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REVIEW: Sonic Boom! Alarm Clock

What: The alarm that no one can sleep through.
Where: Available online; I used appliancehut.com
How Much: $34.99 (though I got mine on sale for $32.99)

I have a problem waking up in the mornings. Not only have I always been a heavy sleeper, I’ve also had a lifelong habit of staying up far too late into the wee small hours of the morning to allow for early rising. Because of this one-two whammy, I’ve never found an alarm clock that could wake me up properly. Oh sure, I’ve tried all sorts of tricks – randomly switching the alarm between CD or radio or buzz. I’ve tried moving the alarm clock to different places in the room. I’ve tried one of those clocks that gradually increases the volume of the alarm. You name it, I’ve tried it.

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REVIEW: Archos AV400 Portable Media Player

What: Possibly the best all around portable media player
Where: Stores everywhere; Archos’ homepage is here.
How Much: Around $449

There are dozens of devices out there that can play digital video these days: laptops, PDAs, Smartphones, portable DVD players and personal media players. Each of these devices have their strengths and weaknesses. Laptops have huge color screens and large hard drives, but they’re rather bulky (and expensive and quite heavy at the lower price points). PDAs and Smartphones are as portable as can be, but almost all of them use some form of Flash memory, which means hours of re-encoding videos, not to mention the hassle of keeping track of 4 or 5 SD or CF cards. Portable DVD players are pretty neat, but are typically plagued by short battery life and the lack of codec support (MP3? Maybe. FLAC or Ogg? No. DivX? Maybe. Xvid? No.) Plus, DVD players also require you to carry around a CD case full of discs, which makes them less portable that you might initially think, especially on airplanes or inter-city trains.

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REVIEW: Motorola IMFree Wireless IM

What: A wireless IM device for AOL Instant Messenger
Where: Many vendors (see below)
How Much: $10-$129 (see below)

IMFreeThe tech world is littered with products that may (or may not) have been good ideas. One of the most famous (infamous?) was DIVX – not the popular MPEG4 video format, but the “DVD rental replacement” player. The premise behind DIVX players was that you could go to Circuit City and buy a DIVX movie disc for around $6. Once you put the disc into a special DVD\DIVX hybrid player, a chip inside the player would record the discs’ title and only allow you to play the disc for 48 hours. After that time, you could play the disc again by paying a “continuation fee” of around $3.25 or you could even upgrade the disc to “Silver status” allowing for unlimited playing. This was all done via a modem built-in to the DIVX player that would connect to a central server and charge your credit card accordingly. Although it seems silly now, there was great fear at the time that certain movies would come out in DIVX format only and thus turn the entire home movie market into one huge pay-per-view moneygrab by the movie studios. (For what it’s worth, the DivX MPEG4 video format was named after the failed DVD substitute as a last “Ha-ha” to the content industry.)

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Has The Music Industry Lost Its Mind?? (Part 2)

In part two of a two-part rant, Jim Cofer discusses the Sony DRM fiasco and its long-term implications for DRM within the music industry in general. Hopefully, this article will be far more coherent than part one, which was just some assorted rambling.

Karma’s a bitch, ain’t it? It seems the bad news just won’t stop for Sony Music these days – and given their almost maniacal hated and distrust of their own customers, it’s not hard to see why karma’s so busy dumping on them lately. Just about every website on the planet – including this one; see my news for 11/01 – covered the initial news about the “rootkit” that Sony included on 20-50 audio CDs for sale in the United States. Here’s a brief recap in case you missed some of the finer points of the story:

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The USA vs. The UK

I recently got back from a week in the UK, and while I was there the missus and I talked about a lot of the things that the US does better than the UK and vice-versa. It’s certainly interesting to go to a foreign country and see how things differ between that country and your own country. Maybe that country even does some things (gasp!) better than America!

Here’s a quick list of things we thought of that either the UK or the US does better than the other:

Stuff The UK Does Better

1) Scarves – This is one category where it’s not even a contest. The UK absolutely kicks America square in the ass when it comes to scarves, specifically the wearing of scarves. British people seem to have this innate ability to effortlessly fold a scarf and make it both practical and beautiful. Remember on the school playground how the girls used to play with string by hooking it around their fingers and pulling their hands apart? Remember too how the guys would occasionally try to copy the girls at this, yet only succeed in cutting off the blood supply to one of their fingers? Well, in that analogy the girls are British people and the guys are Americans. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure that there are plenty of Yankees that can tie a scarf as well as an Englishman… but they just don’t have the grace that Britons (of both sexes) do.

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10 British Shows Worth Watching

When I was growing up, “British TV” meant either Monty Python’s Flying Circus, The Good Life, the inexplicable Benny Hill Show or one of those well-acted but painfully dull movies on Masterpiece Theatre. Of course, looking back on it now, American TV wasn’t that exciting in the 1970s either, but Brit TV was well-known as being especially boring – not to mention cheaply put together.

If the last British TV show you watched was The Tomorrow People, you’ve been out of the loop for far too long! Thanks to the magic of DVDs and the Internet, you no longer need a passport and a plane ticket to watch most of the dozens of great British shows out there. Here’s a sampling of some of my favorites, listed in no particular order:

SpooksSpooks – If you like 24, there’s a good chance you’ll like Spooks as well. It’s a gritty action\drama set in the anti-terrorism division of MI-5, which is Britain’s version of the FBI (sort of). Because most British shows still lack the big budgets that American shows have, most Brit TV writers rely more on cheaper things like, I dunno… character development. Whereas 24 is populated with a bunch of cartoon characters that we couldn’t care less about (excepting Jack, of course), we get to know each of the characters on Spooks deeply. And this makes us care. And when bad things happen to them, it’s like a kick in the gut. The show is tightly written, so whether the gang is chasing IRA or Muslim terrorists, computer hackers or rouge agents, you’ll almost always be on the edge of your seat. More than once I thought I was gonna have a heart attack before an episode was over. This show pulls no punches. At all. Yes, Spooks sometimes leans heavily on “technobabble” (not to mention technology that simply doesn’t exist in the real world). But still… this show will simply take your breath away!

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One last thing…

OK, make that two last things about the ongoing conversion of the site from FrontPage to WordPress:

1) I am moving items from the old site to the new one in the order that best suits me – from easiest to hardest. I also like to move them in groups. I’m not bothering to copy the timestamps from the old articles, so WordPress treats each “old” post as “new” and posts it on the front page. This means two things: at times, you may see nothing but recipes or “Geek Stuff” entries on the front page. Know that this site has much more to offer than just recipes or Windows tips; I’m just copying them over in a batch, so that’s all that there is on the front page at the moment. Secondly, you may see something that seems out of place. You might see posts on the front page dated today saying that I’m excited “about the Steelers being in the Super Bowl next week” or “going to see the brand new Matrix Reloaded movie this Friday”. Let me assure you that neither are your eyes playing tricks on you, nor am I hopelessly crazy. I’m just copying some old stuff to the new layout and the post was originally written a couple of years ago!

2) At this point, the entire old site is still online (look for the “Old Site” link on the front page under “Links”). However, in the next few days I will begin deleting old pages that have been moved to the new site, and I will probably create a new page in WordPress that has a clickable index of all the old pages that I’m not going to transfer to the new site. In other words, I’m going to move all of the old pages to a directory on the server called “old” and will have an index page where you can click a link to read the page in the “original” FrontPage format. Why? Well, look: an article about converting DVDs to MPEG-1 movies made a fair amount of sense back in 1998, but it’s old hat today. Why should I spend half an hour converting it to WordPress when no one is going to read it anyway? And some articles (while recent) are simply too time consuming to convert to WordPress. My “list of 62 great 80s films” article is only a couple of months old, but all of the links and tables would make it a pain to convert over. Unless I can find an easy way to strip that page’s HTML into something more WordPress-friendly, I’m just going to create a page in WP that has links to all of these types of articles. You follow me?

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USB Drives Not Assigned A Drive Letter

When you attach a USB mass-storage device to a computer running Windows XP or Windows Vista, the operating system assigns the device a drive letter – usually the first available letter. However, Windows reserves that drive letter for the USB device until your next reboot. So if you have a single hard drive (C:) and a CD\DVD drive (D:), and you attach a USB flash drive, Windows will assign the drive the first available letter (E:), but if you remove the flash drive and attach a USB hard drive, Windows will assign the drive the next available letter, which would be F: in this case. Windows won’t “give up” the flash drive’s E: until your next reboot.

This is all fine and dandy, unless your next available drive letter is a mapped network drive. Using the previous configuration as an example, let’s say that you have a network share mapped as F: on your system. You attach the flash drive, which gets assigned the letter E:. But then you attach the USB hard drive and… you don’t get a drive letter! Windows will show that the device is connected to your computer, but the device simply never shows up in Windows Explorer.

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Time Warner’s DVR: how I made it to Engadget!

Time Warner Cable updated the firmware on their SA-8300HD DVR boxes on 10/26/05 at around 3:55am. I know because I was watching TV when the box turned off and a bunch of hex numbers ran across the front panel of the DVR. After it rebooted, I was curious, so I looked into the settings menu. Imagine my surprise when I saw this:

TWC DVR funny!

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REVIEW: VoiceEclipse VoIP Service

What: Voice over IP (VoIP) telephone service
Where: http://www.voiceeclipse.com
How Much: $19.95/month

When I moved from Atlanta to Charlotte, I wanted to be able to keep in touch with family and friends as much as possible. To that end, Lisa and I signed up for MCI’s “The Neighborhood” plan, which gave us unlimited local and long distance calling for around $49.99 a month. This worked well for us for a couple of years, but two problems cropped up which made the plan less attractive: for starters, I simply lost touch with many of my Atlanta friends, which made the plan seems less necessary. Also, MCI raised the monthly fee, so that with taxes one month of “The Neighborhood” ended up costing around $76.

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