Gadget Wisdom

We love the Sansa Clip. We bought a 1GB Clip refurbished a while back, and it replaced a slightly more sophisticated player with video playback capabilities. Sometimes, simplicity is more useful. Now, we’ve replaced our 1GB Sansa Clip with a new Sansa Clip Plus(or Clip+).

The Plus offers a slightly sturdier construction, the buttons have been reorganized, and one big new feature…a microSDHC slot for expansion. It also contains the features that we loved about the Clip.

• It can play FLAC and OGG files.
• It has good Podcast and Audiobook support.
• The sound quality is good.
• It is REALLY small
• It has a screen, something the Shuffle lacks
• It has a built in FM radio

We commented on the Clip+ when it first came out. Sandisk advertises the expansion slot as a slotMusic slot. slotMusic and slotRadio were Sandisk’s attempt at selling preloaded microSD cards, which we still insist, on the face of it, is not a bad idea, but never took off. Sandisk’s implementation was not quite what we thought would work. We’d like to see an on-demand kiosk that would allow you to buy files, load them onto the little card, and that could be available in airports and music stores.

That aside, the Clip form factor is the perfect size for sticking into a bag. Everyone we’ve shown it to, even iPod lovers, have agreed that if you are looking for a simple, utilitarian, good quality music player, the Clip is superior to the iPod shuffle and to many other players on the market in similiar price ranges. For those who are Linux users, or like a simple interface, the Clip offers easy loading of new music by copying it over a USB cable. The jack built-in is a standard Mini-USB jack, as opposed to any proprietary plug.

It relies on ID3 tagging to allow you to browse for files to play, but offers Playlist(created on your computer not the device, although this may change), and an folder browse mode to allow you to select by the directories you have put on the device. When we bought it, there was already a new firmware we could load on, which gives us hope Sandisk will continue to maintain it. AnythinButiPod has a list of possible firmware improvements.

They also show how you can get a microSD to SD converter to, with a corresponding increase in size, get cheaper SD as opposed to microSD memory for the Clip.

Elsewhere, the Clip V1 has unstable support for the Rockbox alternative music firmware and other versions may come someday.

The only complaint we could see having about it is that it is so small, it is easy to lose. We’ve narrowly avoided misplacing it a few times for that reason. But a device being too portable is the sort of complaint we can live with.

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Recently, for a limited time, Newegg offered the Western Digital TV Mini Media Player for $40 including shipping. It is currently listed for $59.99.

The Mini is the little brother of the WD TV and the WD TV Live. The basic differences between the three is that the Mini is SD, and the WD TV Live includes networking capability.

The device has its pros and cons. It is very small, and can playback media from any USB drive formatted to FAT, FAT32, NTFS, or HFS. This makes it useful as a portable device, although the slightly larger WD TV and TV Live have much more functionality. The maximum resolution is 720 x 480 for most files. It doesn’t support MKV or H264 either. But it does support XviD, OGG, etc and a variety of other common formats.

It can playback not only video, but music and pictures.

This weekend, we field-tested it. It was able to playback everything within its defined parameters that we threw at it, including two movies, several Revision3 shows, and some audio podcasts.

Ultimately, this device is not something we’d have in our house. Quite franky we don’t need it. But it is a great device, for the price we paid, to stick in a bag and use to playback your digital media at whatever place you happen to be with a minimum of fuss. Reading reviews, two popular uses are to playback ripped movies and to hook into a car entertainment system.

We hope, however, that firmware updates bring additional features to this device in the future. Although we are not holding our breath.

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Earlier, we were reading LifeHacker’s Five Best Online Backup Tools. We’ve been in the market for an Online Backup solution. Right now, we use Dropbox.

Dropbox offers a free 2GB account that syncs a directory on your computer to their server. It offers a paid option for a monthly charge of $9.99/50GB or $19.99/100GB, which is a bit too much for our needs. It is a great tool that we use every day, but is, in our opinion, for our most used files…ones often changed. It offers clients for every operating system, which is important.

We need a solution that will work with Linux…our primary operating system. Thus, Mozy or Carbonite is not an option. Assuming we’re keeping to the Lifehacker list, that leaves CrashPlan and Jungle Disk.

Jungle Disk will be changing its pricing scheme this week, according to its blog.

• Jungle Disk Simply Backup: $2/month, with 5GB of free storage
• Jungle Disk Desktop Edition: $3/month, with 5GB of free storage
• Jungle Disk Workgroup Edition: $4/month, with 10GB of free storage
• Jungle Disk Server Edition: $5/month, with 10GB of free storage

The new plan includes a minimum 5GB of storage. Beyond that, you have your choice of cloud storage providers, either Amazon S3 or Rackspace Cloud Files. Both charge 15 cents per GB used, but S3 charges for bandwidth as well.

CrashPlan offers unlimited storage, either an individual unlimited plan for $3.50 a month if you purchase 3 years worth, or a family plan for $5.00 a month if you purchase 3 years worth. It is $4.50 or $8.33 if you buy a single year plan.

At the moment, while we like the idea of online backup, everything we have that is critical fits into the 2GB Dropbox partition and beyond that may not be worth it. Everything else…well, try encrypting it and sending it somewhere safe. Like a safety deposit box…the house of a friend in a different state, or even have your parents store it for you in your childhood home. Mom is certainly a cheap option.

If your friend/relative is willing to trade with you, you can store their emergency backups too.

But what do you think? Should we go for online backup?

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We’ve spent a lot of time, of late, talking about the excitement of the latest version of MythTV. But it is an exciting topic. Video under MythTV is especially important. On the DVR side of things, MythTV has significant attraction. But as a media center application for the playback of video files, the competing software packages change, to software like XBMC and Boxee.

In version 0.22, MythTV unveiled MythUI, which is a complete rewrite of the Myth user interface. New themes were released and several old ones modified. Last night, we did a series of screenshots to show off some of the theme magic available.

Terra(The New Default Theme)

If you enlarge the image, you will notice that JAMU has added the episode metadata, including description, to these episodes of St. Elsewhere. There is discussion of adding additional options for screenshots for MythVideo(the feature is there for Recordings). If you look at the above image, every episode is using a stock poster.

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Graphite

Graphite is being shown off as another new theme for MythTV 0.22 which shows off several of the new features you can enjoy, namely posters and fanart in the Watch Recordings menus. If you note the picture below, you’ll see the ABC show Castle, has a poster, and each episode has an autogenerated screenshot.

The next two images show the background art available in this theme for shows. All of the art shown was imported by the JAMU script.

Here is the popup, with the extra art and metadata, for a movie we brought in, and a TV episode. It offers a lot of information, which can be used to sort videos by year, genre, season(if TV show), etc.

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Here is an alternate display of a directory of movies under the Metallurgy theme, also a theme newly included into MythTV 0.22. As you can see, the automated process didn’t bring in posters for everything. This can be corrected manually, by entering in additional information to better identify the item.

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All in all, MythTV offers an exciting new and themeable interface that brings it on par with XBMC and Boxee, products that are not in the same category as MythTV, but perform some of the same functions. MythTV still has a ways to go in some areas, however, but it has come a long way.

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Recently, a relative of ours discovered a box of old slides in his garage that had been sitting, untouched, for many years. The logical thing to do with untouched media is to digitize it. then, not only will it last forever, but it is suddenly accessible. New prints can be made at any drug store without problem, it can be added to digital photo frames, displayed online, shared with relatives, etc.

As a side note, we love the idea of loading decades of photos onto a digital photo frame. It allows your entire album to be visible to you, as opposed to just a select group of pictures using conventional means.

The cheapest professional slide scanning we could find was 27 cents a slide. With several thousand, that would turn out to over $500. Even though it would require work on our part, a slide scanner seemed a more economical option. We never expected professional quality results, but we aren’t blowing up our slides to poster size. For digital photo frames and prints 8×10 or less, it seemed good enough. And sometimes, good enough just is.

We read the reviews of many different slides scanners and decided on the Wolverine Data F2D100 scanner for many reasons. One, it does not require a computer, which allowed it to be set up on a table very easily. Slides are viewed on a tiny screen, then saved to a Secure Digital Card.

Specifications

• 6(H) x 3(W) x 3(D) dimensions in inches
• 5 megapixel CMOS sensor
• Scan Quality: 1,800 DPI – 2520×1680 pixels
• USB powered

Now, we have a simple system for the cleaning of slides prior to scanning. The scanner includes a small brush to clean dust off the backlight in between scans, and you can get slide cleaning supplies. We went with a homebrew solution. A bottle of canned air to blow the dust off the slide and a cheap brush used to clean LCD monitors without scratching them to wipe it off. It isn’t perfect, but both were sitting around our office already.

Below, you can see a sample slide, taken in San Francisco nearly 40 years ago. Click to see full-sized images. You can spot a little dirt still left over, but that could be fixed with a more thorough cleaning of the slides. The first image is exactly as it was when loaded from the scanner. The second is with the picture crapped, and an automatic white balance and color enhance function run on it(as opposed to manual fiddling, which might produce even better results).

Ultimately, the hardest part of the process is the insertion of slides into the slide tray so they can be slid into the scanner. However, Wolverine has replaced the existing tray with one that makes this easier, with a new magnetic lock, as of last month. Unfortunately, we got the old one. We may purchase extra trays anyway, as this would speed the loading process.

Otherwise, this is the perfect item for someone who wants a reasonably decent quality slide scanner.

Yesterday, MythTV unveiled its version 0.22 Release Candidate 1. It has been almost two years since version 0.21 was released, and the change brings a great deal of welcome changes.

• Support for the HD-PVR 1212 – The Hauppauge HD-PVR captures analog HD video and digital audio from component video inputs and outputs them over USB using the H264 codec. Since cable companies are encrypting almost all of their content, this device ensures the analog loophole can be exploited. We’ve been using the development version of 0.22 for this reason ever since our cable company shut off our other alternative.
• VDPAU Support – VDPAU is a feature of certain Nvidia graphics cards that permits offload of processor intensive video decoding, include the H264 codec the HD-PVR uses, from the system processor to the graphics card. Thus a slow system can play back HD content without problem.
• The User Interface has been ported to a new standard, MythUI. It allows for inheritance and menu animation, and takes layout and behavior away from the program and puts it under the control of the theme. And surprisingly, that simplifies things.
• Automatic Prioritization, which keeps track of what you watch and uses it to increase the priority of shows watched closer to their recording times over shows that are not.
• A New Channel Scanner – This is a big one, as instead of adding channels when found, it allows you to decide which channels to select, dividing them into New channels, Old Channels, and several different channel types. For example, every time we scan we find a variety of foreign-language channels. Since we don’t speak those languages, it is pointless to add them. This allows us to tell the system to ignore them on scan.
• HDHomeRun Multi-Rec Support – Multi-Rec has been supported under MythTV for DVB devices for a while. This extends it to the popular HDHomeRun, which we also happen to have. Digital TV, both cable and broadcast, allows for multiple subchannels to be embedded on the same channel frequency. Multirec allows two subchannels from the same channel to be recorded at once, instead of discarding all but the one you are watching. It means that if your cable system puts the local NBC and CBS affiliate on the same channel, you can record them simultaneously on the same tuner.
• A score of bug fixes and general handling improvements too numerous to list, but can be checked in the Release Notes.
• MythBrowser now has support for flash and javascript, which means it could be used for Hulu and other Streaming sites(We have yet to test this feature).
• MythNews, the RSS reader, now has podcast support(We have yet to test this feature).
• MythVideo now supports videos stored on the backend. Previously, this required adding the videos as NFS shares. New video metadata grabber scripts are now part of the package, and several other features. The networked option is still in its infancy, and is considered beta till the next version.

There are some additional features that you can review, but essentially, MythTV 0.22 is everything we hoped for after all these months. It can only get better from here. And for US residents, the only possible way this software would not be a great addition to your tech offerings is if the cable company locks down their system so much as to prevent you from using it.

For the record, we’ve never tried slotMusic. But the idea Sandisk tried to push was the selling of microSD cards preloaded with music. These cards, aside from being preloaded, had nothing special about them. The idea of purchasing quick-load music in a pinch at retail outlets had potential. Of course, it would be better if that could be customized at a kiosk, rather than sold in bundle packaging.

Engadget is a bit unfair to claim that the adding of a microSDHC in the new Sansa Clip+ is merely an attempt to get rid of old inventory. We love the original Clip(pictured right). The size is small…small enough we’ve had trouble finding it. It plays OGG, FLAC, etc. Which allows us a better range of playback options. And it is great for quick on the go music enjoyment.

The addition of an expansion slot makes it even more useful. Aside from that, it incorporates a few stylistic changes. A square instead of round control pad, etc.

The Clip, + or not, is superior to the iPod shuffle in every way. It offers a good screen, configurable options, a built-in radio, etc. The one complaint some people have is the 15 hour battery life. But it is rechargeable, and how long do you need or expect for a player this size?

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The WD Media Player is a great device in both price and features. It plays almost any file off of a USB-connected flash or hard drive.

Details have been leaked of the next generation WD-TV-2, which adds a network connection for streaming video from a network connected drive. This device could replace the old computers we currently have connected to some televisions for easy media playback from our network server, although we may hold out for an Ion computer. Either way, it looks like a good update. More to come as details are available.

Western Digital has also added a discount option. The WD TV Mini. It is smaller than the current box and loses HDMI and full 1080p in favor of analog HD and SD outputs only.

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For years now, we have run a MythTV DVR. It is a Linux-based software package that turns a computer into a digital video-recorder, complete with scheduling of programs.

We started with a single cable box with an active firewire connection to change the channel and a PVR-250 card we got cheap. That encoded the composite output from the box to MPEG2.

Eventually, we got the hang of firewire, discovered a bunch of tricks to get it to cooperate without crashing, and we’re working almost entirely off of cable with firewire, using a digital tuner to add redundancy on broadcast stations.

Then one day, the cable company shut down every firewire connection. The channel changing still works, but not streaming directly from the box. So we ordered the HD-PVR 1212.

The HD-PVR turns high definition component video and analog or digital audio into H264-encoded files. Ultra-compressed, and requiring a good CPU to decode. It exploits the so-called “analog loophole“, allowing one to record HD video off of an HD source.

And MythTV will support it in Version 0.22. Some have backported the device support to 0.21, the current stable version. So, we upgraded our installation(after a backup) to the 0.22 ‘bleeding’ version. You use development versions at your own risk. Unless you are contributing to the process with information, complaints about things not working will be ignored, mostly.

The HD-PVR seemed very buggy under Version 0.22, capturing at all resolutions, 480i, 720p, 1080i, with AC3 audio. And all of the files were filled with corruption, making it hard to play them back. So, the other night, despite the notation that the ability of the HD-PVR to handle multiple resolutions at a time had been stabilized, we reverted to 720p and AAC analog audio. So far, it has made everything rock solid. We’re doing tests of this over this weekend, after which we’ll try bringing back AC3 audio and/or 1080i, to see how high a quality we can get with complete stability.

The HD-PVR is a decent device that is developing better Linux-based support.  It is unfortunately the best option for recording HD video from other sources, as any digital options are shut down by the content providers.

More on our efforts in this area when all tests are complete.

We plan to offer more thoughts later, as we will be doing some field-testing. We have installed Fedora 11, code named Leonidas on a MSI Wind U100 netbook which we will be taking with us on a trip this weekend, allowing us to explore it before rolling it out to other systems.

Our initial impressions are that F11 is a winner. It has been cleaned up at every level. We installed it from scratch and proceeded to install everything we routinely use on a mobile system, including Firefox(with Xmarks, formerly Foxmarks to store our bookmarks), Dropbox for our Documents and some configuration files, and Adobe Air so we can run our Twitter client. There was a problem with Adobe Air, but a quick net search found us the solution(a symbolic link so Air could find a library). The whole process took very little time.

Plymouth, Fedora’s graphical boot loader, now supports Intel based graphics cards, which are found in a majority of productivity based notebooks and netbooks. Since our previous systems didn’t support it by default, and we saw no need to override that, this is the first time we’ve seen the graphical loader outside of one try. Plymouth is plug-in capable for different boot screens. The default one is merely a circle that gradually fills in until it is complete. We’ll have to take a look at the alternatives there as well.On the other hand, it is a boot screen. We don’t want to spend too much time looking at it, especially if it slows things down to render something fancier.

Fedora also has changed the default volume group name to include the hostname…a minor touch, and the ext4 file system. Anaconda, the Fedora installer, continues to be fairly user-friendly. Fedora has rebuilt many areas of the program, but the feel is pretty much the same for installation.

Into the OS itself, Fedora 11 had a goal of a 20-second boot time. It isn’t quite achieved on a netbook, but it came fairly close. The netbook is the only system we use that doesn’t support the 64-bit architecture, so we used the 32-bit, which has now been rebased as i586 instead of i386 We also enabled Presto to reduce update sizes. On our first update, we had a 91% download savings with no noticeable problems.

The new versions of Gnome and Firefox look subtly different, but we haven’t had a chance to experiment with them yet, beyond configuring things the way we want them. We will report back on this.

Finally, as this is a mobile computer, Fedora 11 boasts new power saving measures, including an update to the handling of relatime backkported from the 2.6.30 kernel, which was just released, but after the Fedora 11 release. We look forward to seeing how these power measures enhance battery life.

So, in the end…Fedora, better than ever, no show-stopping problems we’ve seen so far…and more to come.

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