In May, I mentioned CableJive’s new iStubz sync cable in my review of their SoundDock cable, which I’d purchased last year, and I was contacted by Zack, one of the folks at CableJive, who offered to send me an iStubz cable for review. In the interest of full disclosure, please know that the cable I received was a review sample that I got to keep.

Would I have bought one otherwise? Yes. I think that at $7.95 for the 7cm size or at $8.95 for the 20cm size, these cables are a great deal. They fulfill a real need for those of us with iPods and iPhones — namely the need the declutter our desks. They’re much shorter than the standard sync cable that ships from Apple, they work just as well, they’re made from the same materials — thus, they’re perfect for quickly connecting our Apple peripherals to our laptops.

I got my cable in late May, and have been using it ever since. I opted for the 20cm size. I packed my old sync cable and put it away from the very first day after that. It’s useless to me now. The iStubz cable is much more convenient to use, and in terms of design, it comes closer to Apple’s design philosophy than Apple’s own cable.

The cable I have can be seen the right side of the picture shown above, or in the two photos shown below. The longer cable, the one used to connect the iPhone to the laptop, is the 20cm one, and the shorter cable, the one used to connect the iPod to the laptop, is the 7cm one.

I had some issues with the sturdiness of my 1st gen SoundDock cable, as you can see if you read my review of it, but these iStubz cables are nothing like it. These are mass produced and very likely made to the same quality standards as the Apple sync cables. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re made by the same manufacturer.

I took a couple of photos of my own to show you the difference between the iStubz cables and Apple’s standard sync cable. While I’ll agree that sometimes it’s better to use the standard sync cable, such as when you have a desktop computer with USB ports on the back, in most situations, the iStubz cable is all you need to connect your iPod or iPhone to your laptop.

If you want to buy the iStubz cable, you can get it directly from CableJive.

You might also like

• CableJive SoundDock and iStubz cables
• Why Apple won’t be around in 2010 (!)
• Data Robotics launches the amazing DroboPro

(c) Raoul Pop

Hardware review: CableJive’s iStubz cable for iPod and iPhone

Back in May, I wrote about the mole cricket — one of the pests that we have to deal with in our garden — and I posted a short video clip. It was a pretty crummy video, shot with my cellphone, which doesn’t have a macro video mode.

Last week, I had the chance to shoot footage of another mole cricket that my wife caught in our garden, and this time I used a camera that could record video in macro mode. The result is definitely worth it — at least I think so. You can see the mole cricket in all its nasty, creepy splendor. Let’s hope you won’t get nightmares. Just think, this little monster can fly. One of them could land on your face at night.

This video is also available in my photo catalog’s Wildlife gallery, at Vimeo and at YouTube.

You might also like

• In the garden – video
• The mole cricket
• Flowers, upclose and personal

(c) Raoul Pop

The mole cricket – with better video

This is a summary of articles I read and found interesting during this past week. The list is shared from among my feed subscriptions:

• Canon Digital Learning Center – EOS 5D Mark II: How to Use Manual Video Exposure
• Video: Energizer Bunneh! « Lolcats ‘n’ Funny Pictures of Cats – I Can Has Cheezburger?
• Creatures from the Sewer | Deep Sea News
• Demolished! 11 Beautiful Train Stations That Fell To The Wrecking Ball (And The Crappy Stuff Built In Their Place) » INFRASTRUCTURIST
• What happened to the great train stations? | Gulliver | Economist.com
• YouTube – Cop shooter gets beat down before court appearance

You might also like

• Condensed Knowledge – June 28, 2009
• Condensed Knowledge – June 21, 2009
• Condensed Knowledge – June 14, 2009

(c) Raoul Pop

Condensed Knowledge – July 5, 2009

Over the course of a few days, I recorded macro footage of flowers, then picked the best sequences, edited them and set them to a nice, soothing soundtrack. The end result is this — a short video that should get you nice and relaxed. It goes along nicely with my video of garden insects, also filmed in macro mode.

You can also see the video at Vimeo and YouTube. There are a few photos that go along with this as well. There are more photos in my Romanian Gardens and Parks set, too.

You might also like

• Remembering spring
• A more rounded point of view
• National Arboretum

(c) Raoul Pop

Flowers, upclose and personal

This is a summary of articles I read and found interesting during this past week. The list is shared from among my feed subscriptions:

• MOMENTOUS ANTI-COSMOS CHANGE BILL PASSED
• Ahmadinejad Sucks at Photoshop
• WTD
• Kindle DRM Follies
• What’s in a Name? Apple Removes a Space From “iPhone 3G S”
• Vodafone mobile home offers trendy and green nomadic life experience
• The Legend of Kodachrome Flat
• 7 Basic Knots Every Man Should Know
• In NYC this Afternoon? Watch Steve Nash Play Soccer
• Boston.com Mobile

You might also like

• Condensed Knowledge – July 5, 2009
• Condensed Knowledge – June 21, 2009
• Condensed Knowledge – June 14, 2009

(c) Raoul Pop

Condensed Knowledge – June 28, 2009

In March, we crossed the Carpathian Mountains in the county of Harghita, Romania, as we drove from the city of Bacau to Medias. The route was scenic and there were lots of beautiful places to stop and admire the view. Snow still covered the mountain peaks, and it covered the ground as well at higher altitudes. The roads got pretty bad at times, as is quite often the case in Romania, but they were fairly decent about half the time, which is something — for Romania. At any rate, the places we saw are among the more beautiful in the country.

I recorded a short video clip as we drove through the high peaks of the Harghita Mountains, and stopped in various places to take photographs. The video clip is embedded below. If you’re reading this on my feed and it doesn’t show up, then you can see it in my Video Log set.

The white line you see at the top of the abrupt mountain slope you see above isn’t a lens aberration. It’s snow. It covers the other side of the mountain. The visible slope is too abrupt and windswept for the snow to keep, so all that’s left is some dry brush and a few trees.

Here we begin to approach the tops of the peaks, and snow is more abundant.

The road hugs the mountain side closely as it curves upward. I love the wooden fence alongside the road, it’s so well suited to the place.

A small mountain cabin holds onto the top. It leans to the left, either because of the settling of its foundation over the time, or because of the strong winds at that altitude.

This is the road where I recorded the video clip you see below.

This mountain brook wound its way through a conifer forest. I think its color is either given by the mud in that region, or by iron ore deposits in the brook bed.

Here’s the video clip, recorded from our car, while driving.

Further reading

• List of mountain peaks in Romania
• Bacau (also see my photos from Bacau)
• Medias (also see my photos from Medias)

You might also like

• Passing through Cheile Bicazului (part 2)
• Passing through Cheile Bicazului
• Shenandoah Valley panoramas

(c) Raoul Pop

A drive through the Carpathian Mountains in early spring

Sorry for the baited title. This post is really about how web users interact with written content on the Internet, and how people in general interact with the news these days. But read on anyway, you might find this useful, and there’s even another cute kitty photo at the end.

I’ve been sitting on the sidelines lately, looking at the way people interact with items on FriendFeed, and I realized it’s all part of how people in general interact with the world these days. In a word, it’s superficial. On the web, there’s barely any interaction with items that have no thumbnails. If there’s no image to be digested quickly with a news item, then it gets buried, fast. That particular news item might be truly meaningful, it could have real value, it could be worth at least a few minutes of someone’s time, but users just don’t take the time to click through and find out what’s going on if there isn’t an image to go along with it. It’s like they’re little kids and they gotta have pictures in their story books. Whatever happened to being adults?

I’m not talking about my own articles, and I’m not talking about FriendFeed per se. I’m talking about the bigger picture. You can see this on TV as well. In the US nowadays, instead of showing the person who is talking, whether that be a news presenter or a person being interviewed, the stations overlay the audio on top of looping footage of the things the person is talking about, or they run the audio on top of marginally related video, ostensibly to keep a spastic audience glued to the set. In Romania, where I’ve been staying these past few months, they divide the TV screen in half. They show the commentator in one half, and they show video footage in the other. Your eyes keep jumping from one spot on the screen to the other, to make sure they catch all the action. And they also scroll text and stock and weather alerts on the bottom of the screen. It’s nuts. You just don’t get the chance to digest what the person is saying, because your attention is continually grabbed and pulled in many different directions.

If you are reading this on FriendFeed or in a RSS reader that shows media content thumbnails, do you know why you clicked on it? Likely because I had a photo of a cute kitten to draw your attention, not because you wanted to do some actual reading. It would have been much better if I showed some woman in a bikini — many more people would be reading this article right now, or at least skimming it, hoping for more photos.

Isn’t it sad though? For a person who likes to write, and wants to communicate through writing, it’s so disappointing to see the audience drifting from adult food to baby bites, to cute or sexy photos with (preferably) one or two sentence captions, instead of real articles. Whatever happened to sitting down and reading something?

Don’t tell me it’s because you’re busy. I don’t buy it. You’re lying to yourself and you’re lying to me. People have always had lots of work to do. Sure, it wasn’t computer work a few decades ago, but it was chores or factory work, and it took just as much time and much more effort. But they knew how to relax. They could sit down with a magazine or newspaper in hand, tune out everything else, and read something they found interesting.

You still have that ability. Stop being immature and clicking on everything, and pick the stuff you want to spend your time on carefully. There’s only so much time in one day, and you can’t keep up with a thousand RSS subscriptions and still do other things. Thin out the stuff you want to see on the web every day. On a larger scale, thin out the stuff you want to do every day, because you can’t do it all. Decide on what’s important to you, and stick with that. Maybe if more people took this advice, the world would be a saner place for those who write on the web, like me. We wouldn’t have to go nuts trying to get the word out about our content, because people would take the time to find interesting stuff and stick with it.

If you’re a FriendFeed user, let me tell you it’s not cool to subscribe to tons of people just so you can watch news items stream by you in real time and feel good about keeping up with everything that’s going on in the world, because that’s not the case. In the end, you’re just as superficial as the guy who looks at a magazine cover and thinks he knows everything inside it. Instead of wasting your time doing that stuff, pick the people you find interesting, weed out the rest, and really sit down to see what they have to say.

Now, just because you read/skimmed this far, here’s another photo of kittens, this time two of them, playing together. See, I’m not such a bad person.

You might also like

• Creating vs. consuming content
• Too many splogs
• Wish I could do something about those dogs

(c) Raoul Pop

Meet Buttons, the cutest kitteh ever

While traveling through the southeast corner of Romania one day, very close to the Black Sea, we decided to make a stop on the beach between the seaside resorts of Saturn and Venus. I have fond memories of these places, as my family and I vacationed there during my childhood.

This particular beach where we stopped had a wide swath of sand accessible from the main road. Since it was still spring, and still quite cold and windy, the beach was deserted. During the tourist season, cars aren’t allowed to park on the beach, but when we arrived, nobody seemed to mind — nobody was around to mind things, anyway. So we pulled our car right next to the sea and spent a bit of time walking up and down, breathing in the fresh sea breeze and taking in the scenery.

I recorded a short video clip, and took some photos of the beach and of my wife. I had quite a bit of a throat cold at the time, so you’ll hear a pretty hoarse voice on the video’s audio track. You can also see the video below, or in my Video Log set at SmugMug.

You might also like

• A drive through the Carpathian Mountains in early spring
• The ancient city of Histria
• Downtown Bacau, Romania

(c) Raoul Pop

Spring on the beach in Saturn, Romania

A software update noticed popped up on my MBP today, telling me Bluetooth Firmware Update 2.0 was available for download and install.

The update explanation says the following:

“This update provides bug fixes and better compatibility with the Apple Wireless Mighty Mouse and Apple Wireless Keyboard. It installs on all Macintosh systems with Bluetooth based on the Broadcom chipset.”

Finally! If you’re unfamiliar with the Bluetooth crashing problems on Mac computers, then you’re one of the few lucky ones. But the rest of us with late generation laptops like the MacBook Pro have had this issue for at least a few months now. This, for example, is just one of the many threads in the Apple Forums dealing with this persistent Bluetooth issue. On June 9, I’d had enough and vented on FriendFeed about it.

Basically, Bluetooth communications stopped working after a Mac was woken up from sleep mode, necessitating either a turn off/on cycle of the Bluetooth hardware, or another quick sleep/wake cycle. I for one didn’t have too many problems with the keyboard and mouse not working, but I did have a serious issue maintaining connectivity with my Nokia N95 via Bluetooth. My MBP kept refusing to connect to it, and I can’t remember how many times I removed and re-added it from my preferred Bluetooth devices. I even thought my N95 was to blame, until I tried turning Bluetooth off/on and realized my MBP could connect to it just fine after that.

From the looks of things, Apple’s been at work on a fix for the problem, and it’s now available for general install. So, by all means, download away and see if it helps you. I for one will be on the lookout for any more Bluetooth issues, to see if this firmware update has truly fixed the bug.

Before I close, I’d like to point out that even though a restart is not announced for the firmware update, you will most certainly need to restart your Mac. Once the Safari update installs, and your Mac restarts, the following dialog box pops up on the screen, informing you that the Bluetooth update will now begin, and your machine will restart once it’s finished. Just FYI.

You might also like

• A glimpse at the new Snow Leopard from Apple
• You simply can’t depend on computers
• If iMovie ‘08 crashes…

(c) Raoul Pop

Finally, an update for Apple’s Bluetooth problems

When the Duke Nukem series came out in the late 90s, I was a huge fan. There was a time when I played it every day, and I knew almost every trick on each level. I even bleached my hair once to get the Duke Nukem look. Given that I was also working out regularly back then and had some fairly serious muscle on me, it was a pretty good approximation.

As with all such phases, my obsession with the video game passed on, but I still looked forward to the sequel, called Duke Nukem Forever. I waited, along with countless others, since 1997, only to find out last month that 12 years later, in 2009, work on the game stopped altogether.

It was, by all means, an expected conclusion to what had become a game industry joke and cliché. Still, when I see the trailer for Duke Nukem Forever, released in 2007, I still feel regret for the promises made so many times that never came true. I’d have loved to play the sequel, if only for nostalgic reasons. This should have been awesome. Instead, it ended up in the crapper. What a shame.

[Video embedded from Don MacAskill's Duke Nukem Forever gallery at SmugMug]

You might also like

• It’s about expectations
• How many of my photos were stolen?
• The mole cricket – with better video

(c) Raoul Pop

Goodbye, Duke Nukem

On a clear day on the 21st of June, 2009, the sounds of distant thunder made their way into the valley in which the city of Medias, Romania, lies. I checked the sky but not a dark cloud was in sight. In spite of that, the wind began to quicken, and the ruffling of the leaves gave evidence of the approaching rain. Soon, dark clouds appeared over the horizon, and within a quarter of an hour, filled the sky. Peals of thunder punctuated every passing minute. The wind began to blow the dust from the pavement right into the eyes of passersby. People hurried home, shielding their faces.

In another quarter of an hour, the rain started to come down, suddenly. It rained in buckets, with large, thick, heavy drops that hit with a thud and splashed heavily all around. It only lasted another quarter of an hour or so, and it stopped as quickly as it started, but everything was soaking wet. The thick cover of dark clouds slowly parted, and the evening sun lit up the terracotta roof tiles in a golden-orange hue.

I’ve witnessed many rains of all kinds in my time, in temperate and tropical regions, but this was one of the few that I noticed more than the others. I’m not sure why — perhaps because I’d been outside, cleaning up the yard. In the past, I tended to slide in and out of my car and into air conditioned places (work, home), where I was seldom in contact with nature. Now that I’m spending more time at home, and in the yard, I’ve slowed down to where I can sense things a little more. I feel a little of my boyish wonder coming back, and that’s nice; I thought I’d lost it.

A quick video clip recorded while the rain was falling is up in my SmugMug galleries. You can watch it there, or below, if you happen to be reading this on my site (embedded videos don’t appear in the site feed, sorry, nothing I can do about it yet).

You might also like

• Passing through Cheile Bicazului
• A drive through the Carpathian Mountains in early spring
• Spring on the beach in Saturn, Romania

(c) Raoul Pop

First torrential summer rain of 2009

This morning, I took my trusty Olympus C-770UZ into our garden here in Romania and shot some video footage in super macro mode. I love the bokeh I get that way, and how close I can get to things. I found an iridescent beetle sunning itself on some parsley leaves, a butterfly resting on some spinach leaves, two beetles getting it on, a bee collecting pollen on a squash flower, ants drinking nectar on a raspberry blossom, and more.

The video is embedded below at DVD quality (640×480). If it doesn’t show up in the feed, then you can view it directly in my galleries at SmugMug. You can also see it at Vimeo if you like.

You might also like

• The mole cricket – with better video
• The mole cricket
• Flowers, upclose and personal

(c) Raoul Pop

In the garden – video