Rafe's Blog

Is this the next iPod?

You try to take the wife out for dinner on a weekday, to get away from work for just a few hours. And what happens? A news scoop drops in your lap, and there you are, thinking, I have to blog this. Right now.  So here's the scoop: The next iPod. The one Apple is teasing the press about. The iPod Macro. Spotted in the wild on display at a neighborhood hardware store in San Francisco. How they got the prototype, I have no idea. [More photos.]

Rant of the day: Allergic to peanuts.

I hate packing peanuts. Almost every time I order something online, it comes in a box filled with either Styrofoam, or much less frequently, cornstarch packing peanuts. I have boxes of packing peanuts in my garage. I can't put them in my recycling bins for pickup with newspapers and the like. And I don't want to put them in the ordinary trash, since they're man-made materials and should be recycled. So they pile up.

My city's garbage company says,

Styrofoam peanuts can be recycled at most shipping/mail houses (ie: UPS and Mail Boxes, etc.). Call to see if you can drop them off for reuse. There are no local places to recycle to-go containers or large pieces of Styrofoam; however, some local art organizations may reuse large pieces for art projects.

Thanks. Big help. Why don't you just pick them up?

Also, a memo to online stores that use Styrofoam: just quit it! Go with the air bags that Amazon and a few other companies use. Once these have served their purpose, you poke a hole in them, they collapse into next to nothing, and they can be thrown in the recycling bin.

A lot of money for an obsolete product

We're putting an addition on to our house, and I've opted to not wire it for data or phones.  I'm going to use cordless technologies instead. WiFi, of course, is cheap. And on the phone side, all I need is to get two additional wireless extensions for my Siemens 8825 two-line phone system. It's not a great system, but I'm invested in it, with one base station and four extensions already distributed around the house.

But there's a problem: the phone is no longer being made, and the extensions, which were hardly cheap when I got the system years ago, are now selling at inflated black-market prices on eBay. I just lost an auction for two handsets, where I grudgingly bid $110 each. Buy-It-Now prices are $129 to $149, and it sells for $350 at online stores. This is robbery.

I'd like to dump the system and start over, except getting a high-quality six-extension two-line wireless system is expensive now matter you slice it, especially since if I'm going to upgrade, I'd like to get a 5.8GHz system, and there are only a few models available. So I think I'm stuck paying these usurious prices for a product I don't really like to begin with.

End of rant.

An iPod under the tree

My wife got me a 60GB Video iPod for Christmas. It's a fantastic machine. My entire music collection (35GB) fits on it, and I've also loaded it up with podcasts, videocasts, and even the first few eps of Lost, which I missed when it premiered. Of course, the day after Christmas, I started to wonder how to extend on what the iPod does.

The first thing I wanted to do was plug it into my living room A/V system, so I could watch the iPod's recorded TV shows and videocasts on a bigger screen. Apple charges $19 for its special AV cable, which is robbery.  The connectors are identical to a standard 1/8" video camera cable, which you can find on eBay for $4.99. You just have to remember that Apple shuffled the connectors. See this page for the mappings. I went out looking for a cheap non-Apple cable, but even at my local Radio Shack the cable was $17 (there was an absurd Monster version for $39). I bit the bullet and got the cheaper one. If I lived closer to Fry's I would have shopped for one there.

The other thing I wanted to do with my iPod is listen to new (to me) music, and I didn't want to spend $1.99 on iTunes for each new track. So I'm using the trial version of Griffin's iFill instead. This is a very cool desktop app that tunes into multiple Internet radio stations of your choice and saves the tracks (with artist/title info) directly to your iPod. You can leave it running overnight while you recharge your iPod, and it will fill up your player with fresh content.

My next project revolves around iTunes, which I do not like. I find the interface to be slow and inflexible. There's an alternate iPod manager called Anapod that I'm beginning to experiment with. I prefer it to iTunes, although it doesn't have built-in support for subscribing to podcasts or buying videos. So for the moment I'm still using iTunes, but once I get tired of paying for iTunes videos (won't be long) and once I lock in to a good alternate podcast manager, I plan to move over to Anapod.

Popularity is the new Open

Because I own a Rancilio Silvia espresso machine, I was delighted to find an article on modding the Silvia in the latest issue of Make. (The story tells you how to add an accurate temperature regulator to the otherwise approximate system that's built into it.) The fact that there are mod instructions for the Silvia reinforced my opinion that I have the "right" machine. Many coffee geeks believe [reviews; more reviews] it is the best mid-priced machine available (which is how my wife picked it out for me in the first place), but even if it wasn't, I'd still feel like it was the best machine for me, since other geeks and hacks own it. 

The same is true with other products, the iPod being the best example. Is it the best machine of its kind available? Perhaps not, but it's the most popular, which means it has more accessories available for it, and it also means more clever people have taken to modding and hacking it, extending (theoretically anyway) the utility of the device.

Some devices, even if they are not inherently hackable, become de facto targets for modders simply because they win an audience of people who like to improve the tech they own, and who like to share their experiences with other people who can appreciate their work. Thus, closed products become open.

Be careful what you ask for

The keyboard I want is real. Almost. United Keys is taking pre-orders on a keyboard with programmable displays on the function keys. Not color, and not the whole keyboard. But how far behind can that be?

The signal in the noise

Quick post: Herman Miller offshoot Sonare Technologies is developing a super-weird technology that gives acoustic privacy to an open cubicle by playing little scrambled snippets of your voice over a speaker. It automatically starts when you're on the phone. People can hear you, but they can't pick out your meaningful syllables from the sea of nonsense noises. It's like having your own psycho backup vocals. (Thanks, HardOCP and Wired News.)

Canon PowerShot SD400: Four out of five geeks recommend it

I just got this little camera, a Canon SD400. It's the third Canon digital in the household. I'm retiring my old S100 from 1999 (2 megapixel, no video capability), and my wife has an S230. You can read a lot about this great camera here.  But what none of the reviews will tell you is this: This is the digicam of the digerati.  I just got back from a reception for Kevin Werbach's Supernova conference, and way more than half the people snapping digi pics were using this little guy.  I am so relieved I didn't show up at the party with an uncool camera.

See my Flickr Pictures from the reception.

Gadget of the Day: Treo software

I've had my Treo 650 for about a week. Things I hate: It's too big to carry comfortably in my pocket (and holsters are dorky), and it crashes every day or two. Things I love: It's a very good phone, and it runs real applications, some of which are unbelievably useful, especially for the business traveler. Here are my picks so far:

• GoodLink mail. Our IT department runs this, and they installed it on my Treo. Love it! I get perfect, always-on synchronization with my Outlook email, calendar, contacts, and notes, and I never have to sync my Treo. Unfortunately, the Good software does step on some of the built-in Treo apps -- for example, I can't access an address book from within the Treo's native VersaMail, which I need to send pictures, since GoodLink doesn't support attachments. Also it drains the Treo's battery quickly. I recharge every night, but if I didn't, I think I'd be in trouble. On the whole, it's still fantastic.

• United Airlines timetable. This is a self-contained database of the United flight schedule that you can load into your device (PC, Palm, or PocketPC). Very useful for seeing all the flight options available to you, not just the ones the UA website decides to display when you're planning a trip. Free.


• FlightStatus. This app gets up-to-the-minute flight arrival information over your data connection. Better, by far, than the flight status Web pages hosted by the airlines or the travel sites. It's free (tips accepted), and written by Andrew Faber, now a 15-year-old high school sophomore. You gotta love that.


• QuickNews. An RSS reader. Web access on my Cingular Treo is rather slow, but most of the sites I use have RSS feeds, and this app makes short work of consuming them. $14.95 after 30-day trial.

• Most useful Web site: Google's mobile search engine, www.google.com/xhtml, which parses everything into small-device-friendly pages. Just added to the service: Google Maps -- although they're really too small for the Treo's screen.

• Utility that shouldn't be needed but is: LEDOff. Turns off that damned blinking LED. Free, donations accepted.

More to come.

Gadget of the Day: Timbuk2 Commute

I needed a new laptop bag, and I had a big REI dividend check to spend, so I picked up a Timbuk2 Commute messenger-style bag. It's a little bigger than I need, but not as over-the-top as most computer briefcases, whose manufacturers seem to think value equals absurdly huge capacity and having a billion pockets. The inside has a well-padded laptop section that should fit most standard-sized laptops, although my X40 looks a little lost in it. It has two nice outside water bottle pockets, which are also good for umbrellas or rolled-up magazines.

I dig the hipster across-the-body carrying style, and it's very comfortable, thanks to padding where it lies against your body.