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Newstips Electronic Editorial Bulletin Issue # 2010-02a
With weather this nasty, a short month is good news
Stop Word from choosing your words
From Marty's perspective, having hands-on with The Unabridged
Merriam-Webster's Third International Dictionary Franklin
handheld ($300) means an end to the more restrictive dictionary
in Word bullying him around. It doesn't happen every issue, but
several times each month, a word that seems like the word gets
flagged by the Word speller as "not found"; a quick check of the
Franklin Unabridged validates the choice & word by word, Word
gets a needed addition to the list it recognizes. Since you're
also in the business of finding the right word, regardless of
what Word can find, you'll find getting your own hands onto this
cool tool a delight; ask Aline. Contact: Aline Boutin, Franklin
Electronic Publishers (Burlington, NJ) 609-386-2500x4434
aline_boutin@franklin.com http://franklin.com
BACtrack S70 adds speed, accuracy
The BACtrack S70 Select model breathalyzer (street $100) can
display a blood alcohol content reading within 3 seconds, lets
you adjust the units being displayed, configure the blow time &
offers the option of a beep if the results are over any selected
threshold. A longer blow time means air has to come from deeper
in the lungs, enhancing accuracy. Semiconductor sensor technology
helps keep its price reasonable; next issue, we'll look at
another technology. Connect with Keith to pick the model you want
to get look at for your pre-St. Patrick's Day coverage. Contact:
Keith Nothacker, KHN SOLUTIONS (San Francisco CA)
415-693-9756x113 mailto:keith.nothacker@khnsolutions.com
http://bactrack.com
Tiffen goes "puppy dog" with Dfx 2
In sales lore, a "puppy dog" sale is one where the pet store
sends the family home with a puppy, promising a full refund if
they decide not to keep it; those puppies never come back. Now
Tiffen is offering a 14-day free trial of Dfx version-2 software
(standalone for Windows & Mac, plug-in for Photoshop or After
Effects or Aperture or Final Cut Pro or Avid AVX). Version 2 adds
layering, masking, more than a thousand new filters & special
effects plus new controls for new flexibility. Like a new puppy,
it's addictive & fun; ask Hilary to get your own paws on one.
Contact: Hilary Araujo, Tiffen Company (Hauppauge, NY)
631-609-3216 haraujo@tiffen.com http:/.tiffen.com
Special Report: Still a niche, no eReader itch
Books didn't come to look like books by accident. After parchment
scrolls & before movable type, calligraphers & scribes would
create large bound volumes of flat sheets. The Gutenberg presses
were first used primarily to publish the Bible; that's less
because he was profoundly faithful than because the Church became
his greatest client & sponsor. There were obvious economies to
the idea of printing on both sides of the sheet, which led to the
left/right 2-sided reading experience of books today. It is, as
they say, a field-proven, time-proven user interface for reading.
Certainly there have been content & technology advances since
Gutenberg: tables of contents, indices, the incorporation of
illustrations & photography, edge coding (from the thumb indices
of dictionaries to the edge color coding of authoritative or
reference volumes). So with centuries of evolution into a
universally accepted format for books, why does the entire
spectrum of eReader products look more like teletype or
teleprompter pages than books? When you read a book, your eyes
often skim down less involving passages to land on pithier
content across the gutter; that's a rare option with an eReader
today. How often do you quickly flip through half an inch to an
inch of pages to zone in on a part that you're looking for?
Neither that kind of action nor that kind of position cue is
available on today's eReader products. From a user interface
perspective, even if it were free, an eReader is a jarringly
terrible compromise in familiar reading techniques for anybody
who's ever been familiar with the ink-on-paper version of books.
Should we believe in the reality in the much-hyped rush to buy
eReader products or is it one of the slowest, mildest, laziest
stampedes ever? The idea of your kid being able to fit the
20-pound, cubic foot of book bag contents into something the size
of a DVD case is wonderful. Subscribing to monthly magazines (if
not daily newspapers - news doesn't fit smaller galleys quite so
well - plus early adoption numbers are more likely to favor
national media when it comes to luring advertising support) is
also intriguing, especially since electronic versions are likely
to cost less for both subscribers & publishers. There's no need
for live content, so there's no need for WiFi or cellular
connectivity; a simple occasional link to a computer (perhaps
through a charging dock, as with today's smart phones) can
provide an easy way to update content, pass notes or clip
citations or perform other simple information exchanges. It's
also possible that commitments to paid content (book purchases,
magazine subscription purchases, etc.) could earn discounts on
the eReader hardware. There's nothing in what we describe here
that's beyond today's technology, though it does seem to be
beyond the vision, imagination & wisdom of the pioneers in this
category. It's up to them to make us want to read on their
hardware. We think that the obvious answer is to emulate books;
so far, they're not & we believe that's why this is still a
limited-volume niche category.
Project Yippie: How big, how small a server
There's nothing complex about our Web sites. There's little more
than text & static JPEG graphics, plus whatever little active
things Fusion uses to animate its menus. We don't get a lot of
traffic. Our aggregate e-mail count is seldom more than a
thousand a day (give or take). We initially thought in terms of
building a server based on the Intel Atom in a mini-ITX case, but
as we investigated the software side, it quickly became apparent
that we'd want to be in a 64-bit operating environment. Daniel
Snyder at Intel first brought that to our attention & suggested
that it might be an interesting deployment for the microATX Intel
"Clarkdale" CPU & board we recently reviewed. That was a
provocative idea, given the integrated graphics on that chip
(alongside a Core-i5 dual-core, 4-thread CPU); it's apparently
not nuts, since Fujitsu & IBM both announced small, low-cost
servers based on Clarkdale. (We should note that a Clarkdale is
an even better match for a small media server or set-top box with
its HDMI port & high-definition audio). We won't need to add
anything but memory, an optical drive & 3 hard drives (mirroring
2 in a RAID1 array as our main drive & making the third a backup
drive). We forecast total peak power consumption (as drives start
up & boot-time memory writes happen) at less than 250 Watts,
about half that in normal operation. Even with a smaller case, we
should be able to switch our fans to their slowest, quietest
setting. We can over-spec the power supply to help that run
cooler, too. A UPS in the $100-200 price range should be able to
give us 30-60 minutes of runtime through one of our Blizzard Belt
blackouts. We anticipate that 8GB of RAM will be enough (our
biggest Web site, including unpublished content, is less than
1.5GB) to keep some snap in its stride, but if not, we have the
option of going from 2GB to 4GB DDR3 modules & bumping that to
12GB or 16GB. The optical drive can be a CD/DVD reader (only),
mostly for installing software; USB or eSATA hard drives offer an
easier way to get files out of the system, should that need
arise; in-house Gigabit Ethernet should handle a lot of the rest
of it, with or without ftp. While we could have played this
faster & looser with a really small mini-ITX + microATX dual-fit
case (which would have been great for one of those small media
server or set-top box applications), that wouldn't let us fit the
3 hard drives we wanted in this configuration; we got a Mini P180
microATX mini-tower case from Antec; we may have been able to
find something that takes a little less space, but this one both
looks good & pays attention to keeping things as quiet as
possible. We think this is the right scale of hardware for
bringing a very small business scale Web & mail server in-house.
We'll soon know for sure.
Special Report Bonus Review: Belkin lighted USB hub
There are two things we tend to hate about USB hubs: we never
have enough of them and very often, those we do have can't fully
power all of their ports. We asked to review the Belkin Lighted
7-Port USB2 Hub because it looked cute & seemed promising,
although the Web site spec said nothing about the amount of power
its AC adapter could deliver. It is cute - small & flat, with a
size somewhere between a harmonica & a 5-pack of Swisher Sweets
cigars. We were a little surprised, for no apparent reason, when
we found the two cathedral-shape end panels light up in blue, not
white (probably because of the LED lighting reviews we're doing).
The AC adapter is rated to deliver 4 Amps, even more than the
3.5Amps that 7 ports need when running at the full 500mA USB
spec. The adapter is necessarily too chunky to let a neighbor
live one socket over in a tightly packed strip, but it has a long
enough cord to its coax power connector to allow some flexibility
in finding an outlet for it. Bottom line: the Belkin Lighted USB2
7-Port Hub is small, efficiently laid out, does everything it's
supposed to & looks cool.
Special Report Bonus Review 2: Antec TP-650 PSU
As we approached Project Yippie, we wanted to do everything we
could to make it as noiseless as we could, which got us thinking
about power supplies. We reasoned that a PSU designed for a lot
more power than we need to draw wouldn't be likely to heat up
under so lazy a load, which means one with a thermally responsive
fan would be very unlikely to ever run that fan at anything but
its slowest, quietest speed. On advice from Antec, we got in
their True Power New (series) TP-650, able to routinely deliver
about 5 times more juice than we need. Instead of a small rear
panel fan, this one has a big 120mm top fan with PWM (pulse width
modulation) speed control, so even its loudest would be quieter
than most. The need-always cables are hard wired; modular
connectors & cables keep it ready to add more if circumstances
should ever require them. In our initial test, even as close as
5-6", the fan was entirely inaudible. In a higher horsepower
environment, the open grate back & big fan offer more than enough
airflow to keep the PSU from turning into an oven while the
additionally kitted cables offer everything you need to address
multiple graphics cards (Project Yippie has no graphics card) & a
full stack of drives. The hold-up time (how long it can ignore a
power outage) is 12ms or so at full load, which is a little less
than other recent PSU products but more than triple the time that
our UPS needs to kick in if power does fail. Bottom line: the
sweet Antec True Power New TP-650 delivers more than just the
convenience we were looking for, it runs silent or very close to
it, runs cool & runs reliably.
Special Report Bonus Review 3: Hitachi Deskstar 3.5" drives
In working out the trade-offs of power consumption versus
performance for our Project Yippie story, we quickly decided to
favor power efficiency, so we asked Hitachi to let us have a look
at their Deskstar P7K500 3.5" SATA2 hard drives. They use less
than 5 Watts each at idle (about 30W when starting up); in our
2+1 configuration, the RAID1 mirrored Main pair stays on while
the third Backup drive is only called on once per night. (The
Hitachi Feature Tool lets us tweak several of the drive's
settings). While these drives offer stream-optimized features,
our application isn't using those; we are however taking
advantage of the coincident presence of some audible noise
reduction features. The lower power consumption also helps reduce
noise in its own by creating less heat, letting
temperature-sensitive system fans run at their lowest, least
noisy settings. This is not a drive model to choose when extreme
speed is your greatest need, but it's an excellent match to our
priorities for low noise & low power consumption (to help extend
runtime on backup power). Bottom line: Hitachi Deskstar P7K500
3.5" SATA2 hard drives offer wonderful power efficiency &
conscientious noise control in an economically priced,
high-reliability product.
Special Report Bonus Review 4: Altec Lansing BXR-1220
Years ago, when we wrote about "PC Theater", we described our
desktop system digitally feeding an external surround receiver
that drives small, desktop-scale speakers, but not everybody
wants to be that immersed or do all that wiring. Now that we're
building more small systems, we wanted to find compact solutions
that don't sound compromised. We turned to Altec Lansing & asked
for three of their solutions; in this issue we're looking at the
BXR-1220. The two speaker cases are about the size of tomato soup
cans with the front edges lifted by small flat-bottom brackets;
the right-channel cylinder has an on/off knob on the back & a
volume control at the top. The speakers are attached to a cable
that terminates with both a standard analog stereo plug & a USB-A
plug (for power only). The audio coming out of these is
unexpectedly good; while there's no woofer to thump out the
lowest tones (it's rated 180Hz-20KHz), the 50mm full-range
drivers work well with these enclosures to deliver sound quality
much better than the speakers built into most notebooks or
monitors. Bottom line: the small, simple, substantial &
satisfying Altec Lansing BXR-1220 space-saving stereo speaker
system for notebooks or smaller desktop acreage presents us with
a nice combination of good sound quality & handsome cosmetics.
Special Report Bonus Review 5: Vizo Anti-Vibration Kits
In reading up on the Cooler Master Silent Pro M series ATX power
supplies, we thought it was cool that they used a rubbery "bra"
to fight vibration noise, which sent us on a little Google
search. We found an ATX-dimensioned Power Supply Accessory
Anti-Vibration Kit made by Taiwan-based Vizo Technology Corp. so
we dropped them an e-mail. They sent us a box full of goodies.
The power supply kit has a lightweight silica gel front frame
that goes between the PSU & the case plus some screws long enough
to make for a secure fit; yes it really does quiet down some of
that computer-is-on noise. They also sent kits for 80mm, 90mm &
120mm fans. Perhaps the most novel item in the collection is
their 2.5" Hard Drive Protector Anti-Vibration Kit for those
times you need to use a drive that isn't mounted (like when
upgrading to a new one). It surrounds the case on all sides,
leaving a connector gap at one end, an open top (in case you have
to read what's on the drive label, we'll guess) & air holes on
the bottom (to promote air flow for cooling. When on a drive the
whole thing is only half an inch tall, they're designed to stack
& they're a sweet way to protect naked drives when you tote or
store them. Bottom line: if you're tired of that dumb computer
hum driving your ears numb, these Vizo Anti-Vibration kit
products are an effective way to bring fans & power supplies a
lot closer to stealth mode.
Spotlight the local geeks
We want suggest something for you to consider for your coverage:
the neighborhood geek. Every neighborhood has one - a neighbor, a
neighbor's kid, a relative, a local school's computer club -
they're everywhere. Now think about all the non-geeks in those
same neighborhoods who would love to have simple things done that
would improve the speed, stability or safety of their computers,
but who are afraid to make adjustments let alone ever open the
case for anything. Some of the little fixes are easy: boost the
memory, vacuum the dust out or maybe swap the hard drive for a
newer/bigger one. With a little help from a local geek (plus some
gentle explaining from you), it's relatively inexpensive to get
their hands on the pieces & parts they need. Where a computer
store service desk might charge them the price of a pretty good
dinner for 2-4 people, most local geeks would do the work for a
plate of cookies or a six-pack. There's another bonus: this could
significantly improve a lot of geeks' social skills. Contact:
Martin Winston, Newstips (Novelty, OH) 440-338-8400;
marty@Newstips.com http://Newstips.com
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Newstips Bulletin [Novelty, OH] +1.440.338.8400 http://Newstips.com
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