Where I left you all last time was at the point where I was deciding on what to do next. Indeed, I did contact the retailer to ask for a replacement, and another RCR-1 was shipped out to me in due course. It suffered the same problem. Contrary to Sangean’s claims however, the devices were not atypical of the RCR-1 model line. I believe they were all like this, and the final resolution to the problem only proves it further.

After telling the distributor about the problem, he offered another replacement. This time though, it wasn’t the same clock. Indeed, Sangean knew about the model’s shortcomings and was already now offering an updated model. Presenting the Sangean RCR-3:

At first glance, it looks just like the RCR-1 with some different buttons and colourings. However, it actually trumps the RCR-1 in several ways. Most notably it now has an external transformer which is completely silent, and instantly solves the only critical problem of it’s predecessor.

Interestingly though it also added some other extras. For starters, it now supports 4 alarms rather than two, and the active alarm buttons light up green when they are active. The Humane-Wake-Up system has also been tweaked. Whereas before the radio/buzzer would started out quiet and quickly become louder on the RCR-1, it now happens at a much slower pace, which I find ideal. Changing DST and general alarm settings are now also much much easier, requiring far less button pressing - usually by utilising button-hold commands.

The backlight is now white instead of blue which while not as fancy, actually makes it much clearer especially at dimmer light levels. The dimmer also now gradually fades to dark when you activate it, which adds a touch of class. When in dimmed mode however, pressing any buttons on the clock will temporarily light it up again - just for long enough so you can see on the screen as to what you are doing. Brilliant. As before, the backlight colour changes to orange when the alarm activates, but this time only for the analogue clock face. The LCD display stays white, keeping it nice and readable, if a tad awkward looking.

Unlike the Australian version of the RCR-1, the RCR-3 also now supports regular 12-hour time format. This isn’t exactly what I would call an “extra” but it’s certainly something that should always have been in the previous model, which now is. Granted, the presence of the analogue clock makes the digital display much less important, but I’ve never been a fan of 24-hour time formats.

The only real downside to the clock would have to be it’s colouring - white and silver probably looks good in other locations, but my desk would have suited the RCR-1’s complete silver look a bit better. Given all the other advantages that this clock radio has though, I can’t complain. They’ve sacrificed a few minor cosmetic advantages to add in some great functionality and bug fixes, and hence, my quest is over. If you’re here because you’re looking for a bigger list of the clocks feature, you’d do well to read my RCR-1 post, as it details the others not mentioned here.

At this point I would like to post a shout-out to the retailer who was extremely helpful throughout this quest. The guys at The Hi-Fi Trader in Sydney certainly deserve it. I would certainly go back there again, save for the fact that there’s nothing else on their shelves which interest me in the slightest. But I digress.

The Sangean RCR-3 is the perfect clock radio.

The best analogy I can think of is the car I drive. Just a few months ago I was driving a 15 year old bomb. All sorts of things were wrong with it, and it was generally not a pleasant driving experience. Now I have a brand new automobile. Being new, it has everything I could possibly want in a car, and more. What this means though, is that the few niggling bugs which do exist (a couple of rattles, a scratch or two, and a slightly misaligned dash panel) drive me absolutely insane. It’s so close to being perfect, but just not quite there because of some really stupid minor issues.

This is why Firefox 3 RC1 makes me so frustrated, and unfortunately very few of the issues appear to be fixable before the full release.

The first and most glaring problem I have is the default theme. Now, this issue is a carry-over from Firefox 2, which also had a theme that I couldn’t stand. Thankfully the theme from Firefox 1.5 was made available and I have been using it ever since, but it concerns me that yet again, a new release has taken another step backwards in the looks department. I understand there is a need for an integrated look across the various platforms, and I can see how that would make it harder to do whilst also keeping some similarities across them all. I also understand that big strides have been made particularly on the Mac for integration. Honestly though, IE7, Opera and Safari all look much, much nicer. If the keyhole buttons were considered too ugly for Vista then I can’t fathom why they were deemed acceptable for Firefox. -5 points. Subjective, I know.

No piece on Firefox 3 would be complete without the not-officially-named “Awesome Bar”. This is a term which a few Mozillans have given to the new functionality present in the address bar for Firefox 3. No longer do you need to type the start of an address to have similar things pop up for you - now you can type any words at all. The autocomplete will then match what you type to both the URL and page title of the sites in your history, and match them up intelligently according to your previous browsing habits. While overall it is a big plus, a couple of niggles are present. Most importantly, stop words need to be handled better. When I typed in “for” I was first greeted with “Slashdot: News for nerds…” when I was trying to get to some forums instead. Thankfully it has since remembered my choices and it’s no longer the first suggestion. These unimportant words need to be given a much lower priority. Secondly, the suggested addresses and their favicons make terrible use of space, and add to the already serious clutter problem. When the last beta release was stealthily installed on my mothers computer, she was convinced that she had been infected with adware because of it. +5 points but -1 for the implementation shortfalls.

The clutter problem is one which I have been keeping a keen eye on ever since the now ubiquitous RSS/Feed icon was first put inside Firefox’s address bar. Now in Firefox 3, as well as the clutter added from the Awesome Bar, we have the feed icon, the favourites star, and 3 different kinds of favicon underlays depending on the security level of the site you are visiting. No longer does the address bar turn yellow on SSL encrypted sites - the left-most part now just turns blue. And for sites with properly verified certificates, they’ll turn green and become extra large. It is a surprising move since they only just recently got IE and Opera on board with the yellow SSL cue, and I am not sure if this is a particularly good solution. -1 for the address bar clutter, but I’ll abstain from judgement on the security colourings for now.

The downloads manager has seen substantial change. While the additional features are mostly welcome, the price paid for them has been the amazing simplicity which the download manager provided back in Firefox 1 and 2. No longer are the pause/resume options presented by easy to read text links. Now they are tiny white icons - they don’t save much space, they don’t look better, and they don’t make it easier to use. The file icons and file names are too large, and cause the entire window to feel cluttered by a lack of padding. Finally, the easy button that takes you to your regular downloads folder has been removed, and replaced by a completely useless search field. Why anyone would need to search through their downloads is beyond me, if you have a button that goes straight to that folder anyway. +1 for the extra features, nothing more.

Then we come to the list of smaller changes.

• The options window. Those menu icons across the top? They’re not evenly spaced. Upon highlighting them, the button sizes are all different. Does it look unprofessional? Yes. -1
• The new password manager dialogue. It now pops a short while later, so you can first see if your login was successful before being asked whether or not you want Firefox to remember it. +1
• Once again they’ve left the “duplicate tab” menu item off the list, and only doable as an extension. -1
• Luckily for Mozilla, getting that extension (and others) will be a much simpler process, with the new built-in add-on finder. +2 points
• Adding tags to bookmarks increases clutter and I cannot think of a more useless feature to have added. -1
• Full-screen zoom. Something I know a few people have been waiting a very long time for. +1 point.

After that exhaustive analysis, the list comes out with an overall score of 1. Impressive.

Lastly, we come to the less noticable improvements. Memory usage has been slashed, speed has been boosted, and rendering improvements are all around the place. One might argue that these are in fact the most important improvements in the browser, and I couldn’t really disagree with you. However for the average user they are among the least important, and let’s face it, Firefox has already won over all the web fanatics out there. The challenge is getting everyone else. Nevertheless, all of these improvements can’t go ignored (by me at least), so they get +10 points. I would have given them +50, but apparently the bug which causes extremely slow smooth-scrolling on fixed backgrounds won’t be fixed in Firefox 3. That’s a shame, as I’ve been waiting for that one to be fixed for years.

In conclusion, I’m being a bit of a bastard. Of course I can’t just add up the points above and claim a score for the program, because there are many more minor tweaks which I just don’t care to really look at and try out. I also don’t care to try it out on other platforms. Firefox is staying ahead of the game, but it seems that increased competition from the likes of Microsoft, Opera and Apple have caused Mozilla to rush through their latest Firefox features without the usual polish. So much work has gone under the hood of Firefox 3 that to appreciate all that it offers, you’d have to be in the business of making websites. For the average joe, the improvements are numerous, but it could be so much better. Knowing this makes me grind my teeth.

As time progressed, I got used to the nuances of the BenQ, but at the same time I’ve grown more and more aware of the move to widescreen formats. Previously not very well supported by many games, this is now no longer the case. Seeing all of Blizzard’s StarCraft II demos in widescreen format, I knew I’d have to make sure I was able to play it that way by the time it was out. So, I got myself a new monitor.

Whilst scanning the web over the last few months to research potential candidates, the Samsung 226BW showed itself to be the frontrunner amongst many forumers. Whilst there was some controversy surrounding the different panel variants sold under the same monitor model, the general consensus showed this screen to be the best for those willing to spend a bit more than what the cheaper brands could offer. However, by the time I was ready to get one two weeks ago, it had effectively been superceded by a newer model - the 2253BW. Similar specs, slightly different bezel and a different stand (still no height adjust). The best part though is that the 2253BW’s entry price point was lower than the 226BW was going for at the time - in fact, my purchase proved to be less than that of my old 17″ BenQ. How times have changed.

The first thing I will say is, the 2253BW is not perfect. It uses a TN panel, which is a type of LCD panel which by nature cannot reproduce colours perfectly - instead using algorithms to mimic the colours it can’t produce. Alternative panel types can reproduce all the colours needed, and with better viewing angles, but at a cost of speed. For gamers, the drastically better response times of a TN panel are typically more important - plus they’re cheaper. Unless you like editing photos, making graphics, or websites, then TN is generally the way to go.

Getting the colours right on the 2253BW took me a while, but to speed up the process for any of you who may get one, here are a couple of tips. Firstly, don’t bother using the MagicTune or Natural Color software that comes with the screen. These can make the colours on the screen appear more vibrant, but at a cost of accuracy. It was a week of fiddling before I finally uninstalled MagicTune, and only now am I generally satisfied with the colour accuracy of the screen. Even then, it’s certainly no CRT, but that’s to be expected. Secondly, don’t spend too long in a single sitting fiddling with the buttons on the monitor - it played havoc with my wrists. In a perfect example of form over function, the buttons for the screen are all hidden on the underside of the bezel. To press them, your fingers need to slide under the transparent plastic fitting and then up behind it to touch the buttons. It’s an attractive, minimal arrangement which does mean the power light is rather fancily reflected, but as far as usability goes it’s a disaster.

The viewing angles are distinctly better than other LCDs I have used, but the vertical angles could still be better. I can sit with my head 60cm from the screen and not notice any real degradation around the edges. This compares to my friend’s 22in Chimei 221D, on which you could see distinct yellow discolouration on the sides even when just sitting normally in front of it. With the 2253BW, it actually takes a bit of movement to see this discolouration, and even then it’s not as pronounced. I won’t bother telling you how it compares to my old BenQ. It’s just no contest there.

Backlight bleeding on my screen is particularly noticable at the top when playing dark movies (usually letterboxed slightly). Other 2253 owners I have read about have had various results with this, some getting it worse than others. It’s not a big issue for me, as I can’t notice it under any other circumstances. The backlighting itself is also still slightly uneven. It is much better than the BenQ, and is definitely within my realm of acceptability, but I certainly can’t wait until LED backlights become the norm on all LCD screens - the uniformity they bring looks to be truly worth it.

Since I got the monitor I’ve already seen a shift in the way I operate on the computer. Using full screen is now for movies and games only. The extra room does wonders for just general web viewing and chatting, with the IM contact list no longer taking up valuable browser window space when docked. In fact, it no longer needs to be docked - there’s so much room it just floats around on the side, completely out of the way.

Civilization 4 benefits greatly from the extra room. Just being able to see more around your cities and active units greatly assists with decision making. I did also give UT2004 a whirl to see how the screen does on an FPS. I haven’t tried more demanding games like Team Fortress 2 yet, but given that TF2 only runs OK-ish on medium detail on the smaller BenQ screen, I think I may be in over my head trying to run at even higher a resolution. Unfortunately the other games I’ve been playing again lately - StarCraft and WarCraft 3 - both don’t support widescreen resolutions (or in StarCraft’s case, any resolutions but 640×480). Thankfully Nvidia’s control panel means I can still play these games in their correct aspect ratio, a feature sorely missing from ATI’s drivers last time I checked a month ago.

I just now realised I haven’t made mention of ghosting or dead pixels - I guess that’s because I’ve not noticed any of either. For most people I would imagine these will similarly be non-issues. All in all, the Samsung 2253BW is a solid product on it’s own. The real killer though is the price - a year ago you’d be paying more for a much dodgier 22in screen, from a more questionable manufacturer. Now I just need to get my hands on a new PC that can power it properly.

What irritates me however, is despite the fact that they’ve been hugely common for decades now, you still can’t go out and buy a cheap one which has no glaring issues. Surely manufacturers have had enough experience over the years to iron out the bugs? The only way you can get a product approaching what I would deem an acceptable level of quality is to spend, spend, spend. So, being a very light sleeper and extremely fussy about the things I buy, that’s exactly what I did.

The clock in question is the Sangean RCR-1. I decided on this model after some exhaustive research in to what was out there - a depressing mass of cheap junk topped off with a few high quality Tivoli Audio devices approaching $300. Even for my tastes, that’s outlandish.

The RCR-1 slipped in at around $150, which was still far more than I expected to have to pay for a solid clock radio, but the lack of alternatives (given my strict requirements) meant I didn’t have much choice. The clock radio which it has now replaced was a $40 no-name brand from Target, so it wasn’t going to be hard to beat.

The Sangean is by no means perfect, and perhaps my irritation at that fact is why I felt the need to even write this piece at all, but it does represent what I feel is a good effort by a company which does what no others have really bothered to do. At least, not that I’ve seen. What follows is a list of clock radio pitfalls which I feel need to be addressed in every product, and how the Sangean stacks up.

• The real basics: Size matters. No-one wants an enormous device taking up valuable desk space when it doesn’t need to. This was one of the reasons I bought my last clock radio - it was super thin (maybe an inch and a half in depth) and had virtually no footprint. The Sangean is a fair bit bigger, but mostly in width and breadth (approx 6.5 inches each). At only 4 inches deep, it’s very reasonable.

  Decent sound quality is what the old model sacrificed to be so tiny, I suppose. The RCR-1’s speaker on the other hand is, for it’s size, quite respectable, with an output jack if you want something even better. Like all modern clock radios, it also has battery backup if the power goes out. Exciting stuff.

• A clear display: This one is a bit of a no brainer, but surprisingly the manufacturer of my last clock even got this wrong. While the digits were massive and easy to read from far away (face-on), reading them from an angle was near impossible due to the cheap LCD’s terrible viewing angle properties.

  The RCR-1 meanwhile trumps this with an amazingly clear digital display (with an extremely bright back light), but also with an analog display which amusingly catches up to the digital time when you set it. Having the analog display also means the time is easily readable when the backlight is switched off, which is how I usually have mine. Which brings us to the next big issue.

• A proper dimmer: Being the light sleeper I am, I find it terribly hard to get to sleep when there is a noticable source of light eminating from near my head. My outgoing clock radio had a neat feature in that it automatically dimmed itself depending on how much light was in the room. Unfortunately this meant that there was no manual dimmer - a big letdown as the “dim” setting was far too bright. The last few years I have kept a few small books to cover it up at night.

  The Sangean lacks the automated feature, but the manual dimmer is second to none. There is a switch for “bright” and “dim”, with the dim setting itself being adjustable in itself, right down to emitting no light at all. This is fantastic for me, as keeping it quite close to the lowest setting means I don’t need to worry about it at all.

• No backlight bleeding: Clock radios should not be made of a thin white shell of plastic, like my old one. The backlight of the LCD shone right through the case, effectively meaning that to blot out the light, I had to cover the entire clock rather than just the face of the display.

  The Sangean thankfully is made of solid materials and feels like a quality product, with no light shining through where it shouldn’t. Of course, it’s not such an issue with the excellent dimmer.

• Simple controls: This is one area where the old clock was reasonable - it didn’t have many features, so it only had a few buttons. However, there is one set of controls I have found to be difficult on all clock radios I have ever used. The tuning and volume slider wheels. On my old clock it was impossible to change the volume or the tuning without working myself into an odd position in bed while reaching over, incessantly fighting with the gritty movement of the wheels to get the volume or station I wanted.

  The Sangean fixes this by having larger, smooth sliding wheels on the side which are extremely easy to move, while being heavy enough so that brushing against them won’t change anything. The Sangean does have a lot of buttons, but this is a natural side effect of having a lot of features. Plus, seven of the buttons on the top of the radio are for present stations - something my last clock didn’t have at all, though admittedly not hard to find on other models.

• Smart alarm settings: I recall my first clock radio let me set the time for the radio to come on each morning. The next radio after that let me set two different times, which was good for uni with some days starting with later classes. The Sangean, however, takes this to the next level. With the RCR-1 you can specify which days of the week the alarm will go off. Need to be up at 7am each week day, but 9am each Sunday? This clock can do it, and you never have to remember to set the alarms (or unset them) the night before. This is a brilliant feature and given the lack of complexity in it’s computation, I can’t believe it wasn’t standard on more clocks years ago.

  The Sangean goes above and beyond with the alarm in two other ways as well. Usually a bright blue colour, the clock’s backlight changes to a light orange when the alarm goes off. This makes for an excellent visual cue on those darker early mornings, and also helps to make sure you don’t walk in to anything as you are getting up to find the light switch.

  Finally, the alarm audio (whether you have it set to a radio station or an actual beep) will come on very quietly, and gradually get louder. I can’t count the number of times I have been slightly startled awake with the old clock radio because the station was playing something a bit loud at the time. In addition to this, the Sangean’s radio alarm settings have their volume set differently from the regular radio, so if you turn it up during the day and forget to turn it down before you go to bed, it won’t wake up everyone in the house when the alarm goes off next morning. The station too is set independently, so if you left the clock tuned in to your usual techno-junk station, you can rest assured you’ll still wake up to your usual news station or classic concertos.

• No Humming! This is the one area where the old clock simply wins out, and is the only big beef I have with the Sangean. The quiet “humming” so common in small appliances like clock radios is from their power transformers. Whilst a quality transformer can be designed or treated in ways to mitigate this, the most basic way to eliminate this problem is to have the transformer separate from the device. As such, my old clock had the transformer at the wall plug, far away from my head, and causing no problems at all.

  Not so with the Sangean. While the humming is so quiet that it’s impossible to hear in the day time, at night when my head is right near the clock, it is infuriating. Thankfully, tightening the screws at the back of the device actually made a substantial difference, but I am still considering whether or not take take it back over this small yet critical shortfall. I have emailed Sangean and they said it should indeed be replaced, but given the nature of the problem I do really wonder if I would just be given a clock with the exact same issue.

And so, there we are. I never thought there would really be this much to write on what is certainly not the most exciting topic of the modern era, but it just goes to show how little thought has gone in to most products, and how different that makes the Sangean. But it’s still not perfect. The humming needs to go. The backlight really should have an photonic sensor for this kind of money, and the controls could be simpler. Enabling or disabling DST for example requires two button presses too many. And the manual was pretty lame.

That said, it does have even more bonuses which I haven’t gone over yet, simply because I find them superfluous. The clock can tune in to the atomic clock radio frequency to ensure it always has the right time - something not available to me in Australia though. There is also a “nap” feature, letting you easily set it to alarm in 30, 40, or however many minutes up to 120 before it alarms - perfect for afternoon siestas. It’s getting silly now.

But while it’s nice to know that one company can get so close to making the perfect clock radio, it’s a bit disturbing that after having these around for so long, we still don’t have a perfect one.

For the past 6 months I have made the hour-long journey to work in a 1992 Corolla Seca. Several dozen hail dents, mismatching and broken hub caps, disintegrating seat covers, and a steadily growing amount of rust. It also doesn’t have a working sound system. My trips to work were typically either in silence (or as silent as one can hope for, with all the road noise a car like this doesn’t block) or with my iPod Shuffle plugged in to my ears. When I say a Shuffle, I don’t mean one of these funky new clip-on ones. Mine is an original 512mb USB stick, and the lack of capacity really kills it’s usefulness once you’ve gone through the collection a few times and can’t be arsed plugging it back in to iTunes.

As of 2 weeks ago however, an opportunity arose for change. My new car, being a black one of these, actually has a working sound system. (For those who care, my variant is the 2.0 TDI with DSG). Not content to just burn MP3 CDs, I made my way to the department store last Saturday and bought myself some new gear worthy of the new car. And colour coded, too.

First up is a 3rd generation iPod Nano. Black, of course, to match the car, and 8GB, of course, to ensure my future needs are covered. Currently I have my entire music collection on there and am using barely a quarter of the space available, so I should be set. All with the added bonus of not having a hard drive to clunk out on me.

I have to admit that when the 3rd Nano was released, I thought it looked incredibly stupid. Gone were the slick dimensions of the first two models, only to add in video support which I felt (and to some extent still feel) to be completely inane on such a small screen. Seeing one in the flesh for the first time on Saturday, however, changed my opinion completely. I didn’t know just how darn small and how darn thin these things are. Up close they are incredibly slick, and once accustomed to the screen dimensions, the older Nanos seem visually restricted.

The only things I find odd about the Nano is that the earplugs for it are still white (which makes sense for any colour Nano except black), and there were no provided cushioned bud covers (luckily my Shuffle came with two pairs). Of course, given that my iPod lives in the car, neither of these are really much of an issue, but odd nonetheless.

This brings us to product number two. Since the VW doesn’t have any auxilary inputs (which should be considered a sin in any new car), the only way to realistically get sound moving through the car speakers has been to find an FM transmitter. And since there is only one easily accessible 12v power point in the car, it also needs to be able to charge the iPod at the same time. Thanfully, after a quick walk around the electronics section of the department store, a few options presented themselves.

The best of these, that I could see, was the Griffin iTrip Auto SmartScan. The device houses a few nifty features, such as a light on the charger which tells you what is going on using different colours, a good clear LCD screen, and the SmartScanner. This last feature supposedly scans the airwaves for the three best available frequencies to broadcast on, and lets you save them. All good, at least in theory, for a place like Sydney where the FM bands are chock full of useless stations.

Unfortunately, playing with the iTrip when I got home proved the SmartScan function to be somewhat useless. Scanning several times, none of the detected stations could ever broadcast my iPods music clearly, some not at all. It was through some manual fiddling that I settled on 103.7, which will be fine until I go to Brisbane, where that just happens to be a major radio station. But who wants to go to Brisbane anyway?

The actual biggest selling point of the iTrip Auto was it’s size. The charger is tiny, the FM transmitter is also nice and small, and that’s essentially what caused me to buy it over a chunkier Belkin option also in the store. It’s size means I can stuff it and the iPod in to the tiny dash compartment where the power outlet is, closed off and hidden from anyone peeking in through the Golf’s windows when not being used.

Overall the device is working well - the music from the iPod is quite clear, though the odd glitch has to be expected, given the tiny power output of the transmitter. I am a picky person, and even I find it acceptable, so I doubt anyone else would find it bothersome. That said, I can’t say that the SmartScan is worth the added cost over Griffin’s more basic iTrip Auto, assuming the transmitter is the same. I certainly would have gone for the cheaper option if it were available in the store.

And so, my very own black operation moves forward. Black sunglasses. Black phone. Black car. Black iPod. All that’s left on the list is the black computer, black screen, and hell, I’ll take the black president too.