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2010-02B

Newstips Electronic Editorial Bulletin             Issue # 2010-02b

        Last news before Chinese New Year & Valentine's Day

Antec power push throttling higher
  Welcome Antec, a long-time leader in cases, power supply units,
  cooling fans & other gear for the gang of DIY PC builders. You
  may see a lot of new competitors in the PSU arena, but Antec
  isn't standing still when it comes to power supplies. Ask
  Veronica to help you check out their new designs that emphasize
  even less power waste, even less heat production, even better
  reliability & even quieter operation. If your build projects get
  coverage, ask how Antec products can help you add bragging
  rights. Contact: Veronica Feldmeier, Antec Inc. (Fremont, CA)
  510-770-2150 vfeldmeier@antec.com http://antec.com

How Franklin bill reader works
  Inside the small bar-of-soap-size package of a Franklin Bill
  Reader ($300), an embedded camera grabs a snapshot of the front
  or back of US currency, open or folded, in any orientation.
  Pattern recognition algorithms (USB-updatable) compare key
  "fingerprint" points in the image to like areas in known currency
  ($1-$100 denominations), find a match & announce its value,
  either aloud or through a headphone jack. Vision impaired users
  are, of course, the intended focus for this device, but we don't
  know anybody who doesn't marvel at it. Review units are
  available; ask Aline. Contact: Aline Boutin, Franklin Electronic
  Publishers (Burlington, NJ) 609-386-2500x4434
  aline_boutin@franklin.com http://franklin.com

Fuel cell dwells inside S80 Select BACtrack
  Perhaps the most professional-caliber blood alcohol screening
  device in the line, the BACtrack S80 Select BACtrack breathalyzer
  (street $155-$199) uses an advanced Xtend electrochemical fuel
  cell sensor for enhanced accuracy. Users can adjust the blow
  time, required blow pressure, displayed measurement units & set
  an audible beep threshold. (Blow pressure options mean that even
  people with diminished lung capacity can test). Your beat may not
  cover those who frolic on St. Patrick's Day, but consider the
  concerns of places that serve them, park their cars or enforce
  the laws. Contact: Keith Nothacker, KHN SOLUTIONS (San Francisco
  CA) 415-693-9756x113 mailto:keith.nothacker@bactrack.com
  http://bactrack.com

Tiffen's top tipsy fighter: Merlin
  We were thinking about St. Patrick's Day & how a Steadicam Merlin
  can keep people shooting straight even when they're not
  necessarily able to keep walking straight when we learned that
  Merlin has become one of Tiffen's best-selling retail products.
  It's hitting a broad mix of pro, semipro & avocational users of
  both video cameras & DSLRs (not just those with video modes
  either). Ask Hilary for info, explanations & maybe a loaner for
  your St. Paddy segments or items. Contact: Hilary Araujo, Tiffen
  Company (Hauppauge, NY) 631-609-3216 haraujo@tiffen.com
  http:/.tiffen.com

Special Report: Getting geeky with pinholes
  We learned a trick we want to share, but be prepared because this
  is on the full metal geeky side of life. This is a router trick
  that lets you come from an "outside" LAN (static IP addresses on
  the "real" Internet) to access a WiFi printer on an "inside" LAN
  (behind the network address translation of a router). Let's set
  the stage. When we upgraded to "Business Class" cable modem
  service, we bought a tier of 5 static IP addresses (which cost a
  lot more than just 1 & a lot less than 13, the next steps up &
  down). For now, 2 of those 5 are spares (anticipating more
  Web-facing servers), 1 goes to our production desktop, 1 goes to
  our "Project Yippie" server & 1 goes to our router. Behind the
  router, our inside LAN has wired & WiFi connections to several
  PCs & handsets, a femtocell, several printers & occasional
  notebooks. Part of the router's job is to protect many of those
  inside assets from access by the Web at large - imagine the
  denial of service & other hassles if some punk hacker decides to
  task your printers with churning out a few thousand pages of
  porn. We contacted both online & phone support for the vendor of
  our router as well as people at several of the leading brands to
  ask how we could configure everything to do what we want to
  accomplish. We want to keep static addresses where we need them
  while keeping most of our connections (via router) from using or
  needing more static IP addresses - so far the easy part - yet
  still let our static-IP desktop print to an "inside" LAN WiFi
  printer. The answer is a pinhole, in this case meaning specific
  permission to allow specific ports from a specific IP address
  (our desktop) to communicate with a specific device at a specific
  internal LAN IP address. (Our TrendNet router lets us assign a
  specific IP address from its inside pool to any specific device
  based on its MAC address). The exact methods will vary from
  router to router & the exact ports will vary from printer to
  printer (especially one with scanner, fax & other services like
  our Lexmark models), but this basic approach can accomplish what
  support wonks on the other side of the planet kept telling us is
  impossible.

Project Yippie: The server-build
  The hardware part of our system build was fast & uncomplicated,
  giving us some elbow room for a few fillips. With essentially
  everything we needed other than drives already part of our
  Clarkdale system board (officially, an Intel Core-i5-661, socket
  1156 processor on an Intel DH55TC micro-ATX Media Series
  motherboard), we didn't think we'd have to populate a single slot
  until we noticed that this motherboard doesn't include the Intel
  Matrix Storage Manager, so we'd have to find our own way to array
  the drives. Our trio of nicely power-efficient 3.5" Hitachi
  Deskstar 500GB drives (2 to be mirrored as Main, 1 for Backup -
  nightly) all fit a single drive cage in the noise-reducing Antec
  Mini P180 microATX case. In our initial build, we're leaving the
  Crucial 2GB DDR3 modules in place (for 8GB total that we can
  later increase to 12GB or 16GB by swapping in a pair or two of
  4GB modules) & running without an optical drive (since we already
  used our desktop to download the software we need to install into
  a Seagate Free Agent Go portable drive). We added a Thermaltake
  noise-reducing silicon fan gasket & stuck their noise-reducing
  foam inside the left side panel. We used an ATX
  vibration-reducing Vizo gel gasket when mounting the Antec True
  Power New TP-650 power supply; modular cabling means we only have
  to plug in cables we need to help keep open airflow paths
  uncluttered; we chose to over-spec the power supply to assure
  that it would stay cool, meaning its temperature-responsive 120mm
  fan will always run at its slowest, quietest setting. The case
  offers 2 front USB ports & one front eSATA port & we added a rear
  chassis bracket with 2 additional USB connectors for a total of
  10 available (which we don't think we'll need, but there's yet
  another available 2-port connector on the motherboard). The whole
  hardware build was only slightly more complicated than one of our
  little Atom box builds, which we can now do on the kitchen table
  between drinks & dinner.

Special Report Bonus Review: PDFzilla
  These days, between features embedded in applications or
  utilities & all the e-mail attachments that arrive, we all have
  growing collections of PDF files, but what if you need those
  pages in some other format? We'll confess to being suspicious of
  the claims for PDFzilla, but having tried it, we're very
  impressed. You start by adding one or more PDF files you want to
  convert; it lets you convert one at a time, a folder at a time or
  in huge batches (in our test run, conversions ran at less than 1
  second per file); it also lets you limit the conversion to a
  single page or a limited page range. There are options specific
  to some output format: none for DOC, RTF or HTML; page breaks for
  TXT; DPI for graphics (JPEG, BMP, GIF, PNG or TIF) & for Flash,
  it offers fps, play button & Flash 6 compression options. Some of
  the conversions are imperfect; taking a PDF that showed only a
  graphic, we've seen areas that are transparent in original art &
  appear correctly in PDF files come out on black backgrounds in
  their conversions to any graphical format & GIF files display no
  colors while TIF files do; the DOC & HTML page was unrecognizable
  but the Flash file was perfect. Many runs with mixes of type &
  simple images came out perfectly, others with more complex
  graphics had these issues & several files reported password
  protection (which we can't absolutely confirm or deny as
  accurate). Bottom line: PDFzilla is a promising utility for
  "jail-breaking" PDF pages into other useful formats that has some
  sandpapering left to do, but even so, is very useful indeed for
  several kinds of need.

Special Report Bonus Review 2: SpectraSan 24
  We're not well-enough educated in disinfectant sciences to know
  where to begin looking for evidence of whether they work or not,
  but we know enough about gizmos & gear to figure out the
  trade-offs of spraying to prevent germs. When we got pitched to
  review an antibacterial, antiviral & antifungal (plus
  deodorizing) spray called SpectraSan 24 we were pretty clear that
  we'd take a look at it mostly to learn what might make it a less
  than optimal choice in a tech-laden workplace. The lit claims
  it's effective against H1N1, HIV-1, E Coli, Staph Simplex 1,
  Salmonella, Polio & more, based on a hint of silver & a roughly
  5% citric acid active content in the spray, also claiming a
  residual effectiveness up to 24 hours. They recommend spraying
  any hard, non-porous surface from toilets to kennels to counters
  to TV remotes & computers (especially in shared areas). We
  sprayed it on some phones & things; it is not quick-drying; the
  instructions say to thoroughly wet an area, let that stand for 30
  seconds to 10 minutes (the time depends on what organism you're
  trying to kill, as if we'd know) then wipe it dry. We can
  certainly see that practice of daily wetting, waiting & drying as
  helping increase employment & helping them sell more products,
  but we find the regimen way too intense & somewhat too tedious
  for a normal workplace. Bottom line: Even if SpectraSan 24 is
  completely effective in killing every dangerous germ in the
  workplace, it's unlikely to fit well into the work habits of
  those without some overriding special need for concern.

Special Report Bonus Review 3: Cooler Master Silent Pro M 700
  Our "Yippie" server doesn't draw much power (about 250 Watts at
  peak, less than half that most of the time) so why would we
  consider an over-capacity power supply? One reason is that
  installing a new power supply in an existing system can be
  tedious, so even if our configuration grows, this will handle it.
  One reason is heat; if we can run a power supply at less than 30%
  of its design load, power efficiency may drop a smidge but it
  will produce less heat & handle it handily. Less heat also means
  less noise because its fan can run at its slowest, quietest
  speed. We asked Cooler Master to send their Silent Pro M 700 for
  review & had another nice surprise on the quiet front: it's the
  first power supply we've seen that comes with silicon rubber pads
  to absorb vibration. It uses flat modular cables that are easy to
  tuck out of the way of air flow; also, since you only populate
  those you need, you don't have to find a place to stuff the
  spares. The big 135mm fan is well balanced & seems to have been
  chosen for low fan noise. We had some concerns about whether it
  could keep a system alive during the switch-over to backup power
  during an outage, but this supply maintains a hold-up time of
  17msec (UPS switchover time is on the order of 4msec). It's very
  tolerant of vagaries on the power lines (not uncommon here in the
  Blizzard Belt), adapting itself to work with 90-240VAC at
  47-63Hz. We were delighted in our initial run test to find that
  even without its rubbery pads, it was inaudible. Bottom line: the
  Cooler Master Silent Pro M 700 seems to do what it takes to
  assure that once you install it, you never have to think about it
  again.

Special Report Bonus Review 4: Thermaltake TMG i3 CPU cooler
  When we fired up our Project Yippie system for an acoustic noise
  test, the loudest thing about it was the CPU cooler fan (the
  stock fan with the Intel kit). We set our sights on Google to
  find some quieter Socket 1156 alternatives. The short list came
  down to two (both identically priced at $12.99 at our local Micro
  Center & both featuring simple Intel-standard pushpin mounting):
  a Scythe Arctic Cooling Alpine 11 GT (28.6CFM, PWM 500-2000rpm
  fan) & a Thermaltake TMG i3 (35.1CFM, PWM 300-2500rpm fan). Our
  choice of the Thermaltake was based in part on our reading
  (spring & ring vibration dampening in the fan mount & an "enter
  bearing" with a better seal & more available lubricant than
  standard sleeve bearings) & in part on seeing it first; both of
  these products gains bragging rights for both heat dissipation &
  silence versus the stock solution. We like the wider fan speed
  range of the Thermaltake because it means that as long as we keep
  the server running coolly, it can run more quietly. The air flow
  is down through the fan, then out in 4 sideways directions across
  the fins, meaning it can also help cool the memory & motherboard
  chips. Bottom line: with the Thermaltake TMG i3 CPU cooler in
  place, it is now very difficult to tell by ear whether our
  Project Yippie server is on or off.

Special Report Bonus Review 5: A-L Expressionist Classic
  The Altec Lansing Expressionist Classic speakers (second of the
  three reviews we're doing on their products) are nice to look at
  with smoke-grey plastic plates a bit over 5" square on the
  business side of cylindrical housings about the size of a pound
  can of coffee. The built-in amplifier can drive some big-league
  volume out of these speakers, which Altec Lansing positions for
  use with notebooks or media players (standard analog small stereo
  connection plus a wall wart for power, with a power switch &
  volume +/- controls on the right channel). The sound profile adds
  a lot of low-midrange emphasis. These are not speakers for audio
  purists (the tonality can be reminiscent of listening through a
  few feet of 5" ventilation ducts), but we can see them working
  out fine for many office desktops or dorm rooms. Bottom line:
  Altec Lansing Expressionist Classic speakers do a good job of
  sound field imaging, including a very good phantom center
  channel, delivering sound energy that will please many younger
  ears while looking handsome in the process.

Is one paragraph too much?
  We have a serious question to ask you about this Bulletin. Back
  in 1982, we set a standard of just one paragraph for any one item
  (based on the old AP Radio Headline Wire, plus a little elbow
  room). We still keep things to just one paragraph, including some
  that we admit to being monstrously long. Daniel Dern wrote to
  suggest that we break long items into multiple paragraphs; we'll
  have to rewrite our VBA code to handle that, so it won't be
  instant. Our question: should we? Would you rather see multiple
  paragraphs short paragraphs, the long ones we have now, or a
  compromise in content to stay with a single paragraph but keep it
  shorter? We do this weekly work for you, so we want what we do to
  work for you. Please drop a note to Marty & let him know what you
  prefer. Contact: Martin Winston, Newstips (Novelty, OH)
  440-338-8400; marty@Newstips.com http://Newstips.com

                               # # #

Newstips Bulletin [Novelty, OH] +1.440.338.8400 http://Newstips.com

(c) Copyright 2007 Martin Winston and TwandaCorp - all rights reserved.

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