Creative Zen

On Monday, I mentioned that I was looking for a new Portable Media Player (PMP), because my old one had died.

At this point, I am only looking at players that use flash memory, instead of a hard disk (thinking that a unit of this type will last longer under my usage conditions). In this category is the Creative Zen [creative.com]. Also in the category are the iPod Touch, iPod Nano, Zune, SanDisk Sansa Fuze [amazon.com], Sony Walkman [amazon.com], and then a bunch of other offerings that are hardly worth mentioning.

I think that it goes without saying that anything under 8GB is almost useless. The files that I listen to most of the time are an hour in length, and there are a stack of them. And then there is my music collection, which is in the tens of gigs.

I'm not going to buy any sort of iPod. While they may be great for other users, I don't consider the interface good at all. You can't navigate it especially fast, and it is impossible to use without looking at the screen (which means that you can't use it while driving). And then there is the shitty software that you have to use to transfer media to your device (and the shitty file formats that are imposed by the software). I already have my files in a shitty file format; I don't need to give money to a bunch of assholes who are going to force me to convert all of my files to a completely different shitty file format...

Anyway, these factors pretty much narrow it down to only the Creative Zen. Here's a video review of the device:



On the positive side is MTP mode transfers (in other words, it looks like just another USB mass storage device, and no special software is required to transfer music or video files to it). On the negative side, the USB cable is comically short (3"?) and there does not appear to be a way to browse files by folder (ID3 tags only). Ugh.

Parking Garage Bench

As much as we love the city we live in, we have noticed a lot of oddities about it. Hopefully, this will be the start of a series of weblog posts with weird pictures...

Here's one of a park bench that was apparently built to face directly into a parking garage:


Here's a closer shot:


These shots were taken on Belle Ave, just north of Detroit in Lakewood, OH.

If you were going to build a park bench there, wouldn't you build it facing the street? Or is the parking garage host to some crazy spectator events (demolition derbies, monster truck rallies, etc) where seating may be required?

Body of Lies

One of the books that I have read lately was Body of Lies by David Ignatius [amazon.com]. It's a spy novel, in which CIA agents are going after Al Qaeda.

Actually, the basic premise of the novel is very formulaic, and reminds me of most of the other spy novels I have read. The agents are in black ops, where there is little/no government oversight over what they are doing, and they're running around doing all kinds of crap. Then there is the obligatory spy novel theme where the main character realizes that there is no one he can trust (a la Jason Bourne [wikipedia.org]).

Plus, the characters were comically two-dimensional. All of the other CIA guys (other than the main character) were like robots. I guess what I'm trying to say is that the story was too similar to all of the other books in the genre.

That being said, there were some really interesting plot elements. And it was very suspenseful; I didn't want to put the book down, once I got into it. So, from that point of view, it was pretty enjoyable to read.

R.I.P. Archos 504

About 18 months ago, I bought an Archos 504 Portable Media Player (PMP). And I think that it just died.

To be fair, I think that I am an atypical user. It was on about 12 hours a day, every day (on average). And a lot of that time was spent in the car, where it was being subjected to a lot of vibration. I suspected that the built in hard drive wouldn't survive long under all of that abuse. There weren't many PMPs out at the time that were based on solid state disks (flash memory) -- almost every single one that had a reasonable memory capacity was based on a hard disk.

In general, this hasn't been a great year for electronics in our house, with two of our computers (and a bunch of other stuff) biting the dust this year already. But with consumer electronics having such short design cycles and the quality of the electronics out there generally being very poor across the board, we're probably going to have plenty of years like this...

Unfortunately, that means that the long and arduous process of searching for a new PMP is going to start up again. I know that I bored the hell out of a bunch of you guys last time, with all of my whining and complaining how each device on the market didn't satisfy my specifications.


Currently in the lead is the Creative Zen [creative.com]. More later.

Picture of Creative Zen via giik's Flickr photostream [flickr.com].

IOUSA and Autocross

• Tonight, you can see showings of the documentary I.O.U.S.A. [agorafinancial.com] at locations all over the country. Here's a description of the movie:

  "I.O.U.S.A. boldly examines the rapidly growing national debt and its consequences for the United States and its citizens..."
  
  "The ultimate power of I.O.U.S.A. is that the film moves beyond doomsday rhetoric to proffer potential financial scenarios and propose solutions about how we can recreate a fiscally sound nation for future generations."



• Heimlich took some incredible shots at an autocross event last weekend. Here are a selection:
  
  
  
  More pictures on Flickr [flickr.com].

Double Cross

One of the books that I have read recently is James Patterson's Double Cross [amazon.com]. I had previously read Cross, which is another book in this series of novels. The main character is a brilliant detective, who works or consults for the FBI in solving high-profile homicide cases.

I had previously thought that this author did a great job of making Cross a suspenseful book, but the characters were two-dimensional and lacking in personality and development.

As far as the plot goes, it is very suspenseful. Actually, the premise of the story is great, and sets up all kinds of interesting events. Patterson does a great job of building up intrigue and keeping the reader hooked into the story.

The downfall of the book is the ending. The ending is very rushed, and is a bit of a let down. He spends 300 or so pages building up all of this suspense, which is then resolved in about 10 pages. Not the best denouement.

Since these two were both letdowns (albeit in different ways), I probably won't be reading any other books in this series.

Falling US Demand for Oil

Bloomberg.com: U.S. Retail Gasoline Falls to $3.85 a Gallon. From the article:

"Gasoline prices retreated along with inventories, which have fallen 3.6 percent since July 18 to 209.2 million barrels, the Energy Department said August 6."

"U.S. gasoline demand fell a 15th consecutive week, as motorists cope with high fuel prices by driving less..."

Congratulations, America. You have done it -- you've managed to drive down prices by driving less. Now that the prices have reached a more reasonable level, you may resume wasting gas again.


On a related note, there are more and more articles being written now about the demographic inversion of American cities [poligazette.com] -- the more affluent parts of society used to move as far away from cities as possible, but in some cities, the general trend is for them to move back in (gentrification). Is this a real movement, or are we just setting ourselves up for another housing boom/bust cycle?

And on another related note, prices for new and used SUVs have been decimated, because no one wants to buy them [nytimes.com].

Image of traffic from respres' Flickr photostream [flickr.com].

NBC and the Olympics

• I haven't been watching the Olympics coverage on TV. None of it. I appear to be the only person who is still bitter and angry about how horrible the coverage of the last Olympics was... You know, how many commercials they showed, how they would string you along, telling you that a particular event was going to be televised next, only to show an hour of crap before getting to the event that everyone wants to watch. I'm sick of it. I would rather not watch any of it, and just follow the results in the news.
  
  Here's someone who agrees with me: NBC has ruined the Olympics [russellbeattie.com]. From the post:

  "While trying to watch coverage tonight with my six year old son before his bedtime, we were bombarded with commercials EVERY 5 MINUTES. I timed it on my watch..."
  
  "NBC focuses on the same handful of athletes over and over again despite the 400+ in Beijing from the US alone. Yes, it's great Phelps is awesome. We fucking get it, now shut the fuck up about it already. And the general ignorance of the commentators about other countries, the lack of any coverage of those countries, combined with the mindless US-only coverage is insane."

  NBC can take their Olympics coverage and shove it right up their asses.


• The Big Picture has some incredible pictures during the fencing competition [boston.com] at the Olympics. I used to fence sabre in college, so these pictures are especially interesting to me because they remind me of a forgotten era of my life.

Mogo Presenter Mouse

I recently got to use someone's Mogo Presenter Mouse [newtonperipherals.com]:


Now I want one. It's a wireless mouse that stores (and recharges) in a laptop's PC card slot. It has a small kickstand that allows it to sit surprisingly comfortably in the hand when used as a mouse.

They have a two-button version and a scroll-mouse version. The scroll-mouse version (the X54) is designed to be used as a presentation tool (allows you to navigate through a presentation), and it even features an integrated laser pointer.

Spice Labeling

If you look for spices in our cupboards, this is what you will see:


We don't have one of those new-fangled spice racks, and I prefer to have them hidden away anyway. But the problem is that you can't really read the labeling on the sides of the containers. For one thing, all of the containers would have to be turned in the right direction. And for another thing, each container blocks the view of the label on the next container.

Heimlich finally got fed up with having to lift up each and every container (thus performing a linear O(n) search) to find the spice that she wanted, and she wrote the name of the spice on the lid with a magic marker. It is so much faster to find the one that we want now (I suppose that it is still O(n), but with a smaller constant?).

Why don't they label the lids from the factory? We can't be the only people having this problem.

Maybe this post should have been labeled, "Kitchens of the anally-retentive"...

Whole Grain White Bread

I'm always trying to tweak my diet to be a little healthier. The latest part of my diet that is under attack is the bread. I eat a massive amount of carbs, most of which consists of bread (but there is also a lot of rice in my diet). I probably eat around 1.5 loaves of bread per week.

Years ago, all of the bread that I ate was white bread. I grew up eating white bread, so it was really difficult to switch to anything whole grain. A few years ago, I switched to alternating between eating loaves of white and whole grain wheat. Now I'm trying to switch entirely to whole grain breads.

A friend recently told me about a new product out on the market: whole grain white bread [usatoday.com]. The idea is to have the nutrition of a whole grain bread, with the texture and taste of a white bread.

If you go out and try to buy this type of bread, you have to look out [cbsnews.com], because many companies try to fool you into thinking that a loaf is whole grain when only a small percentage of the ingredients are whole grain.

We are trying out a local brand right now (as many of the competitors, such as Wonder, haven't made them available in our area yet). So far, the loaves seem like they are a step in the right direction, but maybe they're not quite there yet. From the texture, you can still tell that it is a whole grain bread, but at least the taste isn't so harsh.

Fuelly

Matt Haughey [wholelottanothing.org] and Paul Bausch [onfocus.com] have started up Fuelly [fuelly.com], which is a website that allows you to share and track your car's fuel mileage, among other things.

They just opened their doors to the public last week, and apparently, it has started to take off.

I actually have been tracking the fuel consumption in my daily driver (and using Matlab to plot the statistics), so I can see why people would want to use this kind of service. If you are looking for a new vehicle, you can get access to a database of real-world fuel consumption by owners of that vehicle (albeit the data may be skewed, because Fuelly users will probably be more fuel efficient than average).

The reason that I have started to track my fuel mileage is because there are several things that I would like to measure (being a scientist), such as:

• Is there a noticeable impact on fuel economy when I change my engine air filter?
• Does my car do better with certain brands of gas than others (as I suspect that it does)?
• There is certainly a temperature-related effect on fuel economy, as lower ambient temperatures absolutely cause lower fuel efficiency numbers. But what is the relationship? Linear? Asymptotic?

In tracking my own data, I notice that the measurement of gallons of fuel is the largest source of uncertainty. The underlying assumption in these measurements is that if you fill your tank to the top every time you refuel, you will know how much gas you consumed in the miles that you have driven since your last fill up.

However, the gas pumps don't always fill your gas tank up to the same level. And if you "top off" your tank, you totally will throw the measurement off. My data once (erroneously) showed that I achieved 45mpg over one tank in my non-hybrid car (which is unrealistically high), because the gas station I went to didn't fully fill up my gas tank. And then on the next stop, where my gas tank did actually get filled to the top, my fuel economy dropped precipitously. Maybe there needs to be a way in Fuelly to add an asterisk to data that is questionable.

Image of Fuelly stats from mathowie's Flickr photostream [flickr.com].

Secret Agent Driving Experience

My sister sent me a link to a great gift idea for all of those car nuts: Secret Agent Driving Experience [excitations.com].


From the description of the driving school:

• "...grab hold of the wheel and test your limits in the same training programs used by professional special forces, SWAT teams and protection agencies and learn to nudge your adversary into a spin at high speed without losing control of your own vehicle!"


• "Learn to thwart vehicle assaults, break through barricades, do a reverse 180, and outrun the bad guys at 100 mph"

That looks like a ton of fun! This reminds me of those crazy police chase videos where the police try to use the fish tail maneuver [google.com] to spin out a fugitive's car. This is the kind of driving school that I dream about.

Picture of drifting car from jepoycamboy's Flickr photostream [flickr.com].

Another Linkdump

• 10 Most Amazing Ghost Towns [oddee.com] with some incredible pictures.


• Scientists have managed to take a picture of something using quantum entanglement (as opposed to pointing a camera directly at the subject). From the article:

  "The premise of this process, based on quantum mechanics theory, is that one image can be built by using a digital camera to collect light — photons — from a light source, using a light meter to collect photons bouncing off an object and then pairing them to develop a black and white silhouette of the object."
  
  "...The technique could allow [US Air Force satellites] to penetrate clouds or the smoke that follows airstrikes."



• What the hell is a reverse mortgage? I have heard two people in the last month use that term like its meaning was common knowledge. I found this HUD page which explains it:

  "A reverse mortgage is a special type of home loan that lets a homeowner [, typically a senior,] convert a portion of the equity in his or her home into cash... But unlike a traditional home equity loan or second mortgage, no repayment is required until the borrower(s) no longer use the home as their principal residence."
  
  "The reverse mortgage is different [from a home equity loan] in that it pays you, and is available regardless of your current income. The amount you can borrow depends on your age, the current interest rate, and the appraised value of your home or FHA's mortgage limits for your area, whichever is less."

  Initially, the idea of a reverse mortgage sounded like a terrible idea. But when explained in this manner, it actually makes sense for many retired people.

The Web as your Servant

Recently, I saw a story on USA Today called Next Big Thing: The Web as your Servant [usatoday.com]. The article speculates on a coming wave of gadgets, websites and interconnectivity that will change the way we do things and find entertainment.

"One example... might be a service we'll call Travel Butler, or TB for short... Let's say it's 4 p.m. TB knows you have a flight scheduled for 6 p.m... [and] that you're at a meeting downtown... TB might see that accidents have backed up traffic for miles. It sends you a message, which finds you on your BlackBerry e-mail, saying that to make your flight, you'd have to leave now. TB also shows you an Orbitz listing of later flights."

"You decide to go on a later flight, so you click on the one you want. TB rebooks you, sends an e-mail to your spouse and contacts the car service in your destination city to change the time to pick you up."

This is all well and good, except that I wonder whether I'll ever see this kind of convenience (that actually works properly) in my lifetime.

I mean, right now, we're in a world where it takes longer to connect a Wifi device to a wireless access point (with WEP or WPA security enabled) than it does for the average hacker to figure out what the security key is. We have a bunch of Wifi devices around our house, and every time we get a new one (like our new Vista laptop), it is a huge ordeal to figure out what hoops we have to jump through to actually get it to work.

I'm totally pessimistic on any kind of interconnectivity, when every electronics company has managed to botch the implementation of the most basic type.

Microsoft Office 2007 Packaging

Congratulations to Microsoft for designing what is quite possibly the most frustrating packaging to open. Ever.


There are no instructions on the outside of the box telling you how to open it. And it is in no way obvious where it even opens.

See the tab outlined in blue? When you see a tab, you naturally think that you should push it (you know, maybe it'll release a catch that will allow the package to be opened). Except that it doesn't. Those tabs have a lip on them, meaning that as you push harder and harder on them, it makes the package harder and harder to open (which also isn't going to be obvious to any user).


It turns out that the key is to slice a sticker in two different places, and then pull the red tab that is sticking out (outlined in green) to open it up. And if you do that in the wrong order, the red tab will just rip right off (as I found out with the first one I tried to open).


This is the first package that I have ever needed to consult a webpage [flickr.com] in order to figure out how to open. I was on the verge of intentionally breaking the plastic (with a 5lb sledgehammer) when I stumbled on those pictures.