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2008-04D

Newstips Electronic Editorial Bulletin       Issue # 2008-04d

    News you can peruse when you're back from your walk

7-HOUR NOTEBOOK BATTERY DEATH DELAY WITH TEKKEON
 Welcome Tekkeon with some of the neatest runtime extender
 products we've seen; how much would you love, for example, to add
 3.5-7 hours of runtime to your notebook? The Tekkeon MP3450
 myPowerALL Plus (online $130) universal notebook & accessory
 runtime extender weighs just 12 ounces yet delivers 50 Watt-hours
 of power per charge, enough to keep most notebooks running an
 extra 3.5 hours. If you need more, add a companion MP3450-10
 piggyback battery pack ($100) with mounting clip to hit that
 7-hour runtime extension. You can set it for Voltages from 3-19
 Volts; combo that with its kit of adapter tips & you cover just
 about every notebook out there. For notebooks in the 16-19V
 range, it powers them; for those up to 16V it both powers &
 recharges them. There's also a USB A connector delivering the
 requisite 5VDS at up to 160% of standard current output to let
 you simultaneously run & charge any of your gear that uses USB
 charging. The power versus weight magic comes from the Lithium
 Polymer battery technology. Info & high-res photos are ready now,
 as are (stand by for excitement) review units. Ring René.
 Contact: René Williams, TEKKEON, INC. (Tustin, CA) 949-360-7770
 mailto:rene@tekkeon.com http://Tekkeon.com

NEW JVC SETS HIT STORES IN MAY
 By the end of May, stores should be showcasing two new JVC 1080P
 LCD HDTV set lines. The X579 series (42", 47" & 52", which may
 come after May) boasts bottom-firing speakers & a thin, glossy
 bezel, plenty of inputs & a ton of onboard image processing. The
 new P789 series (32" at 768P & 42", 47" or 52" at 1080P) features
 an integrated iPod dock plus an added up-scaling mode that helps
 iPod video look fantastic on the bigger screen; the TV's remote
 can control a docked iPod through an on-screen menu. Chelsea can
 get you pix & info now & line you up for a review unit when those
 become available. Contact: Chelsea Vander Groef, JVC COMPANY OF
 AMERICA (Wayne, NJ) 973-317-5000x5312 mailto:cvandergroef@jvc.com
 http://jvc.com

LIVE VIDEO VIA CELL: TRADE-OFFS
 Since CTIA & NAB, we've seen video over cell in several current &
 future products & discussed the technology limitations with the
 people who design various codecs & it all comes down to this: you
 can't suck an elephant through a soda straw. The Droplet approach
 is unique in its use of a handset's existing still camera & its
 output at a broadcast-qualified 29.96 frames per second, but even
 Droplet faces trade-offs between bandwidth & the resolution it
 can carry. Its current release (a full release, not a beta,
 though still a stepping-stone) can carry VGA video resolution
 (640x480) in real time, plus audio paths in both directions. The
 next step up will carry full SD video when bandwidth permits, but
 fall back to VGA when it doesn't. Droplet technology is advancing
 faster than available cellular data path bandwidth is advancing,
 but it will take the latter before the former can ever hope to
 send a full HD signal in real time. Jingle John for a chance to
 see what this tech can do now. Contact: John Ralston, DROPLET
 TECHNOLOGY (Menlo Park, CA) 650-688-5762
 mailto:ralston@droplet-tech.com http://droplet-tech.com Agency
 contact: Evan Kennedy (Terpin) 310-821-6100x116 evan@terpin.com

BACTRACK ON TRACK FOR ACCURACY
 While there are some inexpensive breathalyzers whose readings you
 might not want to trust, the accuracy of the BACtrack ($80) blood
 alcohol content measurements are remarkably accurate, due in part
 to the sensor technology & in part on its use of deep-lung air
 samples. The detection range is 0.00-0.40% (BAC); a 0.02% reading
 may be off by a digit, but it means the actual BAC is assuredly
 in the 0.01-0.03% range. Call Keith if you'd like to check it out
 for yourself. Contact: Keith Nothacker, KHN SOLUTIONS (San
 Francisco CA) 415-693-9756x113
 mailto:keith.nothacker@khnsolutions.com http://bactrack.com

SAMSON CL2 CAN SOLVE TV NEWS MONO TRAP
 For almost every TV newscast in the country, the theme music may
 be stereo or surround sound but everything else is in monaural;
 we know the reason & the answer. The reason is that when the
 engineers tried miking for stereo, they did it by putting a
 stereo mike in front of each person on-camera; a small movement
 of the mouth to either side made it sound at home like the voice
 was bouncing around the walls. The approach they haven't tried is
 to keep mono mikes on the talent but cross-aim a matched stereo
 mike pair from high mounts in the far corners, because that adds
 the extra audio information that uniquely places each speaker in
 the studio space. The Samson CL2 matched stereo pair of
 directional pencil condenser mikes (online $299) fits both the
 need & the budget. They're also great for recording musical
 performances, outdoor events or almost anything involving more
 than one person. Ask Mark. Contact: Mark Wilder, SAMSON
 TECHNOLOGIES (Hauppauge, NY) 631-784-2200x142
 mailto:mwilder@samsontech.com http://SamsonTech.com

LP MICRO CHEAP COLOR TEMPERATURE TRICK
 If you've ever seen a snapshot turn green because you shot it
 using available fluorescent lights, welcome to the world of color
 temperatures. The white LEDs in Litepanels products each have
 their own color temperature; one plus of the brand is that they
 maintain tight color temperature consistency within the LED
 arrays in their products. The bigger products come in both
 daylight 5600K & tungsten 3200K flavors. The "little brother"
 Litepanels Micro ($300) comes only in 5600K, but includes some
 welcome cheap trickery. A flip-down frame holds any of several
 square filters that come with the product, including one to
 adjust to 4400K for fluorescents, one for 3200K for tungsten & a
 diffuser you can add to soften the light at any color
 temperature. With 7 hours of run time on a set of 4 E2 Lithium AA
 cells, it's a video shooter's dream. Ask Ken. Contact: Ken
 Fisher, LITEPANELS, INC. (North Hollywood CA) 818-332-3070
 mailto:ken@litepanels.com http://LitePanels.com

YAGI IS NOT YOGIC; THE CELL TELESCOPE
 A Yagi has nothing to do with exercise or spiritualism; it's a
 directional antenna design named for its Japanese electrical
 engineer inventor, Hidetsugu Yagi. As you go up in frequency in
 the radio spectrum, the length of the antenna rods in an
 effective Yagi design gets shorter; at cellular PCS & CEL band
 frequencies, a Yagi is smaller than a pizza box. Wi-Ex offers
 Yagi antennas (primarily for installers) because they work
 something like a telescope, providing gain (like magnification)
 in one specific direction (along the beam of its center post) by
 narrowing the antenna's field of view. Installers can team a Yagi
 with the Wi-Ex cellular signal strength meter to determine the
 best place to snag a signal & if the installation requires a
 Yagi, which way to point it. A Yagi adds a boost to any cell bar
 signal helper, too, but there's yet another reason it may
 interest you. With a Yagi, people outside a tower's normal
 coverage footprint may still be able to get coverage, which can
 be important to first responders & exurban professionals. Ask the
 ladies. Contact: Sharon Cuppett, WI-EX INC. (Norcross, GA)
 770-239-5475x6380 mailto:scuppett@wi-ex.com http://wi-ex.com
 AGENCY CONTACT: Deanna Anderson 404-759-1890
 mailto:danderson705@comcast.net

INDUSTRIAL-SIDE EUBIQ POWER TRACKS EXTEND END TO END
 In addition to its fixed-length power tracks, Eubiq also offers
 short, modular tracks that can extend end-to-end. In a cramped
 space, their twist-to-place-anywhere sockets placed along a short
 track can still offer more flexibility & future-proofing than
 most designs. If later on that proves to be not quite enough
 track, another one or more in-line plug-in add-on tracks lets the
 electrical opportunities grow to meet current (pun not intended)
 needs. Think about data cabinets that have needed to accommodate
 increasing numbers of pieces of gear, each with its own need for
 a socket & you'll quickly appreciate why this is a significant
 offering. Check the Web site or message Kee. Contact: NG Kee
 Haur, EUBIQ PTE LTD (Singapore) +65-6372-9393x380
 mailto:keeng@eubiq.com http://eubiq.com

SPECIAL REPORT: TIME IS PLACE
 It's intriguing that when modern technology needs to locate
 something, it uses time to determine place. The GPS system, for
 example, uses satellites that really are little more than
 orbiting atomic clocks; when you get signals from enough of them,
 the time reading from each will be affected by its distance from
 you, so when you know their orbits, chip-level math can translate
 that into latitude, longitude & altitude. Fold in time once more
 to use changes in position over time to measure speed & direction
 (not quite instantaneous enough for your old physics teacher, but
 you can still think of the combination as a vector value for
 velocity) You may not be aware of the boxes in cell towers that
 also have a pretty good idea of the location of each handset
 within the tower's footprint. This, too, uses time; in this case,
 it's the teensy bit of signal delay between the handset & the
 tower (officially U-TDOA for Uplink Time Difference of Arrival).
 A cell tower has multiple antennas, which aids measurement
 accuracy & adds other cues, like the angle of arrival of the
 signal. When the phone does have Assisted GPS, it's almost like
 cheating, though that may be less than useful inside buildings,
 for example. A third kind of measurement takes you back to before
 high school when the emphasis was on Rate times Time equals
 Distance. We've seen tiny inertial systems (using chip-size
 gyroscopes) in concert with tilt & magnetic sensor arrays in dead
 reckoning systems that are impressively accurate in determining
 exactly where you are relative to a known starting point. Less
 sophisticated versions of such things have been in use for
 decades in the guidance systems of missiles & bombs. If you think
 back to all those old war movies you used to watch, you may even
 remember that for both the navigator & bombardier, the basic
 tools involved a compass, an altimeter, a ruler, a map & a
 stopwatch. In the second half of the past century, relative
 timing also played a part in a radio-based navigation system
 called LORAN. If you want to go really far back, to the sextant &
 the astrolabe, it was the predictability of celestial motion that
 allowed them any accuracy at all in determining where on this
 globe the measurement was being taken. We think of spatial
 placement as being 3-dimensional, but our technology for
 identifying our 3-dimensional position on Earth has always been
 based on the fourth dimension, time. And the more we advance our
 technology, the more its calculations demonstrate how time is
 place.

SPECIAL REPORT BONUS REVIEW: TELENAV 5.1
 Blackberry handsets bundle TeleNav maps, with a menu item that
 invites upgrading to (really adding) TeleNav Navigator 5.1; other
 than that little sales pitch, there really is no integration
 between these two offerings. While TeleNav 5.1 has a lot in
 common with the other navigator products we've tested (Blackberry
 address book integration, point of interest lookup, spoken turn
 by turn, traffic updates, gas prices, etc.) it has the sparsest
 map display of the group. Sparse can be good but this sparse
 loses something, like the names of streets before & after your
 next turn (to be sure you haven't picked the wrong corner),
 direction or even time of day. One nice feature when you're not
 navigating a map is its compass, in case your car doesn't have
 one or you're walking (pedestrian is one of several routing
 options). Its "Spot Marker" can, for example, help you get back
 to where you parked the car. Rerouting is inconsistent; when we
 deliberately strayed from its path, it tried correcting the first
 time, tried giving us a wacky route about 15 miles out of our way
 the second time & then gave up & we had to redo our entries (not
 recommended while driving). When it detects traffic-related
 slow-downs ahead, it gives you the option of staying on course or
 going a different way & displays an ETA (which it doesn't show
 most of the time except on the Turn Icons display, an alternate
 to the moving-maps displays). One nice feature: you can look up
 map points (including businesses, etc.) on the TeleNav Web site &
 sync them to your phone; there's also a phone service that lets
 you call in to get destinations sent to your phone (so your phone
 can send you to those destinations). Another nice feature is a
 distinct POI category for WiFi hot spots. We hope you don't need
 tech support; the 3 times we tried calling we were put on hold
 for major fractions of an hour with no answer ever & a call to
 the company's main number, operator option, simply disconnected
 us. We were calling because the Web site claims this has the
 ability to insert a waypoint en route & we haven't so far been
 able to find that in either the product or its documentation. So
 to recap, we don't love the map display & wish it had more info;
 the ability to sync from the Web site is way cool but we wish the
 Web site part were as good as competing online map services; the
 rerouting feature generally works but we saw it stumble; the
 waypoint feature it claims is either very tough to find or
 missing; but when it comes to getting you from point to point
 with spoken turn-by-turn directions & an awareness of current
 traffic, it does the job. Bottom line: TeleNav 5.1 is a credible
 competitor for navigating with a Blackberry with some currently
 unique & interesting features.

SPECIAL REPORT BONUS REVIEW 2: LEXMARK X6575
 We had been using a Lexmark all-in-one since our XP era, but the
 transition to Vista was one it didn't handle well; when we
 recently upgraded to Vista Ultimate, it became dysfunctional
 (killing the spooler process for everybody) in a way that could
 only be addressed by amputation. We checked out the current AIO
 offerings across the brands & came back to Lexmark to get their
 X6575 in for review, one of our happier decisions. We're using
 its USB connection, though it comes equipped for WiFi & easily
 supports MAC-based filtering at a router. As a fax, it restores
 our ability to let applications print directly to remote fax
 machines without creating paper here first & adding printing &
 scanning steps in the middle. As a scanner, it performs both
 sheet-fed & flatbed scans (Windows applications that can use
 scanners see it as both TWAIN & WIA); its bundled software also
 supports scanning to a PDF file or doing OCR-driven scan & edit
 work. It has front slots for camera memory cards & a PictBridge
 USB connection for printing photos or copying among these. As a
 printer of photos, it's as good as you let it be; photo prints on
 plain paper look better when you choose a photo printing mode,
 but aren't as good as prints made on glossy photo paper & look
 even better when you use their specialized photo print cartridge.
 Lexmark builds the nozzles into their cartridges so swapping
 between normal & photo cartridges doesn't involve lengthy
 rituals; even the alignment is a one-step process that only takes
 one button push from a user. The X6575 feature we most regard as
 an upgrade is its ability to duplex print (both sides of the
 paper, automatically); we used to manually jigger up two-sided
 prints when making copies of our trade show schedules just to
 reduce the weight on our shoulders & now this makes it all happen
 even when fatigue challenges our neurons to remember how the heck
 we did it last time. Bottom line: the Lexmark X6575 adds enough
 intelligent features to the basics of printing, scanning & faxing
 to take it beyond the realm of peripheral & into the realm of
 sidekick.

SPECIAL REPORT BONUS REVIEW 3: NUANCE VOICE CONTROL
 When we put Nuance Voice Control on our BlackBerry Pearl, our
 expectations borne of their Web site description were only
 slightly marred by the user comments we saw on some of the
 download sites. We quickly shared their disappointment, but to be
 fair, the current version of the product will soon be replaced by
 a new version that allegedly dodges several of the shortcomings
 we're about to cite. The basic premise of the product is that you
 can speak a command to call a name or a number, fetch a Web site,
 look up a business, check the weather, get a stock quote, play a
 song stored in the handset, find a business, get driving
 directions, dictate an outgoing message, etc. The idea is
 attractive & compelling but the experience is flawed (in the
 current version). We surmise from watching that rather than
 performing speech analysis within the handset, it works like
 this: When you install it, it uploads data on your handset's
 catalog of e-mail or SMS messages, appointments, media files,
 etc. to its server. When you push the button to launch it & speak
 your command, it captures that command as an audio stream,
 uploads it to the server, performs its analysis there & returns
 commands via downlink to the application running on the handset
 to get them to execute. Our first disappointment is with the
 amount of time this takes (in some cases, multiple minutes with
 no response at all). Our second disappointment is with the
 analysis; when we told it, "Find Mac's Tobacco Pouch near Chagrin
 Falls, Ohio" it came back with a search engine page for "Max
 Tobacco Couch"; in three trials, not one of the pages it returned
 had the right listing. It also flubbed responding to simple
 yes/no answers in its multiple choice near-miss calling
 interpretations; it's not fun waiting that long for wrong. The
 Voice Dialer that comes with the BlackBerry (from embedded speech
 technology vendor Voice Signal, which Nuance owns) is much faster
 & more accurate, needs no data connection, uses no data service &
 is $6/month less (free). Bottom line: Nuance Voice Control
 represents an aggressive & welcome approach to hands-free,
 eyes-free interaction with a cell phone; we hope its near-future
 next version does a better job of delivering on that promise.

SPECIAL REPORT BONUS REVIEW 4: TV GUIDE MOBILE
 TV Guide Mobile (for BlackBerry or Windows Mobile) is free, so if
 we grouse a bit, don't let that reduce your sense of its value.
 Once you localize it, you can see your channel line-up & listings
 as soon as your data connection lets them load. The most
 wonderful thing about it is its exemplary search facility that
 can go by name, by channel & (we love this) by time & date &
 channel. We like that because when you get to a desired show, it
 can not only give you a blurb about what's happening that week,
 it also lets you tag it (one episode or all episodes or all new
 episodes) for a "watched" list with SMS message reminders. It
 also offers news, features & a hot list. Our grouses: we'd rather
 do our searching & typing on the Web at our desks & have it synch
 to the phone & we'd really love to see it figure out its location
 rather than making users set or change them (it stores both a
 home setting & 1 away setting; on the Las Vegas Strip, it had
 specific listings for the LV Hilton but not for The Venetian).
 We'll let you decide your own reasons for knowing when new
 episodes of your favorite shows are coming up. Bottom line: this
 gives more TV program info more conveniently than we ever thought
 anybody would be able to cram into a BlackBerry.

NOTE FROM JUDIE
 Mrs. Winston would like you to help start a rumor that the jump
 in gas and food prices is part of a huge conspiracy to help
 Americans lose weight & get fit.

MAYBE IT'S TIME FOR A DICTATOR
 As we've been thinking a lot about ratcheting up tech to improve
 a journalist's workflow, we've also been thinking about
 text-to-speech applications. We know what we like about them: the
 promise. We know what we don't like about them: the broken
 promises. We're going to try out a few alternatives (suggestions
 welcome) & let you know what we find. Here are some of the
 attributes we hope to find: We want them to save us more time by
 getting more right than they cost us in having to format them or
 correct them when they get things wrong. We want interoperability
 so we can store speech in any of several devices for desktop
 software to deal with later, as a file, in the background as we
 do other work; it would be very cool if it could act
 automatically on audio files we e-mail to ourselves (with some
 secure handshake so it doesn't do that to audio files from
 elsewhere). If we find something fuss-free, nimble, accurate &
 truly useful, we'll let you know; if you already have, please let
 us know. Contact: Martin Winston, NEWSTIPS (Novelty, OH)
 440-338-8400; mailto: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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