By the time you are reading this I will probably be in Europe. So Geeks.com sent in some really cool PC parts, gadgets that I tested this past week and I will be taking with me in the trip.

* Transcend TS4GSDHC6 4GB Class 6 SDHC Memory Card
A 4 GB, class 6 SDHC card. This card with its ECC and write protection support will serve my Kodak digicam. I plan to mostly grab HD video with it rather than plain pictures, and this is a card that can deliver the speed that HD video requires.

* Coolmax HD-250B-U2 2.5″ USB 2.0 Aluminum SATA HDD Enclosure
This SATA 2.5″ enclosure now hosts our 60GB drive that we removed from our Sony PS3 when we upgraded it. It supports USB 2.0 and it comes with a double USB extension cable that uses two USB ports from your computer in order to operate (this way you don’t need to use power adapters). The device also comes with a travel case and a screwdriver that let’s you secure the drive in the enclosure. Installation was a piece of cake, compatibility was great too (XP, Ubuntu and OSX all worked with it).

* 53″ Aluminum Camera Tripod w/Bubble Level (Silver)
This is a pretty nice and extremely cheap tripod. It’s has an aluminum frame, a quick-release platform, 3-way, 360-degree swivel pan-head, adjustable tilt controls & pan controls, 90-degree vertical platform, gear operated center column, a 3-section aluminum legs with brace, quick-release leg locks, a bubble level indicator and a 3 mm standard tripod mount. It’s a good, compact tripod that fits easily in a suitcase. Only thing missing is a fluid tripod head to help with video pans. Great for photography though.

* Overland 70910 Executive Portfolio Bag - Fits to 14″ 3-Pack
Whoah! 22 bucks for three laptops bags! That’s quite a deal. There are two black and one brown bag. I will be using one of them as my main carry-on bag with an IBM T23 laptop in it (the bag fits up to 14.1″ laptops), and all my phones, gadgets, papers. It’s got two big compartments on the back and four smaller ones on the front. It’s got a strong handle and an expandable section. Only thing I didn’t like is the big compartment behind the 4 small ones, which doesn’t close (some Velcro would have suffice).

I am trying to clean up the office so I have 4 machines to give away (I won’t bother trying to sell them): an AthlonXP 1.6 ghz, a Duron 1.3ghz, a dual Celeron 533 mhz, and a Pegasos 1. From all these machines, only the Duron works properly and the Pegasos only when used with Morphos 1.4 and not with 2.0. I installed Ubuntu on the Duron and it’s ready to go, while the Pegasos could actually land me at least $100 if I could install morphos 2.0 (the CRT monitor goes out of sync when loading the installer CD). The AthlonXP and the dual Celeron are completely dead, they don’t start at all. It still is weird to see a machine go completely dead while it was working the last time I used it (granted, about 2 years ago).

Update: Today is not my day. One of my PDAs died too (well, just the battery, still works when plugged in).

EA said that the iPhone is more powerful than the DS, and now Sega is saying that it’s just as powerful as the Dreamcast. It makes perfect business sense to me for Apple to create an addon controller that attaches to the port and adds buttons on both sides of the device, and what not. Then release an API for it too, and let people design or port games to it. Honestly, why not?

I received from Computer Geeks the other day some interesting gadgets and tools that I would like to share with you.

* Fore Care 1315 Advanced Wrist Blood Pressure Monitor

A month ago I visited the doctor and she said that I have high blood pressure! So I thought that this gadget might be a cool idea to try out. This is a very comfortable and easy to carry blood pressure monitor that fits around your wrist. It’s easy to use: you click the power button, you place your left hand on your right shoulder, the battery powered device inflates automatically and you then wait for a few seconds to read the results. Dead simple! Thankfully, in my case the high blood pressure problem didn’t happen to be major. But I will continue monitoring it and even chart it, as the device is able to store 58 measurements! In the meantime, I surely need to start exercising…

* A-Data 16GB Turbo Class 6 SDHC Memory Card

Who could have thought a few years ago that you could get 16 GB flash storage for less than $70. Especially at the size of an SD memory card! This is both a great value and a great buy. The specific card is fast, and it works flawlessly with video recording, which I verified with my Kodak HD camera. AVCHD camera users will be able to use it too. This model can record at 50mbps, and most consumer SD-based camcorders usually don’t need more than 25 mbps.

* 2.5″ USB 2.0 Multimedia IDE HDD Player w/Remote

I had an old laptop drive around, which I tried with this product. Installation was very easy, just four screws needed to remove to insert the drive. From that point on, it could function both as a USB 2.0 external hard drive, or as a TV media player! The enclosure has an RCA AV output, a 15-pin VGA and USB 2.0 ports, aCX (coaxial) - digital audio output and a DC jack. The player can playback MPEG4-ASP (XViD, that is), Mpeg2 VOB files, mpeg1, mp3 and JPG files. It can work both in NTSC and PAL. The experience of using it as a media player does not match something like the AppleTV of course, but for $30 bucks you get a basic TV player and you get to use that old laptop drive that would otherwise be sitting in your closet useless. That’s not a bad deal.

Over a year ago I wrote a review at OSNews for the IBM T23 Thinkpad. Back then, Ubuntu had severe bugs with this (ultra popular in its time) laptop model. But as I have promised that laptop to my little brother, I cleanly upgraded to Ubuntu 8.04 last night. The default Ubuntu installation is now better than ever, as I had to change very few things to make it more usable (e.g. font sizes always irked me as to how big they are by default).

Anyways, all the severe bugs I had found with 7.04 are now fixed: including two suspend bugs, ethernet and USB bugs, and four S3 Savage ones. The laptop works perfectly by default (except the Lucent Winmodem). Overall speed is good too. Within an hour I had setup and configured 5 user accounts for myself, JBQ, my brother, his wife and a guest one.

The trouble started when I needed to make my old Prism54 WG511 PCMCIA card to work with the laptop. Apparently Ubuntu has both the drivers and firmware for this old ISL3890 chipset, but it didn’t work. Following advice from UbuntuForums, I had to blacklist the default 4 related drivers, download the Windows firmware and use Ndiswrapper instead. It then worked, but it was a pain.

The Lucent winmodem worked for the first time on this laptop too (my bro uses mostly dial-up). It works after you download the “-full” version of the “martian” driver: compile and install as per instructions the driver and then do a “modprobe martian_dev” and then a “martian_modem --daemon --mode 0666“. I then put these two commands on the /etc/rc.local file to force the modem to get started on each reboot. If someone upgrades the kernel the driver will have to get recompiled, which is why I made my brother a normal user and not an admin. Unless Ubuntu adds the martian driver to their -restricted kernel modules package, no one should touch the Ubuntu update manager…

Dell released tonight their new Studio laptop line. They are very nice looking laptops: they go up to full HD 1920×1200 at 15″ or 17″, they have an HDMI out to watch movies on the HDTV, and there is a choice for a Blu-Ray player. I swear, I would go for one, but not without the following three features that I also need:
- Keyboard backlight. On my current laptop I hit the stumbling block all the time: I mostly use the laptop when JBQ is sleeping and the lights are off or down. So I really need the backlight like the one on the Macbook Pros.
- DVD burning ability with their Blu-Ray player drive option. The current one reads CD/DVD/BD, but doesn’t burn CD/DVD. I do video, so I need the ability to burn DVDs.
- An SDHC reader slot (not plain SD). I need that to use with my Kodak HD digicam.

Give me these three hardware features (possibly for another $70) and I would buy one of these babies with closed eyes. I am afraid though that while these features will eventually come, by that time the firewire port would be redundant and it would be excluded — and I need firewire for my DV/HDV cameras.

I was checking some prices tonight and 1080p TVs are much more affordable now. Don’t make the mistake to get a 720p/1080i TV, make sure it’s a full 1080p one.

I would wholeheartedly recommend this 30,000:1 contrast ratio Panasonic 42″ 1080p plasma panel for $1400, and if you still don’t have the money for it, get a Vizio 42″ LCD 1,000:1 contrast ratio 1080p panel for $800. This plasma Panasonic kicks the Vizio’s LCD ass in terms of quality, but on its turn, the Vizio would kick the ass of most 720p TVs anyway, so always strive for that 1080p panel.

I mean, really. Do you have to wonder why traditionally big companies are going the way of the dodo? It’s because their god damn R&D departments getting the go-ahead for products that make no market sense — not for that price range anyway.

Here’s the latest one from HP: the HP MediaSmart Connect. It’s a streamer device for media. It also supports an optional hard drive. It costs $349. Read the link for more tech specs info.

Ok, now let me ask you. Why in the love of God, would ANYONE, buy THAT product over a Sony PS3. The Sony PS3 costs $399, it can pretty much do everything that this HP device can, but it also comes with a 40 GB (and easily upgradeable) hard drive, you can play games with it, have Internet access through it if desired, and most importantly, you can playback Blu-Ray movies too. Additionally, the PS3 can playback m2t & m2ts/mts HD files directly from a consumer HD camcorder, and it even supports AVCHD HD video written on plain DVD disks (poor man’s home Blu-Ray disks).

And don’t get me started about the marketing games of the HP press release. They talk about HDMI and how you can connect the device to an HDTV, but they say NOTHING about being able to decode full 1080p video rather than just upconverting (the PS3 can). Also, they don’t mention anything about being able to playback h.264 video (they only mention MPEG4, but MPEG4 doesn’t always mean AVC h.264). No h.264 mentioning, no dice.

So honestly, there are zero reasons for someone to buy this fugly HP thing. Whoever bends and buys it without doing some research first, is as high as HP itself for bringing it to the market in the first place. This is epic failure.

Sure I’d buy this device. But not for a dollar over $150 (if it has 1080p decoding support), or just $100 if it only decodes 480p video (and then just upconverts to HD). But at the current price it must be a joke.

“Only 5 percent of consumer electronics products returned to retailers are malfunctioning–yet many people who return working products think they are broken, a new study indicates,” says PCWorld.

This just shows how important usability is and how bad the industry is providing good usability on their products. Usually, that’s because the engineers and designers who design these products never use them in their personal life and therefore they never use the devices properly. Every time I happen to review a bad product the first thing that comes to mind is “I don’t understand. Don’t these people actually use their products?“.

It’s just sad that companies don’t realize that the money they must spend on usability is a good investment as the fewer returned devices would mean more money for them. I am going to bet that the iPhone is among the lowest returned devices, because it rocks when it comes to usability and user expectations.

Geeks.com, known for their cheap mp3 player offers, sent over the SanDisk Sansa e280 MP3 and WMA player for a small review. The device has 8 GB of storage internally and it also supports microSD cards.

The device is smaller than an iPod Mini, but bigger overall than a Nano. It has a 1.8″ TFT screen, FM radio, a microphone, while it sports USB 2.0 support. The device came to us with its USB cable and earbuds. No documentation or other accessories were included in this white box release. The battery is rechargeable via the USB cable and it manages up to 20 hours in ideal conditions. The e280 has a “record” button on the side, proprietary USB port on the bottom, microSD slot on the other side, and a 3.5mm headphone jack and a “hold” button on the top. There is also a lanyard/wrist-wrap hole near the top.

The device turns on/off with its “power button” below the main wheel menu. This button is also used to go back to home screen if you press it lightly during usage. The wheel button is actually a blue LED wheel navigates fast on long lists of media when turned. I personally found the blue LED incredibly bright, more so than what it was needed as it was overshadowing the look of the LCD. Inside and around the wheel there are buttons that help you navigate or are playback controls.

When booted up, you can select from a scrolling menu the main function: pictures, video, music, audio recording, FM radio, or settings. The device is really easy to use, although some navigation usability is not as good as the iPod’s. More over, if you get back to the music list and you click on the song that’s currently playing, it starts playing back instead of getting you to the “playback screen”. In fact, I found it very difficult to get back to the playback screen after you have wandered around on other parts of the system. It is details like these that show that Sandisk is simply not as good as Apple in designing interfaces.

Nevertheless, the music quality was perfect, and overall this is a usable system. There is a ratings screen, album artwork, EQ and custom EQ, and various ways to sort music. The Pictures menu allowed for background music while enjoying a slideshow, while on the settings you could find screen, language, volume limit and more. The only really unfortunate part on that media player is the video format it accepts: MJPEG in the MOV container. This white box doesn’t come with software so there is no video converter software included, and using free tools to encode in the exact video format that this player supports is a challenge.

Overall, this is a worthy mp3 player. But if you try to use it too much, rather than leaving it playing on the background while you are working or exercise, you might stumble into a few usability issues.

Rating: 8/10

Geeks.com sent over three of their computer part products for a small review.

* A-Data 8GB Turbo SDHC Flash Memory Card

This is an 8 GB Class-6 SD card that I used with our newly purchased Canon 45D XSi and my Kodak V1233. The SDHC card was properly recognized by the cameras without a problem and was correctly formatted too. It was able to even capture 3 pictures at once when using an HDR capturing mode, and I measured a sustained 5 MB/sec transfer rate. The price is right for that storage size, so this has proven to be a good solution.

* Sony Ericsson HBH-602 Bluetooth headset

This is a Class 2 (10 meters) Bluetooth v1.1 wireless headset. It allows you to rotate the ear loop to fit it on both ears, and it feels comfortable. It performed pretty well: 3 hours for continuous talk time, while stand-by time is still going strong almost a week after I received the headset. Reception is pretty good too, with up to 7 meters in open space. The device has an indicator light, and two buttons, making it easy to use. I am not sure about all its features though (besides the basic usability) as the box it came with had no manual at all. You will have to figure out the usability and pairing code yourself.

* Philips PW44460 Camcorder/Camera Bag

This is a great camera bag. It is well made, and it looks robust. It has padded compartments, adjustable padded dividers, dual zipper top opening for film or SD cards, internal & external pockets, a carrying handle and a padded adjustable shoulder strap. This bag seemed to be a great solution for both my HV20 and our XSi. We could fit the XSi with a normal lens and a telephoto, and an add-on flash on the front pocket. In another arrangement it fit my HV20, my wide-angle lens, all my major filters, my second battery and lots of tapes. For that price, that’s a great camera bag! I joke to my husband that I could fit a sandwich in there too.

It’s ridiculous how much CPU speed you need to edit full 1080p AVCHD clips with Vegas. I got my hands on a 1920×1080/60i 14mbps AVCHD clip today and it plays back on the Vegas Pro timeline at ~2 fps on my P4 3Ghz (in “preview/auto” quality). Vegas only supports basic DirectDraw functions, so a faster GPU won’t help either.

Now think that the fastest affordable PC on the market is a Quad-Core Intel at 3Ghz, which is about 5 to 6 times faster than my PC (including bus/RAM speed). Now, multiply that: 6*2fps=12 fps. This means that even the fastest PC on the market today won’t give me full preview speed while editing AVCHD. I would need double that speed. And that’s before adding any plugins or transitions that slow-down preview even more.

Someone might suggest the way Apple does things: all imported footage gets re-encoded to AIC or ProRes codec before editing which are faster to edit/playback. You will have to wait for the transcoding to take place of course, and that will take quite some time for ProRes (it’s faster with AIC, but AIC is not lossless so I can’t recommend it).

So in essense, you have the choice: do you want to wait while importing in the beginning, or wanna wait while editing? In both cases, there’s gonna be stalling. This means only one thing: I will have to wait for a few more years before I decide to get an AVCHD camera and a new PC. For now, the HV20 with its faster-edited M2T format will suffice.

Update: Some people are telling me that AVCHD editing is plenty smooth on newer computers. Good to hear.

We did a few big purchases yesterday. JBQ bought the new Canon XSi 450D DSLR camera and a 135/2L portrait lens for his Canon 5D DSLR camera. He also got an extender for his big telephoto lens. He looked badass with his long telephoto (*cough*), so I snapped a pic of him today while he was trying out his new equipment. My baby worked hard for these.

If you look hard enough you will see the extender behind the telephoto lens.

Remember the five ducklings I saw a few weeks ago with their mother? Apparently their mother has disappeared and only two ducklings are left. At least they are looking healthy:

Geeks.com sent over for a review the Jazz Elite HDV-188 5MP HD video camera and a 2 GB SD card to go with it. This is a cheap digital camera selling at just $140 right now. It certainly sounds like a steal, but how good is it?

In the box we found the camera, a software CD, a Li-ion battery, a Quick Guide, a carrying pouch, a power adapter (100 - 240V 50/60 Hz), a USB cable, earbuds, an A/V cable and an HDMI cable. The camera is pretty small, weighs less than most digicams, and fits well in the hand. Unfortunately, the construction is pretty bad: the battery door is ready to give up and the LCD turning mechanism feels very flimsy. The “macro” slider too.

The HDV-188 has a 5MP sensor, 64 MB flash storage, SDHC support, NTSC/PAL and HDMI-out, and a rotating 3″ TFT screen. It also features digital image stabilization and a voice recording and mp3 playback mode. It has no optical zoom, only 8x digital.

The camera has a flash light and lens similar to the ones we see on some cellphones. There is no protective cap in front of the lens but a glass surface. It has an on/off button on the top but I don’t see anyone using that as the camera turns on/off automatically when you open the LCD. There’s a macro/normal focusing setting for the lens, a tripod hole on the bottom, astonishingly an HDMI port on the front, and a photo shutter button and a video record button on the back. Also on the back side you will find a rocker button that works both as a zoom in/out and a menu selector, along with a few more action buttons and the USB/AV ports.

It doesn’t take long to get used to the interface. There are QVGA, VGA, 720×480 and 1280×720p recording modes. There are also music and picture viewing modes. When you enter the main menu you can modify the exposure, flash light on/off, sharpness, white balance, stabilization on/off, motion detect (the camera will start recording automatically when detects motion) and night mode. The camera mode allows for multi-snap of pictures, self-timer and photo frame. All modes support a normal color mode, or B&W, sepia and negative. The main settings allow for camera sounds on/off (although there is a bug and the camera forgets that setting the next you restart it), format SDHC card, time setup, selection between NTSC/PAL, and support for 11 languages.

The camera records in h.264 AVI at 5 mbps when in 720p mode (1 hour of video in a 2 GB SD card, sample). Unfortunately, instead of using the much more common h.264 setup of MP4 and AAC, it uses AVI and the “MS ADPCM 22050Hz mono 88Kbps” audio codec that Windows Media Player and most of the freeware players didn’t support well (WMP and VLC had no audio even with ffdshow installed). Sony Vegas was the only application that I tried that was able to read both the video and audio correctly though! The video is recorded at 30.00 fps, but if you enable the image stabilizer the frame rate falls to 24.00.

In terms of visual quality in 720p mode, it’s horrendous. There is a lot of pixelation throughout, and if you start panning, there is even tearing in the video. I don’t see the point of including an expensive HDMI input on a camera like this. Now, the interesting thing is that if you record in 720×480p mode instead (2.5 mbps, can hold 2 hours of video in a 2 GB card, sample), the quality is much better than in 720p mode! Which leads me to believe that their 720p mode might be a marketing ploy, that is, being interpolated. Having said that, the audio quality out of the mic is good though. Better than on most digicams.

So the question remains, is this Jazz camera a better deal than an Aiptek or a Kodak HD camera at a similar price? In terms of visual quality, I would for an Aiptek instead. If I wanted both a pretty good digicam and an HD video camera in one, I would go for this Kodak instead (which also offers image stabilization while the Aipteks don’t). I would get this Jazz camera only if HDMI, image stabilization when in 480p mode were important to me. But its 720p mode is nearly useless.

Rating: 5/10

I am really bad at conserving power, as I have so many gadgets hooked up at all times (some of these older PDAs will lose their memory if they run out of battery).

So I decided to at least turn off the secondary 28″ 1920×1200 monitor of mine. It was used daily only with an XGA Firefox window in it, wasting over the half of the resolution of that big monitor with emptiness. So I thought, I should try to move my Firefox window on my primary monitor, and turn off completely the big secondary monitor (and only turn it back on when I do video editing).

Right now my 22″ 1680×1050 primary monitor is a bit crammed with an SVGA Firefox window, WMailLive and Trillian, but I think it’s usable.

Now, I need to get rid off of all these old gadgets that eat power for no good reason. It’s not that I use them anyway…