Various and Sundry: Now Everything But Photography

Less than a year out of college, I finally purchased my own computer with my own money.  Previous to that, I had been using an IBM Aptiva I bought at CompUSA a couple years earlier that I had paid for most of, but that my parents helped to fund.  (Let me tell you, that 133MHz processor was a screamer!)

On February 10, 1999, I bought a Gateway.  And just today, I ran across the receipt for it.  Check out these specs and prices:

My First Gateway Computer

The most painful part is probably the $550.00 I spent on a 19 inch monitor.  It wasn’t an LCD display, either.  (Here are the full specs.)  My next computer about two or three years later would have that.

The computer, itself, was $1666.00.  When I think about what that kind of money will buy in an iMac today, it’s crazy.  People complain about the expense of Macs, but look at what I got for $2600 12 years ago.  It wasn’t top of the line at the time.  For $2600 today, I could get the top of the line iMac with a 27″ screen.

Yes, I include the price of the printer in there, because the iMac I’m typing this up on right now came with a free printer/scanner/copier/fax machine combo unit — after $99 rebate!

Still, there was nothing cooler than the assemblage of brown boxes with black cow spots arriving at the office, was there?

Exactly what is the distance limit for an 802.11N router, do you figure? I took my handy dandy iPhone around the house tonight to figure out why the internet felt so sluggish around the house sometimes. What I found is probably not surprising, but does raise some annoying problems.

I used the SpeedTest app for the iPhone, which also has a web counterpart.

My cable modem and router are plugged in upstairs, in the “home office.” I live in a townhouse, so there’s also below that a main level and a basement that’s the “home theater”/play room for my daughter.

My computer is plugged directly into the router, so let’s start with that as a baseline:

• PING: 29ms
• DOWNLOAD: 1.76 Mb/s
• UPLOAD: 2.07 Mb/s

Uploads are faster than downloads? Isn’t it usually the other way around?

That established, let’s now go on wi-fi and move just outside the room with the router set up in it:

• PING: 89ms
• DOWNLOAD: 347.7 kB/s
• UPLOAD: 255.5kB/s

Please note that the download and upload speeds are now in KILO and not MEGA, which is why the numbers look higher, but aren’t.

Now, one floor below:

• PING: 84ms
• DOWNLOAD: 316.5 kB/s
• UPLOAD: 276 kB/s

We’re slowing down a tad, but no big deal. Heck, uploads are faster!

Then, we go to the basement:

• PING: 181 ms
• DOWNLOAD: 53.2 kB/s
• UPLOAD: 3.8 kB/s

Things got bad in a hurry. Latency is twice as bad. Download speed is cut by something like 80%. Ditto the Upload speed.

So I tried turning off Wi-Fi and going to 3G and found this:

• PING: 473ms
• DOWNLOAD: 84.1 kB/s
• UPLOAD: 11.5 kB/S

Latency shoots up drastically, but once the connection is made, uploads and downloads are faster than with the wi-fi 802.11N router.

So, what’s the solution? Is this just a matter of being stuck too far away from the router? Of being underground? Or do I need a new router that’s better at pointing directionally down? The current router doesn’t have antennae on it like the old LinkSys did, so I can’t point things in the right direction.

Last summer, I asked for one iPhone App: a version of ProfCast, a popular Mac slideshow-making program that allows you to record your narration as you flip the slides over. Check out the comments to my original post for a comment from a ProfCast developer that they were working on it.

This week, it arrived. It’s called SonicPics. It does just what I asked for.

You create a project, drop all the pictures in from your picture library on your iPhone then record your narration as you swipe across the screen to change slides. There are even three different recording quality choices.

You need to be on a wi-fi connection to then transfer the final video to YouTube or your computer. For whatever reason, you can’t just save the video into your photo library and then transfer it via iPhoto. It’s a bit kludgy, too: the app gives you an IP address you go to on your web browser, and there’s a page with the video to download. I don’t understand that part, but I can get past it. It still saves the video for you, so you could work on a second project while the first one is still sitting out there. It doesn’t stop you from doing any more work.

My dream new feature: Telestrator capabilities. Let me draw on the slides as I talk, and then erase that drawing when I flip to the new slide. That’s above and beyond, but it would be cool. I can do it on the desktop with SnapZ, but I want everything on the iPhone.

At $3.99, it’s worth it to me for all the things I could do with it — and plan on doing with it.

For now, here’s the video I made this afternoon to test it out. It’ll show you what HDR photography is, and how that can be done on the iPhone, as well. Let me know what you think. Thanks!

(Whoops. Vimeo mangled the transcoding. Am now uploading it to YouTube instead. Let’s see how that goes.)

OK, let’s try YouTube now:

Stealing a bit from Daring Fireball here, I’m afraid.

Take a look at this:

This is how you create a slideshow in IrfanView, a wonderful and relatively simple Windows piece of freeware that I use for very basic image manipulation (cropping, scaling, brightness/contrast) when I’m at work and stuck on Windows.

It’s a mind-numbing number of options, presented in almost random fashion in rectangles spewed across a window. I think my favorite part is the bottom right corner, where you can add text to your slideshow with “simple” variable expressions. This is NOT a program for non-programmers.

I kind of like this idea, coming up in Windows 7 next year, though I can imagine it might get annoying, too:
First look at Windows 7’s User Interface

Window management has also undergone changes. In recognition of the fact that people tend only to use one or two windows concurrently, 7 makes organizing windows quicker and easier. Dragging a window to the top of the screen maximizes it automatically; dragging it off the top of the screen restores it. Dragging a window to the left or right edge of the screen resizes the window so that it takes 50% of the screen. With this, a pair of windows can be quickly docked to each screen edge to facilitate interaction between them.

Of course, multiple Linux distributions should have it implemented by week’s end.

We are so spoiled today.

I’ve been thinking about the television shows my soon-to-be-born daughter will wind up watching. It’s obviously crucial that she watches only the right things. That’s by responsibility as a parent, after all.

So the question then becomes obvious: What’s the first DVD I plug in for her? Classic Bugs Bunny cartoons? DuckTales episodes? The Muppet Show, Season One?

The more I thought of it, though, the more annoyed I became at the thought of having to eject the DVD player’s tray, put a new disc in, push it back in, wait for it to be recognized by the player, get past the FBI warning screen, and then the annoyingly animated menu to come to a rest.

It made me want to go back and set up a home theater server, and burn all my DVDs to some central storehouse to be called up at a single key click. I don’t have the time and money for that right now, though.

Seriously, it wasn’t more than ten years ago we had to rewind a video tape to get back to the first scene in a movie after watching the whole thing. Now, I’m bothered that it’s not basically instantaneous.

We are so spoiled today.

(I’m definitely thinking “What’s Opera, Doc?” The music should make her happy. Or maybe “Rabbit of Seville,” as it discusses death a little less.)

• The source code for Donkey Kong is now available.  One of the original coders even comments on it in the thread at the link.  Here’s some sample comments:

;;HISTORY: ;;
;;Nov ‘82 – IDS, initial coding ;;
;;Dec ‘82 – more coding, hair pulling, general cruftiness ;;
;;Jan ‘83 – schedule screaming, rampant insanity, accusations ;;
;;Feb ‘83 – semi-winnage, accompanied by cries of anguish and threats;;
;;Mar ‘83 – Lucifer announces a cooling trend

And here’s a quote from that aforementioned developer:

“I do remember that [Donkey Kong Jr.] was started in FORTH, and was an ego-driven disaster until that nonsense stopped.”

Somehow, that just shattered a bunch of naive childhood memories.

• Here’s another good reason the internet was created: so someone else could apply every Photoshop filter to one photo to see what it gives you.

• Your Flash Game for the Day: Split Words.  Given a playing board filled with word parts, match up two or three parts to form answers in the board’s theme. It’s timed.  It’s nerve-wracking .And it gets very hard very fast.

Better late than never to post today. . .

• Anyone download Google Chrome yet?  I’m curious, but I’m a devoted Mac user without Parallels running.  Looks cool. The web browser is due for a paradigm shift, as much as I love Firefox and all its wonderful plug-ins.

• How Chrome came to be: First article.  Second article.

• Some classic 80s music videos, including “Sledgehammer” and “Take On Me.”

• iPhone document scanner set-up.  Pretty cool.

• Have you seen the first Jerry Seinfeld/Bill Gates commercial?  It’s awful.  Pointless.  Lacking in the humor department.  Bad.

• XKCD: Contentment at Protest

We’re having another round of rumors of iTunes offering a subscription service.  This round of rumors is based on one e-mail’s hypothetical postulation of how it might work and how it might be a cool option for them.  There’s no word of mouth from inside Apple happening here.  There’s no leaked memo.  There’s no overseas production receipts.  (Not that there would be.)  There’s no hidden variable inside an SDK or an API.

Nothing.

But people are speculating on it, whipping themselves up into a furor that can only end when said product is not revealed in September, and they blast Apple for not following through on a product Apple never promised in the first place.

It’s a vicious cycle.  Sometimes, some Apple fanboys make me nuts.

You know who else make me nuts?  Technology pundits who talk about how great a gadget or a piece of software will be for when you’re flying.  How often does the average person fly, you think? Technology pundits must be doing it all the time, whether they’re giving a speech, or attending a conference, or a product unveiling, or meeting with an advertiser.  That lifestyle directly impacts their recommendations.  Sadly, it’s a lifestyle most of us don’t lead.  So many tech pundits are full of hot air to the average consumer.  Sadly, many consumers don’t take this to heart.

Let’s hear about products that are good for people who work 40 – 50 hours a week, have precious little free time at home, and can’t afford to spend $500 on the gadget of the week.  Let’s talk about gadgets that WILL change our lives, not incremental upgrades of products we’ve already decided we don’t need.

Let’s hear about a product that’s good for those of us who can’t spend all day on a Mac — those of us who are stuck on a locked-down PC all day, with extremely limited web options.  I don’t  need to hear about how you synch your half dozen Macs with your iPhone and your iPod Touch, all without leaving the comfort of your house and open wi-fi connection.  Cloud computing is meaningless when the cloud is as inaccessible to you as your home computer.

Let’s get back to that music subscription model that the pundits all seem to think is The Future.  I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again: I’m sick and tired of paying monthly fees for everything.  I’ve got enough of those bills coming in every month, thanks.  I’ll pay as I go for my music.  I agree — $100 doesn’t seem like much for a year’s worth of music.  But right now, I don’t pay anything to listen to music.  I already paid for it months or years ago.  I buy the few albums a year I might want, but I don’t honestly think I’ve spent $100 on music downloads and CDs in the last year, or 18 months.  Sure, I’d like to sample some new music, but I don’t need to.  I don’t have the time.  And I’m not paying for the pleasure.  I’ll follow the couple dozen bands and musicians I like as they release new stuff.  I’ll be happy with my six albums a year, tops, and that’ll leave me with plenty of time to listen to podcasts for free.

Those podcasts, in many cases, feature technology pundits who fly around the world and own seven Macs and listen to ten audible books a month.

I kid you not: I went back to listening to the latest Mac Break Weekly after writing this (admitted) rant, only to have Andy Ihnatko recommending a piece of software because it’s a great way to store your Travelocity information when you hop a plane to go somewhere.  I should start a website like IDoNotFlyThatMuchThanks.com to track the constant need of tech pundits to recommend or not recommend things mostly based on how well they fare on airplane trips.

Thoughts of this week’s Cuil.com fiasco sent me into a nostalgic haze. .  .

Remember when –
– USENET was king, and why would you want to splinter off conversations to a million little websites?

– AltaVista was king?

– AltaVista was destroyed in an attempt to create another portal?

– Alltheweb.com challenged the young Google on the basis of speed?

– floppy discs were, at most, 1.4 megabytes?  And that would hold all your Word documents for years?

– When you could cut a notched on the other side of the 5.25″ floppy disc and then write to its backside?  Instant double capacity!

– WordPerfect and Word were both in their 5.x releases?  Good word processing times right there.

– People might have actually linked to Lycos?

– Zip drives were the future, with their huge 100MB cartridges that would backup your whole hard drive for $10 a pop?

• This past weekend, at the end of the women’s Olympic try-outs, they lined up all the gymnasts on stage in front of thousands of people, and cheered them on.  Most stood there with their bouquet of roses and smiled.  One at the end was too busy on her Blackberry texting someone to notice that her country was trying to honor her.

• The teenager cashier at the supermarket I did my food shopping at this weekend, actually stopped scanning items for a minute to pull her cell phone out of the drawer and answer a text message.  I think I was staring at her with my jaw dropped while she casually made me wait, then went back to scanning things.

I know I’m an old man, but let’s start charging a dollar per text message — whatever it takes to cure the land of this evil scourge.

Let’s face it: The most exciting part about Gates and Ballmer previewing Windows 7 this week (screen shots) is the inevitable Feature Drop countdown.  Remember all the cool things about Windows Vista that never made the final release? We can restart that cycle now with Windows 7.

Oh, look, it’s already begun!

Commodore 64 still loved after all these years – CNN.com

Like a first love or a first car, a first computer can hold a special place in people’s hearts. For millions of kids who grew up in the 1980s, that first computer was the Commodore 64. Twenty-five years later, that first brush with computer addiction is as strong as ever.

“There was something magical about the C64,” says Andreas Wallstrom of Stockholm, Sweden. [...]
Often overshadowed by the Apple II and Atari 800, the Commodore 64 rose to great heights in the 1980s. From 1982-1993, 17 million C64s were sold. The Guinness Book of World Records lists the Commodore 64 as the best-selling single computer model.

::sigh:: They don’t make them like they used to. Mine lasted me through high school and wasn’t replaced until I started college in 1994. Those things were workhorses!

Related Various and Sundry Stories:

• C64: GEOS (14 Feb 2004)
• C=64 – with pics! (10 Sept 2003)
• The Rise and Fall of Commodore (20 Nov 2006)
• Commodore to Get 30-in-1 TV Game (01 May 2005)

Computer Randomly Plays Classical Music

During normal operation or in Safe mode, your computer may play “Fur Elise” or “It’s a Small, Small World” seemingly at random. This is an indication sent to the PC speaker from the computer’s BIOS that the CPU fan is failing or has failed, or that the power supply voltages have drifted out of tolerance. This is a design feature of a detection circuit and system BIOSes developed by Award/Unicore from 1997 on.

The funny thing is, this is SERIOUS. Not a gag. It comes straight from Microsoft’s own site.

I guess printing an error message to the screen was too hard. . .

Update: An anonymous commenter below pointed out that this is not strictly a Windows problem, and would happen on a Linux box, too. My humble apologies to Microsoft.  It’s still a funny bug report, though. =)

I have what I guess would be called an iPod Video. It’s a 30 gig jobber that plays video. I’m sure it’s a solid two generations out of touch by now, but there are some things about it that drive me nuts:

• This is probably a feature by some standards, but not by me. When I’m in the Music->Podcasts directory and chance across a video podcast, I would like to watch the video with that click. I don’t want to listen to the audio-only. Logically, I can understand it. If I’m in the “Music” directory, I should expect to hear only audio. But from a purely pragmatic end-user experience, a podcast is a podcast. If I click on a podcast and it’s of the video variety, I want to SEE something. I don’t want to have to click back 3 levels of menus, then back down through Videos->Video Podcasts to get to see the thing I should have been able to see 5 or more clicks ago.
• I don’t think I ever want to listen to just the audio on a video podcast, so this feature makes even less sense.
• Pause/fast-forward/rewind works oddly during video podcasts. It doesn’t allow me to rewind sometimes. I can circle my thumb around the scroll wheel a few times to rewind by a couple of minutes, but the second I let go the video starts playing stubbornly from where it started. Sometimes, I can click on the center of the wheel after scrolling back a little to “stick the landing,” but that’s iffy.
• When I’m in the last minute of a five minute podcast, if I pause it for too long, it autocompletes the video and pushes me out to the Video Podcast menu. When I hit PLAY again, it starts at the beginning of the podcast.
• Video playback is a slow-starter. Not a major problem, but an annoyance I should mention while I’m listing them all.
• Finally, when I listen to an audio podcast, I’d appreciate seeing the right cover art for it. It’s completely random, but there are times when the wrong podcast’s cover art shows up on screen while a completely unrelated podcast plays.