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Google Navigation.. Yes please

Filed Under Gadgets & Hardware, Video | 2009-10-28, 11:59

I think I’m sold on the Motorola Droid (and Android 2.0) with the addition of Google Navigation:

Google Navigation takes the awesomeness of Google Maps and puts all of it and more onto your Android device.
Up to date map data, easy searching, voice navigation, live traffic reports, searching for stops along your route, satellite AND street view?! About the only downside is how it behaves if it is unable to get a data signal. I’ll still keep my Garmin eTrex vista HCx for those off road trips and for logging tracks, but looks like Google Navigation blows other navigation software out of the water when it comes to driving.

More details over on the Google Blog.

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Jet Pack World Speed Record Set

Filed Under Gadgets & Hardware, Video | 2009-05-14, 14:52

If you had any doubt that we were living in the future, we’re no longer at the “let’s try to build a jet pack” stage. Now we’re trying to see how fast they can go. This past weekend, a Go Fast Jet Pack Pilot named Eric Scott set the world speed record for a jetpack: 68mph. He even raced it against a Ford Focus and narrowly beat the Focus. Eric Scott is no stranger to world records when it comes to jet packs. He also holds the world record for height (1,053ft) and distance (1,500ft) with a jetpack.

The Go Fast (I swear, that’s their name!) Jet Pack is surprisingly environmentally friendly. It is not a combustion engine, and actually uses hydrogen peroxide, precious metals, and super-heated steam to give about 800 horse power for 30 seconds. Oh, and it’s loud, clocking in at 130 db.

I want one.

For a less polished video of the jet pack in action, check this out:

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Tonium Pacemaker Replaces Turntables for Hobby DJs

Filed Under Gadgets & Hardware, Movies and Music, Video | 2009-05-08, 12:53

As someone who has a problem with both electronic music and technology, the Tonium Pacemaker seems right up my alley. It’s never going to replace a truly talented DJ and luckily the creators recognize that. However, thanks to the lower price of entry ($499 for the 60GB version), it can bring more people into the world of mixing music. I’ll be honest, I’m torn. I don’t know whether to whine about the purity of vinyl, or to go out and buy a Pacemaker. But I do know that if I was to get one it sure would take up a lot less space than the two Technics + a mixer + cabinet of records. My big question though is how well does it deal with jungle/drum and bass tracks?

If you don’t have the patience for the full in-depth review above, check out Engadget’s quick video highlighting some of the features. The official video is absolutely horrible however:

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How To Take Apart the Flip Video Ultra

Filed Under Gadgets & Hardware, Geek | 2009-04-13, 12:50

I love the idea of the Flip Video cameras.I bought a Flip Video Ultra last year and it has served me quite well. It’s small enough that it’s easy to carry around for those random moments when you wish you had a video camera. It’s cheap enough to not worry about taking it places where it could get absolutely destroyed. And it has enough space (60minutes) to record quite a bit of video.

However when I was doing some video for the 2009 Valentine’s Day Pillow Fight I noticed that the power switch was not sliding as easily as I remembered and would occasionally stick and cause problems when I needed to quickly turn the camera on and start recording. I figured it was just dirty so I’d open it up and clean it. I didn’t want to just start pulling stuff apart as I’ve broken many a plastic tab with this method. I did a quick search to see if there were any tear-down guides for disassembling the Flip Video camera, but came up short. I did find this video which was helpful, but also difficult to flip back and forth through. So here’s my quick photo guide to dismantling should you want to clean things, modify the LED, microphone, or whatever.

[View with PicLens]

Unfortunately after all that disassembling and reassembling my power switch was still sticking. A couple loosening turns of the screw closest to the power switch was actually all the solution I needed. It was still interesting to take a look at the guts of my trusty Flip though.

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I Spy Eye-Fi for the iPhone

Filed Under Gadgets & Hardware | 2009-01-05, 19:02

Say that quickly three times. I love my Eye-Fi card and have since the early days beta-testing it. It makes “downloading” photos easier, parties more fun, and opens up all sorts of new possibilities. I also like my iPhone as well, but I’ve been kind of disappointed with the iPhone apps for instant uploading of photos so far. AirMe tends to crash and loses the photo, Klick adds the wrong location, and sending via email sends a stripped down image. I’m hoping that the new EyeFi app for the iPhone fixes all these issues and becomes my new app of choice for quickly uploading photos to sites like Flickr as well as transferring to my laptop. More info on the new Eye-Fi app being announced at this year’s Macworld is on their site.

via

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Time-Lapse Photography with a TI-85 Graphing Calculator

Filed Under Gadgets & Hardware, Hacks and Mods | 2008-10-31, 13:55

I’ve got a soft spot for time-lapse stuff. Most of the time I make my own videos using a webcam because I have things all set up so that it’s easy and quick for me. However, because the webcam is such low quality, I’ve always had a desire to do some higher resolution time-lapse. With my DSLR (a Pentax K100D), I knew that I would be able to take much better quality photos, but the problem was that it didn’t have a handy way for taking a photo at set intervals. Sure, I could have bought an intervalometer, but that costs money and would be another gadget to add to my collection. Then I came across this instructables: Turn a TI Graphing Calculator into an Intervalometer. All you needed was a TI Calculator, the old Calc-to-Calc link cable (which had a 2.5mm plug) and a DSLR that would accept a 2.5mm remtoe trigger shutter. I had all three.

I dug through my old boxes, pulled out my old TI-85 Calculator and dusted it off. By “dusted it off” I mean I cleaned off the battery corrosion that had built up over the years. Some fresh batteries, and a moment of silence for all the games and programs I wrote in high school that had died with the batteries, and I was ready to program my own intervalometer. If you can’t find your old calculator, you can search for a TI calculator on eBay. Make sure it’s one with a link cable (which you can also find cheap on eBay).

It took a few minutes for me to remember how the TI-85 worked, but before long I was writing my first program in probably 10 years. The Instructables suggested the following code for a TI-83 calculator:

: Prompt A
: While 1
: For (H,1,A,1)
: End
: Send(A)
: End


This caused a problem, as the TI-85 calculator doesn’t have the integral Send() function needed to send a signal along the link cable. A little bit of research, and I discovered that you needed to use Outpt(“CBLSEND”,A) instead of Send(A) for the TI-85 calculator. Note, for TI-85 owners, you’ll need at least v9.0 or higher ROM for this. You can check your version by hitting [2nd] [MODE] [ALPHA] [S] and then [EXIT]. I also added an extra line that displays “SNAP!” when a photo should be taken to help troubleshoot if things aren’t working. You can get even fancier with this program, but this is the basic version that should work.

I plugged the calculator into the camera with the link cable, and fired up the program. The first few times I tried really low numbers. Entering 100 for A should give you about a second between shots. While I was testing I had it in RAW mode and it just wasn’t capable of shooting that quickly. I finally settled on entering 5000, which gives me about 12 seconds in between shots, resulting in about 5 shots a minute. I also switched from RAW mode to JPG, since I don’t want to deal with converting all those RAW files into JPGs later. I also set everything (focus, aperture, exposure) to manual so that they wouldn’t change in between shots. I also turned of the photo preview so the LCD wasn’t wasting batteries showing the picture it just took. Then I put the camera on a tripod, pointed it out the window and started the program. After some time I finally stopped the program (hold down the ON key to break execution) and downloaded the images to my laptop for compiling in Quicktime and ended up with what you see above! I can’t wait to try this on a nicer day though, as dreary San Francisco fall days aren’t very exciting.

I should note that the newer Pentax K20D actually has a built in intervolameter, but it’s not clear whether this will produce good time-lapse results as there are some limits on it. Anyone played around with it?

Some good links:
Instructables article
All you ever wanted to know about the TI-85 Calculator
TI Calc FAQ (circa 1997)

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Toshiba REGZA 32″ 32RV530u LCD HDTV

Filed Under Gadgets & Hardware | 2008-10-18, 12:30

I’ve been meaning to make a post about the new tv/monitor I picked up awhile ago. The projector that a friend had given to me as a birthday gift almost 2 years ago decided it was on it’s way out, or at least its bulb was. And since it was a Woot special, the bulb was long since discontinued and going for $2-300 on eBay (if you could find one for sale). I decided it was better to invest in something nice that would be more useful than the projector. I also wanted something super high-def so that I’d be up-to-date for at least a few months.

What was I looking for?
- Something that fits in our apartment – i.e. no 50″ behemoths
- Something affordable – sub $1000 seemed reasonable
- High def – 1080p, I have a Playstation 3 and can play Blu-Ray
- Multiple inputs – Needs at least one of each: composite, component, HDMI, VGA

How did the Toshiba meet these needs?
- The Toshiba Regza 32″ is the smallest 1080p LCD tv out there that I could find.
- The Regza listed for $759.99 from Newegg.com.
- It’s 1080p
- It has 4 HDMI ports, 2 Component, 2 Composite, VGA, and an Antenna/Coax input

Setup:
I currently have the Toshiba REGZA 32″ setup with the following:
Playstation 3 (HDMI)
XBox (running XBMC) (Component)
Dedicated Laptop running a host of software (VGA)
VCR (Composite)
Laserdisc / Super Nintendo (have to unplug one composite connection to switch)
I also have an HDMI->DVI cable that I can use for plugging in the Macbook Pro when I want to use the TV as a monitor.
Sony Receiver and Speakers (refurb) on the Optical Audio out.

Where does it fall short?
Surprisingly for a “budget” LCD HDTV, I have very few complaints. I haven’t taken the time to truly tweak the color settings and everything, but things looked pretty good out of the box. The only significant issue I have had with it was when I hooked up a laptop the image was slightly off center. I was able to correct this by adjusting the screen though. Whether or not this is the fault of the TV or the laptop, is unknown, but I’m betting it’s the laptop. I’ve also had some issues with getting the best resolution for the laptop, but again I’m guessing blame is on the laptop.

I’m very happy with the TV and it’s nice to have a quick and easy way to watch media, play video games, as well as work. The TV doubles as a beautiful monitor for doing web programming and general browsing. I really wish I had a desk big enough to use this as a dedicated monitor (or even get a second for dual 32″ web browsing!). Like all products, it has it’s little annoyances that I won’t bother getting into since they’re trivial. Things like not being able to name your inputs something other than the defaults. All in all I really like it and I’d buy it again in a second. If you’re looking for a TV that will fit in a small apartment, won’t break the bank, and is high quality, this is it. Toshiba has (unfortunately) not paid me for my endorsement though.

In my research on the set, I came across a bunch of links I’ll share with you:
Current price on Amazon:

Calibration Thread: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=1029217

Extensive thread filled with discussion: http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=998752

Why you shouldn’t spend a fortune on HDMI Cables: http://boardsus.playstation.com/playstation/board/message?board.id=ps3&message.id=828972#M828972
Buy em from Mono price instead: http://www.monoprice.com/products/product.asp?c_id=102&cp_id=10240&cs_id=1024004&p_id=3661&seq=1&format=2

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DD-WRT, Tomato, or default Linksys firmware?

Filed Under Gadgets & Hardware, Hacks and Mods | 2008-10-15, 15:26

One of my best “sidewalk scores” since I moved to the Bay Area was a Linksys WRT54G router (v4). This brings up the count of WRT54G routers in the apartment to 3, plus the La Fonera wireless bridge to a friend across the street. How are they being used and what are they running?

Previously I had a WRT54GS (v6) running as our main router/wireless AP. It was running the default Linksys firmware and did a decent job. It’s easy to configure, and it just works once things are all setup. I have had to reboot it a couple times (maybe 3-4?) in the past year, but that’s not that big of a deal. The default firmware is simple, usually easy to understand, but lacking in “fun” features. It also seemed to not really pay much attention to my QoS rules as torrent traffic always chokes our network. It was acceptable, but I wasn’t exceedingly happy or excited with the firmware. Plus it hurts your geek cred to run default firmware when it can be hacked, right?

So, something had to be done about this boring firmware. The sidewalk scored WRT54G just got the Tomato firmware (v1.21) installed on it and replaced the WRT54GS as our main router. I first had to hold down the reset button for 30 seconds to reset things to factory defaults to wipe out the previous owner’s username/password. Then I was able to log into the web interface (default Linksys password is “admin”) and it was beyond easy to upgrade the firmware from the default Linksys firmware to Tomato. You literally browse to the download Tomato firmware and click upgrade. A few minutes later I reloaded the web interface (entered the default password of “admin”) and saw Tomato’s minimalistic admin interface. I ran through and matched all the settings to our existing router and then waited for Heather to take a lunch break to swap them out without any problems. I’ll probably re-flash the old router with DD-WRT or Tomato and drop it back in the office to use on the other end of the ethernet cable I ran back there to have a wired network.

Speaking of the office, there’s also a third WRT54G (v.3) router back there. It’s wired up in the rolling media center, which is comprised of an Ikea rolling shelf thing housing an audio reciever, Xbox, Playstation 3, and 32″ LCD HDTV. Because I keep most of my media on a machine in the living room, but want to play it on the TV, I wanted to be able to stream to either the Xbox or PS3. I used a WRT54G router with it enabled as a wireless bridge using DD-WRT. It utilizes its more sensitive antennas to pick up the weak wireless signal from the living room and then share it with other wireless devices as well as the hardwired Xbox, PS3, and laptop. I set it up once over a year ago, and have not had to touch a single setting on it nor had any problems. It was incredibly easy to setup and it has been rock solid.

So, I know everyone wants to know, what’s the best firmware replacement? Well, ultimately it’s up to you and how you’ll use the router. But here are my thoughts:

Default firmware:
If you’re lazy and just have a normal network setup (cabled modem + wireless router + laptop + wired PC, etc.), and don’t care about tweaking things, then the default firmware is problem fine. If you ever run into a problem, you can call up Linksys tech support and they can help you out.

DD-WRT:
DD-WRT served me very well for several years. However it doesn’t get a lot of development these days. One annoying thing is that it continuously reboots the router when you have to make changes, which can get annoying as you wait each time for it to come back up. It was also extra steps to set up traffic logging so I could quench my stats junkie. It’s a great project, and works incredibly well. I have very few complaints and would probably have kept using this.

Tomato:
However, with my first impressions of Tomato, I’ve found a new firmware to love. Tomato’s interface is incredibly nice and clean:

It’s quick and easy to browse around and change settings. Most settings don’t require restarting as it just restarts the necessary services. It’s on par with DD-WRT, but it has one feature that really sold me on it, bandwidth graphs. Tomato has real-time bandwidth stats where you can watch it update (on a 2sec refresh) your current bandwidth usage based on the network interface (wired/wireless/etc). This alone made me want to install Tomato, and everything else I’ve run into has been a plus. One other nice surprise is that you can mount Samba (i.e. Windows Sharing) file shares in Tomato. So I currently have it backing up the bandwidth stats to a shared folder on another server every hour right now. I’m sure this can be used for all sorts of other fun things I have yet to think of too.

So in the end, unless something terrible rears it’s ugly head, Tomato is now on top in my book due to its interface and stats capabilities.

UPDATE: I noticed shortly after switching to the Tomato based router that streaming .avi videos over a Windows file share was uncommonly jumpy. After some research I went into the Administration->Configuration section and selected “Erase all data in NVRAM memory”. This is recommended if you are switching from a different firmware to Tomato, and will set everything back to defaults. After doing that and reconfiguring, video streaming seemed even better than before!

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Kensington’s Portable iPhone Battery Recharger

Filed Under Apple, Gadgets & Hardware | 2008-10-06, 15:56

One of the first lessons I learned when starting to use the iPhone 3G was that the battery life was terrible. It was worse than the Sidekick’s and many times will not even make it through a day depending on the amount of usage. Now I know there’s all sorts of tricks and tips for extending battery life (turn down the brightness, disable 3G and Wireless, etc.) but they all have an impact on this high-end device that I want to use to its fullest. I needed a better solution to help my iPhone get through a busy day.

With the Sidekick 3 I suffered from a short battery life, so I would carry around a spare Sidekick 3 battery in my bag. Since the iPhone 3G doesn’t have a replaceable battery, this wasn’t an option for me. So the next best thing was to get a portable battery charger to charge the iPhone on the go. After seeing a friend with one, I decided to get the Kensington Battery Pack (Model K33396US). They aren’t paying me to say this, but I must say it is awesome. It comes with four parts to it, a battery pack, 2 cables, and AC adaptor. The battery pack itself is smaller and thinner than the iPhone, and incredibly light. It has a button of the same style as the Macbook batteries that you can press to light up 5 LEDs to see how much charge is left. There are two ports on the battery, a mini-USB and a regular USB. The battery charger came with two cables, a typical mini-USB to regular USB, and a USB to iPhone/iPod dock connector. In order to charge it you connect the AC adaptor to the battery with the typical miniUSB cable. Since I normally carry one of these with me at all times and they’re standard, this means it’s even more useful. You can also connect it to a normal laptop/desktop USB port as well to charge it. Once the battery is charged, you can also flip the USB cable around plugging it into the standard USB port on the battery and then the miniUSB end into another device such as a Sidekick LX. In order to charge the iPhone you use the USB to iPhone adaptor. Again, another standard cable that is already in my bag. Big big thanks to Kensington for not using any proprietary connectors/adaptors/etc in this product!

So how well does it charge? Well I can seem to get a full charge for either my iPhone or my Sidekick LX and still have a few LEDs left of power. I haven’t tried a full charge of my iPod yet, but I imagine it would be similar. The best part of this little device is it’s versatility. Because companies are starting to use standard connections, I can charge a multitude of devices: iPhone 3G, Sidekick LX, and my iPod Video. And I also don’t have to choose which device to charge when on a trip as I can just charge the battery pack and distribute the power as needed across devices. I do recommend getting a small little bag to keep everything together so you don’t lose anything while digging around for something in your bag.

I bought it for $57 from Amazon.com, and had to wait a few weeks for it to be in stock. You might have beeter luck finding it for a good price elsewhere, like searching for “Kensington battery pack” on eBay even. Here’s the official Kensington page on the device. I’ve copied and pasted the specs below:
* Rechargeable battery pack for back-up power for mobile devices
* Enjoy up to 55 hours of extra iPod music play time, up to 14 hours of iPod video play time, up to 5 hours of mobile or smartphone talk time
* Power and recharge your mobile or smartphone, iPod®, MP3 player, PDA and other mobile devices anywhere you go
* Flexible recharging of Power Pack via notebook USB port or included wall adapter with USB charging cable
* Included Mini-USB cable to charge devices like MotoRazr™, MotoKRZR™, Rim® Blackberry™
* LED battery gauge tells how much power is left in your Power Pack
* Also works with Kensington USB Power Tip pack with retractable USB cable

Specifications
* Battery Chemistry: Lithium-Ion Polymer
* Certifications: cULus, CE, FCC
* Input: 5VDC (Mini USB) – 1.00A Max — Output: 5VDC (USB) — 1.50A Max.
* Capacity: 1800mAh, (7Wh)

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