So I recently watched Live Free or Die Hard on Blu-ray with some people that have never seen a Blu-ray movie before. I know it may surprise you but they were unimpressed. That got me thinking, what is it that people are looking for in Blu-ray? The most obvious thing is better video quality. I mean Blu-ray has the ability to hold 720p/1080p video where standard DVD can only hold 480p video. Honestly though, if your TV is not going to display the difference (or you can’t see the difference) what is the point? I thought I would point out a few more things that make up the Blu-ray puzzle.

Menu

While this may not seem like a cool feature or worth any money I have really become accustomed to having a menu available whenever I want. If I want to skip to a new chapter, turn on commentary, or use any other special feature I don’t have to exit the movie to go to the menu. I just hit the pop up menu button and there are all my menu items.

Sound quality

I have to admit, I do not have a receiver that can decode uncompressed DTS-HD and I have never even heard what it sounds like but I know that if you have a great TV and a crappy sound system, or a improperly set up sound system, you are missing half the movie. I can only imagine that having great sound would have the same affect as having improved image quality. Even more so, having good speakers and a properly set-up room will make your Blu-ray experience even more enjoyable.

Bonus features

Of couse regular DVD’s have bonus features too but not like Blu-ray. Of course Blu-ray has all the normal features like deleted scenes, language selection, and alternate endings, but newer Blu-ray movies are starting to come out with what is called BD-live. BD-live is really just a fancy way of saying that the Blu-ray player you are using is connected to the internet and can provide for temporary storage for a movie. Things like web trailers, updated movie information and stats, and even multiplayer games.

So does all these extra features mean you should run out and get a Blu-ray player? Absolutly not. If you don’t feel like you need a Blu-ray player or if you don’t think you will use any of the extra features, you probably shouldn’t spend the money on one (unless of course you want a awesome game system in the meantime). If your TV can’t display 1080p (or is under 42″) you probably won’t tell the visual difference, especially if you bought a Visio, and you should just stick with regular DVD’s. If your sound system came in a kit and cost you less than $200 or your speakers are from the 80’s,  you probably can’t hear the difference and therefore you don’t need Blu-ray. And if you don’t have internet access you can’t read this blog and will listen to whatever the Best Buy employee tells you anyway so it doesn’t matter.

To rap up, the next time you come across a first time Blu-ray watcher please just let them know that Blu-ray is more than just a pretty picture. I will admit, The first time I watched a Blu-ray movie I was less than stunned. As time goes on though expect the transition to be just like DVD’s. The very first DVD (Twister) didn’t even have surround sound for goodness sakes! If you have any features I missed or a first time Blu-ray experience you would like to share please feel free to leave a comment.

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So after my ????????iPaq 310 experience I was pretty set on not getting burned on another GPS device. The easiest way I knew not to get burned was to buy the best available device. Obviously the two options that come to mind are either a TomTom or a Garmin. Garmins are known for being very customizable, almost too customizable for some, and the TomTom’s are just crazy easy to use. I was mainly looking at the TomTom One XL, 720, or the 920 for the TomTom options and the Garmin 650, 750, and 880 for the Garmins.  I ended up buying the TomTom for a couple of reasons.

1. The TomTom’s had all the features I needed. There were a few extra features the Garmin had, for example the parking locator, that the TomTom did not have but the basic functionality was all I needed. And in my experience the more features you have the more things are just bound to go wrong.

2. The TomTom’s were cheaper. And I don’t mean like $100 cheaper. The top of the line TomTom was $500 cheaper than the top Garmin.

3. I would probably have less tendency to break the TomTom. Being slightly less customizable I won’t be tempted to play with every button and make things more difficult to use. I don’t know why but this tends to happen with me.

So I got the TomTom 920 (obviously). I got this over the other two because it was still free, it has a FM transmitter, and it has the ability to get live traffic information through a special antenna or my phone data connection.

The first time I turned on the TomTom I knew already that this was going to be a good experience. Not only did the device get a GPS lock almost immediately but it did it while I was inside my apartment. I knew the device needed to charge so I was going to leave it plugged in its charger over night and play with it the next morning, but I noticed that it came with a car charger and a computer dock but no stand alone charger. While that was really odd I just went ahead and plugged in the dock to my computer and let it charge over USB. Since it was already plugged in, I thought I would install the software and see what it has to offer.

At first the software seemed pretty basic but one thing that I wasn’t expecting was how easy it was to use. As soon as I plugged in the TomTom with the software running I was it asked if I wanted to connect to the computer. I said yes and the device installed drivers and updated the maps. Hey that was cool! I didn’t have to do anything to get the most up to date maps. I also turned on the user maps corrections so I could get updated more frequently when there is construction or a road closed. This all was easy and I expected it from a top of the line GPS device. The parts I didn’t expect were the customizations.

I spent the next 3-4 hours customizing the voice on the device, changing the car icon, and setting up map colors. The voices were really cool. They had everything from user created voices and generic accented voices to Darth Vader and John Cleese. Some of the voices cost money however, John Cleese being the most expensive at $20. One thing to note about the voices is that the computer vocies will say street names but the human voices will say more generic things like street or motorway (the device has European maps so they say fun things like motorway instead of freeway or highway). The car icons was pretty fun too. Right now I fly around in the Starship Enterprise. The colors were pretty basic, along with the ability to make you own. I knew beforhand that most of these items existed because I did a lot of research on the TomTom website, but I didn’t realize how easy it would be to download and install the items or create any of my own voices, icons, colors, or maps. I still want to venture into making my own maps but I haven’t had the time. You are able to make a map of a area and then label areas for certian buildings/seating chart etc.

After all my customizations and actually taking it on the road a few times I found that using the device is a little less intuitive than I would have thought. I am able to get around in the device without problems but if I want to drive to a new location I am supposed to touch the map. While I understand that now, at first I was a bit confused by this. There also wasn’t any quick menu while navigating without setting it up in the options. I was able to add a few things to the quick menu but I can only add a handful of options that are already built into the device. One good sign is I have not had problems with people that have never used the device figuring it out with just a couple of taps on the screen. There have been a few occasions where I was driving and I had someone in the passenger seat find directions to a destination and they have been able to do so in just a few minutes.

Another great thing on the device is the route re-calculations. I was never able to get the iPaq to do that for me and the TomTom does it almost instantly. I do find that I need to use re-calculations more often than I did before. I think the TomTom isn’t quite as good at telling me exactly when I need to turn, but turning on one of the computer voices with street name announcements does help.

I have had 3 minor problems with the TomTom that I also thought I would share.

First is the SD card reader. All of my research said that you could put in a SD memory card with music on it and the TomTom would be able to play the music from there. I tried this multiple times and was unable to get the TomTom to even recognize there was a card plugged in. I may be doing something wrong, I still have yet to read the manual, but on the iPaq the music detection was instant when opening the music player.

The second thing is the FM transmitter. This is a fantastic feature that can broadcast turn-by-turn directions or music through your radio. The main problem I have had is the transmitter is not strong enough to make the audio come through without static. I have tried different stations and adjusting some of the power options but on my 2001 Civic and 1987 Mr2 the option is pretty unusable. The TomTom does still have a line out to plug it directly into my Civic which has a audio input, so this isn’t a big deal but it is somewhat of a bummer.

The third thing that doesn’t seem to work for me is my bluetooth headset. This could totally be a compatibility issue with just my headset but for some reason I cannot sync my Motorola H700 headset with the TomTom. There are two reasons I wanted to be able to do this. The first is the TomTom has the option to send different audio outputs to different devices. For example I want my music to play through the audio out and I want the turn-by-turn directions to go through my headset. While this option exists in the device, I cannot sync my headset to try it out.

Another a minor problem, still dealing with bluetooth, is that the TomTom has not been able to use my phone to get traffic information. I think this is mainly functionallity limitation of my phone (xv6800 with windows mobile 6.1) and not the TomTom and I still need to play with the settings to see if I am doing something wrong. One way or another I think I can get it to work I just need to set aside time to read the manual.

Overall I have been completely satisfyed with the TomTom. I have had two occations when it did not sucessfully get me to my destination but in both cases it was user error when I put in the address and not the device. I will be taking the TomTom on a road trip this summer to Colorado so we will see how it does on a long trip but I have no doubts it will continue to be my prefered way to get places I have never been before.

I would highly recommend a TomTom to anyone looking for a GPS device. And if you are looking to save a bit of money you can check out the One XL. It has the nice big screen but doesn’t have the traffic or FM transmitter.

Recently hack a day had a article about enhancing your Canon to have more functionality than a standard point and shoot camera. The firmware loads on your memory card and it allows you to do things like shoot in RAW picture format, change your ISO speed, even allow a calendar and games on the camera. One of the best features of the firmware looks like it is completely reversable. All you do is load the files on a memory card and it works (as far as I have read at least). Once you no longer want the extra features you can just delete the files from the memory card.

The most difficult part looks like it is picking the right firmware for your camera.  Head over to the CHDK project wiki page and start reading/downloading.

One other thing I was able to do this weekend was enable a super zoom on my camera. Really this is all I did…

The camera lens fit almost perfectly into the binoculars so I decided to see how well it would work. I noticed at first that I had almost tunnel vision when taking pictures and they were a little bit blurry. I quickly saw that if I zoomed in all the way (3x optical) I lost the tunnel vision. I then was able to adjust the blurriness with the focus on the binoculars.

Here are some before and after pictures of what the pictures looked like.

Even though some of the closeups were pretty blurry I’d imagine you could get a much clearer picture with better binoculars.
Let me know if you get to try this on your own and how it works for you.
A couple things I found that worked well was making the camera have a fast ISO speed because with the binoculars the picture was very shaky. I turned off picture review so I could just take as many pictures as I possible. If you are buying a set of binoculars you may want to look if your camera fits in the looking hole. It helped because it shielded a lot of the light and made it easy to hold both the camera and still focus the image.

UPDATE: I wanted to update this post with some more information I found out about CHDK. HackADay had some great tips on using CHDK to its full advantage.

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I was recently given a HP iPaq 310 Travel Companion as a gift so I thought I would explain my experience with the device. I wanted the device because one of our HP representatives bought one and I was very impressed with what I was able to do in the few minutes I played with the device. It also happened to be on sale because HP was clearing out their remaining stock. I didn’t do any navigation, but I assumed the device is designed for navigation so I thought it would have no problems dishing up turn by turn directions for me and Beth. But we all know what happens when you assume…

I am going to start with what I really liked about the device. The iPaq looked great! Internal antenna, 10.9 cm screen, 800×480 resolution, slick looking 3D maps, and 3D building renderings were all the things that just blew me away. The processor was a 600 Mhz dual-core Titan that could render 3D maps faster than I can spot a Ferrari in a four car parking lot. The device even came with a car mount, car charger, wall charger, 2 usb cables, and a carrying case. The buttons on screen were easy to use and the menu system was intuitive enough to never have to pick up the manual.

With built in bluetooth, mp3 playback, jpeg image viewer, and games what could possibly be wrong?

I think the first problem of the iPaq is the name. I know it isn’t a real “problem” but it is still a negative in my book. I know HP has used it for a long time but I think they really need to stop using it, especially because this iPaq, although running Windows CE, has no PDA functionality as the name suggests. I guess I got my wish on this though because this is the last dedicated GPS device that HP is going to be making. Although they will still be using the “i” prefix on their Paq’s, at least they will be sticking with PDA functionality.

The second thing that was really noticeable when using the device was the internal speakers were never loud enough.  This being my first GPS device I just thought it would be normal and I would get used to it. I made sure the “increase volume with speed” option was clicked and assumed I would hear it enough.

??????

The first weekend I got the device I wanted to put it through it’s paces. I took it to a few places to see how it would do and what routes it would choose. The first stop was my local Fry’s. I loaded up my SD card with some music, BTW it has a SD card reader which was a plus for music and pictures, started some driving music, and synced the iPaq with my LG VX9800 in hopes that I would get a phone call. On my way to Fry’s, about 3/4 of the way, I got a “memory execution” error on the screen. The device froze and I had to wait until I could stop the car to use the jaws of life to extract the device from its car mount to poke the soft reset button on the bottom. I was familiar with this kind of error because I have used Windows Mobile enough in the past to know when the OS runs out of memory. As soon as I got to Fry’s I pulled the device from the windshield and hit the soft reset. Not a big deal to me, seeing as the iPaq was still free. I waited the excruciating long time for the device to fully reboot and went into Fry’s to get what I came for.

The next stop was the hospital to pick up a prescription. On the way I decided to not sync my phone with the iPaq to hopefully free up some memory. While this seemed to work I instead had the music stop on me for no reason. In the middle of a song it just quit. Now I was starting to get concerned. After picking up the prescription I headed home and the device just lost all satellites about 5 miles south of the 210 freeway on the 605. If you have been on the 605 freeway, you will know there is nothing blocking the view of the sky. So I pulled off, restarted the device again, and finished driving home.

The next day I decided to drive somewhere I had never been, meeting someone at a movie theater, and I didn’t print any directions. I put in my address, got in the car and put the device in the holder. Five minutes into the drive the iPaq still did not have a lock on any satellites. Luckily I had Beth with me so I gave the device to her to restart. She restarted the device, it locked onto satellites, and she put in our address. Great, now we are 20 minutes into our trip but at least we know where we are going. I put the device back in the holder and *snap* the top piece breaks off.

The next week I took the iPaq out to go look at some homes. I printed directions this time just in case. It was a good thing I did because the device never got a lock on any satellites. At least not until I found our destination and put the car in park. Then all of a sudden the GPS said, “Oh Hey! You have arrived.”

So at this point I just didn’t trust the device. If I needed to go somewhere I still printed directions. Oh and I never once got the device to re-route me when I turned off course, which happened regularly. I gave the iPaq one more shot at not leaving me high and dry.  I went out to look at some more homes the next week but had the exact same problem as before. No satellite lock on until the device was restarted.

I called HP and told them I had a faulty GPS unit. They were more than happy to return the device and fully refund the purchase price to the person who bought it for me.

I also forgot to mention that someone else at my work got the same iPaq and they didn’t have nearly as many problems as I did. They did mention that the battery doesn’t last long at all (maybe 2 hours) and it takes a excruciating long time to charge.  They have had slow lock ons for satellites but nothing as bad as I was experiencing. They also mentioned that their iPaq was able to re-route them without any problems when they went off course.

So, I would steer clear of the iPaq 310 not because it doesn’t look nice and you probably will have better luck than I did, but because there are better devices out there. Speaking of which, my next review will be of my lovely tomtom 920.

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I have been using Digsby for my IM client for a few weeks now. This is after a long time using Pidgin (previously Gaim). I have switched back to Pidgin for a couple different reasons but I wanted to give a quick run down of what I thought of Digsby vs. Pidgin.

While Digsby is based on Pidgin (the back end at least) developed in house and pidgin is open source there are some additional things that stand out that really set it apart from what Pidgin can do. First of all is the fact that Digsby is a server based application.  What does that mean? It means you have a single login for Digsby and that is all you ever need to remember (once you are set up at least). Digsby will keep tract of what accounts you have set up, what the settings for each account are, and even your chat history. If you lose your computer and need to install Digsby on a completely different machine, or even a different OS, it doesn’t matter.  All of your settings, logs, and connections will carry with you to your next machine.  This also means that if there is a update to the software, you don’t have to track it down to find out what the latest version is or remember to download and install it.  All of the updates are server based so all you have to do is start the program to get all of the new features, and possibly the new bugs as well. The last big thing that Digsby incorporates that Pidgin does not have is social networking sites. While I don’t use any social networking sites I hear they are quite the place to be.

On the negative side, Digsby was missing a few things that I really enjoy in Pidgin. Although they are all plugins and could easily be incorporated into Digsby they are missing in Digsby’s current beta form (2858 I think). The main plugins I miss are text replacement and psychic mode. If you don’t know what either of those are you should really check them out for Pigin. The killer that made me switch back to Pidgin was email checking in Digsby.  Although the options you have with email are far superior to what Pidgin can do I had a problem with Digsby not checking my sub folders in Yahoo and using the non-beta version of Yahoo mail which is just plain ugly. While that may not seem to be a deal breaker for some, I realized a week late that I had some important ebay, amazon, and personal emails that I was relying on Digsby to alert me when they came. Because Digsby let me down for those things (and because there isn’t currently a Linux installer) I have switched back to Pidgin. As soon as Digsby is out of beta I will probably give it another try. But for now Pidgin allows me to chat and check my email to my hearts content. I must admit I will miss the “report spam”, archive, and chat popups of Digsby in the meantime.

I updated a few things thanks to the comments I was sent clarifying a few things that I was incorrect about in my original article.

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For anyone that was curious about what happened with that letter I sent to Burger King about their outrageous fry naming scheme I got a response a little while ago and posted the letter in the original post.

You can see it here.

Snipping tool is a part of Windows Vista and is used for screen capturing.  And it actually works really well! If you don’t have it installed you can add it by going to Computer then click on “Uninstall or change a program”.

Then click on “Turn Windows features on or off” on the left side.

Just check the box for Tablet PC optional components and you are done.

Once you have it installed just go to the start menu and search for “snipping”. It should be the first result. One thing I found out you cannot do is take a screenshot of the snipping tool while it is open.  You will still have to use your PrtScn button for that.

The second little tool isn’t really for documentation as it is for quick answers while in Firefox. If you go into the little search bar at the top and search for “miles in Kilometers” and don’t hit enter you will see your answer right there in the suggestion area.

Pretty neat.

Let me know if there are any easy/free tools that you have overlooked for years that you now use everyday in the comments.

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Since the MacBook Air was announced I kept thinking it was just retarded. Sure the machine is thin, but that isn’t going to help you too much when you need something small that will fit on your lap. The footprint of the machine is what is going to help you use the machine in tight spaces (that and losing your gut). When we got a MBA in for testing I quickly had to take some pictures of it compared to our current small travel machine the Sory Vaio tx770p.

Here is a quick comparison of the two spec wise.

Notice the Vaio is lighter, smaller, has better battery life, and better screen resolution.  Oh lets not mention it is 3 years old! Apple engineers don’t look so smart after all. And just for a nail in the coffin the Vaio has a DVD burner built in and a replaceable battery.

And here are a couple of pictures so you can see my point.

I can hopefully have more on this issue when we get more small laptops in.

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Just to give you guys a warning when going crowd surfing. Make sure you land on your feet.

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The Linkstation was not satifying what I needed. So I turned to the internet to see what I could do about the problems I was having. I found a site called Nas-central which happened to have a ton of info about hacking the Buffalo NAS devices. The site had so much information it wasn’t well organized so I spent a good amount of time just figuring out what I could do with the Linkstation. I started my search by finding out more about what the Linkstation has out of the box, and then what I could do with it. It turns out the Linkstation runs a Buffalo modified version of Linux and because of that it is pretty easily hacked with a few utilities.

The first thing was to figure out what operating system I wanted to run on the Linkstation. I found a few main options. Most people would either hack the standard firmware, install a modified buffalo firmware called jtymod, install a more open version of the buffalo firmware called openlink, or install a full replacement with a build of debian linux called freelink. All three options had very good merits, but for my needs I tried to just wanted to get a better DLNA server installed so I decided to modify the current buffalo firmware using acp_commander.

The next thing I needed to decide was what DLNA server I was going to install. I had no idea there were so many DLNA servers out there. The main options I found were mediatomb, ushare, FUPPES, and twonky. I was already pretty familiar with mediatomb because I was using that on my desktop for sharing media. I was familiar enough with it to know I wanted to look for something else. While ushare and FUPPES seemed pretty limited in their options they had one big advantage over twonky.  They are free whereas twonky costs $30. I really liked the features of twonky 4.4.4 so I installed the 30 day trial and gave it a test drive with my PS3. I was very impressed. Not only did twonky have a great web interface to configure everything you could want, but it also worked right away in Windows Media player 11. As soon as twonky scanned all of my media I was able to play almost everything on my PS3 without problems.  I had a couple of problems with videos cutting out but quickly realized that the wireless network was not able to keep up with the high bit rates of some of my videos. It turns out that with twonky installed and the default DLNA server turned off a lot of the hard drive noise was gone as well.

So I got a replacement DLNA server installed and fixed the problem with the drive being loud. But I wasn’t finished. The default firmware still gave me very limited samba settings and required all of my folders to be ordered in a fassion that only my grandma would do if she had 200 GB of divx files. So next I need to installed Freelink.