less features -- notably only one HDMI interface, and no picture in picture support.
It has many inputs, but only one HDMI and only one VGA input. The "PC" input strangely only support a 3.5mm jack as audio input. It will not accept digital sound input. However, the supported video resolution is great. More about using this as a monitor later.
One thing that surpised me is that the TV is not very stable. I have it sitting on top of a nice IKEA TV stand that is on wheels. Because the TV is so thin, it actually wobbles a little if you rock the TV stand back and forth. The custom Sony stands have indentations that mate with the bottom of the TV, and also a safety strap that locks into the back of the TV. The safety strap is not available as an option, unfortunately.
I used to use Sage TV on my Window 2000 PC as my digital video recorder. It works really well. Since I do not have a capture card in that PC that will capture in High Def, I switched to use the DVR feature on the Comcast cable/DVR box.
The box has a 120 Gig hard drive (hence the model number 3412). HD recording unfortunately takes up a lot of room, and I managed to fill the drive in no time. The software and user interface definitely is not as polished as the Sage TV software. Here are some of the issues:
There is a lot of information at the wikipedia on the Motorola DVR box.
I hooked up my home theatre PC, which is an old small form factor Shuttle box, to the TV. I used the VGA to VGA connection, although my PC actually has DVI output. I want to save the TV's only HDMI input for other things. I change the PC screen resolution to 1280 x 768. (I have a ATI Radeon 9600 card.) The display is prefectly readable across the room. I can sit 12 feet away from the screen and read the text.
Only took us four years, but I finally decided to get some solar shades for the lofts. The new loft is high enough that the sunshine pours into the space all thru the day, which I love. However it is also blindingly bright. Since time is money we decided to get them ordered and installed. After comparing different brands and installer, we settled on Soleil solar shades -- No we did not go for the full motorized version. Those are rediculously expensive. But our installer is kind enough to put up some temp shades while we wait for ours to be made. What did he use? Redi Shade. They are about $5 a set, functional, perfect for temporary use. We may even get a few to put up in our hip (meaning cheap) office loft space.
I don't know how I missed this one. You know the problem -- no matter how much hard disk space you have, you always ends up with just 1 gig free on it. How do you find out what's taking up all the space? Enter Win Dir Stat -- "WinDirStat is a disk usage statistics viewer and cleanup tool for Microsoft Windows" from their creator. You can check it out here. I particularly like the pacman status display.
