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Newstips Electronic Editorial Bulletin Issue # 2009-09b
News that alas doesn't include health care for paychecks
Under her skin-tight WET suit: tech
Whatever side you take on the coming controversy over whether WET
($50 for Xbox 360 or Playstation 3, in stores 9/15, rated M) is
too violent, too sexy & too gory, there's a major tech angle to
the way the extremely acrobatic action & extreme camera angles
came together. The core of that part of the story is with
Artificial Mind & Movement (A2M) in Quebec, where they were able
to meld physics with athletics, a little wire-fighter suspension
of disbelief & a lovely retro-cinematic look & feel. Tracey can
plug you into A2M, or video snippets or the game itself. Contact:
Tracey Thompson, Bethesda Softworks (Rockville, MD) 301-354-4216
tthompson@bethsoft.com http://BethSoft.com
Intel at retail - a new "sleeper" CPU
It's almost counterintuitive: in many applications, a new Intel
Core-i5/750 processor ($200-ish) will deliver performance
comparable to the Core-i7/860 ($300-ish) or 870 ($600-ish). Those
beefier engines do make a big difference in heavily
compute-intensive environments, but for the things many power
users (even gamers) really do, the new Core-i5/750 does
respectably well on speed & very well indeed on heat & power
consumption. Even if you don't get geeky enough to want to get
into the details, it's still kind of interesting that we live in
a world where these are choices you can make off the shelf when
shopping at a local store. Feel free to ask Todd where there's a
store near you with Intel inside. Contact: Todd Garrigues, Intel
Americas Inc. (Santa Clara, CA) 301-497-8997
todd.c.garrigues@intel.com http://Intel.com
Photo fx 2 A/V tutorial online
Hit http://www.tiffen.com/photofx_homepage.html for an
audio/video online tutorial that showcases the flash, the glam,
the pizzazz, the finesse, the élan & the fun that new Photo fx
version 2 can do to snapshots in an iPhone or iPod Touch. Hilary
has offered to send review copies, get you info, run your own
photos through it & show you the results & more, all trying to
make it easier for you to cover; maybe a few minutes with the
tutorial can help that happen. Contact: Hilary Araujo, Tiffen
Company (Hauppauge, NY) 631-273-2500x1216 haraujo@tiffen.com
http:/.tiffen.com
Special Report: Ex-post - oh, fax, oh
Message delivery improvements have historically tended to involve
improvements in speed or in cost or both, from the
runner-messengers of ancient times to postal systems, telegrams,
phone calls, faxes, e-mail, instant messaging & so on. Do you
still have a way to send & receive faxes? We get very few faxes
that aren't uninvited sales pitches. The times we're asked to
send a fax almost always involve adding a signature to an
agreement. If you have a fax machine, does it share a voice line
or do you lay for a separate line for it? Like many products at
the end of their useful era, fax machines are increasingly not
replaced when they fail; we should not ignore that the recent
economic era favors casting away things that may have outlived
their usefulness. The fax machine is not yet a relic of some
primitive past; new models are still sold in the office stores &
fax features are still present in some of the newest
multifunction printers. You & we can think of a great many ways
to accomplish what a fax machine gets done using other resources
that we already have on hand; if that's so, why isn't the
category in the obits? The answer is people: we're more
accustomed than most of the world to finding effective ways to
communicate, so we keep scanned signatures on file that we can
electronically embed in a Word or PDF document & send as an
e-mail attachment. It hasn't yet become important that the others
catch up to us because, ironically, there's such an ebb in the
flow of faxes that they don't perceive any urgent need to learn
these new skill sets. Any office's constituency (clients,
customers, members, etc.) will govern when it abandons fax
machines altogether; the less sophisticated their circle of
correspondents, the longer fax machines will still be around. We
have no doubt that some marketer will find an opportunity in that
to use something in the cloud to virtualize fax service at little
or no cost to consumers; imagine, for example, if there were to
be a Google Fax service. It will take a vending-machine-simple
alternative to finally make those fax machines go away; without
that, they may yet be on those store shelves in another 10 or
more years.
Special Report Bonus Review: Honeywell Energy Smart Heater
We took them up on their offer to try the Honeywell Model HZ7200
Energy Smart Cool Touch Heater as we consider products that help
us gadgetize for winter. There really are some smarts in the
approach this little heater takes to warming the air around it.
An arc of LEDs around the control knob glows green to show the
current room temperature as close to 65, 70, 75 or 80 (degrees
Fahrenheit). You can set the control knob for your target
temperature in that range & the heater will automatically switch
to a lower heat output (ergo lower energy consumption) as it
approaches its target temperature. You can also set the control
for "frost watch" which will automatically turn it on if the
temperature drops below 55, or for "high" which just runs it at
full blast. The power on/off switch is separate, so once you find
a setting you like, you won't have to hunt for it again every
time you need the heater. The plastic housing won't burn your
fingers if you need to pick it up & move it; there's even a
molded-in carry handle & the power cord can wind around a spool
hidden in its base. The insides are pretty simple, with 4
concentric hexagons of coiled heating wire & a sizable fan in a
cowl. There's also a separately switched oscillation motor just
above the base to help create a more evenly dispersed bubble of
heat across a slightly larger volume. Honeywell also offers
online advice that suggests saving money by lowering the
thermostat for the house overall while using these small room
heaters for the places you actually spend time; your mileage may
vary. Bottom line: We like the Honeywell Model HZ7200 Energy
Smart Cool Touch Heater a lot for the intelligent way in which it
handles itself while keeping our living & working spaces
comfortable.
Special Report Bonus Review 2: ATH-A700 Art Monitor headphones
Imagine you're a young Superman at the moment you first discover
that you have x-ray vision; that's a feeling your ears may
experience the first time you listen to music through a pair of
Audio Technica ATH-A700 Art Monitor headphones. We're hearing
performance & production details we had never noticed before,
even through our expensive Sennheiser phones; the clarity is not
at the expense of the ability of these headphones to provide
exemplary audio transparency from extremely low to dangerously
high volumes, without coloration. That said, the very
transparency of these headphones let us easily perceive
coloration at the source (like the mikes used in some early jazz
recordings, the equalization in the audio boards of some of the
studio-produced albums & the room acoustics in recordings made
during live concerts). The headbands are also unique with curved
wings that accurately & comfortably position the ear cups exactly
where they need to be. The cloth-covered circumaural (surround)
pads greatly reduce the amount of ambient sound you hear when
wearing these (great for a listening room but lousy for jogging -
an application for which they're clearly unlikely anyway); they
also cause some warming of the ear, which may be more welcome in
cooler months than during the summer. These are big headphones
with cups that are more than 4" in diameter housing drivers that
are more than 2" in diameter. Their frequency response is rated
5Hz-35 KHz (well beyond the human hearing range at both ends);
we've heard the tooth-tickling highs from the top of a pipe
organ's range & the almost imperceptible lows of the internal
resonance of an acoustic bass. Bottom line: Audio Technica Import
Series ATH-A700 Art Monitor headphones are the best of breed
we've heard so far for critical listening by audio purists & by
those for whom details within audio are important.
Special Report Bonus Review 3: Universal Document Converter 5
Has it ever seemed curious to you that when you need a picture of
a digital document that you have to print it out & take a picture
of the hard copy? Have you ever wondered how to keep the spiders
from snagging an e-mail address on a Web page & flooding you with
spam? We've always loved the fCoder Group Universal Document
Converter (a virtual printer driver) for these tasks, but until
this week, it just hasn't been available for our new Core-i7
systems running 64-bit Vista. Now that UDC 5.0 is here, we have
its functionality again at hand (confirmed when Marty turned his
election campaign sheet into a JPG), but the story doesn't end
there. It can now generate output files with up to 6000dpi
resolution. You can instruct it to change page size on the fly,
or to add a watermark. When you choose PDF as your target format,
it can password protect that file & it can generate as big a PDF
as you need, up to 10GB. You don't have to start with document
files; if you can print it, UDC can handle it. Bottom line: the
fCoder Group Universal Document Converter version 5.0 adds
surprising new capabilities, including 64-bit Windows
compatibility, to a favorite utility that we unhesitatingly
recommend.
Special Report Bonus Review 4: Remington Personal Groomer
We have a lot of male friends who tend to grow beards in the
winter then shave them clean for the summer, so we initially
thought of a geeked-up razor as a gadgeting up for winter
product, but it could also make sense as holiday tech. The
Remington PG-360 Personal Groomer "8-in-1 grooming system" is a
kit of cutters & accessories, some of which may be difficult for
a bachelor to use. For example, the "neckliner" is a curved
plastic guide to help trim a neckline, but it's a lot easier to
get straight when a companion is involved. The "sleek charging
stand" tries hard to be a good non-contact charger but it's not
well designed; the material in the base is soft & weak, making it
tough to simply seat the unit, so you end up picking up the whole
thing & squishing it on like support hose. Curiously, they are
using a NiCad battery for this, which requires recycling & is
illegal to simply discard. The mini-foil shaver, not disregarding
its claim of a "Titanium revolutionary trimming technology" left
our test subject with a decidedly non-trivial case of razor burn.
The fine trimmer (intended for beard & moustache trimming) & the
wide trimmer each proved useful for sideburn touch-ups. The nose
& ear hair trimmer also proved useful. (There's better news in
the Remington product we review in our next issue). Bottom line:
for men who have no sensitivity to razor burn, the Remington
PG-360 Personal Groomer "8-in-1 grooming system" may represent a
good value for its combination of useful grooming tools &
accessories in a single kit.
Special Report Bonus Review 5: Belkin Micro Auto Charger
We were willing to ignore half of what's in the box when Belkin
offered their Micro Auto Charger with Charge Sync Cable for
review. You may have heard legends about us - perhaps the only
place on the planet that neither has nor wants an Apple iPod
product - so the USB to iPod dock cable is wasted on us. The
piece we did appreciate is the piece that plugs into the lighter
to provide power to a USB port because in this case, unlike
everything else we've ever seen, it fits the plug snugly without
a big chunk of anything sticking out. There's a minimal lip that
makes it easy enough to unplug without obtruding & the flat top
manages room for both the USB socket & a power pilot LED. This is
the first lighter to USB adapter we've seen that can stay in
place for enclosed lighter plugs behind closed ash tray cover
doors or drawers. We since learned that the Micro Auto Charger is
also available without the iPod cable (for $15 sted $20). Bottom
line: If you can get by with just one USB charging port in the
car, the Belkin Micro Auto Charger is the least obtrusive choice
we've seen.
Sign here
Marty made two pledges anent his township trustee election
campaign: September will be paperless (no documents will be
printed all month) & he will place campaign signs in no yard
other than his own. There are now 2 identical signs (visible from
all 3 parts of this "T" intersection), hand painted on 4'x8'
corrugated plastic sheets, hung by bending paper clips into a
shower curtain hook shape from a length of electrical conduit
that's lashed (with twine, reinforced by a little duct tape) to
8' garden stake uprights. There was a challenge when it rained;
the balance of underestimating the wet weight of the plastic
sheets & overestimating the tensile strength of the paper clips
ended up with the wires unbending and letting the sign drop; the
clip count per sign was increased from 5 to 8 to compensate but
that wasn't enough, so we upgraded again to shower curtain
hangers. If it needs another upgrade that will probably involve
replacing the garden stake uprights with another few pieces of
conduit. No aren't you glad that you don't live & vote here?
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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