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Feedback Gadgetology

Big E vs. Sylvania

DerezzedA couple of months back, you probably remember me waxing rhapsodic about the Sylvania wi-fi net tablet… and then being extremely frustrated that it failed to even last four weeks without falling apart from the inside.

I tried to contact the company handling customer support on this device, Digital Gadgets, to no avail – they sent me a link to an online trouble ticket system that didn’t work. And that was a few days before Christmas. I haven’t heard a peep from them since, despite trying to bring the issue with their trouble ticket site and the issue with my tablet to them several times.

With no further response from Digital Gadgets (why do I have a feeling that I’d be dealing with Peggy?), I’ve now taken the matter up directly with the company whose name is on the box and on the product itself – Sylvania. … Read more

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Feedback Gadgetology Should We Talk About The Weather?

I’m warning to the idea

A couple of days ago, I mentioned my intention to ditch the TV side of my cable subscription and go to a seldom-mentioned internet-only tier of service. In that entry I mentioned that one of the few things that gave me pause about ditching cable TV (especially since I haven’t gotten a DTV converter box) was that I’d be losing the local channels for severe weather coverage. Unless you’ve lived in tornado alley and have intimate knowledge of the kind of “combat readiness” that living here in the springtime entails, that may sound silly, but trust me…it’s a biggie around here. I have a weather alert radio to fill that gap, but I was curious about the possibility of what they’d call “a software solution” in the business world.

I did a little bit of research and found Interwarn, a commercial software package that offers TV-style warning crawlers on your monitor, as well as graphical watch/warning maps (sort of like the things that, anymore, take up about a quarter of the TV screen during bad weather). It’s astoundingly customizable – you can decide what kind of warnings will trigger a crawler, and not every crawler will trigger an alert sound (which can be whatever kind of .wav file you feel like making it – the temptation’s definitely there to bust out the old Star Trek red alert sound…); the degree to which you can define the area involved is amazing too. I live on the border of Arkansas and Oklahoma, and I can pick counties out of two states for the program to keep an eye on. If I wanted to, I could have it watch out for my old stomping grounds in Brown County, Wisconsin too. It takes up a startlingly small slice of CPU resources and bandwidth, despite checking in for new warnings about every 90 seconds. (As with so many other things, you can slow that down so it’s only checking every 3 minutes or however often you like; honestly, in this part of the country, I left it at the check-as-often-as-you-can default.) Quite by accident, I also discovered that it happily pops warning crawlers up on top of full-screen video – there you go, you can still get warnings while watching a movie or what have you.

Here’s a shot of the live National Weather Service radar loop with Interwarn’s live watch/warning map. Who needs a TV station anyway?

Interwarn

(Why am I watching Oklahoma’s watches and warnings? Since we’re on the border, it’s a given that what barrels through Oklahoma will wind up in Arkansas; this is also why I used to watch KTUL during severe weather events and then turn to the local stations when the stuff actually arrived here.)

The company behind Interwarn also has a software package called Stormlab, but it’s geared toward a higher-end market – real live meteorologists (or students thereof) and/or storm chasers. My inner weather geek is more than happy with Interwarn alone.

The registration fee is $40, but since we’ll be saving that much on our cable bill within two months by dropping TV, I’m not even blinking at that figure. While my cable TV’s still hooked up, however, this afternoon was stormy enough to provide a live-fire test. I watched the local TV stations and I watched Interwarn running on a machine that, other than also keeping the live radar in a browser, wasn’t doing anything. Interwarn was either neck-and-neck with the TV station warning crawlers…or, more often, it was faster than the TV stations. (Fun fact: Interwarn isn’t worried about pissing off sponsors by running a crawler during a commercial.)

The one problem is that whatever machine’s running Interwarn, in a severe weather situation, really needs to be a machine that you don’t mind leaving up and running in that sort of weather. I recently “decommissioned” Orac and all but gutted it, but sometime between now and next spring, Orac may return as a bare-bones machine that, when push comes to shove, won’t be a great loss if it eats lightning, but until then will serve a fairly vital purpose, especially during storm season.

Software solution found. I don’t think I’ve ever gone from “let’s see what this shareware trial version does” to “oh yeah, baby, let me know where to send the money for the registered version!” in the course of an afternoon…but I’m totally sold on Interwarn.

Links: InterwarnRead more

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Feedback Gadgetology

Stop shirkin’ and start workin’: the fall of Queeg.

Not too long ago – not even a month ago, in fact – I was raving about the new LaCie “Big Disk” Ethernet network drive I’d gotten, which added a desperately-needed terabyte of storage to my network. After copying most of my media (including my whole directory of Evan photos) to the new drive and making sure it was performing as promised, I started to gradually delete the stuff off the local hard drives on Zen and Orac.

At about the ten day mark, it started getting weird. In short, Queeg started living up to its namesake, trying to elbow out other machines for the *.*.1.1 slot on my router – very weird behavior. LaCie tech support thought that was odd, but couldn’t really offer any solutions, and any attempt to force Queeg to settle down at a specific address rather than a dynamically-assigned one brought about even weirder weirdness.

Then I couldn’t get files from it anymore. BIG problem – kinda defeats the whole point of having a freakin’ outboard mass storage device, no? LaCie tech support sent me two patches, neither of which fixed the problem, and in fact made the thing start acting weirder – I couldn’t modify any settings because the system firmware insisted that the drive was completely out of space and couldn’t handle any more. Then last night, it lost its “shares” – its directories full of stuff that I had moved there from the other two machines. I thought it had lost the data. LaCie’s answer to this was to send a return authorization number to ship the drive back to them, but they said that there was no way they’d get their fingers into the pie on recovering the 600 gigs of data I’d offloaded to the drive.

I know that every hard drive in the world, in every computer in the world, will someday fail. It’s moving parts and motors, which wear out. I accept that. That’s why you’re probably never going to go out of business making hard drives (at least until they’re phased out in favor of stable mass-storage-grade flash drives). But you know, three weeks? That’s a new land speed record. I’ve pretty much made the decision that I’m not going to take LaCie up on their offer – I’m going to return the drive to Amazon and get my money back instead, and get a 1TB internal drive for Zen..by a different manufacturer. Zen’s overdue for getting the dust blown out of it anyway – it needs to be opened up as it is, might as well stick a drive in there while I’m at it.

So, the grade for LaCie’s 1TB “Big Disk” Ethernet Drive is an epic fail – it might be a great product when it works, but when it doesn’t you’re going to be saddled with some of the most inept tech support you’ve ever seen. I’m used to outsourced-to-India call center flunkies not being able to cope when your tech support call diverges from their script. I’m not sure what the excuse is for these jokers.

Also, in the future, I think I need to stop naming my network nodes after cranky-ass sci-fi supercomputers. Apparently the deck’s stacked against me on the hardware manufacturer end anyway, so I need to do myself a favor and stop tempting fate.… Read more

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Critical mass (storage)

Stop shirkin' and start workin'!I’ve been calling for backup for months, and at long last, backup has arrived.

I’ve spent most of today transferring files to a new 1 terabyte network drive that’s now sitting on my network. It’s a nice LaCie “big box ethernet drive” (hey, that’s what it says on the box!), which, I’m going to say judging by the size of the casing, is probably two 500GB hard drives in a RAID configuration. It’s got a lovely big blue eye that flashes when it’s being accessed. It hasn’t gotten extraordinarily warm, despite the fact that it’s sitting in a warm corner of a warm room (said corner also contains 3 other PCs and 5 LCD monitors, along with speakers and other gear). Very importantly (at least to me), you can configure whether or not you want it to be media-streaming capable. Remember the whole blow-up a few weeks ago with the crippled cell phones? Mass storage devices like these are starting to fall victim to the same problems: my friend Kent has a similar device, except made by Western Digital, which he got at a fire-sale price right before Christmas. But the pricing wasn’t just seasonal: WD wanted to clear the decks of inventory and get a revised version of the MyBook 1TB ethernet drive in the stores, which came with complimentary crippleware demanded by the RIAA which prevents the drive from streaming music or video files. Hey, thanks, RIAA, for assuming that the consumer’s a crook! Maybe we’ve ripped our own CDs to our own hard drives for use in our own home, ya know? Inconceiveable, sure. But it might happen. You never know. This LaCie drive has no such crippleware; those wishing to use it in a small business setting have the option to switch media streaming off. The security is scalable, you can assign passwords and user accounts from an insanely intuitive admin console accessed via browser, and for someone like me who might want to use it as a “breakout drive” (i.e. turn it off, pull all the connections, and evacuate with it in the event of fire, tornado, etc.), it’s not overwhelmingly big or bulky. I hope I never have to do that, but it’s yet another option to have in mind. I’m terribly pleased with it.

Anyone wanting to snatch one of these puppies up is more than welcome to pick it up in theLogBook.com Store; I managed to find the links for it in nearly every country except Canada, whose Amazon subsidiary doesn’t do the electronics thing. (What gives, Canada?) I heartily recommend it. It’s not cheap, but for someone like me who’s got a heap of media crowding out the other computers’ drives, and occasionally keeping work from getting done (this thing even takes up some slack for the Avid), it’s a beautiful thing. Should I ever completely fill the thing, additional storage can be added via a USB port on the back of the drive, and the casing is designed so that the additional drive – well, assuming you get the LaCie 1TB USB add-on drive – can simply slide into place on top of this one.

Home of the WOPR
A shot of the newly revised desktop on the Avid, which I network to the other machines to shoot graphics, audio and video files back and forth so often that I leave permanent shortcuts on the desktop. (For those occasions where I have to pull something from a less-frequently used directory, I keep the ol’ Win2K Network Neighborhood icon around under “Home of the WOPR” – WOPR being what I call my LAN.) As you can see, I very quickly named the new network drive Queeg – so stop shirkin’ and start workin’!

Oh, in case you can’t tell from the funky wide angles in these photos and yesterday’s accidentally humorous shot of Evan vs. Bowser, I’ve also replaced the fisheye lens I misplaced in Las Vegas. That helped to turn what would’ve been an otherwise innocuous shot of Evan chattering away into everyone’s favorite photo of the day. 😆 Speaking of which, you’d better believe that the gobs of baby photos have migrated to the new drive too.… Read more

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HAL is on the web

HAL vs. TIXI don’t do the link thing too often, but this site is absolutely brilliant if you’re a fan of 2001: a space odyssey (which, speaking as someone who’s got a working HAL 9000 prop hanging on the well next to him, I suppose I must be). Go visit The HAL Project now – I’m gonna have to try that sweet screen saver on the monitor that just happens to be sitting next to my HAL. 😀… Read more

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Review: Mailwasher Pro 5.2

Mailwasher Pro 5.2 in actionI’m not really sure that there’s a place on my site for reviews of serious software applications, but this one deserves special praise. I’ve been using Mailwasher for several years now to combat spam, and a year or so back we finally paid up and registered it because it is that good. It’s very good at committing spamicide. Basically, what Mailwasher does is scan your inbox and analyze the contents of each message, letting you preview a little or as much of the message as you want before opening your e-mail client and downloading it onto your computer. … Read more

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Skinny’s Catfish…yum!

My wife woke me up today and told me to get ready, because we’re going to have dinner with one of her cousins. I’d never heard of the place we were going – Skinny’s Catfish – in my life. It’s a little place in Van Buren, Arkansas’ Industrial Park, and let me just tell you…yum. I mean, I’ve always thought it was nigh-on-impossible to do catfish wrong, but this is some seriously good stuff. And the hush puppies and fried shrimp are quite simply to die for – they may even be better than the catfish, and my God, the moment you’re down to one hush puppy in your complimentary basket of ’em at your table, someone whisks that straggler away and brings you a fresh basket. The same with drinks – the service was great. No sooner had I drained my Diet Sierra Mist to the bottom of the glass then a new glass magically appeared. (Don’t ask me why I was even bothering with Diet Sierra Mist when I’m sitting there shoveling hush puppies into my face.)
Which brings me to my next point – somewhat related to this previous post: I wound up bringing a lot of food home. Yeah, I ate a lot of hush puppies before the main course was ever brought out, but I used to be able to power down a lot more food than I did tonight. It’s almost scary. That said, my jeans don’t fit me quite as well now as they did when we left the house to go to dinner. 😆… Read more

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Feedback Music

Good feedback: Maorimusic.com

When an internet vendor I haven’t dealt with before does right by me, I like to say a word about ’em for all to hear, to alert folks to their existence. The recipient of my first “Good feedback” here is Maorimusic.com, naturally based in New Zealand. Not only do they have a great selection of traditional and modernized Maori tunes on CD at surprisingly low prices (even when one takes the currency conversion into account), but they’ve just shown me, hands-down, the fastest shipping I’ve ever seen for a shipment from NZ to the States (just under two weeks). What’s more, my order was packed incredibly well, with not even so much as a spidery crack anywhere on the jewel case (when I would’ve fully expected that, as it’s nigh-impossible for some vendors to get a CD from coast to coast in America without damaging the case). So a big thumbs-up to Maorimusic.com – I heartily endorse them and will probably be placing another order before too long.… Read more

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Review: Paint Shop Pro 8.0

I’ve had it installed for about 12 hours, and let me tell ya, I’m lovin’ the new version of Paint Shop Pro. I’ve been using PSP for about ten years, back to v3.0 I think. Back then it was the graphics program for anyone who didn’t need Photoshop’s bells and whistles. Now it’s the graphics program for anyone who needs more than Photoshop can do.
For the past four years I’ve used v5.03 at home, and v7.0 at work for the past couple of years. Why didn’t I upgrade at home? Because 7.0 was an unstable bitch of a program, crash-prone and notorious for losing settings. Too many times I seriously thought about sneaking 5.03 into work and installing it over the newer version. I loved some of 7.0’s new features, but the lack of stability meant that it was damned hard to use – and the workstation I use at work is a very stable Dell NT machine with more than enough memory overhead for 7.0.
8.0 barely fits both my available hard drive space and my available RAM – I’ll probably have to add some memory to really milk PSP8 for all it’s worth. But even on this machine, it’s very stable – the only crashes I’ve had were cases where I was trying to do something that simply exceeded the available memory capacity. The interface is a bit different, with the options toolbar now extended vertically across the top of the screen, but once you get used to that you can rock ‘n’ roll. There are a lot of new features very specifically geared toward photo restoration, including a red-eye eliminator which can de-demonize both human and animal eyes in photos – very cool trick. I won’t even begin to pretend to understand how it works, but it does.
PSP7 always pissed me off because older versions’ .PSP files couldn’t be read; PSP8 can read .PSP files generated by v7.0, v5.03, and everything else in between and before. JASC really did some homework before putting this puppy on the market – if you were ever honked off by PSP7, you’ll like this. Most all of the bugs have been fixed, and once you get used to various selectors being in different places, the interface is very intuitive.
Now I’m gonna go reinstall all my old plugins and have some fun.… Read more