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I’ve owned several mp3 players over the years. Back in 1998, I got a Diamond Rio PMP300 for Christmas (which was eventually stolen… enjoy your 32MB mp3 player, jerks!). After that, the girl I was dating at the time gave me a Samsung UpRoar for my birthday, the first cell phone to feature mp3 playback. After I moved to Charlotte, I upgraded to a Samsung SP-i600, a giant clamshell phone running Windows Mobile 2003. The i600 was pretty nice for its time, but I’ve always been the kind of guy who prefers a single gadget that does one thing well over a “Swiss Army” gadget that does many things poorly.

You would think an iPod would be right up my alley. But iPods were expensive when they first came out, and I was reluctant to buy an Apple product. The search for a music player that was better than the i600 but fairly inexpensive led me to the Sony NetMD MiniDisc Walkman:

Sony developed the MiniDisc in 1992 to compete with Philips’ Digital Compact Cassette (DCC). While DCC was an abject failure, the MiniDisc fared slightly better. The format was popular in Japan, where record labels enthusiastically released albums in the MD format (record labels in the rest of the world? Not so much.). But because of the strength of the dollar against the yen at the time, MiniDisc players were just too expensive for most folks in the United States. And the fact that only component (non-portable) MiniDisc players had the ability to record also limited the appeal. A few years after MiniDisc players hit the market, CD burners became popular, allowing people to burn their own CDs for use in nearly ubiquitous portable CD players. So, by the early 2000s, the MiniDisc was all but a dead technology.

Sony is also the poster child of “Not Invented Here” Syndrome. Sony executives dismissed the mp3 format as an inferior technology. They, of course, considered Sony’s own ATRAC encoding to be a better product. That may or may not be true, but what really mattered was that no one was trading ATRAC files on the Internet, or ripping their CD collections into ATRAC files. So Sony sat on the sidelines, touting their “better” in-house technology, while Apple sold iPods by the million.

Continue reading “RETRO TECH: Sony NetMD Walkman”

For years, laptop users who wanted to check the overall health of their laptop battery in Windows had to hope that their OEM included some kind of monitoring software on the OS install, or had to track down a utility from the third-party vendor.

Happily, Windows 7 has a built-in way to check the overall health of your laptop’s battery. It’s not very elegant, and it’s kind of hidden, but it’s a way to know how well your battery is doing:

1) Fully charge your laptop’s battery. It doesn’t matter if you do the remaining steps with the laptop on AC or battery.

2) Click on the “Start” button and type “cmd” (without quotes) in the “Search programs and files” box.

3) Right click on the “cmd.exe” icon in the Start Menu and choose “Run as administrator”.

4) At the command prompt, type “cd %userprofile%/Desktop” (without quotes) and press the ENTER key. Note that the next step will create a report as an HTML file on the desktop; if you want the report in a different location, change to that location instead of the desktop.

5) At the command-prompt, type “powercfg -energy” and press the ENTER key.

The command-prompt will say “Enabling tracing for 60 seconds” and then “Observing system behavior”. After a minute or two, the process will complete and you’ll see a file named “energy-report.html” on your desktop (or wherever you decided to save the file). You may exit the command prompt by typing EXIT and pressing the ENTER key.

Open the “energy-report.html” in your favorite web browser, and scroll towards the bottom of the report. Look for a section called “Battery Information”:

See the two entries called “Design Capacity” and “Last Full Charge”? This tells us how much capacity the battery was designed to have, and how much it actually reported the last time it was charged. I don’t know exactly what units the report measures, but if you divide the “Last Full Charge” by “Design Capacity”, you’ll get the overall percentage your battery is charging to. In the screen cap above, you can see that the battery on my netbook is around 92% (44820 / 48840 = .9176), so that’s pretty good. Once that number gets below 50%, it’s time to replace the battery.

I know what you’re thinking. You’re wondering how the metric system, a system of measurement used almost everywhere in the world except the United States, and which appears to be in no danger of being replaced any time soon, can be “retro”. Well, for Americans of a certain age, it certainly seems like a retro tech.

The United States has toyed with the idea of the metric system since… well, forever. In Article I, Section 8 of the United States Constitution, Congress is given the power to “fix the standard of weights and measures” for the nation. And, in 1789, the first Congress looked at a proposal from Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, who decided to ditch the English system for a decimal system of his own making. It was very similar to the metric system… however, the big shortcoming of Jefferson’s system was that although it adopted 10 as a base unit, it had unique names for each individual unit of measurement (so no centi- or milli- prefixes). What’s worse, Jefferson’s system used existing names for his new units. The basic unit of measurement of the Jefferson system was the foot, which was subdivided into 10 inches, which were further subdivided into 10 lines, with each line subdivided into 10 points. And the less said about his long distance and volume units the better.

At any rate, Congress looked at Jefferson’s system and half-heartedly liked it. But no academics or powerful businessmen advocated for Jefferson’s system. Many in Congress saw Great Britain (and, by association, her Imperial measurement system) as America’s most important trading partner. Many Federalists (the main political party of the time) disliked France generally and were deeply suspicious of anything French. And since adoption of Jefferson’s system could cause mass confusion, at least for a time (“Is that an English foot? Or a Jefferson foot?”), Congress let the whole thing die.

America flirted with the metric system from time to time, but the metrification of the rest of the English-speaking world in the 1950s and 1960s led to ever louder calls to adopt the metric system. The end result was The Metric Conversion Act, passed by Congress on December 23, 1975. It declared the metric system to be “the preferred system of weights and measures for United States trade and commerce”. Unfortunately (or not), the act lacked any means of enforcing this. People and businesses were free to continue using customary units.

Continue reading “RETRO TECH: The Metric System”