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Newstips Electronic Editorial Bulletin Issue # 2010-03e
Last news before the April foolishness
In this issue:
New Antec notebook bricks... Nobody loves BlackBerry jam when
it's in the RAM ... Franklin abridging prices faster than
vocabularies... Coming, BACtrack 1-shots... Tiffen at NAB: better
stands for smaller cameras... Special Report: Bottlenecks & a
response on Desk Phones... Project Yippie: wrap-up... Reviews:
ArmorLite CFL, Lavalys Everest Ultimate, Belkin CAT6 patch cable,
Brookstone BBQ brush, Monster screen cleaner... plus our
commentary on crash test dummies
New notebook power gear coming from Antec
Coming this spring, Antec has a new line of yawn-stopping
notebook power adapters ("bricks") with new reasons not to ignore
this category. One of them is small enough to carry in a shirt
pocket (though we're not sure why you would), meaning it's a lot
less weighty & bulky when you lug it around all day & is a lot
less likely to bump you into the next weight class on an
airplane. Others give you new reasons not to carry one at all
most of the time because they let you have one at home & another
at work. That's about all we're allowed to tell you until they
ship, but Veronica may be willing to share more. Contact:
Veronica Feldmeier, Antec Inc. (Fremont, CA) 510-770-2150
vfeldmeier@antec.com http://antec.com
Nobody loves BlackBerry jam when it's in the RAM
One challenge with a handset smart enough to run thousands of
applications is that sometimes available memory space can get
eaten alive. There's a way to keep an eye on that inside the new
Fixmo Tools BlackBerry Edition ($20 including a year of updates).
Memory Monitor offers detailed reporting on your handset memory
usage & gives you a way to do a memory cleanup. It offers big,
clear bar graph displays of both the handset's RAM & its Flash
storage with details at the push of one button & instant cache
clearing at the touch of another. Send Rick your e-mail address &
handset PIN to het set up to review it now. Contact: Rick Segal,
Fixmo (Toronto, ON) 416-414-9726 rick@Fixmo.com
http://Fixmo.com
Franklin abridging prices faster than vocabularies
While Franklin offers the only electronic handheld unabridged
dictionary you're likely to see any time soon, many people are
absolutely content with the difference between that & the
abridged vocabularies of their significantly less expensive
dictionaries (dozens, starting under $20). Their MWD1500 Advanced
Merriam-Webster Dictionary & Thesaurus with Spell Correction
($60) is tailored for students from Junior High through college.
Their SCD2100 Speaking Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary 11th
Edition ($100) adds out-loud word pronunciation, a translator
(English, Spanish, French, German or Italian), a scientific
calculator, adjustable font size & more. Franklin believes that
when it comes to language aids, one size can't fit all, whether
that's one size in print, in software, in-hand or online. You're
invited to explore any or all of that collection, especially if
you're ready to help reinforce that point. Contact: Aline Boutin,
Franklin Electronic Publishers (Burlington, NJ) 609-386-2500x4434
aline_boutin@franklin.com http://franklin.com
Coming, BACtrack 1-shots for when you have more than 1
We've just seen (you can too) early production models of
inexpensive new single-use blood alcohol content testers coming
later this year. BACtrack SingleShot testers will offer simple
color-change pass/fail tests for BAC levels of 0.02%, 0.05% or
0.08%. These are small tubes, about the size of an unfiltered
cigarette. You squeeze the middle to break the inner glass
capsule, blow hard for 12 seconds, shake for 3 seconds & see your
results in 2 minutes. Pricing isn't final, but we anticipate
around $10 for one or $20 for a 2-pack. If you ask, Keith can
send you a few to review. Contact: Keith Nothacker, KHN SOLUTIONS
(San Francisco CA) 415-693-9756x113
mailto:keith.nothacker@bactrack.com http://bactrack.com
Tiffen at NAB: better stands for smaller cameras
We've been at TV stations when new news cameras arrive that turn
out to be not much bigger (if any) than the butter-box consumer
camcorders we've all seen - but when the news crew goes out, it's
with the same heavyweight (both meanings) tripods they've always
used. Expect the Tiffen booth to see an unprecedented degree of
interest in their Davis & Sanford tripods, especially the ones
with special features like air-lift center posts or grounder
legs. Ask Hilary. Contact: Hilary Araujo, Tiffen Company
(Hauppauge, NY) 631-609-3216 haraujo@tiffen.com
http:/.tiffen.com
Special Report: Bottlenecks
For computers (possibly elsewhere), technology progress often
just changes where bottlenecks lie. We saw some early reviews,
for example, of external USB3 (4.8Gbps) drives complaining that
USB3 didn't seem all that much faster than USB2 (0.48Gbps). The
max sustained data transfer rate for a typical 7200rpm hard drive
is 0.84Gbps; going from USB2 to USB3 moved the bottleneck from
the speed limit of the interface to that of the drive. A typical
SSD today can transfer at up to 2Gbps. That's enough numbers;
what are the visceral differences to an end user when new specs
seem to turn a PC's old dirt roads into expressways? Research
airlines did into ticket counter terminal response times showed
that people notice delays but seldom notice speed-ups. When
gamers overclock everything to up their frame rates, does the
game itself play any better or is more of the thrill in the
bragging rights? On the consumer side, the biggest difference in
overkill pixel counts is in the other features that come on those
imaging chips, not in the picture itself. (Note: a 12Mp image has
40% more pixels than the 8.4Mp you can fit on an 8.5"x11" sheet
at 300dpi). When vendors & their PR people try to dazzle us, you
may need a geek to debunk their touted specs or to keep them in
context of what they really don't mean.
Special Report Response: Desk phones
Tom Inglesby responded to last issue's report on desk phones:
"For recording from a land line to a PC, I use an Olympus 3100
digital recorder connected to the RJ11 wall outlet via a Radio
Shack module (43-228A). The module plugs into the recorder as an
outboard mic. Olympus provides a program that allows the recorder
to show up on the PC screen & records directly onto the PC's HD.
I can then upload the .wav file to an FTP site where my
transcriber (in Boston) can download it, do the transcription &
e-mail me the results. The file remains on my PC so I can cross
check the transcription or define any unknowns by listening again
while following the copy." Thanks, Tom!
Project Yippie: Wrap-up
We set out to experience what a small business would have to go
through to bring e-mail, Web site & ftp hosting inside its walls.
We built a small, silent server around an Intel "Clarkdale" H55
board & Core i5 CPU, but that was the easy part. Windows Web
Server 2008 R2 was easy enough to install but challenging to
configure. IIS 7.5 proved much easier to configure than we had
feared, but may still pose challenges to less geeky folks.
Forefront proved itself an initially confusing but ultimately
easy antimalware solution. While most users could use IIS to
handle their e-mail hosting, we chose IMail Express for access to
some special tweaks we favor. Our conclusion is that this is not
yet a direction we would recommend to most small offices. The
costs are not low enough to suggest a savings & the
configurations are not easy enough to suggest they'll be
successful on their own.
Special Report Bonus Review: ArmorLite CFL
Side trip: an amalgamated company is a combination of previously
separate companies; the term arose in the late 1630s because of
amalgam (mid-1400s) which is an alloy of mercury with other
metals (like silver, gold or tin) that is soft but solid. Tin
amalgam coats mirrors; silver amalgam is popular in dental
fillings. We took that detour because ClearLite ArmorLite CFLs
use amalgam instead of liquid mercury, so they're a bit less of a
hazard if broken. For their next trick, they jacket the whole
thing in a bulb-shaped rubbery skin to contain glass or chemistry
if a bulb should break & diffuse the light. They also boast a
lead-free base (meaning no solder). Their 14 Watt CFL beams 800
lumens (like a 60W incandescent) for 10,000 hours (at 3 hours per
day) & comes in soft white (2700K) & daylight (4100K) versions.
The box warns not to use more than 25 lamps per 20 Amp circuit;
starting those takes a lot more current (albeit briefly) than the
3 Amps it takes to run them & would blow a breaker.
Aesthetically, they look more like an old-school light bulb.
Bottom line: ArmorLite's line of ClearLite CFLs offer several
pluses over current CFL alternatives & are well worth
considering.
Special Report Bonus Review 2: Lavalys Everest Ultimate
How many places do you have to go to find details about your PC &
its configuration? Say you want to find the serial number of the
C: volume hard drive, the firmware version of your optical drive,
the temperatures of your components, your IP configuration, your
motherboard BIOS version & see a list of everything plugged into
USB; how long would all that take? Lavalys set us up with Everest
Ultimate Edition which offers a well-organized way to look at
thousands of hardware, software & system attributes, all in one
window. It also offers tools for monitor diagnostics,
benchmarking & more. Bottom line: We love how Lavalys Everest
Ultimate gives us a broad & deep dashboard into all of the
gnat's-lash details that we really need to keep a PC in good trim
& lets us forget about the dozens of procedures it otherwise
takes to get at it all.
Special Report Bonus Review 3: Belkin CAT6 patch cable
Our recently upgraded PC now has a second Gigabit port, meaning
we can use one to connect outside our router to the "real"
Internet with a static IP address while the other can connect to
the router for access to all the NAT-isolated gear here. We had
some special characteristics in mind for the second port's cable,
so we had Belkin send their 20-foot orange (the first port is
red) snagless CAT6 patch cable for review. We were impressed with
the connector strain relief; it also has dual gripping fins to
make plugging & unplugging easier without blocking the little
status lights in the connection they occupy. We chose CAT6 to
assure that the cable wouldn't compromise our throughput. Bottom
line: Belkin orange 20' CAT6 Patch Cable is proving itself a
capable, no-compromise performer with comforting pluses in its
design.
Special Report Bonus Review 4: Brookstone BBQ brush
We go through a lot of grill brushes - sometimes because we press
the plastic handled ones so hard that they crack, sometimes
because we leave the steel ones out in the rain, but usually just
because we wear them down. So this year, we asked Brookstone to
send their Motorized BBQ Grill Brush for review. The heft of the
motor in its head helps provide good downward pressure on the
long, spinning metal brushes (which we are delighted to discover
are removable for cleaning); a nice, thick scraper is also on the
head to chop off any gunk build-up. The handle holds the 4 C
cells that power it; they have enough muscle to keep the brush
from slowing when it grinds away at the grate. It cleared through
the winter-long corrosion in a very few minutes. Bottom line: the
Brookstone Motorized BBQ Grill Brush does more & better cleaning
in less time than any of the manual brushes we've used & with
less work on our part.
Special Report Bonus Review 5: Monster screen cleaner
While doing our spring cleaning, one nagging problem has been a
tiny circle of crud on one of our monitors; a few stabs at
removing it failed, so we asked to review the Monster ScreenClean
display cleaning kit. The kit has a 1.5oz alcohol-free spray in a
cleverly flattened bottle (packs or travels or fits a drawer
nicely) & 2 cleaning cloths (each roughly 6" square), one
microfiber, the other more textured, like the tech version of a
washcloth. The kit claims Aegis Microbe Shield antibacterial
protection permanently embedded in both cloths. We tested the kit
on our monitor, camcorder display, camera display, eyeglasses,
BlackBerry & even our fingerprint scanner with a perfect score
for ridding them of junk we thought would never go away. Bottom
Line: The Monster Digital Life ScreenClean Advanced Cleaning Kit
for Displays works better than almost everything else we've
tried.
Half of us weigh more than crash test dummies
Crash test dummies are built to represent 50th-percentile people,
so by design, they're skinnier than (give or take) half the
population, fatter than half, taller than half, shorter than
half. PCs & software also tend to aim for the middle: too much,
too hard or too confusing for about as many people as those who
find them too slow, too stupid or inadequately sophisticated.
Digital cameras are playing the 1980s auto industry planned
perceived obsolescence game with diminishing success. So should
you & we report from the middle of where we think consumers are,
from the middle of where the vendors tell us the marketplace is
tethered or from some other perspective? Any choice will be more
wrong than right from any internal or external group perspective,
yet few of us ever fret about that. Should we? 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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