I’m not a huge TV watcher. I barely keep up with one television show at a time. But I do love a good movie, especially the classics.
Turner Classic Movies is airing 31 Days of Oscar this month. 5 classic movies a day with no commercial interruptions. It’s a Tivo owner’s dream.
Here’s an example of two days:
February 20th: Some Like it Hot, Stalag 17, The Caine Mutiny, The Buccaneer, On the Waterfront
February 29th: The Day of the Jackal, Three Days of the Condor, Marathon Man, The Boys from Brazil, Kotch
All without commercials…
What I’ve been doing instead of blogging
I’ve been helping with science projects…
Importing Photos in Vista
This post is for Vista users that might have run into the same problem.
I’ve been transitioning Michele from a homebuilt XP system to a iMac running Vista. Everything had been going along smoothly until I tried to import some photos. We’ve always used her computer as the import station for all our digital cameras. The photos are backed up on several other computers.
The issue is that the default Vista camera import method sucks, mainly because you can’t select which photos you want imported and where to put them. It’s an all or nothing arrangement. This may be great for for 90% of users, but many of us want to be a bit more selective about how we import and place our photos.
In XP, we had the Scanner and Camera Wizard, which was pretty damn good. I used it for years with no problem. Seemed simple enough to me.
The Vista team must have disagreed and made the new import system basically into a on-click, no options process. As a result, many people feel that the default Vista Import method is inferior to the XP import method.
The last couple days, I have done a bunch of research on alternatives. In the end, I found that Windows Live Photo Gallery is the solution. I’m not sure why it doesn’t come with Vista, but it’s a free download.
Importing with Windows Live Photo Gallery gives you back all the features of the XP Camera Wizard. It gives you the option to import everything or select individual photos or even groups of photos to import into specified folders and rename as you desire. There’s even an Autoplay option to always use it when you connect a camera.
I’m quite happy now with the solution and Michele is ready to move to her new computer full time.
A year in Hotel Rooms
I travel a lot and end up in a lot of hotel rooms. In 2007, I stayed in 16 different hotel rooms. That doesn’t include 2 vacations where I didn’t stay in hotels.
In 2006, I started making short videos of my hotel rooms to show to Michele and the girls. I’ve been posting them to my Vox account. Now that 2007 is over, I can present you with:
My Hotel Rooms of 2007
January 15th – San Jose, California
January 16th – Emeryville, California
February 6th – Toronto, Ontario, Canada
February 9th – Bellevue, Washington
February 24th – Las Vegas, Nevada
March 17th – Austin, Texas
March 27th – London, England
April 18th – Las Vegas, Nevada
May 14th – Cupertino, California
May 27th – San Francisco, California
July 1st – Long Beach, California
July 17th – London, England
August 24th – Seattle, Washington
October 10th – New York, New York
October 18th – San Francisco, California
December 5th – San Jose, California
Vox makes it very easy to upload videos when I’m in the road. They recently added the ability to embed Vox videos on other sites. Even if you already have a weblog, having a Vox blog is fun and useful.
As an example of the videos I made, here’s the one from Long Beach, when my daughters and I attended the Anime Expo.
My Hotel Room in Long Beach from https://cruftbox.vox.com/
Why CDs are still better than downloads
This is the third time I’ve bought an album from Amazon and the third time that the downloader has crashed. When this happens I have to send an email to Amazon to get them to unlock the album and allow me to redownload it. A huge pain the butt. With iTunes full of DRM & wacky AAC files, Yahoo Music & Napster with DRM & wacky WMA files, it simply doesn’t make sense to buy music digitally.
A CD still makes the best sense for music. You can play it in a CD player and you can rip it to MP3 (even if you lose the files).
You can try to tell me I’m wrong, but you know in your heart I’m right.
Good things in 2007
Now that it 2008, it’s time to discuss a few things about 2007. You start seeing stories about 2007 just after Thanksgiving, when the year isn’t done yet. Seems strange to me.
So Happy New Year to you, Loyal Cruft Reader, here are my thoughts.
Books
The Good Fairies of New York – Martin Millar – This was my most enjoyable read of the year. Not a new book, but a great one. My review explains.
Glasshouse – Charles Stross – Stross’s previous work have been excellent and Glasshouse was fantastic as well.
Sun of Suns: Book One of Virga – Karl Schroeder – Space Opera meets Niven’s Smoke Ring in a new series. This is the first book. I eagerly await the third one to be published.
Games
Bioshock – A fantastic single player game. The first game in years without multiplayer that I’ve loved. Great story, music, game play, and astounding graphics. Perfection.
Portal & Team Fortress 2 from the Orange Box – Who cares about Half-life anymore? Portal is a truly innovative game that uses sharp writing and design to elicit various emotions. Team Fortress 2 tosses the notions of realism out the door and gives us a cartoon world of team based mayhem.
Movies
Dan in Real Life – I’m not sure why this film struck a cord with me. Perhaps as a father of daughters, I can relate. In any case, a well written and well acted film about people dealing with love & loss.
3:10 to Yuma – A classic western that looks at the motivation behind men’s action. Fantastic acting and better writing.
Sunshine – A good attempt at hardcore science fiction. The last 20 minutes devolve into a horror film, disappointing me a bit, but worth seeing anyways.
Web Sites
Woot.com – I’m now firmly addicted to Woot, patiently waiting until 10PM when the new items appear.
Ask Metafilter – Not a new site. I’ve been a member at Metafilter since 2002, but recently I’ve enjoyed reading & answering people’s questions in a sane, controlled environment.
Hardware
The iPhone – Simply the best mobile phone available. Fanbois can try to deny it, but the iPhone completely changes the face of the cellular phone industry. Strangers don’t want to look at your Voyager or Blackberry, but they sure as hell want to look at your iPhone.
Humanscale Foot Machines – Michele bought me a FM500 for my desk at home to put my feet on when sitting. I highly recommend getting one. With the amount of time I spend at the computer, proper posture is essential.
Don’t buy the Rip Roar Creation Station
DO NOT buy a Rip Roar Creation Station.
For Christmas, we bought my daughter Mira a Rip Roar Creation Station. Looks great right? A video camera for kids that does green screen video? Too bad it’s crap.
I help her get going and do the software install. After a convoluted set of steps that required CD install, downloading from the internet, plugging and unplugging of the camera USB cable, and even a good old command line patch, the software won’t run. Crashes everytime.
Undaunted, I uninstalled and reinstalled. Same problem again. It doesn’t work.
My daughter is standing there ready to go, dressed for he video with the green cloth background ready. Utterly disappointed that her ‘big’ Christmas present doesn’t work. Breaks a father’s heart to see this.
I track down the customer service line for Rip Roar/Toyquest. Amazingly a real person answers. I speak to him for a bit, but he tells me that they can’t support the Rip Roar Creation Station, that I need to use the ‘Help’ email address. I asked if there was a phone number to call, since solving software problems via email is usually useless. He said there was no phone number and that only the email address.
I expressed my concern that waiting for an email to resolve the problem for a Christmas problem was not good. He responded that the ‘Help’ email people should get back to me “in a few days”. He also suggested that I could return the item to “my local retailer”. Yes, I’ll enjoy explaining that to my daughter.
All I want is for the camera & software to work. I guess that is too much to expect these days.
I started searching on the net for help, since none was forthcoming from Rip Roar. I’m not alone in having trouble. Read what the Amazon Reviews of this product say. I wish had read them before buying this.
Not one to give up easy, I tracked down the parent company, Toyquest. I gave them a call at (310) 231-7292, trying to track down help on the problem. Of course, Toyquest doesn’t make it easy to find their number, it’s nowhere on their website, but I found it anyways. No people there to help, just recordings that wanted me to email for help instead of speaking with a person.
I thought that the President of Toyquest, Brian Dubinsky, would want to know how his product was doing, so I left him an voicemail explaining my frustration with the product. I’m sure that Mr. Dubinsky is a nice man in person with his family and friends, but his business operations leave much to be desired.
So, my hope is that when others search for the Rip Roar Creation Station, they find this note and are warned off. My fear is that there are many parents in the same boat as me with disappointed children with non-functional gifts. My PageRank is pretty good, so this will likely float to the top, but any extra linkage would be helpful.
In Memory of Anita Rowland
My friend Anita Rowland passed away from cancer this week.
Although we never met in person, we conversed via blogs, in IRC, and through email. She loved science fiction and meeting new people. An early blogger, she used Greymatter until the end. She kept a LOL – List of Links that I enjoyed quite a bit and introduced me to many new things.
I am better for having known her. My sympathy to her husband Jack in this tough time.
Schick Quattro Razor & MP3 Docking Station
Yesterday I was at Target doing some shopping, when I spotted this on sale for $6.99.
A strange marketing combination to be sure, but look, they got me to pick up the box. The picture is obviously of a Zune, but the box says it is iPod compatible. Visions of cool docking systems swam through my mind. For $7 I would get a razor, 6 blades, an MP3 speaker set, and 4 AAA batteries. Of course, I bought it. Cruft Labs always needs new things to examine.
When I opened the package, I found the speakers folded up. I put in the batteries and attached the actual holder for the MP3 player.
I was disappointed, that there was no docking in the traditional sense with the multi-pin conncector found on the bottom of most major MP3 players. The was simply a headphone jack that I needed to plug into the MP3 player.
In my first test with an iPhone, the infamous headphone connector problem was in full effect. I had to trim down the plastic on the speaker set connector to get it to fit. As you can see, there’s a on/off switch, a volume control, and even a DC power connection.
The sound was mediocre. Way worse that most of the other speaker setups we have around the house from the Muji Cardboard Speakers to the Tivoli PAL. But for $7 I’m not expecting much.
I put the Zune in place, and unsurprisingly it worked just fine, just like the cover of the box.
I also tried a video iPod. Like the others, it fit well and I could see using on an ongoing basis.
At this point, my daughter Mira came in and wanted to see it. She put on Ratatouille and shooed me a way so she could watch the movie. She could have gone 25 feet into the family room and watched the same film on a HDTV set off of the Apple TV, but she preferred this way. I think this says something for what the younger generations will expect when it comes to personal media. She picked up the set and walked out of the room.
Now that I was no longer in possession of the speakers, I took a look at the razor part of the boxed set. In the past, I tried a Schick 4 blade razor and was unimpressed. Keeping an open mind, I wanted to give it a second chance. Currently I prefer a Gillette Sensor 3 . I have backed away from the Gillette Fusion since I reviewed it.
The head of the Schick seems to be a step back toward sanity from the gel surrounded razor I last tried. The design is simple in comparison. I prefer to shave in the shower and use Kiehl’s Shave Cream (as should you if you want a close shave).
The razor went pretty smoothly on the flats, but just didn’t feel right on the curves. It just couldn’t stay as close as I’ve come to expect. Perhaps that the head size is bigger than what I’m used to these days. But the Schick did feel much better than the previous one I tried. Very comparable to the Gillette Fusion. On the back of the razor is a trim blade. Nice idea, but when I’m in the shower, sans contacts, I can’t see well enough to trim my sideburns.
Overall, I’m pleased with my purchase. I will keep the razor as a backup and I will actually use the speaker set when I travel.
Kindle and the New York Times
We got a Kindle at the office to test out and demo. If you haven’t heard, the Kindle is a new kind of electronic book made by Amazon. I took it home last night and gave it a try in my normal reading circumstances. To be honest, I was impressed. The Kindle felt good and was easily readable, even in bed. Since the Kindle is not back lit, I did use my reading light, just like I have to when I read a paper book.
This morning, I was eager to see what it was like to read the newspaper on the Kindle. Via it’s wireless connection, the Kindle can download the newspaper while you sleep. I told it to subscribe to the New York Times.
I walked outside to get the paper New York Times and brought it inside to compare it to the Kindle Edition New York Times. The first thing I noticed was that the headlines were markedly different for the same story. The first sentence of the story is the same, as is the rest of the article text, but for some reason the headlines are different. I looked at the web version of the same story, and the headline different as well, close to the paper version headline, but not exactly the same. Three different headlines for the same story in three different mediums? Kinda strange if you ask me. Here is the comparison.
Paper NY Times: Lenders Tighten Flow of Credit; Growth at Risk
Kindle NY Times: Lenders’ Belt-Tightening Stifles Growth in Economy
Web NY Times: As Lenders Tighten Flow of Credit, Growth at Risk
I guess they have an excess of headline writers these days…
The differences don’t stop there. Today is Thursday, my favorite day with the NY Times, since it is the day for Circuits in the Business Section. I enjoy reading the Circuits section a great deal.
The Kindle showed only 5 stories in the Business Day section. When I started to compare, I found that not one of the front page stories on the Business Day paper version was in the Kindle version.
Intrigued, I counted and found that in the paper version, there are 30 articles in Business Day and 5 in Circuits. Of the 5 articles in the Kindle version, 2 were from Business Day and 3 from Circuits.
So let’s be clear, the Kindle version is missing 28 of 30 Business Day articles and 2 out of 5 Circuits articles. Not really the electronic version of the traditional NY Times. Maybe they are still getting the kinks out, but it sure is weird. At ~$15/month of the Kindle version, you would expect equivalence to the paper version or the web version at a minimum.
Topping off the strangeness is the choice of articles in the Kindle version. Of the two Business Day articles included, one was a short blurb about some guys promotion that’s in a tiny box on the bottom of page C6. While I am happy for Mr. Strangfeld and his promotion at Prudential, I would have greatly preferred to read any of the article from the Front Page of the section instead.
Don’t get me wrong, I think the Kindle is fantastic, but the stuff with the NY Times is just plain weird.
Next, I need to figure out how to get books from Project Gutenberg into the Kindle.