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Review: HTML5 for Web Designers

Paul Stamatiou — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 19:52:04 +0000

While it went on sale back in May, A List Apart‘s first publication, HTML5 for Web Designers, only just began shipping. I have been eagerly awaiting my copy and it just arrived. I’m not normally compelled to write reviews of technical books I read, mainly because I don’t read them all at once and they usually just lie around my apartment as an every-so-often technical resource (when Google turns up nothing). This book is different. It reads like much less of a verbose white paper — or HTML5 specification rather — and more like a refreshing one-sitter.

At only 85 pages, this book is rather slim and handy for taking — and reading in its entirety — on my morning Caltrain commute to Notifo HQ.

The HTML5 spec is 900 pages and hard to read. HTML5 for Web Designers is 85 pages and fun to read. Easy choice.

What to Expect

This book is not a one-stop shop for all your HTML5-related needs. It’s an introductory resource aimed at showing you a snippet of the new functionality contained within HTML5 and the reasoning behind it with a dabble of example code. Not much more than that. It scratches the surface — enough for you to know what you want to use to do something in your next project and point you in the right direction with how to get started and research more. That being said I was a little disappointed upon flipping through the pages of the book when it arrived. I wanted to see sections about things like geolocation, drag and drop, Web Storage, Web SQL Database, Web Workers, WebSockets and so on.

Instead I was greeted with this quote in the book:

The [JavaScript] APIs in HTML5 are very powerful. They are also completely over my head. I’ll leave it to developers smarter than me to write about them. The APIs deserve their own separate book.

Fair enough. Those are rather technical subjects and this is an introductory book. I can live with that. In fact, the first chapters of the the book cleared up many misconceptions about what the HTML5 spec actually encompasses. Many people lump things together in the HTML5 buzzword. Web Storage isn’t even in the HTML5 spec, but I had to read Mark Pilgrim’s Dive Into HTML 5 to learn that nugget:

[Web Storage] was at one time part of the HTML5 specification proper, but was split out onto its own specification for uninteresting political reasons.

Author Jeremy Keith, whose DOM Scripting and Bulletproof Ajax books have been in my arsenal for several years, sets out to explain some of the more landmark structure and feature changes in HTML5 while keeping the book far from a boring technical read:

Suppose there’s an evil bastard out there who hates the web and all who sail her. This person probably doesn’t care that it’s incredibly rude and stupid to embed an audio file that plays automatically. Thanks to the autoplay attribute, such malevolent ambitions can be realized

Doesn’t quite read like an O’Reilly book. I like that.

Chapter Breakdown

HTML5 for Web Designers is separated into the following chapters. I took some notes while reading and will attempt to clean them up and present you with some broad takeaways for each. This is not a summary of the book and some sections are left out. I recommend you snatch a copy the book to get the bigger picture. I just want to share what I learned.

A Brief History of Markup
The Design of HTML5
Rich Media
Web Forms 2.0
Semantics
Using HTML5 Today

A Brief History of Markup
The first two chapters setup the history of HTML and provide some good insight into the rather confusing space of HTML5. Keith begins all the way back in 1991 with Sir Tim Berners-Lee proposing the original HTML spec, which started at version 2.0. Mentions of the Internet Engineering Task Force, the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) intertwine with mentions of Web Apps 1.0, XHTML 1.0, HTML 4.01 and lots more specifications and version numbers. The current state of HTML5 emerges — the WHATWG and W3C HTML Working Group are both working on the HTML5 specification in a still-complicated manner.

The Design of HTML5
HTML5 is all about backwards compatibility — supporting existing content. Lots of emphasis on how changing existing user behavior is just about impossible. A key point of this chapter that sets the tone for the book starts with the description of the relatively simple HTML5 doctype and character encoding:

From that Keith ascertains that HTML5 places less importance on versions and more importance on backwards compatibility — browsers support features, not doctypes. Likewise, other facets of the syntax have been simplified. You no longer need to specify text/javascript or text/css for script or CSS inclusions, respectively.

HTML5 for Web Designers mentions how in the favor of backwards compatibility and supporting existing content (starting to see the trend here?) that certain elements are being marked as obsolete, not deprecated, in HTML5. These obsolete elements include frame, frameset, noframes, acronym, font, big, center, strike, bgcolor, cellspacing, cellpadding, valign and big. Meanwhile, certain elements like small, b, i and cite received an update in their meaning in regards to how each one bestows importance and semantics upon their contents. Keith also mentioned how the a element now officially supports wrapping multiple non-a elements in a single a element in HTML5, even though browsers have been able to do this for a while already.

The chapter ends on a brief mention about JavaScript APIs like drag and drop and UndoManager that HTML5 will document, but there’s no diving deeper into that subject matter.

Rich Media
Canvas, audio and video make their appearance in chapter 3. These elements bring native rich media support to the browser without the use of plug-ins like Flash or Silverlight, but they are not without their caveats. The canvas element lacks a DOM and as such is less accessible to screen readers unless used in certain, less advantageous manners. Aside from that (rather large) nitpick, canvas seems to hold much promise. It currently only has a 2D API, currently capable of JavaScript actions like strokes, fills, gradients, shadows, shapes and Bezier curves that can be run at any time. Keith suggests thinking about canvas as an environment for creating dynamic images.

Audio and video are easier to begin using right off the bat but it is quickly realized that browser limitations force developers to encode different versions of media as well as include fallback content to cover all the bases. Boolean attributes (not the same as Boolean values) are touched upon. Just think of them like how putting “checked” in an input checkbox changes its value, regardless of whether “checked” is set to anything. The audio element has several of these Boolean attributes: autoplay, loop, controls. The audio player is scriptable via calling functions like play() on the element. Meanwhile, the video element is both scriptable and styleable.

Web Forms 2.0
The fourth chapter has many sections introducing and showing off new elements and features for forms — perhaps the most interesting section for web application developers by far. And it is with that declaration that I point out the placeholder attribute for input field. If you’ve ever had to do something like this:

onfocus="if (this.value=='Search') this.value=' ';" onblur="if (this.value=='') this.value='Search';"

Then you’ll immediately know what placeholder does. It replaces the need for that JS snippet — in supported browsers. This is where Jeremy takes the time to check whether an element supports that attribute. This is done many times in the chapter and reinforces the motif that working with HTML5 is more about feature detection rather than browser detection. This is touched on more in the last chapter.

Other elements discussed include:

autofocus
required — Boolean attribute for input fields (think form validation)
autocomplete — Boolean value to tell browsers whether or not they should automatically fill in forms if they have the data (for example, tell a credit card number text input field not to automatically fill)
datalist — hybrid between input and select. Provides a drop-down of items while typing text into an input or while focused, which users may use to click on the item they want.
many new input types: search, email, tel, url, range (slider!), spinner, date, datetime, datetime-local, time, month, week, color and pattern

And of course, there’s a smattering of Keith’s quips. In regards to how type=”date” brings up a native calendar display:

Opera implements these input types using its patented ugly-stick technology.

And about using the pattern attribute (regular expression):

Most of the time, you’ll never need to use the pattern attribute. On the occasions that you do, you have my sympathy.

Semantics
Chapter 5 is the beefiest chapter in the short pamphlet-like book and with good reason; it discusses new structure changes in HTML5 with a focus on bridging the gap between machine-readable and human-readable markup. There’s some talk of microformats and how they were an early attempt at web-based semantic markup and dataformats by utilizing present technologies, like simply adding particular class names to elements.

Several new elements are introduced again.

mark — like highlighting a certain snippet of content without attaching any semantic importance to it
time
meter — for measurements
progress — like meter but more for dynamically changing values. scriptable.

But the pieces that might take a second to grok are in the structure section of this chapter. While at first they may just seem like new elements to use in place of divs that you already use, they will provide web browsers (that support it) with “a completely new way of understanding your content.” Using these elements isn’t always as simple as say, replacing your

with

. These new semantic elements place importance on content rather than position and it is as such that Keith provided a few examples of how a footer element would make sense to mark up author information that is positioned inside of a sidebar.

section — used to group related content
header — container for a group of introductory or navigational aids. document can have multiple header elements. typical to use header within section.
footer — info about author of main content, links to related content and so on
aside — related content but separate from main content
nav — list of links for major navigational info and sitewide nav. typically used within header element.
article — self-contained related content designed for syndication. think blog posts

Last but not least was an explanation about content models and the new outlining algorithm. Inline elements are now known as text-level semantics, block level elements like lists, divs and paragraphs are grouping content, forms are their own content model, new structural elements listed above are sectioning content while images, audio, video and canvas are being referred to as embedded content.

Things get a bit trickier when talking about sectioning content and outlines:

In HTML5, each piece of sectioning content has its own self-contained outline. That means that you don’t have to keep track of what heading level you should be using—you can just start from h1 each time

Each piece of sectioned content can have its own header element and other headings; several times on the same page. This means you don’t have to many levels of headings to get the desired nesting. Use sections to divide it up and start each one as if it were a new page, if that makes sense. Then you can use the hgroup element to ensure that only the first heading listed contributes to the outline. An example use case would be having a website title heading and tagline within an hgroup inside of a header element.

I can’t describe the concept as well as Jeremy did without going into lots of detail, so I’ll leave it at that. Certain elements called sectioning roots are not subject to the outline algorithm: blockquote, td, fieldset. You can imagine how that works out.

Using HTML5 Today
In short, you can’t use everything you just learned right away and expect it to work in good chunk of modern (as of this writing) browsers. Instead, HTML5 for Web Designers enforces good practice by using tools like Modernizr to detect supported features in browsers and use new features where supported, gracefully degrading where not supported. You can start by updating to the new doctype and getting in the habit of using new semantic elements by changing the classes of your divs to section, header, aside and so on. When the time comes that HTML5 has better support in browsers, you can simply go back and switch to actually using those elements.

Other HTML5 Resources

While HTML5 for Web Designers is among the very first HTML5 books to hit shelves, several others from reputable publishers are coming later this summer. However, I will go out on a limb and say most will not be as brief and easy a read as HTML5 for Web Designers. After reading it though, I definitely want to learn more and feel like this book barely touched the tip of the iceberg.

Introducing HTML5 (Voices That Matter)
HTML5: Up and Running
Dive Into HTML5 — highly recommended
Beginning HTML5 and CSS3: Next Generation Web Standards
Pro HTML5 Programming: Powerful APIs for Richer Internet Application Development
HTML5 Rocks — Google created and curated website
HTML5 Demos — examples by Remy Sharp
HTML5 Doctor — quite possible the most comprehensive HTML5-centric blog currently in existence.

Verdict

Lovely typography and whitespace galore

I give HTML5 for Web Designers 8.5 out of 10 Stammys. Oh and I just used the HTML5 meter tag on that rating, as mentioned in the book. The book is a well-designed quick and simple read, if a little too beginner-oriented. I would have liked to see more discussion about JavaScript browser APIs and some more in-depth examples along with included code on a website somewhere. At $18 + shipping for a slim book, you might double-think about whether HTML5 for Web Designers is actually worth it for you.

On an related note, do you buy technical books anymore or rely on the Internet? I used to be an avid consumer/reader of technical reference books and bought at least one every other month for years. Then I started realizing that they would remain on my bookshelf — and become outdated — as I would simply Google for whatever I needed.

What are your thoughts on HTML5? How about the HTML5 buzzword collective.. CSS3 and related JS APIs? What do you think about this book?

Disclosure: I was not given an advance press copy as other bloggers have been. I bought this myself and decided to write about it on my own. I have no affiliation with the author or publisher. If you read this far, grats! Leave a comment saying something smart about anything web dev/HTML5/etc related and if I like your comment I will send you the book I just reviewed.

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Review: HTML5 for Web Designers

People: Bruce Lawson, Jeffrey Zeldman, Jeremy Keith, Mark Pilgrim, Remy Sharp

Turning 24

Paul Stamatiou — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 07:38:03 +0000

For the last few years I have written a blog post on my birthday. This birthday is no exception but while working late at Notifo tonight I decided to have some fun with it. Chad and I whipped up this simple page where you can send a birthday message directly to my phone. Notifo uses push — a lightning fast notification technology made possible by the flux capacitor powered by 1.21 jiggawatts — so I will get your message on my iPhone usually in under 3 seconds. We decided to make it the first of a bunch of examples/projects that will go on a future Notifo “Labs” site. You can view the PHP source here to see how it’s done and begin tinkering on your own.

For the next 24 hours, on my 24th birthday you can send me a message to my phone using Notifo. Cheers!

Thanks for reading and subscribing to my blog over the years! PaulStamatiou.com turns 5 years old sometime in August. If you have yet to subscribe, head over to my sidebar and take your pick of email or RSS. I’m actually using WP-Notifo so technically you can also subscribe to this blog on Notifo as well but I need to spend a few seconds to add the widget first. I know I haven’t been blogging as much in the last year; been keeping busy with work but hopefully the articles I write are useful and informative. My recent move to San Francisco has been amazing and I am loving it out here. Some great things to come…

Best,
Paul

Related: Turning 20, 21, 22, 23

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Turning 24

People: Paul Stamatiou

Review: $99 TonidoPlug Linux Home Server, NAS

Paul Stamatiou — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 20:22:04 +0000

Have you ever wanted to get more out of your home network, like adding a NAS, without ponying up for expensive hard drives with Ethernet built-in, Time Capsules, Drobos or the like? While some newer routers come with a USB port allowing users to add a hard drive or printer on the network, they are costly and rather limited in their functionality. It was this dilemma that had me pondering a custom solution when I wrote my series about building a cheap and small mini-ITX-based computer with the sole purpose of being a NAS and download box. That setup cost over $200 and required much hardware and software tinkering. For those looking for a cheaper and hassle-free solution, I would suggest the $99 TonidoPlug linux home server, NAS, cloud-in-a-plug… et cetera.

TonidoPlug unboxed.

The TonidoPlug falls into a relatively new category of “wall-wart” form factor computers. They are generally defined as being cheap, low on power consumption (in the single watts range) and fanless. Most plug computers, as they are also called, are based off of the Marvell SheevaPlug reference design. The difference between the TonidoPlug competitors like the Ctera CloudPlug, PogoPlug and Globalscale GuruPlug comes down to the bundled software and services. While they all essentially run on the same hardware, each has its own set of pre-installed applications in addition to services (some are paid) that do things like facilitate file and media sharing from outside the home network.

Tonido bills their offering as “an alternative to cloud services and storage.” I think Tonido is going after some stiff competition with services like Dropbox and Amazon S3 for file storage/syncing and countless other cloud services for every niche imaginable, that don’t rely on cheap commodity hardware that has a much higher chance of failing compared to aforementioned cloud services with SLAs. But I digress; for what is essentially a $99 network-connected Linux box, I couldn’t resist taking a look at the TonidoPlug.

Hardware

At roughly the size of the last-generation Apple Mac Mini (the new version of which is slick as heck) power brick itself, the TonidoPlug comes with a 1.2GHz Marvell Feroceon processor (ARMv5), 512 MB of DDR2 RAM, 512 MB of flash storage (Hynix NAND using JFFS2 according to dmesg), a gigabit Ethernet port and a single USB 2.0 port (Marvell Orion EHCI). Sorry, no Wi-Fi in this plug computer… though the updated version of the Marvell reference design includes 802.11b/g, bluetooth, a 2.0 GHz processor and built-in hard drive.

As for power consumption the TonidoPlug has been said to draw approximately 5 to 13 Watts though I cannot confirm without a Kill-a-Watt meter handy. The fanless design is silent at the expense of being warm to the touch, neighboring on toasty when performing a rather large apt-get update. Overall, the TonidoPlug is a nice, simple server I can hide anywhere, such as right on my power strip.

The TonidoPlug nestled away in its natural habitat — the majestic power strip.

Assuming the TonidoPlug is always running near its load (only likely if you were to do something like fold on it 24/7), it would cost $1.42 to run for a month in California (15.22 cents per kW-h according to the DOE).

Software

Like its ilk, the TonidoPlug does not include any sort of monitor or display connector. As a network device and server more than a desktop, the plug computer is meant to be accessed through a web interface (or SSH if you prefer… or you can setup VNC if you must). The underlying operating system on the TonidoPlug is Ubuntu 9.04, but seeing as how users have access to SSH and apt-get (though it is broken right out of the box) this can be user-updated whenever necessary. This is where Tonido shows off what it can do. CodeLathe, the folks behind Tonido, have developed a web interface and suite of applications. The larger goal is to get developers to build other applications for inclusion in Tonido’s own app store. Tonido has a well-documented developer platform and SDK out for this purpose. That being said it appears they are still in the early stages of fostering this developer community and the only applications out are ones written by CodeLathe.

Before delving into those TonidoPlug web applications I’ll talk about setup. Hardware setup doesn’t really warrant a mention — just plug it in, attach an Ethernet connection and USB storage device, be it a USB stick or external hard drive. Software setup is almost as easy. Find the local IP of your TonidoPlug on the network by going to tonidoplug.com/ip then access that in your browser; the URL is usually something like http://[local IP]:10001.

After changing the root password (you use also this for SSH access later on if you so choose) you will be prompted to create a Tonido account. This account is vital to accessing your TonidoPlug outside of the network by simply browsing to your easy-to-remember Tonido URL. That’s pretty much it for setup.

Creating a Tonido profile with tonidoid.com lets users easily access their TonidoPlug remotely at http://[username].tonidoid.com

There are two main UIs for the Tonido. There is the admin interface that provides control and lets you see the status of hardware, network and storage, and then there is the primary interface for managing applications. You’ll spend most of your time in the latter.

TonidoPlug Admin

At this point, without any further configuration you can connect to your USB drive on the network. Samba is pre-configured and already running. WebDAV support is also available, but after setting up the included WebsharePro application. This brings me to the next point: applications. Currently the TonidoPlug comes with a slew of applications:

TonidoPlug Dashboard – Simple View

Explorer – Manage your files from anywhere
Torrent – BitTorrent client
Workspace – Personal Information Manager and Group Collaboration Application
WebsharePro – Share files and photos directly from your desktop
OpenID – Use your Tonido URL as an OpenID provider
Photos – Share high resolution photos easily and securely
Jukebox – Listen and organize your music wherever you are
Money – Personal Finance
Thots – Personal Journal/Blog
Search – Search your desktop and files on your USB storage
Backup – Backup your files to your private cloud

TonidoPlug Application Dashboard – Advanced View

Below are a few screenshots from some of the applications:

Tonido Jukebox

Tonido Money App

Tonido Torrents App

Unfortunately, I have come to the conclusion that all of the included applications would never replace my current usage of other services or applications for their respective utilities. The Tonido apps are all minimum viable products at best and do not compare to other feature-rich web or desktop applications. Even if these included TonidoPlug applications were up to par with other competing cloud services, I would not trust my daily workflow on a cheap piece of hardware that could stop working at anytime and that relies on a home Internet connection that is just as unreliable. The main draw of the TonidoPlug is the Tonido service that lets users access these applications and their files remotely, outside of their network but in the end that introduces another failure point — the home Internet connection. That’s where the Money and Workspace-like apps make no sense to me. On the other hand I have no problem using the TonidoPlug to serve up local media files and the TonidoPlug’s ability to stream media to UPnP and DLNA compliant devices like the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 are enticing.

So what do I like?

I could expand on my thoughts but there’s no convincing me otherwise. If I am to use a so-called cloud alternative to store my files it would not be in the form of a $99 piece of hardware. I have become far too used to happily relying on robust cloud services like Amazon S3, 37 Signals web apps, my own server for OpenID purposes, WordPress for blogging, desktop applications uTorrent/Unison for downloading and so on. In short, I already have something that does each of the things better than the Tonido apps are meant for. There is one big exception though. Tonido has an app store and more useful applications and innovative TonidoPlug uses could emerge based on new applications.

However, the TonidoPlug is still valuable to me at the moment, despite my disappointment with the applications. Why is that? It’s a $99 linux computer that is perfect for small projects. For example, Scientific American asked some MIT and CMU students how they would use such a cheap and small server. There are some great ideas in there from home automation to remote video surveillance or anything really:

8. You name it:
Because SheevaPlug uses the Linux operating system and open-source software (both of which can be downloaded for free), it could be a cheap Web server, a source-code repository, a backup server or countless other things. “In general,” M.I.T.’s Hutchinson says, “it would be possible to host a lot of different types of services on such a box.”

Verdict

2TB Western Digital My Book Elite hard drive not included.

For $99 I would recommend the TonidoPlug to any hardware and software hacker looking for another platform to tinker around with. I’m already thinking about using it to control an RFID reader and some software to manage a door solenoid lock in addition to sending out access alerts via Notifo. However that would be made much easier if this had Wi-Fi built-in like the updated reference design.

The TonidoPlug gets 8 out of 10 Stammys for great value for a small Linux server, not so much for the bundled apps. I will be keeping an eye on Tonido and its app store to see when things change for the better.

What would you do with a TonidoPlug? Would you buy one? Do you currently own any similar network devices or tiny servers?

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Review: $99 TonidoPlug Linux Home Server, NAS

Notifo (YC W2010) Gets a Co-Founder… Me

Paul Stamatiou — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 17:03:11 +0000

Just over 5 weeks ago I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area to seek new opportunities. I had no idea what I wanted to shift my full-time focus to and began connecting with people, researching and interviewing with a handful of companies — ranging from huge web presences all the way down to tiny startups. I considered companies in different spaces from finance all the way to video. I met with dozens of folks to see what they were up to and what their company was about. That led to me being wired on caffeine for a few weeks when I had 3-4 coffee meetings scheduled each day, but I digress. I am elated to announce, likely to the surprise of many, that last week I jumped onboard the smallest company I chatted with — Notifo.

Notifo recently graduated from the Winter 2010 batch of the Y Combinator startup incubator run by Paul Graham, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris (rtm) and Trevor Blackwell (who spends his time working on Anybots). My title is Co-Founder alongside Chad Etzel (also a Georgia Tech Alum). We recently closed an angel round.

What’s it do?

Notifo is a mobile notifications platform that consists of two parts: the backend to serve up hot PUSH notifications rapidly and mobile clients to interact with them. Notifo currently has an iPhone app but will be expanding to Android next, then other smartphones. The biggest draw of Notifo is that people can send notifications to mobile clients without having to personally develop mobile apps, a time consuming and expensive process. Instead, users just have the free Notifo app which can be used to receive notifications from a number of services that use the simple API (post over https with basic auth).

An example notification coming from GitHub and then the listing of other notifications in the Notifo app.

Version 2 of the iPhone app is currently under beta testing with a scheduled release in the next month (after compatibility testing with iOS 4). It will feature some interesting features with utility adjacent to notifications that will be driving our early user adoption.

Doing mobile dev means we will need to have many devices on hand to test various builds of the application. Ex: for Android we need something that runs 2.2 for c2dm (Android’s push) as well as some older versions to test a pre-c2dm workaround.

The flow of things is that the user creates an account on the site or within the application (currently only the iPhone app is public and released) then signs up for services and grants them permission to notify them. At the moment there aren’t too many services, which explains why I will be doing some sorts of developer evangelism with various how to articles and coding up various neat scripts as mentioned below.

Below you’ll see some of the individual controls users have on each service they receive notifications from. There is also a page (not shown) where you can set things like quiet hours.

The Hacker News service (add Notifo username to HN user profile) notifies you of replies to your HN comments.

What do you do?

I will be doing what I love doing — a bit of everything. Traditionally this has been mainly front-end tasks but as I have never touched mobile development, I’m eager to learn and help out where I can. For example, random things I have been working on include a Google Chrome extension to send the current page to the phone (similar to the chrome to phone functionality but that was Android-only), a Safari 5 Extension, adding functionality to the Notifo WordPress plugin created by Hacker News user ErrantX in addition to various things around the Notifo web app, including some PHP/Redis tinkering and lots of aesthetic improvements. I also have been planning on making a section of the site to promote interesting uses of the Notifo API and services from those in the development community.

How you can get started with the Notifo API

On Monday GitHub added my Notifo service hook. This allows any repository admin to specify a CSV list of Notifo usernames to be notified upon each commit to that repository. GitHub has information on how to start working with service hooks on their github-services repository page lthat they want people to fork.

Notifo Service Hook now live on GitHub. Just click the Admin button for a repo you own then scroll to Service Hooks.

I’ll briefly go over what was involved with creating a Notifo service hook and using the API. First off, there are two types of accounts on Notifo: user accounts and service accounts. User accounts may subscribe to service accounts in addition to being able to send notifications to themselves without needing to send a subscription request first. Service accounts may send messages to any user but those users must first accept a subscription request sent by the service. Notifications sent from a user account to that user cannot change the avatar shown when the notification is received. Both types of accounts have their own API secret key that must be used in conjunction with the username before interacting with the API. In addition, interacting with the API must be done over HTTPS.

In the case of the GitHub service hook, we decided to use a service account for GitHub so that there can be multiple subscribers and so that everyone would see the lovely squidcat icon (avatar set inside the Notifo website). ;-)

This particular script is in Ruby and two loops are taking place. In the first loop I run through the CSV list of subscribers (Notifo usernames) that is specified on an external file, open an HTTP connection and specify basic authentication and SSL to the subscribe_user API URL and send a POST consisting of the username. That sends a subscription request to the user — required or the user won’t receive subsequent notifications. In this case the user will end up missing the first commit notification but it will work for the second after they accept the request.

The second loop is nested within the first and sends the actual notification to the user. In this case we want to sent information about the repository commit. The external payload contains that information so I’m merely passing along that data in some of the parameters for a send_notification:

to – the Notifo username
msg – the commit message
title – repository name and branch
uri – the GitHub commit page, opened when the user double-taps on the notification (a single tap expands the message; useful for long commit messages)

Parameters must be URL encoded so that explains the long URI.escape chunks. There are tons of ways of URL encoding and escaping strings though. In summary: for a service account establish HTTPS connection with basic auth utilizing service name and API secret key, loop through users, send subscription notification request then the send message.

How about an example for sending a notification to the user from their own user account? Let’s tackle that in JavaScript:

This example comes from the Chrome extension I was hacking away on so that localStorage stuff probably isn’t relevant to you. Just hardcode or require parameters for the username and API secret key instead of taking them from localStorage. Creating basic authentication in JavaScript requires setting the authorization header and sending the base64 encoded hash of the “username:key” token. Calling Base64.encode() requires a base64 encode/decode library to be included within the page. I open the connection to send a POST to send_notification() with some parameters. The only difference about sending a notification from a user account is an optional code style=”display:inline;”>label to describe the application. Note that this was simply a quick JS example and there is more that should be done for production code. Also, due to same-origin security policy there is a JavaScript dilemma with doing cross-domain POST requests that involves a tricky setup. A quick search on StackOverflow should yield a few of the ways to get past that.

How about an example in PHP? Here's the function WP-Notifo uses to send notifications:

You can start to see similarities between all these pieces of code. The only real difference between everything is how each particular language sends the actual POST. The above examples were the vanilla plain examples and did not make use of any handy API libraries. Notifo currently has a few API libraries on this GitHub repo page with libraries for more languages to come. Don't see a library for your language of choice? Fork it, code it and submit a pull request.

The Office

Chad and I work out of a garage in Menlo Park. I brought my own desk to work the first day. As for what the startup life is like — it's absolutely brilliant working next to a smart person for hours on end. I woke up at 5:50am my first full day, went to work and got home at 11pm. The second day started just as early. In a startup no one benefits from you slacking. It's not about reaching 5pm or 6pm and clocking out; it's about moving fast, completing your objectives and creating passionate users. (and then exiting, working for Google and enjoying their sweet, sweet froyo machine in Building 43 everyday).

The current Notifo office.. in a garage in Menlo Park, CA. Just gotta watch out for those big spiders and you'll be fine.

The other wall (not pictured) serves as our own write-once note keeping device.

Never underestimate the importance of a great coffee maker in a startup setting. COD (Coffee-On-Demand) units like this Breville serve up K-cup goodness in seconds.

There's a lot more I could say here but this blog post started out with the intent of just being a simple announcement. I'll save the more thought-out blog posts about product development and technical talk for the near future. Keep up-to-date on Notifo happenings with the company blog and Twitter.

Thoughts? Questions about working with the Notifo and/or the API? What would you like to build out to test Notifo? Any improvements to the API or product concept in general?

Update: Checkout the coverage on ReadWriteWeb and the Notifo blog.

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Notifo (YC W2010) Gets a Co-Founder… Me

People: Chad Etzel, Jessica Livingston, Paul Graham, Robert Morris, Trevor Blackwell

Why the Apple iPhone 4 Isn’t for Me

Paul Stamatiou — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 02:11:23 +0000

Hot on the heels of my quick review of the Sprint HTC EVO 4G, I’d like to take a minute to share my thoughts on the latest iPhone announced at WWDC today here in San Francisco. There seems to be two camps when it comes to the iPhone 4 — those that love it and those that hate it. Actually, it is more like three; love, hate and those that aren’t exactly sold on it but will buy it anyway. I have been onboard with the last 3 iPhones and waited in long lines on launch day to get most of them. However, I won’t be getting the iPhone 4 this time around.

The latest Apple pocket toy is 24% thinner and features a beautiful 960 x 640 IPS display.. so why don’t I care for it?

If you’re just catching up withh all the news today, below is a quick summary of what was announced. If you want juicier details head over to Engadget, Mashable, ArsTechnica, et cetera.

iPhone 4 comes in 16GB and 32GB flavors in white and black. Priced at $199 and $299 respectively. AT&T only.
Lots of emphasis on new 960×640 IPS LCD display: 800:1 contrast ratio and 326ppi. Dubbed “retina” display for clever metaphor that human eye can’t see individual pixels so tightly packed together. Display is still familiar 3.5-inch size. For comparison, the massive 4.3-inch display on the HTC EVO 4G only packs in 800×480 resolution.
Processor is 1GHz A4 chip which makes room for a larger battery: 40% increase in talk time. Am I the only one that thinks modern smartphones should no longer be judged on this talk time metric? Talking on a smartphone is only a small percentage of what many use their smartphones for now.
No 4G or LTE… which is why the iPhone is called 4 and not 4G. Many people would confused the 4G moniker for 4G cellular wireless standards-based technology, not fourth generation iPhone. While there is no 4G, Apple packed in Quad-Band HDSPA/HSUPA data modems.
Three-axis gyroscope.. most important for new games. If only Apple spent less time on hardware sensors for gaming and more time on utility. The iPhone still doesn’t come with a turn-by-turn navigation app. Google Maps Navigation is great on Android phones.
Dual cameras – VGA on front, autofocus 5MP with single LED flash on rear. Rear camera records 720p HD at 30fps (Compare to only 25fps 720 on EVO 4G). Rear lens is slightly more wide-angle than the iPhone 3GS’s lens. Photos appear to be good but won’t know for sure until the reviews emerge. iMovie app announced for $5.
iBooks coming to iPhone; supports PDFs
Wi-Fi now supports up to 802.11n
better Enterprise support: data protection, device management, wireless app distribution, SSL VPN, multiple Exchange accounts, support for Exchange 2010
iPhone OS 4 now called iOS4, launches June 21st. Big feature: multitasking “done right.” Notable: unified inbox with message threading
FaceTime – “open” standard video chat for iPhone, with zero config necessary for iPhone 4 to iPhone 4 calls. Only on Wi-Fi at the moment

The hardware looks rather spiffy for the most part — great display, dual cameras, faster processor, better battery life… sounds like what dreams are made of. But I don’t think I can stand being with AT&T for another year. I had 107 dropped calls in the last 270 days with AT&T. Considering I don’t talk on the phone every day, that effectively means I have dealt with a dropped call once per call session.

WTF!

I have only been okay with AT&T for the last year with my MicroCell but now that I have moved to San Francisco and explored it I just can’t stay on this network any longer. AT&T service especially sucks in San Francisco. Even times when I do have a few bars, it is deathly slow.

Colin Ake’s post summarized most of my thoughts on the iPhone 4 announcement:

Yes, iPhone 4 looks nice. Nice screen, dual cameras, HD video, I get it. [...] And you didn’t even throw us the bone of getting rid of AT&T or upgrading to LTE.

And it’s not like there are better options. Sure, I could go with the EVO 4G. Then I’d have fast connectivity, right?! Right! Unless you’re in a building! I mean, seriously, go look at the Clear reviews and see how sporadic it is and how much it sucks. [...]

So here’s the recap. There’s a huge market for a phone that does all that, is on a platform that’ll upgrade easily and have a seamless UI and uses a real network like Verizon.

Verdict

Do I think the iPhone 4 is sexy? Absolutely yes. It has so many things going for it but AT&T’s shoddy network is holding it back. There are blocks in my neighborhood where I get absolutely no service at all and it’s not like there are tall buildings surrounding me like in the Financial District, where horrible service is at least somewhat justifiable. How am I supposed to partake in all of the cool features of the iPhone 4 when I don’t have access to the Internet when I’m out and about? This is a mobile phone — requiring me to stay within earshot of my MicroCell or a Wi-Fi access point is like selling me a ball and chain (or if you prefer this metaphor: a supercar with a high-compression engine that requires 110 Octane gas when I can only find 91 Octane here in California, aside from being trackside at Infineon).

So what phone will I end up with? I’m not sure if I want the EVO 4G, but I know my next device will be Android-based. I think I’ll wait until the next big Android hyperphone gets announced later this summer and then I’m off to Verizon or Sprint. Oh and I almost forgot why I love Android so much — native Google Voice integration. This is a really, really big deal for me.

Thoughts? Will you be pre-ordering your iPhone 4 on June 15th and waiting hours for it on launch day? Will you pick one at your leisure later this summer, or at all? What is your current phone and provider?

Unrelated: on the upshot, I think the Reader feature in Safari 5 is fantastic. Granted Chrome has been my primary browser for several months now, I might end up doing my reading within the confines of Safari 5. I’m also curious to see what happens with Safari Extensions. Panic showed off how easy it was for them to add a new feature to Safari with their extension.

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Why the Apple iPhone 4 Isn’t for Me

People: Steve Jobs

Review: Sprint HTC EVO 4G Android Phone

Paul Stamatiou — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 01:06:52 +0000

For the last week I have been toting around two mobile phones: my usual iPhone 3GS workhorse with extended battery a la Mophie and the just-launched-today Sprint HTC EVO 4G on loan from Gregory Miller. This is my first time touching an Android device for more than just a few minutes. As such I think I’m interestingly posed to show a different perspective on the EVO from MG Siegler’s thoughts in his recent post entitled “An iPhone Lover’s Take On The HTC EVO 4G.” Similarly, the EVO 4G has received tremendous press as of late — mainly as it has geared itself as being the “it” phone of the month as well as the first 4G WiMAX phone ever.

The lovely HTC Sense UI upgrade adds lots of polish to the Android OS.. perhaps too much?

This post will sort out my likes and dislikes about the phone rather than serve a full review. If you don’t have time to read this entire post, here’s a summary: huge phone with subpar battery life and a great camera.

Pros

Huge screen and small bezels are usually the recipe for a slick product but I miss a bit of bezel useful for holding onto while taking pictures. I would often accidentally hit the button while trying to take a picture.

4.3-inch TFT LCD WVGA (480×800) display is great for consuming media and superb for the Google Maps Navigation app. Also, big screen = big keyboard = easier to type on.
Sprint Mobile Hotspot app (Android 2.2 includes similar hotspot functionality)
Kickstand!
Dual cameras: 8-megapixel autofocus rear camera with dual LEDs for flash, and a front facing 1.3-megapixel camera great for Qik and Skype (via Fring currently). Rear camera shoots 720p HD video.
Sprint network much better than AT&T, at least in San Francisco.
Plays Flash! (barely.. should get better in Android 2.2)
FM Radio
1GHz processor makes things snappy. Every Android user I’ve shown the phone to said it felt much faster than whatever Android phone they had. Froyo should make things even faster.
Google Voice integration (this is a general Android feature but a huge selling point for me)

The rear of the EVO houses a sturdy kickstand, dual LED flash, protruding 8-megapixel autofocusing camera and speaker.

Cons

HTC Sense UI add-on means that Android updates must come from HTC, not immediately OTA from Google.. so you might have to wait months to receive the lightning fast Android 2.2 “Froyo” update. Nexus One owners already have Froyo.
Pricing issues: 4G capability invokes a mandatory $10 price premium. Mobile hotspot functionality also incurs a whopping $30/month additional fee but no data caps (yet).
Lackluster battery life (about 4 hours with my use – about the same as my overworked iPhone) and the rear battery cover is flimsy plastic held in place by some small clips that are sure to break soon.
microSD card awkwardly placed under battery. Not that you need to take it out too often or anything. Just plug microUSB cable into EVO and tell Android to use in disk mode.
Camera lens protrudes from the EVO’s body such that resting it on a flat surface causes the metal rim of the lens to make contact.
Power button is almost flush with the body and not very ergonomic. Could be easier to push.
Android apps are nothing like iPhone apps. Most are crap. One of the most popular apps is a task killer application to keep things running smooth, or at least that’s the claim. I have noticed the phone get slow to a crawl at times unless I keep an eye on how many apps are open, despite Android’s stellar memory management.

Look ma, no hands!

Camera

While the 4G WiMAX is what Sprint and HTC are promoting the heck out of with the EVO, that means little to me in San Francisco where a 4G network isn’t slated to emerge for about a year. The next most impressive hardware feature in that case is the camera. I place a lot of importance on my cell phone’s camera. My iPhone currently has over 5,000 iPhone-taken photos on it. The iPhone is not happy with that situation and is very slow. It’s not meant to be used for anything more casual use. The EVO’s camera is by far the best phone camera I have ever used. Best “phone camera”… what does that mean? It means that the pictures look good enough up to around 1600px wide. After that you can see some compression artifacts and grain. For the most part, given sufficient lighting conditions you can leave your Point & Shoot camera at home and have good enough pictures to throw up on Facebook. Of course, there’s no real physical zoom with the EVO so zooming in will just look pixelated.

Camera settings galore!

The flash is very bright, so much so that it will wash out people/subjects in close proximity. Autofocus has a harder time in low lighting so you have to be patient while it focuses. For the most part the camera interface is slick and snapping pictures is lighting quick compared to the iPhone with the exception of autofocusing. The front-facing 1.3MP camera is nothing to write home about but affords users the ability to finally do video chat. I tested it out on a 15-minute video chat on Skype via Fring and it worked quite well. Though my mother did mention there was a slight video delay (I was on my WiFi network).

My mom would not be flattered that I blogged this picture..

EVO-taken Photos

Original JPG File: 1.6 MB

Original JPG File: 1.0 MB

Original JPG File: 1.4 MB

Original JPG File: 2.4 MB

Original JPG File: 1.3 MB

EVO-taken 720p HD Videos

I was randomly at 3rd and Market when Obama’s massive motorcade drove by.

Golden Gate Bridge as seen from Land’s End Trail near Ocean Beach

Great view of SF from the de Young Museum Tower

Verdict

I went to Best Buy today (EVO launch day) and waited in a long line for about 15 minutes before leaving the store without buying anything. I didn’t want the phone that bad. To get an everyday-usable phone setup I would need to get a case to protect the protruding lens, external battery pack so that it would last more than 4 hours and a handful of micro-USB cables to keep around the apartment, with my laptop, in my bag with an extra charger and so on. That would start to get pricey.

Even more so, I really wanted the mobile hotspot feature without paying the $30/month premium. That is available in Android 2.2 which I could get on the EVO with a few hours spent rooting it and installing a Sense-less Froyo, or with some other Android phone. The cheapest EVO 4G plan with mobile hotspot is $109/month — rather high. My iPhone bill is currently ~$90/month due to add-on $15 text messaging.

So I’m going to wait. Wait to see what Steve Jobs announces on Monday. Regardless of how paradigm shifting the rumored iPhone 4G is I do not see myself purchasing it if it is still tied to AT&T. Dual cameras. Neat. 960×640 IPS HD display. Great. AT&T. Fail.

This was a rather quick review and I left a lot of information out. Let me know if you have any questions about the phone or Android in general in the comments and I’ll reply!

Thoughts? Do you currently have an Android phone? Which? What network?

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Review: Sprint HTC EVO 4G Android Phone

Working with Media Temple’s Developer (ve) Server

Paul Stamatiou — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 17:19:55 +0000

Media Temple has listened to the masses and finally made a VPS offering aimed at developers and advanced users. While their (dv) Dedicated-Virtual VPS offerings allowed users to have root access and the ability to modify much of the installed software, it was still a fairly turnkey solution: create a new account, transfer files/databases over and everything is ready to go. It also ran Parallels Plesk control panel which sys admins and developers unanimously seem to despise for a mixture of Plesk being a resource hog as well as only working well for out-of-the-box configurations and becoming a burden with custom setups — say, a Rails app. There is a large market for tech-savvy folks that prefer to handle all aspects of server setup and administration themselves. Enter the (ve) Virtual Environment.

A new product series has been created, ProDev, which caters to the side of our customer base that wishes to take hosting a step further. These users want more controls and low-level options. Therefore, we’re working on new ProDev products, such as an API, CDN and Advanced DNS, that compliment (ve) Server.
— (mt)

You know who these people are — they typically congregate around Linode, Amazon EC2 and Slicehost services. They know exactly what OS and solution stack they want to use, their favorite kernel version and so on. After having a more than a few issues with their (gs) Grid-Server, Media Temple needs for this latest (ve) offering to catch on. Here’s why I think it will.

Full Disclosure: I have been exclusively hosted with Media Temple for almost 5 years now and have a partnership with them. They often hook me up with free food whenever I’m in Culver City or at one of their events at SXSW.

(ve) Basics

(ve) Server is designed for users who have significant experience with Linux, or for those who are interested in learning. Our goal is to give customers complete control of their Virtual Environment, therefore servers are delivered with SSH only. You will control and install all software.

In regards to hardware, the (ve) is far from commodity hardware with SAS disks in RAID 10 but I digress; if you want to read more about specs visit their site. Media Temple lets you install Ubuntu LTS, Ubuntu, Fedora release 12, Debian and CentOS distributions on (ve) servers. After choosing what OS you want installed on the server and waiting about 10 minutes to have it provisioned, you get to SSH into a basic Linux installation. Nothing is pre-installed. This gives you the freedom (or burden, if you are relatively new to Linux and systems administration) to setup everything on your own.

Now you get the point of the (ve) server — you run the show and know your way around Linux for the most part. Media Temple has several guides online that help with basic setup. For those considering such a developer-friendly VPS option, be warned that a solid setup is at least a few hours away of installing packages, configuring files, transferring files, importing databases, configuring more files, securing everything, monitoring for a while and tweaking for optimal performance.

As far as pricing is concerned, the (ve) is priced competitively. Below is simple comparison on the pricing of the closest offering to a 1GB RAM VPS:

Linode, Slicehost, Media Temple

Media Temple’s logic is that they can afford to price the (ve) as such since advanced users (the target market) are much less likely to require technical support.

My Setup & Experience so far

This blog has been hosted on a (dv) 3.5 with 2GB of RAM (though I think you temporarily get access to 3GB of RAM for under high load) for over 2 years now. That setup started getting finicky and needed daily or sometimes twice daily Apache restarts or it would crash on its own. Needless to say, it was time to start from scratch with a clean setup — much like how I tend to completely reinstall OS X every year or so (or back in my Windows XP days, every 6-9 months).

(ve) Control Panel in the Media Temple Account Center

I was not much of a CentOS fan on the (dv) server, so I chose to setup my (ve) with Ubuntu. Once the (ve) server was added to my Media Temple account, I enabled root SSH access and SSH’d in, with my first objective being creating a new user, adding that user to the sudoers file and configuring SSH to disallow root SSH login. This will probably sound familiar to you if you have tinkered with a fresh Linux server install before. If not, several of Media Temple’s guides will come in handy but for the most part apt-get is your friend.

A while later I had a simple LAMP setup with Webmin (lightweight control panel) configured on my (ve) server. I temporarily changed an Amazon S3 blog backup to public, downloaded it on the (ve), uncompressed the files into the public web folder then imported a recent database dump with Sequel Pro. The last step was logging into the Account Center and changing the zone file to point to the new server. I had set the TTL low so the DNS propagated quickly and the new server was live within minutes.

(ve) Server Guide

Then I got in touch with Chris Lea at Media Temple who looked over my setup and offered a few suggestions and made some adjustments. Notably he installed and configured nginx as a reverse proxy to serve static files — images, javascript, CSS, HTML, XML, et cetera — while letting Apache handle the dynamic stuff. I prefer this setup over a wholly nginx configuration so that all my .htaccess rewrite rules would remain in place (and not need to be rewritten for nginx) and so that various WordPress plugins that need their own rewrite rules would not break when they needed to tweak those settings. Also, since I use a caching plugin that creates static HTML cache files, nginx will end up serving most pages, leaving resource-hogging Apache with little to do. The best of both worlds in my opinion.

Chris also installed APC for PHP, set expires headers for all image types to 1 day and enabled compression for text based file types (I wrote about compression for Apache a while ago). And finally, munin was installed for resource monitoring.

All said and done, the server is now using around 400MB of RAM most of the time. Compare that to using at least 2GB of RAM at idle with my last (unstable) server setup and I’m rather delighted. Other performance options I had considered were Squid (but was told nginx is better for a reverse proxy role) and Varnish. Of course, this blog does not receive anywhere near the amount of traffic to need those kinds of advanced setups.

While the (ve) box does not come with a hefty, resource-intense control panel like Plesk included on (dv) servers, it does come with Parallels Power Panel that provides basic monitoring and service controls.

Basic Repair & Diagnostics.

Thoughts

So that’s a little background info on my current server setup and working with the relatively new (ve) VPS. No complaints to report of thus far and it was exactly what I was looking for: a no frills, simple server that lets me do everything myself. While I was in the end working with a typical LAMP setup (albeit with some nginx mixed in there), the (ve) and related offerings from competitors are aimed at customization and the ability to adapt the server to fit any need from Python projects with Django all the way to using Yaws to serve up Erlang apps.

Would you be in the market for a developer inspired VPS that requires you to do all the heavy lifting at the benefit of extreme customization? Who is your current webhosting provider and what kind of hosting needs do you have? What framework/software/stack does your server run?

Bonus: (mt) chatted with me on camera during their SXSW BBQ.

Update: There is now an (mt) guide on Using Nginx as a Reverse Web Proxy

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Working with Media Temple’s Developer (ve) Server

People: Chris Lea

Atlanta to San Francisco: What I Learned Moving Cross-Country

Paul Stamatiou — Tue, 25 May 2010 09:23:06 +0000

Early last month I detailed my plans for moving to California for friends, a change of scenery and of course the acclaimed high-tech hub in the San Francisco Bay Area. Many have contacted me asking to share my experiences on what it is like to move cross-country — in particular to San Francisco — as they were looking to do the same pretty soon. I will attempt to chronicle my journey and adaptation to San Francisco in this and possibly future blog posts.

Apartment Hunting

I first scheduled a weeklong trip to San Francisco to get more oriented with the city and find out what neighborhoods I liked. I told myself I would not depart until I had signed a lease and received the keys to my new apartment. I had planned on couch surfing at several friends’ apartments but Noah Kagan (with whom I had worked on some Mint.com marketing years ago) of the not quite launched AppSumo was gracious enough to let me stay on his couch for the entire week. Once I got settled in on Noah’s couch I spent several hours each day browsing two great apartment listing mashups — PadMapper and HotPads.

My first objective was to get a sense for what neighborhood I wanted to live in. A bunch of Googling, walking around and talking with friends helped me figure that out. The SF Gate has a great section explaining neighborhoods, their restaurants, attractions and so on. I narrowed down my search to Hayes Valley, Duboce Triangle and the Mission. For example, here’s a snippet of what SF Gate says about the Mission:

The Internet boom brought on heavy gentrification — trendy restaurants and boutiques blazed in, rents shot up and many Latinos and artists were displaced by the influx of highly paid young professionals. Today, there’s an interesting mix of places that survived the changes and new arrivals that are trying to make the Mission home. [...] Generally speaking, the 24th Street area is the culturally rich heart of the Mission, the stretch from Dolores Street through to Valencia Street is young and upscale, the area around 16th and Valencia streets hops with nightlife and the industrial area near Bryant Street has some hip, trendy restaurants.

It did not take long before I needed to adjust my expectations to fit within my budget. I was expecting to land a 600-700 square foot 1-bedroom apartment in a decent neighborhood for around $1,200. Yeah, that was not going to happen. In Atlanta I leased a 723 square foot 1-bedroom loft for $975/month in a favorable part of town with included parking, in-unit washer and dryer, microwave, garbage disposal, central heat and air conditioning and a dishwasher. The same in San Francisco would cost around $1,800-2,200/month and very likely not include several of those amenities. My priorities changed and I focused instead on finding a 400-500 square foot studio with in-building laundry. That was going to be enough of a challenge.

The first few days were hectic to say the least. I would browse for a while, find something decent, then call to ask questions only to be let down every single time. One particular place seemed to fit the bill then I called to find out it was under 300 square feet. Another place seemed great online and in the pictures then I started walking in the neighborhood and quickly realized it was not an area I wanted to live in (16th & Mission – near the BART station). This happened a few more times. It then became a game of catching new listings as they were posted; so I was online a lot that week. If I wasn’t restricted to my short timeframe (I had to move before my lease was up in Atlanta), the best solution would be to setup a script to notify me of new listings that matched my preferences. That’s exactly what Nick Bushak did for a private Google group of hackers that were trying to find a summer “Hacker House.” I was initially looking to live with them but the timing did not work out.

Having something or someone else search for you is probably one of the better ways to deal with long-term apartment hunting. For example, Noah outsourced his apartment search to an overseas assistant for $4/hour that found listings according to his preferences, made viewing appointments and added them to his calendar.

On the fourth day of apartment hunting I stumbled upon a great listing within hours of its posting. It was a studio in the Mission District with a secured parking garage (for extra of course), newer construction (likely 1970s — much better than the 1920s buildings I had seen in most listings), RFID entry and in-building laundry facilities. I went on Twitter to ask my friends what they thought of the exact area and all seemed to like it.

Listing photos are incredibly deceiving… this lamp was not included with the apartment.

I scheduled a viewing appointment for the same day, in between two other apartment viewings I had booked earlier. I got to the neighborhood an hour early, walked around and stopped by a coffee shop with lots of character that Nivi recommended. I sat down and chatted with some of the locals to see what they thought of the area and what it was like at night. It turned out I had been chatting with someone that graduated from UGA (my alma mater’s rival). Then I went to the apartment viewing and was pleased to hear the leasing agent say I was the first person to view the apartment. She also mentioned many Google employees live in the building since their shuttle picks up nearby. The kitchen was smaller than I had hoped for — actually the entire place was smaller than I had in mind (probably 375-400 square feet at best) — and the oven was tiny (I cook a lot), but I was going to deal with it. I filled out the paperwork that day.

A tiny studio but definitely livable. Notice custom Cat 6 stapled to the wall. Only took three tries to get the T568A pinouts right. In hindsight investing in a dual-band wireless N router (~~currently just 802.11g via WRT54G2 — will install DD-WRT soon~~ just tonight my WRT54G2 died and I swiftly replaced it with a 1TB Time Capsule) would have worked almost as well, but the AirPort in my MacBook Pro still needs cycling fairly often.

Ikea desk and chair were just under $100. I will be keeping an eye out for deadpooled startups that sell their Herman Millers for cheap.

The mechanics of actually getting them to approve me for the apartment requires some explaining. Landlords and leasing agents in San Francisco are rather aggressive. Many apartments have open house viewings often. I had heard of some nightmare situations when it came to these open houses; that everyone would have their checkbooks out, proof of income, pay stubs, credit reports printed out and were ready to sign the lease right there. I was particularly nervous about the whole situation as I was unemployed when looking for an apartment and had no verifiable income that I could list. The only thing I had in my favor was a good credit score from the three credit bureaus. I was able to find this out easily with American Express CreditSecure credit report monitoring ($2 for the first month, then cancel immediately). The FTC lists authorized, free ways to acquire your credit report but I am not sure whether their recommended service can get the report the same day. Some apartment listings state they will waive the application fee if you come to the viewing with a recent credit report in hand.

I got a call back from the leasing agent saying that the landlord gave me two options: I could get a cosigner or since I had a good credit score they would let me sign the lease if I provided two months rent (2x security deposit) in addition to the first month’s prorated rent. I chose the latter option as it would be quicker and help my credit score in the long-run. That meant I had get a hefty cashier’s check made before I got the keys to the apartment.

In no particular order, here are some random apartment things I learned during my hunt and lease signing process:

You don’t need air conditioning in San Francisco. It’s mid-May and I have my heater on right now. Though I did purchase a small Vornado fan (“air circulator”) for the few summer days that it does reach 80 degrees in the city.
In-unit washer and dryer is just about impossible to find. Same with dishwasher. If you find an in-building washer and dryer, you’re sitting pretty.
Just about everything is early 1900s construction and has hardwood floors. In fact many listings love pointing out period details, stating Edwardian this or Victorian that.
Many apartments with hardwood floor state in the lease that tenants must cover 80% of the floor with carpet to alleviate noise issues for neighbors. To give you an idea, a 6′ by 10′ carpet from Ikea costs $199 and you would need two to make it look like 80% of the floor was covered. Keep that in mind. Of course there are definitely cheaper places to buy carpet.
You get two pamphlets when you sign your lease: how to deal with lead-based paint and how to survive natural disasters like fires and earthquakes.
While getting renter’s insurance you will be asked if you want to buy earthquake insurance (doubles the price). The local Best Buy sells “Quake Straps” to fasten your TV to the wall.
It’s important to ask the leasing agent if previous tenants have (successfully) had DSL/Cable installed prior. Buildings built in the early 1900′s don’t have the best wiring and that may affect signal quality and thus performance.
There is an ISP called Web-Pass that offers FTTH for certain properties. Check to see if those properties have any apartment listings because the service is great: 45 or 100 megabit. Otherwise Comcast offers up to 50 megabits down with their “Extreme 50″ plan — if the 250GB/month bandwidth cap does not bother you.
It takes Comcast at least a week to come for an installation appointment. If you’re lucky one of your friends will have a Sprint Overdrive or Verizon MiFi you can borrow.
Buying a bed? Most places deliver same day for free (but it’s implied you tip them). I got my queen, box spring and frame from a place called Sleep Train.

Obvious Pro Tip: Save up before heading out to San Francisco while unemployed. If you plan on living by yourself, I would say at least $5,000-7,500 would be a decent number to have in mind if you can live somewhat frugally. Otherwise, and especially if you are moving cross-country, $8,000+ would be best. Friends that have moved to San Francisco through work received ~$10k relocation bonuses, so that’s what their companies value the move at. Please leave a comment below if you have thoughts on this.

Moving

#roadtrip: gas ~$350, hotels ~$370

I spent some time deciding how I wanted to move. Should I rent a U-Haul truck and car trailer to drive out? Or should I rent the U-Haul and have my car shipped out? Or maybe I should have my stuff sent out in a shipping crate while I drive out or perhaps I just leave the car at home and fly out? Eventually I went back to one of my favorite Paul Graham essays, Stuff, and read it again. I took that to heart and sold or donated as much of my stuff as I could with ease.

My 50-inch plasma HDTV, surround sound system, PS3, Roku player, Vudu box, Core i7 + Windows 7 Gaming/Boxee/Home Theater PC, 24-inch Dell monitor and 23-inch Samsung monitor? Sold.
Desk, Herman Miller Celle chair, bed, dresser, couch, coffee table, lamps and two large SumoSac contraptions? Sold/Donated.
Zooey, my beloved black labrador? I found her a loving new home where she will be much happier than in a small San Francisco studio apartment while I am out much of the day.

Zooey’s new owner is a long-distance runner and gives Zooey all the exercise she needs. Farewell pup.

Surprisingly, I sold almost everything through Twitter and Tumblr. This made sense financially as well — a shipping container would have cost $1,600 for port to port delivery which requires renting a truck to load and unload, or $2,400 for door to door delivery. Another alternative would have been shipping some boxes on a pallet. I believe that runs in the $400-$600 range.

A few small boxes, a suitcase and my laptop remained. And my AT&T 3G MicroCell because their network sucks everywhere I go and at the very least I want good signal at home. If you are in the same boat, I highly recommend you consider the MicroCell. Aside from a few dropped calls when my iPhone switches between the MicroCell and a regular cell tower, I am very happy with the MicroCell.

Empty apartment in Atlanta

With just those few possessions left I decided to make the move via car. Krystyl volunteered to fly out to Atlanta and roadtrip back to San Francisco with me. A big thank you goes out to Krystyl. Before departing from Atlanta I partnered up with Richard LeBer of Atlanta Startup Drinks and Rick Myers of Talent Zoo and Strongbox West coworking facility to have a special Startup Drinks/Stammy farewell party. Entrepreneur Tim Dorr, whose company A Small Orange hosting was recently acquired, graciously sponsored the event.

I can’t say thanks enough to everyone in Atlanta for coming out to Startup Drinks to say goodbye to me! Atlanta tech blog extraordinaire TechDrawl covered the event and chatted with me beforehand on why I decided to make the big move.

Atlanta-based rapper T.I. made an appearance of sorts at the gathering; his rap studio Grand Hustle Records happens to be next door.

T.I. posing with his Ferrari 599 ($320k+) after @marisasharpe asked him if I could take his picture. Note his new white Porsche Panamera in the background — he mentioned that car in the song “Winner” feat Jamie Foxx and Justin Timberlake. That’s his second Panamera; he also bought his lady friend a black Porsche Panamera Turbo ($130k+).

And some obligatory road trip pictures.

Getting close to the desert

The landscape started getting interesting in New Mexico. Everything else East made for a boring drive.

Pipe Creek Vista — Grand Canyon, South Rim in Arizona

This picture definitely does not do the Grand Canyon justice. I highly recommend visiting.

The beautiful Hoover Dam

Crossing the Bay Bridge

The City

The first thing I wanted to learn about San Francisco was getting around with public transportation. Coming from Atlanta, which is definitely a car city, I had lots of catching up to do. For those unfamiliar with transportation in the bay area, there are quite a few options: Caltrain, BART, Muni, AC transit, VTA light rail (south bay) in addition to taxis, ZipCar and City CarShare. If you take public transit with any regularity you will probably want to get a TransLink card (soon to be renamed Clipper). Otherwise keep some crisp dollar bills on hand at all times for Muni. There’s nothing worse than holding up a line of people trying to get on the bus while you try to cram in two crumpled dollars into the machine.

Left to Right: monthly Muni pass ($60. getting phased out by TransLink), BART pass (TransLink can also do this), TransLink card, ZipCard.

Other things I’ve learned:

Last Caltrain out of San Francisco leaves at midnight. Muni runs 24 hours. BART stops running at midnight and resumes 4am on weekdays, 6am on Saturdays and 8am on Sundays.
It’s always chilly. I have yet to get a chance to wear shorts. I went to Union Square and got some more jeans the first week. I will probably need to get another windbreaker. Gabor told me he quickly learned that everyone out here wears button-up shirts when going out, so he had to beef up his wardrobe in that regard.
It takes about 30 minutes to get to downtown from the Mission on Muni (only 2-3 miles). On BART or underground Muni rail it’s more like 10 minutes.
The most I’ve had to pay to get across town (well, almost across town: Mission to North Beach) via taxi was $15. Mission to downtown is about $8 (not including tip). (First 1/5th mile is $3.10 with every additional 1/5th mile or minute adding 45 cents.)
Yellow and Luxor cabs accept credit/debit cards.
Keep an eye out for some parts of Market Street that have taxi/bus-only left lanes.
Driving in San Francisco takes some getting used to because the traffic lights are usually on the sides, not hanging above the intersections.
Finding a cab in SoMa once a Giants game lets out is rather difficult.
iPhone Google Maps has excellent public transit information but can drastically tell you different routes just to get you on a bus/train sooner, even if the trip might be longer. Tinker with changing your departure time. Alternatively there are many iPhone apps for transportation info: Taxi Magic, MyCaltrain, iCommute SF, Pocket Muni, iBart Live. NextMuni.com is also useful.
Do not fall asleep on BART or you will miss the Embarcadero stop and end up in Oakland. I speak from experience and a series of entertaining tweets.
Two Ikeas: Emeryville just across the Bay Bridge and in East Palo Alto
There is a Pinkberry near Stanford campus. Fraiche Yogurt in Palo Alto is great too — Steve Jobs has been spotted there before. Watch the Scoble interview.
Tea tasting is the thing to do in Chinatown. Also, Ten Ren at 949 Grant Ave is a great place for $3 tapioca bubble tea.
Blue Bottle Coffee is popular here. Visiting Blue Bottle Cafe at 66 Mint St is a must.
People here were not joking around; AT&T is horrible in San Francisco. In particular I have noticed many dead spots around the Mission.

Ocean Beach in San Francisco near Cliff House and Sutro Baths

Driving down Lombard like a tourist.

In Short: For someone coming from Atlanta, SF Public transportation is great. I brought a car out here and now I’m already thinking about getting rid of it. Related: parallel parking on a steep hill with a manual transmission is annoying.

Thoughts

I have now been in San Francisco for exactly two weeks and I am in love with the city. Hopefully this honeymoon period does not fizzle away too soon.

Any questions? Have any of you made a cross-country or other such long-distance move before? Reading this and live in San Francisco? Let’s meetup some time.

RSS ads (for the student loans, I promise!): PaulStamatiou.com runs the Thesis theme. View my usenet downloading how to then checkout my usenet host Giganews.

Atlanta to San Francisco: What I Learned Moving Cross-Country

People: Babak Nivi, Celia Dyer, Dave Walters, Kimberly Turner, Krystyl Baldwin, Lance Weatherby, Nick Bushak, Noah Kagan, Tim Dorr

Review: Beats Studio by Dr. Dre and Monster (Noise Canceling Headphones)

Paul Stamatiou — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 02:01:06 +0000

In preparation for my move to San Francisco I have started selling many of my electronics and sundry possessions. Unfortunately, this included my absolute favorite technology purchase in recent years — the KRK Rokit RP5G2 studio monitors I discussed at length in my How To: Upgrade to Studio Monitor Speakers post. After selling the Rokits I began considering headphones as a replacement for my audio consuming needs. Investing in high quality headphones started to make sense for a few reasons:

1) I will likely have roommates at some point during my life in San Francisco and I can’t blast music all day and night
2) My roommates might blast music all day and night so I will need some good noise canceling headphones to concentrate while I work
3) Headphones will easily fit in my Timbuk2 Commute 2.0 bag along with my trusty 17-inch MacBook Pro for various Caltrain trips to South Bay

After I decided to look into high quality headphones I became reacquainted with the Beats. While I had been aware of them since their 2008 Consumer Electronics Show debut, I never gave them a real look solely due to the Monster Cable association. I assumed the overpriced Beats were junk, as is the case with most Monster products (my lawyer tells me it’s not libel if it’s true). The headphones are the product of a collaboration between revered rapper, actor and producer Dr. Dre and Monster Cable. Monster positioned the Beats Studio headphones as their flagship personal audio product with an MSRP of $349.95 USD.

Monster also has a cheaper offering called the Beats Solo; they are smaller and lightweight but lack noise canceling functionality. The Beats Solo (MSRP $199.95 USD) are — according to a Monster representative on their Facebook page — geared towards bass while the Beats Studio were designed for all-around flat response. I would have thought it was the other way around with the powered Beats Studio being meant for bass. I say this because the Beats Studio have excellent bass, which I will discuss in the performance section of this review. The only Monster headphones product priced above the Beats Studio is a DJ-oriented pair, called Beats Spin, slated for a June 2010 release.

Beats Studio circumaural (also known as full-size) headphones as modeled by yours truly.

Let me start this review off by making it clear that I am an extreme critic of all things Monster Cable and feel they only sell over-marketed and overpriced crap aimed at taking advantage of not-quite-tech-savvy consumers unaware of facts like how HDMI is a digital signal and there is no difference in signal and thus video quality between a $10 Monoprice cable and a $250 Monster cable.

Unboxing and Setup

The Beats Studio unboxed. They come with a touring case they fold nicely into.

The Beats Studio box was a little larger and heavier than I expected. The box sleeve slides off to uncover a nice unfolding box displaying the Beats already folded inside of their own cheap carrying case. Glancing at the other side of the box reveals cables, adapters, batteries and promotional material. There are two adapters provided — one for converting the 3.5mm mini-jack to a 1/4-inch TRS connector as well as a dual-prong airplane audio adapter. Two male-to-male mini-jack cables (a red and black one) are included; both 4.26 feet (1.3m) long. The Beats Studio headphones do not have any audio cables permanently attached and have a female mini-jack port built-in — a very handy feature for a number of reasons. I like that I am not tied down to using the provided cables. If I wanted a different length or style of cable, such as a coiled cable, or if I just need to replace a damaged cable, I do not have to replace the headphones too. That being said, I think the included cables are the perfect length. Some people have complained that they are too short but they are perfect for my typical use — using them with my MacBook Pro on my desk or lap as well as using them with my iPhone in my pocket.

One small nitpick – I would have liked a right angle connector for when using the Beats on a laptop. For example on a plane or when computing on your lap it is annoying to have cables sticking straight out.

The black cable, dubbed the iSoniTalk cable for its handy compatibility with iPhones, includes an inline microphone and button. When connected to my MacBook Pro the button on the iSoniTalk cable can pause/play iTunes music and when connected to my iPhone can do the same as well as accept incoming calls and end them. It’s regrettable that using the Beats Studio as a headset does not workout well; it’s hard to hear yourself talk and the microphone is placed a little too far back to get clear sound without holding it closer to your mouth.

Beats Studio Headphones with Monster iSoniTalk cable and iPhone

Those unfamiliar with the Beats Studio will be taken aback by the included batteries. Why do headphones need batteries? Well the Beats Studio use the batteries for both amplification purposes and to power the integrated noise canceling circuitry. More on how this all works later on. Installing the batteries was a trivial process that required unscrewing a panel on the left ear cup. The right ear cup houses the power switch and indicator LED.

A panel on the left ear cup unscrews to show the required 2 AAA batteries. When these die, I’ll replace them with lightweight lithiums.

Unfortunately — and this is a huge downside for the Beats Studio — the headphones only work with batteries installed and the noise canceling switch flipped on. There is no passive setting devoid of noise canceling that does not need battery power. You cannot use them at all without batteries.

The red LED means the Beats are on with noise canceling engaged. The LED turns orange when battery power is low.

The case is likely that the 40mm drivers used are too large to be powered without the aid of batteries. You will need to keep a drawer full of AAA batteries on hand. Okay I am exaggerating a bit, but an active user will need to replace batteries every 2 weeks with a moderate user replacing them every month. Of course, if you forget to turn off the headphones one night the batteries will need replacing much sooner. I have not owned the Beats long enough to test battery life claims but Jake Jarvis provided me with the aforementioned data from his own Beats Studio experience.

Fit, Finish and Feel

Everything about the Beats draws attention, for better or for worse. The outer facing construction is glossy plastic, which while looks nice at first I can imagine it will quickly become scratched and show regular wear and tear more so than if it had a matte finish. Monster claims the finish is scratch-resistant and I have only had the Beats for a week so I can’t comment on that yet. One thing is for sure though, the exterior is a fingerprint magnet. That explains the included microfiber cloth.

The inner plastic of the headband has a matte finish that I like considerably more. Moving up the inside of the headband there are two small aluminum pieces neatly engraved with “studio” on one side and the Monster logo on the other side. The entire headphones assembly weighs in at just under 0.6 pounds. Compared to professional studio reference headphones weighing in around 0.7 pounds that are classified as mid-weight, the Beats are on the lighter side. While I personally prefer heavier headphones, the lightweight Beats Studio are ideal for travel.

In the event the color black is not your style, Monster also sells white and Boston Red Sox themed versions (at a $50 premium). Alternatively, you may opt to send in your Beats to ColorWare and have them drop some candy paint all over your ‘phones however you like for $250.

It’s hard to find a side of these headphones that isn’t branded or marked in some way; something that might deter potential owners.

Okay so that’s a description of the headphones, but how do they really feel? Honestly, they seem flimsy and very plastic-y. While holding or putting them on there is a bit of a “plastic on plastic” dissonance. There are small fitment details that annoy me too. For example, the joints can extend slightly backwards past their stopping point. Another annoyance is that the ear cups freely move about and have no resistance, making for a plastic clank whenever you take off or move the headphones and the ear cups immediately drop.

Sign of a cheap paint job lacking uniformity – the clearcoat/paint beads up next to edges. It should be pristine for the price Monster is asking.

Everything thus far in this section has more or less been nitpicking. What about the comfort? I can’t knock off any points there; the Beats Studio feel great. Despite the ear cups and headband being wrapped in some sort of cheap vinyl/leatherette they never became too hot and remained dry.

Can you say glossy?

Performance

As with all quality audio devices, best testing practices include listening to uncompressed (WAV), lossless (FLAC) or high bit-rate audio (256+ kbps MP3). In addition, it would be wise to test these headphones with a quality standalone audio output device like the PreSonus AudioBox USB I used in my Rokit studio monitor setup. However, I opted to test without an external audio output device as most people reading this review wouldn’t use one; more importantly these headphones are meant to be mobile; used with iPhones and so on, but I digress. I listened to a plethora of FLAC and high bit-rate MP3 files with the equalizer off and OS volume at varying levels between 5% and 60% (Pro Tip: hold option and shift in OS X while adjusting volume to increase/decrease in tiny increments).

Before I dive into details, I will talk about the noise canceling feature of these headphones. Despite being called “isolation” headphones, the Beats are powered, active noise canceling headphones. This can be tested by simply turning them on and wearing them; no audio source or input cable necessary. My unscientific decibel meter (iPhone app) tests showed a max reduction of 4-5 dB. That is to say the average ambient noise level with the headphones worn but switched off was 44 dB and with them switched on it was 40 dB. I tried this in a number of scenarios with differing ambient noise levels. With the air conditioning on, the average ambient noise level was 53 dB and with the Beats Studio switched on it dropped to 48 dB. Monster claims a maximum actual noise reduction of up to -14 dB. However, it is important to note that the Beats Studio seem to do a better job at canceling out lower frequency sounds like air conditioning and refrigerator noise as well as some high frequency fluorescent lamp ballast hum than mid-range frequency sounds like people talking. Is a 4 or 5 dB reduction in noise level noticeable? Definitely. I would rate the noise canceling functionality in the Beats Studio as above average. Part of the secret behind this could be that Monster placed the microphones necessary for noise canceling on the inside of the ear cups, more accurate to what your ears hear, than on the outside of the ear cups. I have yet to take these on a flight with me but I imagine they will be a welcomed traveling companion.

Do they sound any good? While Monster claims these headphones are more about all-around flat response than being bass biased, my first impressions were along the lines of ”Whoa, these things can make some great bass.” For the most part bass is punchy with a response that is much closer to tight than boomy. Most rap songs tend to have a continuous boomy bass line — for example “Coca Coca” on Gucci Mane’s The Burrrprint 2 HD album — and while the Beats perform well with those types of songs, the bass tends to overpower the weak midtones. Examples of punchy bass are found in any track on the new Gorillaz album, Plastic Beach. That is the type of music that shows where the Beats excel, without any overpowering bass. Treble with the Beats Studio is clear and succinct. Any of DJ Tiësto’s albums bring this out — in particular listen to “Sweet Mysery” on the Just Be album. It is the midtone reproduction with the Beats that I take issue with; it is a bit muffled. Bumping up the 250 – 2k range a tad makes midtones sound much more reasonable.

One particular measurement metric for audio quality is instrument separation, whether you can hear individual instruments in the music as if they are on their own rather than mixed and coming out as just one sound. This is an area where studio reference headphones and monitors must perform well so producers and studio boffins can accurately know what each change in their mixing sounds like. Unfortunately, this was a bit of a hit or miss with the Beats. At times I was able to detect a slight sense of instrument separation but most of the time, and this was throughout many of the tracks I listened to, it all just sounded mashed together. An example of a song where I was able to hear this favored instrument separation was in the song “Reckoner’s Encore” on the Jaydiohead: Encore mix album.

Overall, the Beats perform well and I was most impressed with their ability to create bass like I’ve never heard on headphones before. I enjoy it so much I often adjust my equalizer settings to emphasize bass, such as when I’m watching Live Free or Die Hard and want to feel the movie, so to speak. If you don’t consider yourself an audiophile (I don’t) I think you will be happy with the Beats.

Sound Leak

Below is a quick video of me showing off one particular issue with the Beats Studio; sound leak. Of course this happens with most headphones but it feels much more apparent with these headphones. Even at a comfortable 25% volume, I think they might be too loud in a library setting. I think it will be pretty easy to tell what song I’m listening to in this video.

Beware Wi-Fi

While reviewing the Beats Studio I did notice one interesting quirk. I was watching an HD movie on my laptop streamed over Wi-Fi from my NAS across the room. I was wearing the Beats and noticed that in certain positions, notably when I pointed my head in the direction of the router, a prevalent static entered the headphones. I paused the movie stream and the static went away. I pressed play and the static came back.

I was about 10 feet away from my router — a typical distance for any apartment dweller. Given this experience I can only surmise that the Beats Studio are susceptible to radio interference and could use some shielding.

Verdict

This is the part of the review where I mention how these headphones are expensive and then try to decide if their features, quality and performance can justify the cost. I purchased my Beats Studios for $229 USD from some random e-tailer I found on Froogle. Most retailers like Amazon charge around $299 while Monster sells them for a whopping $350. If I had no idea how much the Beats Studio cost and someone asked me to price them, I would say $199 would be a good price; nowhere near $300. The headphones feel like a toy with flimsy construction and cheap materials. Looking around online I have found several reports of ear cushions separating from the ear cups, among other build quality issues.

Another sizable downside to the Beats is their battery requirement. The option to have a non-amplified, passive setting lacking noise-canceling — even at the expense of degraded audio quality — would be a huge boon. I would hate to be traveling and risk carrying around useless headphones for the rest of my trip unless I kept extra AAA batteries handy.

The Beats do have one thing going for them over their more expensive professional counterparts; they are mobile. They are lightweight and fold compact with ease. In addition, you don’t have to deal with some ridiculous 10 foot cord. The included 1.3 meter mini-jack cable is the perfect length for tasks like plugging into your laptop on a flight. The mute button on the Beats is ideal for one particular scenario that keeps coming to mind — ordering your drink or snack on a flight. I always have to take out one ear bud and pause my music or movie.

That brings me to one point about flying with headphones or ear buds. From moving about in my seat or leaning over to grab something I always manage knock out my ear buds, which is fine as I would rather that happen than break the headphones port in my laptop. With the Beats though, they are firmly planted on my head and the same action would stress the mini-jacks. That’s not a big deal for the cable in the headphones, it would just unplug itself. However, depending on where the force is coming from, it could damage the laptop jack. It would be safer if one end of the cable employed a right-angle connector or magsafe-inspired technology from Replug.

I give the Beats by Dr. Dre Studio headphones by Monster 6 out of 10 Stammy’s. If they were $199 I would rate them closer to an 8.

Disclaimer: I am not an audiophile.

What do you think of the Beats Studio? What headphones or ear buds do you use? Any of them with noise canceling?

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Review: Beats Studio by Dr. Dre and Monster (Noise Canceling Headphones)

People: Dr. Dre

Exploring Silicon Valley

Paul Stamatiou — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 07:06:44 +0000

Next month I will be moving to San Francisco — roughly 6 years after I moved to Atlanta, enrolled in Computer Engineering as a Georgia Tech freshman. I soon realized my interests involved the Internet, web applications and new media. I changed my major a year into my college stay to nurture these interests. While I enjoyed tinkering with electronics — having designed and printed circuit boards, soldered and built small servo-powered robots for science fairs from a young age — I did not see how one person could make a huge difference on their own in the hardware field. The typical route was for recent EE/CmpE graduates to work for a large, established hardware company the likes of Intel. It was and remains to be exceedingly difficult for innovative hardware startups to get off the ground without significant capital and a strong team. I need not explain how a few people with computers, vim and an Internet connection can build interesting products and services.

It was in that mindset that I began playing around with software (initially MediaWiki, then WordPress). I have Georgia Tech to thank for that. My college stay, as devoid of girls (“The Ratio“) as it may have been, introduced me to brilliant hackers that lived on my floor and showed me the ropes of Linux my first year (and one too many attempts at hacking the vending machine in the dorm basement with everything from Ethernet replay attacks and magnetic strip encoders to alter BuzzCard data to random button combinations).

In the summer of 2006 I flew out to California for the first time. Yahoo! had found this blog and wanted me to help them with the development and launch of their corporate blog. It was during this trip that I explored Palo Alto, Cupertino, Mountain View and everything else on the 101 and Caltrain. Silicon Valley was lined with technology companies and I knew I wanted to be a part of it eventually. In that and subsequent trips I met long-time Internet friends and made new ones including Bryan Veloso, Kyle Neath, Eston Bond, Mike Malone, David Ulevitch, Phil Freo, Dimitry Bentsionov, Noah Kagan and Richard Crowley. Now that list of awesome people has grown to a length that I cannot ignore. It has become clear that I would lead a happier life living near my friends.

A picture I took while visiting friends in SF May 2008. Not quite sure what part of SF.

Skribit was the reason I remained in Atlanta after my graduation, due largely in part to Stephen Fleming, the Georgia Tech Edison Fund and Co-founder Calvin Yu along with the best startup mentor I could have ever hoped to find, Lance Weatherby. Thanks to those folks and many others in the Atlanta tech community (too many to list, you know who you are) for a wild ride. If I may have one parting wish — free Wi-Fi in Technology Square (or at least lifetime Wi-Fi for alums).

Skribit is a niche product that serves a small market well and it is with that in mind that development will continue, but in a part-time manner. Some changes will be taking place around the site to focus more heavily on converting users to paid Pro accounts (and pay off our convertible note) rather than building out certain community features that require much upkeep; making Skribit more of a tool than a destination. Ultimately, I need to land a paying job and focus on paying off my out-of-state tuition, which is still a six figure number.

So I’m off to San Francisco to seek interesting opportunities for full-time work and network with friends that have been telling me to move out there for years. I don’t think this is the last time I will be seeing Atlanta but for the next few years I will be exploring silicon valley. If you would like to meet up in San Francisco this summer or if you have some interesting ideas about what I should be doing in California, please get in touch with me. I will be on an apartment hunting trip in San Francisco from April 20th to the 26th.

Follow my journey to the west coast here.

I would love to hear your thoughts. Please leave a comment below. Oh and what part of San Francisco should I live in – Mission?

RSS ads (for the student loans, I promise!): PaulStamatiou.com runs the Thesis theme. View my usenet downloading how to then checkout my usenet host Giganews.

Exploring Silicon Valley

People: Bryan Veloso, David Ulevitch, Dimitry Bentsionov, Eston Bond, Kyle Neath, Mike Malone, Noah Kagan, Phil Freo, Richard Crowley

SXSW Interactive 2010 in Pictures

Paul Stamatiou — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 04:25:13 +0000

Last year I wrote about my experience at the 2009 South By Southwest Interactive Festival as a first-timer. I gave it 10 out of 10 Stammys and had a fantastic time. I just got back from SXSWi 2010 last week and my thoughts have not changed one bit — in my opinion SXSW remains the best conference of sorts (technically a festival) I have ever attended. While there is good reason to attend SXSW for education purposes and sitting in on some great panels, the best part of SXSW is the strong networking, which occurs mainly at various parties every night. However, one main thing did change this year — there were a lot more people. For another take on the SXSW experience, read Jolie O’Dell’s (formerly of ReadWriteWeb) article entitled Why SXSW Sucks.

With Ashton @aplusk Kutcher, shortly after talking about Nikon cameras.

Since many of my sentiments haven’t changed since what I wrote about in last year’s post, I will make this more about pictures. You can find a lot more SXSW 2010 pictures in Ken Yeung’s flickrstream as well.

The customary badge lines inside the convention center

While I attended many panels last year, this year I didn’t get around to seeing as many as I wanted. I soon learned that my four hotel roommates did not purchase SXSW badges this year and only came to network and party hop. One big difference from last year was that I reserved my hotel room more than 6 months in advance and was able to snag a room on the top floor of the Hilton. We ran into Jason Calacanis, Jeff Pulver, Robert Scoble, Tony Hsieh (Zappos) and Drew Houston (Dropbox) on our floor the first night.

With @ev of Twitter at Peche (it was raining outside)

The typical routine this year went something like this: wake up late, get food, come back to the hotel, change and check email for a while, head out to the first party of the night at 8pm then hop around until the parties end around 3-4am, come back to the Hilton lobby and mingle with many folks until 5:30am when the Hilton’s pool opened up, swim around for an hour or so, come back to the room, get room service and head to sleep by 8 or 9. And it was with this crazy schedule that I met and got to converse with some interesting folks. Networking at a bar is one thing, but being able to chat about tech with smart people in a hot tub is something not easily forgetten for anyone involved.

The Hilton lobby got busy every night around 3-4am. Inevitably someone orders 20 boxes of pizza.

Kyle Neath (github), Jolie O’Dell, Eston Bond (iSocket), Paul Stamatiou, Richard Crowley (stealth startup) at the GeoBash/PureVolume party

Alex Albrecht, Kevin Rose and Leo Laporte at the live Diggnation

Leo Laporte making a record: Longest Live Streaming Crowd Surf

Typical crowded 6th street at night during SXSW

Drinks with friends at an Austin bar on 6th street – @ebloch, @julien51, @mjmalone, @rcrowley

Akshay @Dodeja, @Wei_Yang, Paul @Stammy Stamatiou and @CourtenayBird at the Diggnation party

@iJustine @ Geobash/Purevolume Party

The Belmont flash mob with Chris Pirillo

Rob @rsg Goodlatte (Facebook), Paul Stamatiou, @ZachKlein (Boxee) at Geobash

Stage at Geobash

Tesla Roadster on the street – belongs to @joshuabaer of otherInbox

Ricky Van Veen of College Humor and Pete Cashmore of Mashable

Sarah @pop17 Austin and Paul Stamatiou at (mt) party

@Dodeja, @RandiZuckerberg and @Stammy at the Iron Cactus during SXSW 2010

One of the biggest takeaways from SXSW was that so many of the attendees seemed to be from San Francisco. So much so that the unofficial slogan of SXSW might as well be “where San Franciscans go to meet other San Franciscans.”

Links of Interest

Five Tech Investors Reflect on SXSW — WSJ
Successful SxSW: the Tao of the Conference — Derek Sivers
SXSW 2010: A Haven for Geeky and Techie T-Shirts! — Coty Gonzales
My Takeaways from the Idea Orgy that is SXSW — @SaraDavidson
How to not be a douchebag at SXSW wrap-up — Ed @edrabbit Hunsinger
and a lot more that I’m missing..

Have you been to SXSW before? What did you think of it? If not, is it something you would consider attending? As for those of you taking note that my blog posting has been slowing down — been busy with stuff, which I’ll probably explain in another post soon.

RSS ads (for the student loans, I promise!): PaulStamatiou.com runs the Thesis theme. View my usenet downloading how to then checkout my usenet host Giganews.

SXSW Interactive 2010 in Pictures

People: Akshay Dodeja, Ashton Kutcher, Chris Pirillo, Drew Houston, Eston Bond, Ethan Bloch, Evan Williams, Jason Calacanis, Jeff Pulver, Jolie O'Dell, Kyle Neath, Mike Malone, Paul Stamatiou, Pete Cashmore, Randi Zuckerberg, Richard Crowley, Ricky Van Veen, Robert Scoble, Sarah Austin, Tony Hsieh, Zach Klein

Review: 23andMe DNA Testing for Health, Disease & Ancestry

Paul Stamatiou — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 08:10:34 +0000

Okay I know what you’re thinking — why is some genetics testing service being reviewed on Stammy‘s tech blog? Well for one, because 23andMe is at the forefront of technology that is slowly but surely enabling the general public to get access to their genome data that would have cost thousands of dollars just a few years ago. I heard about 23andMe in 2008, when they were charging $1,000 for a DNA test and access to the results. Now the price is somewhat more reasonable, but still expensive at $399 for access to ancestry information, $429 for health or $499 for both. Each of those prices is just for one person. 23andMe operates in the personal genomics space and they have a few competitors like Family Tree DNA and Navigenics among others.

23andMe Genetic DNA testing – Ancestry Edition Box (but this review is for the Complete Edition, see disclosure notice)

I decided to give them a shot for almost entirely one reason — Google co-founder Sergey Brin. He not only financially backs 23andMe but he’s married to 23andMe co-founder Anne Wojcicki. Brin blogged about how he used 23andMe to learn more about Parkinson’s disease in his family:

But, of course, I learned something very important to me — I carry the G2019S mutation and when my mother checked her account, she saw she carries it too.

The exact implications of this are not entirely clear. Early studies tend to have small samples with various selection biases. Nonetheless it is clear that I have a markedly higher chance of developing Parkinson’s in my lifetime than the average person. In fact, it is somewhere between 20% to 80% depending on the study and how you measure. At the same time, research into LRRK2 looks intriguing (both for LRRK2 carriers and potentially for others).

This leaves me in a rather unique position. I know early in my life something I am substantially predisposed to. I now have the opportunity to adjust my life to reduce those odds (e.g. there is evidence that exercise may be protective against Parkinson’s). I also have the opportunity to perform and support research into this disease long before it may affect me. And, regardless of my own health it can help my family members as well as others.

I’ll be honest, a lot of the technology and processes employed by 23andMe go right over my head. The gist of it seems to be that they use single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) genotyping to analyze more than 580,000 locations in a person’s genome and find DNA sequence variations. They then compare that to known clinical and research reports backed by many trials proving correlations that certain SNPs have with disease risks and traits, with a certain amount of accuracy (the more people in the study, the more accurate). SNP genotyping is not the same as Full Genome Sequencing, a more complex and accurate process, which used to cost around $50,000 per person just a year ago but is now in the sub-$5,000 range. IBM received some press in late 2009 with their efforts to get that down to $1,000 through their “DNA transistor” breakthrough.

In a nutshell: personal genetics testing is still maturing and will provide an important platform for medical breakthroughs such as personalized medicine in the near future. At the moment, companies like 23andMe have preliminary offerings aimed at providing consumers with a useful glimpse at what can be found in their DNA: basic ancestral origins, trait comparisons to other individuals, likelihood for certain known diseases and so on. As I will discuss later on, the means through which this data is gained cannot be trusted 100% and it is not entirely clear at all times whether 23andMe uses general data about ethnicity to provide risk correlations (ie, if you are European you are more likely to…) or personalized “only you” type stuff.

Disclosure: I personally paid $413.95 for the Ancestry Edition then approached 23andMe about receiving an upgrade to the Complete Edition for purposes of this review. They upgraded my 23andMe account free of charge (would have cost me $100).

Um… Why?

Why would I ever plunk down a several hundred dollars to learn more about my genetics? Primarily — I enjoy discovering new technologies and services first-hand (if you haven’t noticed already, I’m an early adopter) so this new-to-me industry was extremely interesting and I just had to grok it. While purchasing this kit I did not know what to expect.. at all. I had grand expectations of having a detailed family tree practically created for me, going back many generations, or getting a peek at how my genes affect my health.

Unboxing

After ordering the kit online, I received a small box soon after. It was pretty light and there wasn’t much inside: a spit tube contraption, some documentation, a specimen bag and padded mailer.

Spit Acquisition and Delivery

There was not much involved with sending my DNA sample to 23andMe: spit in the tube a few times to fill it up, close the flip top, unscrew it, replace it with a small cap, shake it up to mix the saliva with the preservation fluid that was in the flip top, place in the specimen bag and mail it to 23andMe.

Thorough instructions for spit acquisition

Close-up of 23andMe spit tube – the top portion has some liquid that helps preserve your spit during transit

Spit tube all filled up and ready to be shipped out

After sending the DNA sample, I had to wait around 2-4 weeks to receive access to my results online. But before that could happen I had to setup my 23andMe account and claim my kit with a number that came on the spit tube.

Online Account Setup

As you might imagine with such a sensitive subject, there are a few forms you have to read and accept before you can finalize your 23andMe account.

Entering the code that came with the spit tube

After typing in the claim code I was greeted with a lengthy document to read through.

Consent and Legal Agreement

Here are some items in the agreement that I found worthy of mentioning:

While certain genetic markers—SNPs in this case—are associated with a higher incidence of certain diseases or health conditions in certain populations, accessing your genetic information through 23andMe does not translate into a personal prediction

Furthermore, the 23andMe Personal Genome Service is not a test or kit designed to diagnose disease or medical conditions, and it is not intended to be medical advice.

While we measure many hundreds of thousands of data points from your DNA, only a small percentage of them are known to be related to human traits or health conditions. The research community is rapidly learning more about genetics, and an important mission of 23andMe is to conduct and contribute to this research. By obtaining 23andMe’s services, you are agreeing to contribute your genetic information to our research efforts as described below. These efforts could translate into meaningful information about your genetics.

You may learn information about yourself that you do not anticipate. This information may evoke strong emotions and has the potential to alter your life and worldview. You may discover things about yourself that trouble you and that you may not have the ability to control or change (e.g., your father is not genetically your father, surprising facts related to your ancestry, or that someone with your genotype may have a higher than average chance of developing a specific condition or disease). These outcomes could have social, legal, or economic implications.

Genetic data you share with others could be used against your interests. You should be careful about sharing your genetic information with others. Currently, very few businesses or insurance companies request genetic information, but this could change in the future. While the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act was signed into law in the United States in 2008, the protection it will provide against discrimination by employers and health insurance companies for employment and coverage issues has not been clearly established.

Genetic research is not comprehensive. Many ethnic groups are not included in genetic studies. Because interpretations provided in our service rely on these published studies, some interpretations may not apply to you.

From that agreement I gathered that 23andMe is experimental and very much a work in progress and that I should not put full confidence in my personal results nor use those results to change the way I currently live.

After that legalese there was a page asking whether I wanted to have my saliva sample biobanked. Biobanking lets 23andMe keep my DNA sample on hand for up to 10 years. I can see potential cases where this might come in handy when they release a new feature of DNA analysis — be it advanced SNP genotyping or a take at FGS — and this would allow me to not have to send in another DNA sample.

I selected yes, in hopes of getting a call one day that they have successfully cloned me. I rather enjoyed The 6th Day.

That’s the last step in the signup process and now I just needed to wait for the DNA sample to arrive and the results to be processed.

To kill time, 23andMe has lots of surveys users can fill out, ranging from medical history and health habits to a survey about optimism. But I digress, you’re here to read about the results.

Ancestry

I will split the results by Ancestry and Health, since those are two separate versions people can purchase individually or together as the Complete Edition. After a few weeks I got an email saying my results were available online. The first thing I learned was my maternal and paternal haplogroups. Yeah, that was my first reaction too — what’s a haplogroup? Fortunately, 23andMe has lots of explanation for every term used on the site.

Haplogroups are families of mitochondrial DNA types that all trace back to a single mutation at a specific place and time. Technically, every new mutation creates a new haplogroup, but geneticists only label the ones that help them trace significant events in human prehistory, such as the migration of people to the Americas or the expansion of agriculture from the Near East.

I discovered my maternal haplogroup was J1a* and my paternal haplogroup was T. 23andMe also provides some fun comparison info — for example Thomas Jefferson had the same paternal haplogroup. The site also provides haplogroup trees but they were of no use to me other than an interesting information visualization. So far I haven’t learned anything remarkable about myself.

Maternal Haplogroup Map

Maternal Haplogroup Tree – interesting visualization but I don’t really know how this helps me. Although I will say it gets more interesting as you begin sharing genome data with other members of your family/relatives and their icon shows up on the tree.

More screenshots: Paternal Haplogroup Map, Paternal Haplogroup History, Paternal Haplogroup Tree, Maternal Haplogroup History

Then there is something called Ancestry Painting which displays colored graphics of my chromosomes to trace their ancestry by indicating the geographic origins of each chromosomes and their segments. Mine are all the same color, the key for which tells me I am 100% European. Again, something I already knew but interesting to see verified nonetheless.

Ancestry Painting

Moving on, there is a Global Similarity feature that tells me I am most similar to people from Southern Europe and has a chart conveying my similarity to other people based on geographic origins. Again, nothing quite mind-blowing.

Then there is Ancestry Labs that has some experimental features like “Haplogroup Tree Mutation Mapper” and “Family Inheritance: Advanced.” The former was of little use to me and provided me with some raw data while the latter, described as “Compare your DNA, bit by bit, to see what segments you share with close and distant family”, would be interesting if I had any family or relatives on 23andMe that took the DNA test as well and shared their genomes with my account.

Ancestry Labs

So far.. well I am kind of disappointed. I have not learned much about my ancestry that I did not already know but what I did already know was presented to me in an instructional manner with nice graphics and background information. Oh, but what is this Relative Finder feature I seemed to have skipped over?

23andMe found 17 people in its database (of around 35,000 people) that it thinks might be 3rd, 4th, 5th or distant cousins of mine. This got interesting when one of them, marked as a 3rd cousin, contacted me. The site has a unique way of letting potential relatives contact each other, with privacy in mind first. Before I could continue contacting the relative there was a warning about how reaching out to potential relatives may freak them out or be unwanted news (in more professional terms of course). It should be noted that 23andMe users can opt out of this entirely. There are two checkboxes in the privacy tab of the settings:

I do not want to receive sharing invitations from anyone.

I do not want to participate in Relative Finder.

By checking this box, your profile (Paul Stamatiou) will not be able to use Relative Finder to view or contact relatives. Also, you will not show up in other people’s Relative Finder results. If you change your mind, you may re-join at any time by unchecking the box.

I accepted my potential 3rd cousin’s request for contact and I shared my genetic data with him and he shared his as well.

23andMe lets you share this data in stages — Basic and Extended — depending on how much access you want to provide this person. This let me use the Compare Genes feature to see some neat similarities I share with this person.

The Compare Genes tool is likely even more useful if you have direct family on 23andMe sharing their genetic data with you. A related feature called Inheritance Calculator lets you select two people and see their offsprings potential traits.

At the moment I am still talking with this person to verify if and how we are actually related. He currently lives in a part of Greece (Heraklion, Crete) where my mother is from, so there’s a good chance he is a relative. ~~23andMe states that his paternal haplogroup is the same as my maternal haplogroup, so by that I know my mother’s side of the family could be related to his father’s side~~ (Update from comments: turns out the haplogroups just have the same name and are unrelated). We are exchanging family information like last names of other relatives and so on. Google tells me he is a computer-savvy 30 year old. Then again I have many 2nd and 3rd cousins all over Greece so it’s not like this was a landmark discovery. However, the chances that someone related to me in Greece heard about some genetic startup called 23andMe and forked over the many Euros to try this service must be fairly small.

Relative Finder is one of the newest features at 23andMe and by far the most useful in my opinion, even compared to some of the health features below.

Health

Now on to the reports 23andMe provides with their Health Edition. There are three sections: Clinical Reports, Research Reports and Health Labs. There are currently 51 clinical reports on the site divided up into categories of Carrier Status, Disease Risk, Drug Response and Traits. Clinical reports are the most accurate of any other health-related data on the site:

Clinical Reports give you information about conditions and traits for which there are genetic associations supported by multiple, large, peer-reviewed studies. Those associations must also have a substantial influence on a person’s chances of developing the disease or having the trait. Because these associations are widely regarded as reliable, we use them to develop quantitative estimates and definitive explanations of what they mean for you.

Clinical Reports Overview

Each clinical report has its own page. This is part of a page on muscle performance that states I have a certain type of fast muscle fiber.

Research reports on the other hand give you information based on research with limited scientific evidence and have thus not been demonstrated through large, replicated studies. 23andMe currently provides 88 research reports.

Research Reports separated by risk and research confidence

Research Report for Caffeine Metabolism

Research Report for Heart Attack risk

Similar to how there is an Ancestry Labs section, 23andMe also has Health Labs for showcasing experimental features that “may still be in development, require specialized knowledge or be of interest only to a subset of our customers.” Currently I only see three inside of Health Labs: Reynolds Risk Score (10-year risk for heart-attack), Genetic Weight Calculator (how much of your weight you can blame on your genes) and ABO Blood Type (find your probable blood type).

While I did not find much value in the Ancestry Edition results, with the sole exception of Relative Finder, Health Edition results were more intriguing and provided me with little tidbits about myself. Of those tidbits was a laundry list of diseases I might be at risk for: something that might be heavy news for many folks and explains why 23andMe warned about the effects of receiving such information in their legal and consent agreement. Nothing I learned about myself was life-changing but I did learn some interesting things. For example, according to a research report (not clinical), my body metabolizes caffeine quickly and does not increase my risk of heart attack and may even reduce the risk. That is relevant to my interests as I have a passion for all things caffeinated, although I have stopped drinking soda ever since I got out of college. According to a clinical report I have two working copies of a fast twitch muscle fiber, which potentially makes me well-suited for thngs like sprinting versus endurance running. I also learned that I am resistant to norovirus strains (“stomach flu”) and that I have a decreased risk of developing Parkinson’s disease based on the research currently available (I lack the LRRK2 G2019S mutation).

23andMe has several reports that are “locked.” When clicking on these reports, users are told how the information to be presented is not thorough and only checks certain mutations associated with the disease or carrier at hand. The user then must click through to unlock the report. Several reports also have useful sections explaining genes versus environment that describe how genetic factors may contribute more or less than environmental factors.

Advanced

For those that are more do-it-yourself and were awake during their 8am honors genetics and bioinformatics collegiate class, 23andMe also offers full access to raw data.

Click the image to get a view of more advanced genetic data.

Verdict

I acknowledge that many people have no desire to pay $400-$500 for this type of information. On the other hand, a growing minority of people find great value in 23andMe’s offerings. I believe it is a remarkable field and we are living in a great time to have such advanced personal genetics information readily available to the public. If 23andMe’s legal and consent agreement offers any hints, it is that this is by far a very early-stage offering and results are not as accurate as they could be. That being said it is msot definitely a great insight into what is to come. Clinical and research reports are continually being added and updated.

I had a hard timing trying to decide how to rate 23andMe. There are a few reasons. For one, it’s a relatively new company in a developing space trying to offer cost-effective solutions to the public. You know how technology works; you just can’t expect any just service to be perfect the first time around, especially in such a volatile space where new processes are being evaluated incessantly. Second, 23andMe’s offerings become exponentially more useful the more people in your family you add to your account. You can compare genome data, build a family tree, see what traits might get passed down to potential offspring, find out what disease risks run in the family and much more. Of course that would run $400-$500 per person. Perhaps a family package would be interesting: $1,500 for up to 5 people.

23andMe receives 8 out of 10 Stammys.

What do you think about 23andMe and services like it in general? Would you be interested in trying it out? If not, why? Privacy reasons or cost? At what price would you consider checking out such a personal genetics service. What interests you most about this space? Leave a comment down below and let me know whats on your mind! Thanks.

Notice: To protect myself from this data getting in the hands some potentially evil entity, like my health insurance company, I have manually altered some data presented in screenshots via Firebug (not Photoshop, aside from blurring out someone else’s name). This does not affect anything in my review or how their results look.

Update 3/5/10 @ 6:15pm: Some great conversation about this post going on at Louis Gray’s Google Buzz, including some comments by Linda Avey of 23andMe:

This is one of the most thorough and accurate summaries I’ve seen (I’m the co-founder of 23andMe). One small point…the testing technology 23andMe uses is highly accurate, it’s just the interpretation of what the datapoints means which is, in some cases, early and subject to revision (this would be equally true if you sequenced the entire genome vs. genotyping, which is the SNP-based technique used by 23andMe).

Getting wider diversity in genetics research is a key objective of 23andMe…need to figure out ways to attract people of all backgrounds. Once we have enough representation of any given population, the statisticians can see if genetic associations replicate (or discover new ones!). Filling out the surveys is a much-appreciated contribution.

-Linda Avey

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Review: 23andMe DNA Testing for Health, Disease & Ancestry

People: Anne Wojcicki, Linda Avey, Sergey Brin

Live Blogging: Startup Riot 2010

Paul Stamatiou — Wed, 17 Feb 2010 13:37:55 +0000

Startup Riot, the biggest and most interesting tech event (in my mind) hits Atlanta for its third year. You might remember the first two Startup Riots which I blogged about: I presented at the Startup Riot 2008 and covered Startup Riot 2009. I’ll backtrack a bit first. Startup Riot 2010 is a startup pitch event and this year 50 startups in Atlanta, GA will take the stage for 3 minutes or less and talk about their startup company with just 4 slides. It’s an all day event and by far a pillar event for the growing Atlanta tech community. That being said, Robert Scoble came into town this week to attend Startup Riot. He works for RackSpace Building43 and RackSpace bought local startup Jungle Disk last year, so they decided to fly out from California to meet with the Jungle Disk team and network with local startups. Skribit Co-founder Calvin Yu and I went to the Jungle Disk offices yesterday for a video interview with Scoble that I’ll post up soon.

Now on to the point of this post. I am going to attempt to live blog Startup Riot today. This is my first time live blogging so there will likely be some snags along the way. Thanks for reading!

The event will be also be streamed live at live.startupriot.com.

Live Blog Coverage

8:20am Just getting to the Fabulous Fox Theater:

8:28am People slowing coming into the Fox theater. There’s a busy lobby area where several startups have demo booths setup. A/V crew is doing some sound checks.

Startup Riot Organizer @Sanjay

The Egyptian Ballroom of the Fox Theater in Atlanta

8:39am Sanjay is prepping the first batch of speakers.

8:44am Wi-Fi is acting up, hopefully they’re just rebooting it or something.

8:53am Voice over the PA says everything will start in 2 minutes.

8:58am Sanjay up making jokes and trying to stop people from eating doughnuts and come sit down.

9:01am Sanjay starting his 41 slide deck. Talking about success of Startup Riot. 400 people in attendance today.

9:02am Sanjay telling people how to pronounce his name. He does this a lot.

9:04am+ Sanjay talking Startup Riot basics. Big sponsors: Georgia Tech ATDC (disclosure Skribit is a member) and Jungle Disk. Other sponsors include Georgia Research Alliance, Georgia Tech Research Institute, Imlay Investments, MailChimp, Microsoft BizSpark, One, Siavage Law Group LLC, Silverpop, Development Corporate, Epilog Laser (laser engraved the netbooks that are prizes for the winning startups), Friendly Human Productions, Mashable, Mixergy, TechDrawl, Whynatte.

9:12am Wi-Fi keeps crashing. This makes Stammy sad.

9:13am Sanjay talking about his startup gossip mailing list. I’ve been subscribing for a while and have advertised in it for the last 2 months. Also mentioned Shotput Ventures.

9:15am Sanjay introducing the keynote speaker, Bo Peabody:

Bo is an accomplished entrepreneur and investor. He co-founded Tripod.com in 1994 and co-founded Village Ventures in 1999. Bo’s book, Lucky or Smart?, is available on Amazon. Wikipedia entry on Bo here.

You should also read this recent Washington Post piece that Bo did on social media, startups, and advertising models.

9:16am Bo takes the stage. Dude looks at least 15 years younger than I thought he would be.

9:17am+ Bo talking about his titles. He has been CEO of various companies and is now a venture capitalist. He also has a few restaurants.

Bo talking about how he wanted to be an entrepreneur when young and how his friends were all getting high-paying jobs right out of college. “What exactly does an entrepreneur do?” Talking about meeting women in a bar and how saying you are an entrepreneur is like “this guy is unemployed.”

9:25am Wi-Fi keeps dying and being slow. Sorry for the delay guys.

9:26am Bo talking about how every successful company at one point was very close to shutting down. At Tripod they wanted to provide 90% of the content and the audience would add 10% of the content by talking about it… was actually the other way around once they started working with it. This was in mid 90′s. Once they started seeing how the Internet worked, it took off.

Bo is now talking about his restaurant group Mezze. Tweaked to success: raised the lighting in the restaurant and made meals larger portion sizes, attracted an older crowd and got more business out of it.

Entrepreneurship is all about passion.

9:30am Bo takling about his sections of his book: Humilty – don’t believe your own press, and Level-Headedness – Best defense is a gracious offense. Just because he had a great piece on the USA Today, he shouldn’t have scrapped his great talk assuming that everyone read the great news piece. He was at a speaking gig on a book tour and asked the audience who read his book – no one raised their hand.

9:34am Story about a big meeting with some movie producers. Made tons of plans. Movie producer assistant called.. had to change meeting. Bo changed plans again. Two days later they call back again saying that day isn’t going to work. They reschedule again. Another call, that day won’t work either. They schedule once more time, Bo is pissed but talking about being gracious. Being an entrepreneur – constantly getting screwed. Time changed again, he told them “look, I’m going to be out in LA for an entire week.. if there is any 30 minute point at which I can meet with him, I can do it.” Assistant says “great”.. calls back right before the trip and has the final date. Bo goes to the meeting and gets the deal done. Enterpreneurship – gotta stick with it.

9:38am Bo talking about the VC fund he works with, Village Ventures – currently $134M. I need to pitch this guy..

9:39am Q&A starting…

“I’m trying to raise funding… I’m getting blown off a lot as well. Meetings cancelled, etc. Tell me the story of the first time you raised funding. Also, if you don’t have any connection.. how do you get in when you’ve got no lead?”

Bo says: you have a connection. Think about who you know and you’ll find someone with money – they might not be a traditional investor but they can connect you with who you’re looking for.

“What cosmic set of circumstances must occur for you to say yes to a deal?”

Bo says: Running a venture firm is just like running a business, just like you. When we’re dealing with a limited partner as a customer, we tell them a story. They remember that story pretty well.. if we veer from that story it creates problems with them as a customer. The story he tells them: I’m investing primarily in vertical media companies. Ones that are building out audiences in particular set of verticals that he has marked as being valuable to advertisers and consumers. First thing that has to happen – you have to be doing something that is interesting to me. Tells entrepreneurs to do their homework, look at their websites to find what they invest in and look at their portfolio companies.

“What are the verticals that you invest in?”

Travel, Health, Beauty & Fashion, Parenting, Technology Media, Financial Services Media, Food & Wine, Education

“Hi Bo – I’m trying to raise capital for a startup in Zambia, Africa. Investors are scared in funding in an emerging markets. Advice?”

Bo says: I think your best bet is to get to individuals who have an interest in Africa. Have invested in startups in Africa, et cetera. My guess is that a venture firm is not your best route.

“How much does geography play a role in investments?”

Bo says: It’s hard for me to invest in a company in LA, even though I think there is an opportunity out there in video and content creation etc, it’s really hard for me to manage a relationship that is a 3 hour time difference and 3,000 miles away. Focus on getting to local people in regards to funding.

“First Round Capital put together this entrepreneur equity share thing… diversification”

Bo says: Diversification is a good thing but I don’t want to back a company that is giving away their own companies equity. They should value their company’s equity very highly, more so than someone else’s startup.

10am Bo is done speaking. Sanjay is back on stage. We have a break now.

10:19am The pitches are starting…

Transaction Tree Problem with juggling receipts. Product gives consumer opportunity. Have their receipt emailed including marketing, survey, ads and coupons relevant to their current and past purchases. Not spammy. Saves retailers 30% over receipt paper overall. Looking for funding.

Mediasode Multi-media manager product enables you to coordinate a video stream along with other types of content. People absorb content in the order of their choosing. Term “sync the story” – fully augmented media. Not just a collection of links. Embed app on any website or device. Target cost-aware verticals with big media libraries. Designed for new touch applications like the iPad. Information at your fingertips with Mediasode.

Othernum.com Small biz and need a phone number with no crazy contract or pricey hardware? Virtual PBX platform that scales with your business. $9 a month for a number and get conferencing etc. Been working on it for about 10 months now, both co-founders still have their day jobs. Went through a private beta and now in public beta. Launched 2 weeks ago. An ATDC company. Fully operational. Needs customers. Use code “startupriot” at othernum.com

Ultralite Phototherapy machines to solve things like psoriasis. 2-3% world population have psoriasis. Typical treatments are drugs or phototheraphy. Phototherapy usually involves the patient visiting a clinic many times a week. Phototheraphy is somewhat dangerous as people can overdose on it. To prevent this, Ultralite has developed a prescription system for phototheraphy. The prescription is on a flash drive that is placed in the phototheraphy machine. FDA approved. Seeking funding for development and marketing.

CritSend Email delivery service. Ensures all emails go to inboxes. Easy setup and online reporting setup. Lowest price on the market. Showing example customer that got 3x better email delivery using CritSend. They are scalable. 24/7 monitoring system with people watching it worldwide. Setup takes just minutes.

Placevision Web development for urban planning. Communication gap between government and citizens. Government is confused as to what tools to use to close this gap. Product focuses on consultants such as architecture and urban planning firms to facilitate community outreach. They need a website to spread this info.. as it stands it is just a bunch of PDFs on a website. OnlinePlanGuide.com is 90% complete – comes with all architecture, visualization tools and plugins necessary. Raising funds to finish final development.

LessAccounting Most small biz owners use QuickBooks. “QuickBooks is fucking horrible.” All accounting applications suck, we just suck the least. LessAccounting helps small biz owners get back to working and making money. Data entry is a thing of the past. We import your bank transactions every night. All their tech support is book keepers.. they can help you sort your accounts. Integrate with lots of services. Packages from $12-$300/month. Here to take some money. Here to spread the gospel of LessAccounting.

Artisanal Influence Pair wine bloggers with wine brands. Wine bloggers are “our last best hope” to wineries. Sales are down in the wine industry. Many wine magazines are on the verge of bankruptcy. Product is a weekly mailing list. Wine marketers pay $50 to submit a promotion. Pair blogger with opportunity. Looking for additional funding.

neybor Free listing service that allows you to create online reports.. make money by partnering with real estate photographers that use their virtual tour product. Also local newspapers.

Drive Safe Glucose Monitoring System – Making driving safter for Diabetics. Product is patent pending, has a monitor watch device that monitors blood sugar 24/7 and alerts drive when too low. Ultrasound for measurement of blood sugar lows.. 98% accurate. Expect to launch within next 13 months and be able to save over 600 lives every year.

Viral Prints Lets users shop for merchandise inspired from their favorite videos and also create their own merchandise and profit from its sale. T-shirts and things. Website is seamlessly integrated with all the video services. Link between video and merchandise helps conversions. Over 100,000 uniques. Cash Flow positive, custom design application.

learn it live Online service marketplace. Like Guru and Elance do for outsourced labor we for top training. Consumers meet with business professionals. Interactive experience.. networking and communicating in an online forum. World of experts in the palm of your hands to find the information you need to know to succeed. For example Spanish teacher in Bolivia helping you brush up on your Spanish.

Gold Brothers Entertainment Mobile company creating (iPhone) applications. Games, educational apps and so on. Also building for the iPad. Also “agent” product helping authors get published. Received $250k funding.

NetParty, Tribester, We Just Click Properties devoted to making new connections and bridging gap between online and offline business connections. NetParty is “worldwide young professionals network” with sponsoring “networking with a twist” events in over 15 events in the U.S.. Ranked #1 in a CNET post “Professional social networks that take on LinkedIn.” Younger crowd than typical LinkedIn user. Tribester.com – Nation’s biggest singles event (4k ppl each year in NYC), biggest Jewish Facebook group (100k) competes with JDate.com. And in development property called We Just Click – like a mix of The Huffington Post, match.com and reality TV.

Rank’em “Accelerating Music Discovery” Rank songs from favorite artists. Private Beta at gorankem.com. Use their search engine to browse artists. Money made through affiliate partnerships. Helps artists change set lists based on location and what fans like.

napstay Marketplace for vacation home rentals. Vacation homes are generally cheaper per person compared to hotels. Huge market potential. Consumers – online bookings, no deposits, flexible stays. Owners – standardization and distribution. Currently building up inventory of properties.

jobtitled Career Analytics product. Problem – uninformed career decisions. Solution – data mining and statistical analysis. Crawl the web looking for CVs and resumes.. see how people move through careers and what industries they work in. Given any job title they can provide a list of next and previous positions, average time between positions. Give user an idea of how long to get to their end goal/ideal job. JobTitled.com – patent pending, public peta, tripled source data. JobTitled Edu – GA Tech, GA State joined pilot, alpha prototype completed. Here to meet with investors and advisors.

looxii Part of inaugural Shotput Ventures class. Social media analytics space. How do you best deal with a large amount of qualitative data and make sense of all of it? Then how do you interact with and engage? Looxii is social media analytics made simple. Site beta live at looxii.com

11:17am Lunch time!

1pm And we’re back for the next batch of presenting companies at Startup Riot 2010!

High Road Craft The Ben & Jerry’s for restaurants, hotels and resorts. Ice Cream on the market by this June. Already secured investment. Delicious premium ice creams, apparently.

CoreMotives “Detect, track and target online visitors who express interest.” Capturing and analyzing traffic on sites, landing pages, email interactions and look at where traffic is coming from. Secret Sauce – cross reference this data with sales data that their customers are already tracking so they can identify patterns and find people who exhibit buying behaviors. Four pillars: Web Analytics, Email Marketing, Lead Capture, CRM.

Ninja Post “Finally — a message board built for today’s internet.” What can I do to make my website more social? Modern Message Board software with a modern twist – real time updates, elegant design, integration with Twitter, Facebook and WordPress. Your site + Ninja Post = Sales leads, customer loyalty, web visibility and SEO. Business model – SaaS + premium services like SSO. Looking for angel investment of $150k and looking for customers. Also a Shotput Ventures incubator program company.

CoThrive Hard to drive accountability and track work my scouring your inbox. CoThrive takes email, messaging and communications and converts them into actions that can be tracked without having to leave the inbox. Reads and parses keywords like who is it for, who is responsible, et cetera and converts them into actions without having the user do anything unnaturally. Dashboard created entirely with emails. Paying customers, secured $1M funding and strong management.

Bee Well Wishes “What to send when you don’t know what to do.” Most gifts – “flowers die, food goes bad, not helpful, not useful, not memorable.” Bee well wishes are “lasting, useful gifts of comfort” like blankets, onesies and so on. All delivered in bright orange box with a personalized card. “Smart, infinite growth potential, non-seasonal, always relevant, endless customer base, personal.”

Nexpense Simple online receipt management system that lets you capture receipts real time with your iPhone, Blackberry or Android phone. Receipt goes off to the cloud and your expense report is sent to you via email weekly. Export expenses how you like. Freemium model. Tier 1 has limited receipts and limited history, second tier is $4.95 month for unlimited receipts and history. Tier 3 has a sliding fee structure for multiple users. Launching Alpha in mid-April, seeking users.

Quotejuice Online platform to quote, compare and purchase individual health insurance. Recurring commission revenue for each seal. Nobody wants to get hassled buying an insurance policy. User provides basic info (A/S/L), goes out and finds price quotes then matches plans. Not looking for investors but looking for customers.

SkyBuyHigh In-flight Luxury E-Boutique. “The only in-flight shopping service on private jet flights… and tax-free.” Electronic and displayed on wireless devices in-flight. They have no competition. Based in NYC and Atlanta.

HydroCoal Technologies “We Make Clean Coal Affordable.” Gasification systems for industry. An affordable approach to clean coal – scalable, efficient, reliable. He talked about techie stuff about coal gasifiers and stuff. “disruptive product” for where the GE industry doesn’t play. Seeking $1M for 6 month 2010 pilot.

CitiSync Helps college students discover and share events and specials happening in their city. CitiSync helps local businesses get their specials and events in front of students at the point of decision. I’m skeptical about these types of products. Lots of competition and an ADHD target market..

ElectronicNapkin.com A Show & Tell system for connecting people with ideas. Camera with mounting device.. like interactive whiteboard. Currently reviewing revenue models.

Regator Find the best blog content on the net – using editors and algorithms. “We make it really easy for everyone to find the best blog content and trends.” They have two iPhone apps (one free and one paid). 2010 plans – redesign for trends + social coming up, api to spread the love and app updates and iPad support.

Mobilization Labs Product is Wildfire Platform, helps causes and brands manage, mobilize and measure their support base. SRM — supporter relationship management tool. Like CRM with layer of social data and activities – how they are engaging with your brand. Looking for partners and customers.

Candeo Product is YouHaveAPackage.com and live and creating revenue. Every day thousands of packages are delivered to apartments, business and so on – mail room, front office staff, concierge deals with burden to tell person they have a package. That’s about 4 minutes of time for them each. Candeo’s service with handheld device takes only 20 seconds. Automatically text messages, calls or emails recipients.

Smart Video Interactive Product is digital signage panels. Model – take a huge market and niche it. Revenue positive and expense neutral. Content is key. Seeking $250k funding. Large HVAC distributor currently testing program.

LessMeeting Run effective meetings. Plan meetings, send out meeting minutes and follow-up to see how meeting went. Rate and analyze meeting. Long-run measure meeting productive at the personal level and across the enterprise level. Been around for 3 months with a beta version out. Subscription model starting at $5/month.

PawPawMail E-mail for Grandparents. Live product, lots of positive feedback so far. Moving towards groups – assisted living facilities, libraries and so on.

OpenStudy Get-Help Give-Help Study Network. Piloted with teachers, universities and students for the past 12 months. Students want to collaborate – more effective way to study. Revenue from student subscriptions and charging partners for data about how students using the service. “Connect & collaborate in real time.” Funding from NSF and GRA and looking to raise this summer.

3:05pm And we’re back with the last batch of pitching startups.

eCampus Wide Events calendar. Easy to create, organize, integrate and share. Embed on sites. Freemium model.

Kabbage Product for online sellers. Provides financing for online sellers as they list products for sale. First sellers list products for sale like eBay or Amazon. Then Kabbage makes offers for them and funds them in as few as 10 minutes – money directly put in their online checking accounts. Why Kabbage? It comes down to data. Take data to leverage FICO credit scores.. how much they should lend to them. Raised $1.4M in capital. Completed partnership with bank to fund all these loans online. 60 days from launch.

Chatfé Start conversations with like minded people. “post or find an entertaining comment or question, chatfé finds like-minded people and connects you, speak in real time with people who share your interests.” Both peoples’ phones ring – no phone number or other info is exchanged. Public beta is out now.

the plan is… Plan out your projects. Not exactly sure how it works. Description was confusion. “Visualize your plan, use trial and error, nothing to install, theplanis.com/sur”. Now in private beta.

Abundant Closet “What’s in the Closet?” Product is a patent pending outfit engine. Kind of sounds like Polyvore.com? Abundant Closet raised $350k in founder and family money.

itsFound.org The Craigslist of Internet lost and found. “Make it easy for finders to return items back to losers.” How it works – create unique identifier, print stickers, electronically collect. “If found, return via…”

Savont Helps people build ROSCAs using your social network. For example, saving cycle. Borrower and Saver. Let users pay down interest-bearing debt. Savont is an equal, paying member in every ROSCA.

Uvestor Problem: Inefficient real estate transactions to close any deal. “Uvestor is real estate in real time.” Makes it easier for bank, seller, broker, buyer, appraiser, agent. Monthly subscriptions to small businesses, realtors and individuals. Scaling revenue model.

GetUnBored Picture-based city and events guide. Affiliates and partners include ticketmaster, citysearch, entertainment book, facebook with valpak coming soon. I still don’t really get it. Need more screenshots.

Toomah “Interviewing made easy.” He mentioned an Easy button. Isn’t that trademarked by Staples? InterviewPlus product – review phone screens over the web. Voice-recorded and embedded back into the website.

Medivity Minimally-invasive medical devices. Go through natural openings instead making incisions. “PuncSure” advantages: safer, easier and faster. Market – up to 1.5M proceedures.. a $1B market. Looking to be a FDA Class II device. Exit strategy would be sale or licensing to a larger company.

doleaf Grow your garden. Online marketplace to find and buy plants from mom and pop specialty nurseries and garden centers. “Etsy for plants.” Looking to get the word out. They are asking for links to boost their PageRank.. (hint dont explicity ask for links..)

Softmaxx The FedEx of wireless software – a middleware that hooks modems together. Cellular M2M Market – every modem needs software.

MakeSmallTalk.com Become part of the conversation. “Content destination site.” First place to go when researching new topics – typical articles are short and concise, with a few facts up top.

3:49pm Pitches are done. Sanjay on stage talking about how voting is going to work. Each attendee is to give one pitching startup their lanyard.

And the winners are…

LessAccounting wins first and then Regator and Nexpense tied for second. They all won Startup Riot laser engraved netbooks along with some other prizes.

That wraps up Startup Riot 2010. Thoughts? Are there any events like this in your city? What do you think about fast-paced startup pitching events like this?

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Live Blogging: Startup Riot 2010

People: Sanjay Parekh

Review: Rev iPhone app and PLX Devices Kiwi Wireless OBDII Module (Part 1)

Paul Stamatiou — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 05:17:22 +0000

There are two things I do not usually talk about on this blog — cars (okay maybe there are one, two, three, four, five or more exceptions) and iPhone applications. The former because I am not quite sure everyone here would be interested in reading about anything except the technology behind the car and the latter because most iPhone apps do not have enough substance and utility to create a compelling review. Well I am breaking both of those rules today and for good reason. A few months ago I discovered a $40 iPhone app by DevToaster called Rev.

What it does

At $40 for an iPhone app, Rev is most definitely not cheap compared to other iPhone apps. The only iPhone app I have purchased that was pricier was Navigon GPS and I rarely use it. However, when you are put into the mindset of a true car nut that spends over $300 just to install a single boost gauge, $2000 for a pair of cheap racing seats, $2000 for a basic coilover suspension setup, $400 for a professional dyno tuning session, $500 for a polished throttle body/plenum assembly, $15k for a crate engine and then $10k for a custom twin turbo setup and so on, then a $40 iPhone app is like an impulse buy of a Snickers bar at the grocery checkout.

There are several use cases for the Rev iPhone app, best described by the video below, but in a nutshell Rev gives car enthusiasts access to detailed metrics about their car’s performance, the ability to create a custom gauge cluster, check engine codes, log data and lap times along with GPS. It’s one of the most comprehensive vehicle tools I have seen. It is, however, a more involved setup than some of those automotive iPhone apps that rely solely on the iPhone’s accelerometer. Rev requires that you install an OBDII module in your car that provides real-time data from your car’s ECU to the iPhone — in this case via a Wi-Fi connection.

The official DevToaster Rev product video – shows off different use cases

OBDII is a standard port on all 1996+ cars and provides onboard diagnostics information. If you look under your car’s steering wheel it will be somewhere there — car manufacturers are required by law to place the OBDII port within ~6 inches of the steering column. All OBDII ports are also required by law to utilize a friction fit and no snap lock, so installation is as simple as plugging in the module.

Why I got it

While others may be interested in using such a setup to keep an eye on MPG or checking engine codes, I purchased the Kiwi and Rev for the purpose of showing additional gauges and logging lap data. In my car I have relatively few gauges: tachometer, speed and fuel level. As someone that is very much into modifying cars and experimenting with various ECU tunes, I would like to keep an eye on air to fuel ratio, engine temperature, et cetera (note: some vehicles don’t have all these sensors and you may need to purchase the Kiwi version with iMFD and install your own sensors). Rather than purchasing and installing an expensive gauge cluster behind the steering wheel or in the A-pillar, I decided to check out Rev.

iPhone 3GS and Rev app with unboxed PLX Devices Kiwi Wifi

Of course there are a few downsides to this approach. For one it involves using an iPhone mount that can obstruct road view when mounted to the windshield (alternatively it can be mounted lower elsewhere but that defeats the purpose if you must constantly look down to check gauges, unless you are purely using it for logging purposes) and second if you do not always remove the iPhone windshield mount when parked, that imposes a break-in risk (even if the iPhone isn’t there, it has been said that thieves assume the device is hidden in the glove box and will break-in regardless. I have also even been told by a local police officer that some thieves look for windshield suction cup marks, so if you live in a crime infested neighborhood, keep a cloth and rubbing solution handy).

What you need

Everything you need: iPhone with Rev app, PLX Kiwi Wifi, Griffin WindowSeat mount, Griffin PowerJolt charger

iPhone (3G or 3GS if you want GPS logging functionality)
Some sort of iPhone mount. Rev displays and logs G-force data but requires that the iPhone stays perfectly steady after calibrated in a certain position. I went with the Griffin WindowSeat iPhone windshield mount but found the suction cup weak and hard to engage. Anyone have any better suggestions?

Griffin WindowSeat iPhone windshield mount

iPhone car charger. Having the Rev app open all the time sucks battery life. I got the Griffin PowerJolt USB charger and think it’s one of the best ones out now. It’s compact and has 2 USB ports.
Rev iPhone app
A wireless OBDII module. There are several of these on the market but I decided on the PLX Devices Kiwi Wifi (~$150) and have been happy with it. There is a pricier version (~$250) of the Kiwi Wifi that lets you add other sensors.

closeup of the Kiwi Wi-Fi OBDII module

What’s next?

The next post in this series will go over installation of the OBDII module, Rev setup and a review of the Rev application itself.

Example screenshots of Rev

Thoughts? Are you a big enough car enthusiast to consider a setup like this on your daily driver? What about your weekend exotic?

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Review: Rev iPhone app and PLX Devices Kiwi Wireless OBDII Module (Part 1)

How To: Apple MacBook Pro RAID 0 Array with 2 Intel X25-M SSDs

Paul Stamatiou — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 00:07:09 +0000

In late 2008 I wrote about my experience using the first generation 80GB Intel X25-M SSD — my first SSD. I had to pay the early adopter tax for that SSD, so it cost me around $700. The speed boost alone justified the price to me. Fast-forward about a year and that SSD stopped working. I’m not quite sure what died — the controller or something else — but I RMA’d it with Intel and they sent me a new, second generation X25-M that week. The second generation (G2) X25-M is based on 34nm fabrication compared to the 50nm first generation. The G2 is also substantially cheaper at roughly $299 and noticeably faster due to a new controller and firmware. Intel still claims the same “up to 250MB/s” sequential read speed and “up to 70MB/s” sequential write speed but the G2 brings improved (2x for 80GB, 2.5x for 160GB version) random 4KB writes.

The second X25-M G2 SSD prior to installation in a 17-inch Unibody MacBook Pro

But I digress, this post is not about why I love Intel’s SSD, but rather how using just one SSD was not fast enough. (It should be noted that the X25-M will not be top dog forever and will be getting stiff competition from OCZ and their “SandForce” controller that can compress data beforehand in the Vertex 2 Pro SSDs.) Getting to the point, I put two 80GB Intel X25-M G2 SSDs in my unibody 17-inch Apple MacBook Pro and then set them up with RAID 0 — striped data for better performance.

How this is possible? MacBook Pro laptops only support one hard drive/solid state drive. Well, I had to remove the optical drive. Not a big deal for me as I rarely used it and if I ever need it I can use it with an external USB enclosure.

What You Need

Laptop of your choice: that uses a SATA interface for its optical drive. If you’re using a Unibody MacBook Pro you should be good to go.
2 Solid State Drives of your choice: For optimal results, ensure they are the exact same brand, model, capacity and generation.
- Intel has the 80GB (~$289) and 160GB (~$489) flavors of the X-25M. Make sure to spring for the G2 second generation (linked).
- Kingston has their SSDNow V-Series: 64GB (~$149) or 128GB (~$269)
- I mentioned the new OCZ Vertex 2 Pro earlier but at the time of this writing I could not find one for sale to link to.
MCE Optibay ($99): The Optibay is the special ingredient in this How To. It fits properly in the optical drive bay slot and lets you securely attach your second SSD to it. It is important to note that you need to buy the SATA version if you have the same Unibody 17-inch MacBook Pro as I do. Prior models used IDE for optical drives and the respective Optibays had onboard IDE » SATA converters that resulted in slower performance; definitely not what you want with a RAID setup. When I ordered my Optibay it came with a USB 2.0 enclosure for the SuperDrive I was taking out.
Tools: The usual small (#00) Phillips head will do but there is also one screw that is very difficult to remove unless you remove a small T6 Torx screw in front of it. I have been quite happy with a small tool with changeable bits called the Teeny Turner.

These two tools have helped me void many gadget warranties over the years.

No regard for Apple warranty: Unless you are have mastered the art of deception, if you ever take your MacBook Pro in for warranty repair they will likely notice that you have opened it up before. You can always claim the work was done by a Certified Apple Specialist but they might call your bluff. Or you could meticulously undo the RAID setup and put the optical drive back before walking in for an unrelated repair.
Blank disc: You will want to make sure your SSDs have the latest firmware. Most SSD manufacturers require that you burn a disc and boot your computer into their software. [Intel SATA SSD Firmware Update Tool]
External USB/FireWire hard drive: It’s always a good idea to have an external hard drive drive dedicated to backing up your computer, not storing excess media files and documents. In this case of this guide, the external drive will be used to boot off of during a phase of setup. I use a cheap 500GB My Book I bought years ago, but anything large enough will work.

Hardware Install

Unfortunately, swapping/adding hard drives in the 17-inch Unibody MacBook Pro (without user-removable battery) is a bit more involved than the simple procedure on the 15-inch Unibody MacBook Pro with removable battery. You will need to be comfortable taking out the entire back panel of the laptop.

Detailed instructions for taking apart your MacBook Pro can be found at ifixit.com

For my MacBook Pro there were ten Phillips screws in my way before I could take off the back panel.

The opened up 17-inch Unibody Apple MacBook Pro

Since I had previously already installed an 80GB X25-M G2 SSD in place of the hard drive the laptop came with, my next objective was removing the SuperDrive.

Removing the optical drive. Inset: disconnect bluetooth module first

The SuperDrive had a few more Phillips screws but there was also a display cable and Bluetooth module in the way. The Bluetooth module has a tiny cable that can be gently tugged and removed. Then you can remove the two screws holding the module in place. Push the display cable out of the way and remove the grounding pad near the hinge. Gently try to lift the optical drive up. When you have enough wiggle room disconnect the SATA cable from the SuperDrive.

Next, unbox the MCE Optibay and screw in the SSD into it.

MCE Optibay with SSD installed

Then position the Optibay, connect the SATA cable, screw in the Optibay, put the grounding pad back and reattach the Bluetooth module. Here’s the bad news — the screws for the Bluetooth module do not fit into the holes in the Optibay. The good news — the Bluetooth module is so tiny and lightweight that it’s not the end of the world that it isn’t screwed in. If you’re really worried about it use some Polyimide/Kapton tape to keep it in place or find appropriate screws.

Bluetooth module doesn’t screw into the Optibay using either the provided or original screws.

And finally, reassemble the laptop and put the ten back panel screws back. Boot the laptop to make sure all is well. Open Disk Utility to see if the new SSD is listed.

Place the SuperDrive you removed into the external USB 2.0 enclosure provided with the Optibay.

Install the latest SSD firmware

So the new SSD is seen by OS X and all is well. Great! If you haven’t already burned the firmware updater tool provided by Intel (or whatever company makes your SSDs), do so now. Boot up to the burned disc by holding down C on boot when the gray screen is shown. Follow the on screen instructions and 5 minutes later both of your SSDs should be loaded up with the latest firmware.

Usual firmware updating precautions apply — make sure all of your data is backed up on the off-chance the SSD gets bricked.

Software Config

Now you have two working SSDs in your MacBook Pro. You are currently in either one of two situations:

[My Situation] One of the SSDs has already been loaded up with OS X and the other is empty.
Both SSDs are new and empty. There is no OS loaded on either.

If you are in situation #2, I am guessing (not tried it personally) that you need to:

put your OS X disc into the SuperDrive you placed into the provided external enclosure and connect it to your MacBook Pro
hold down C and boot into the installer
close the installer window and go to the top menu to open up Disk Utility
create the RAID array and proceed installing OS X onto it

However, I have heard of some issues where the computer will not see the RAID array when you are booted off of the OS X install disc. You might need to create the array while booted off of another external OS X install or on a working OS X install already present on one of the SSDs — that’s why I recommend having an external hard drive lying around just in case. To clarify, it seems if you have the computer booted off of OS X on another drive, insert the install disc, run the initial setup from the inside-OS X installer that auto-reboots for you, that it should work.. if that makes sense. If not, leave a comment.

If you are in situation #1 like myself, then things are a bit trickier. In a nutshell, I cloned my OS X installation onto an external USB 2.0 hard drive, changed the startup disk to that external drive then booted from it, created the RAID array, cloned the external drive onto the new RAID array, changed the startup disk to the RAID array and rebooted.

While you can do the drive cloning back and forth like I describe below I always recommend doing a fresh OS X install whenever possible.

Alrighty, here we go. Download and install Carbon Copy Cloner (SuperDuper works too). Connect your external hard drive. I have had a cheap Western Digital My Book hard drive solely for Time Machine backups. I had plenty of extra space on the drive so I partitioned it so that I could maintain both Time Machine backups and a Carbon Copy Clone of my OS X install.

If you want to do the same and use your external drive for both Time Machine and a bootable OS X drive clone, connect the drive and open Disk Utility. Click the external hard drive on the left pane and then click the Partition tab on the right. Resize the current Time Machine partition to make room for a second partition. Apply changes and name the new partition.

Fire up Carbon Copy Cloner and select the internal SSD with OS X as the source drive and the new partition you just made on the external drive (if you did that) as the target drive. Make sure the drive will be bootable. It should say “This volume will be bootable.” Click Clone.

Somewhere around 30 minutes to a few hours later, drive cloning will be done.

Now we want to boot OS X off of that new external clone. Go to System Preferences » Startup Disk and select the external drive. Click Restart.

After successfully booting into OS X on the external drive, open Disk Utility once again. You may opt to first erase both SSDs before proceeding. Select one of the SSDs in the left pane (the root device that says INTEL SSD…, not the partition disk1s..) and select the RAID tab on the right. Select Striped RAID Set for RAID Type, and keep Format as the default “Mac OS Extended (Journaled).” Drag each of the SSDs on the left into the open section on the bottom right.

About to create the RAID array

Click Options. For RAID Block Size select 128K and then click OK. As for why I selected that value, I find it to be a great all around compromise for performance and versatility with files of all sizes. If the block size was smaller, it would perform slightly better with smaller files (versus just letting one SSD in the RAID 0 array receive the data of a file that is smaller than the block size) but it would not be as effective with larger files. If you’re still curious about this, feel free to ask me for a more in-depth explanation in the comments.

Selecting RAID array block size.

Click Create, then click Create again in the next window. Your new RAID 0 SSD array will be made momentarily.

Creating the RAID 0 SSD array

Sweet! The RAID 0 array is working and online.

There’s still no OS on the RAID array so we’ll need to fire up ye olde Carbon Copy Cloner again. This time select the external drive as the source disk and the new RAID array as the target disk. Make sure “Backup Everything” is selected. Again, check to see that CCC says “This volume will be bootable.” Click Clone. If it gives you a warning about deleting files on the target volume, click Continue.

Don’t use the computer and go grab a bite to eat or get a quad-shot cappuccino or something. Or comment on this article saying how you’re following along and all is going well and you’re super excited about the new speeds your laptop is about to see.

Cloning OS X from external drive to new RAID 0 SSD array underway – Carbon Copy Cloner

After cloning finishes, open up the Startup Disk pane in System Preferences again. Select the new RAID array you made as the startup disk. Click Restart.

Boot off of your new RAID array

When the computer boots up into OS X again, this time from your new RAID array, eject and unplug the external drive. One last time, open up Disk Utility. Click on the RAID array, select the First Aid tab and click Repair Disk Permissions. After that is done click Verify Disk and then Repair Disk if deemed necessary.

RAID Array First Aid

Now, one last check to make sure everything is running a-okay. Select the RAID array in Finder and hit Command+I (Get Info). Expand the Sharing & Permissions section at the bottom. Click the little lock and type in your password to gain access. Make sure that both “system” and “admin” have Read & Write privileges set.

Performance

I’ll let the numbers speak for themselves. You may click any of these screenshots for a larger version. Benchmarks were carried out by QuickBench after a fresh reboot and the numbers presented below were calculated as an average of 10 runs. Tests from 4KB all the way up to 100MB are shown below.

Without Cache Effects and Asynchronous I/O enabled, standard averages varied slightly from the test above: 206.885 MB/sec (seq reads), 106.755 MB/sec (seq writes), 162.901 MB/sec (rand reads), 72.378 MB/sec (rand writes).

Without Cache Effects and Asynchronous I/O enabled, max reads and writes were 520 MB/sec and 170 MB/sec, respectively.

If numbers aren’t your thing, how about some typical day-to-day tasks:

Photoshop CS4 loads in 2 seconds and only takes another 7 seconds to load 5 hi-res images (each around 5-8 MB)
It takes 6.5 seconds to load Photoshop CS4, Illustrator CS4 and Fireworks CS4 simultaneously.
What other daily tasks do you do? Let me know in the comments and I will update this post with the results.

However, bootup times are not remarkably fast as it seems to take a while for the RAID array to get recognized. Not the biggest deal if you only happen to reboot every 50 days or so like I do.

Verdict

This RAID 0 SSD setup in my 17-inch Unibody MacBook Pro is just the way I like my cars and computers: pricey, impractical but hellishly fast. I give the 2x80GB Intel X25-M RAID SSD setup in my MacBook Pro 9.0 out of 10 Stammys. It’s not a 10 out of 10 because:

the X25-M is already outdated by the new SandForce controller SSDs, as well as offerings with Samsung or Indilinx drive controllers with caching, currently emerging on the market
the 160GB version of the X25-M has faster sustained reads and writes than the 80GB X25-M
the X25-M is MLC. while more storage at the expense of performance made it acceptable for a single SSD, having a RAID setup makes it easier to get two 64GB SLC SSDs and have much greater speeds

Q: So is this hardware or software RAID?
A: This MacBook Pro (or other Apple laptops for that matter) do not seem to have hardware RAID controllers, such as ICH10R and their ilk. As such, this RAID array is software. That just means that intense disk I/O is also accompanied with some increased CPU activity.

Q: OMG how do you live without an optical drive!!?!?
A: Easily. The last time I used my optical drive for anything was to burn a music CD for the car and that was just because I was too lazy to sync and charge my iPod Nano. Optical media is slowly dying. Although I would like to see the next Core i5 Apple laptops come with the option of a Blu-ray drive.

Q: But you’re running twice as many drives.. doesn’t that suck a lot of power?
A: I haven’t noticed any changes in battery life. Most SSDs have better power consumption profiles compared to their mechanical counterparts in most scenarios. For example, SSDs easily outperform spinning disks under high load situations in terms of power consumption.

Q: What about TRIM?
A: Well first off, TRIM isn’t even supported by OS X as of Snow Leopard so it’s not like that’s a big deal. However, while you could boot into Windows 7 previously if you had a dual-boot system and run TRIM from there (edit: but even that is of limited utility as Windows 7 can’t run TRIM on HFS+), that isn’t possible with an SSD RAID array. It is not possible to TRIM a RAID array now for a few reasons. No RAID controller (and this array is software too, so there is not a physical RAID controller) currently supports TRIM on RAID and it is not possible to TRIM each SSD separately since the file system needs to be seen and the RAID layer on top of that kind of abstracts it. This does not mean that TRIM on SSD RAID arrays will not be possible in the future but it requires that the OS, RAID controller and SSDs all support TRIM, which will invariably take some time.

In short: not being able to run TRIM is only a substantial concern once the entire volume has been written to once. I am currently using less than half of the array’s storage space so this is not a huge concern right now. Also this array will probably only exist on my computer for 9 months, then I’ll upgrade it with something faster.

Now that you’ve read all of this, here’s a bit of a warning: back up your stuff often. SSDs are kind of flaky in terms of lifetime. My first one died in under a year (I believe Intel claim 5 years of writing 100GB/day – correct me if I’m wrong – but still the controller can go out and random events), and it doesn’t help that I am now running 2 of them in RAID 0 without any way to run TRIM.

Thoughts? Is this something you would do with your laptop or desktop? Do you currently use a Solid State Drive in your main computer? Do you have the need for (computer) speed?

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This post was based on a Skribit suggestion. Have a good idea for a post? Let me hear it.

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How To: Apple MacBook Pro RAID 0 Array with 2 Intel X25-M SSDs

How To/Review: Surf Securely with VyprVPN

Paul Stamatiou — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 02:13:05 +0000

Knowing how to keep your web traffic data safe while browsing the web on unknown networks is a vital skill that not enough savvy Internet surfers take part in. I have previously discussed a few ways of solving this issue through the use of SSH tunnels (manually-created and application managed). I have also discussed things like “anonymous” web browsing through the Janus Privacy Adapter as well as with public Tor nodes. (Side note: Anonymous in quotes because truly anon browsing requires encrypted, signed traffic over private Tor networks — not public, published ones everyone knows about — but I digress). While VPN is nothing new and has been used by businesses and their employees for over a decade, it has not generally been something aimed at the typical Internet user. However, there is a problem with all of these solutions — they are just too hard to setup for most users and have various drawbacks (see nerd talk at the end of this post).

Enter VyprVPN

A recently launched software development company called Golden Frog, inspired by the creators of Giganews, debuted their VPN service called VyprVPN. Having been a happy customer of Giganews for the last 2 years and therefore receiving access to VyprVPN in my account, I decided to put their claims to the test with this review.

VyprVPN provides a secure encrypted connection to the Internet, creating a solid layer of online privacy protection unavailable with traditional Internet security software. Valued at $14.99 per month, VyprVPN is free to Diamond customers for a limited time.

Before beginning with setup and my VyprVPN review, let’s see how it is marketed to get a better idea of its uses. Golden Frog mentions VyprVPN in the context of privacy, security, reliability & speed, as well as trust and stability. I’ll try to summarize what they’re aiming for briefly:

“VyprVPN thwarts Deep Packet Inspection by encrypting your Internet traffic as it passes through your ISP.”

“You get a high-speed connection with unlimited speed. VyprVPN has the bandwidth and high-quality server infrastructure to deliver 99.99% uptime.”

“VyprVPN was developed by Golden Frog, a global software developer which is currently partnering with Giganews to beta the service for free with Giganews’ Usenet customers.”

What You Should Not Use VyprVPN For

I feel obligated to mention that using VyprVPN in an attempt to hide your tracks while doing nefarious online activities is not a good idea. I say “attempting to hide your tracks” because a quick read of the Golden Frog VyprVPN Privacy Policy and Terms of Service shows that they complies with criminal investigations:

Golden Frog cooperates fully with law enforcement agencies, yet there must still be a subpoena before Golden Frog provides a member’s identifying information – minimal information reasonably calculated to identify and no more. In a criminal investigation Golden Frog is required by the Law to not divulge the fact of the investigation to the member.

While on the subject, Golden Frog has a list of prohibited activites while using VyprVPN or any of their services:

Spamming (email, Usenet, message boards, etc.)

Copyright, trademark, and patent infringement.

Defamatory or abusive language

IP Spoofing

Illegal or unauthorized access to other computers or networks

Distribution of Internet viruses, worms, or other destructive activities

Export control violations

All other illegal activities

I just wanted to get that out of the way as there seems to be a consensus among tech-savvy people my age (or at least all my computer science friends have been to one too many Black Hat, DEF CON, HOPE and ShmooCon conventions) that SSH tunnels, Tor networks and VPN services were created solely for hiding their web traffic while doing shady things online. There are in fact real world legitimate uses for VPNs on a daily basis…

What You Can/Should Use VyprVPN For

Using inflight Wi-Fi by a provider such as Gogo that uses a completely open and unencrypted Wi-Fi access point with no link layer security. Anyone on the flight could open up a packet sniffer and see what you are up to online.

Using similar public Wi-Fi access points at coffee shops, airports, that inviting open access point named “Linksys” that just seems to follow you around or those hotel networks that allow you to see other computers on the network. Or even while on your own GSM 3G data card (but to be honest the chances of having your GSM 3G data packets sniffed are very, very slim as it’s not just as easy as any random script kiddie installing Wireshark or NetWitness Investigator)

Bypassing your ISP’s port blocking and/or traffic shaping and throttling activities based on Deep Packet Inspection. For example, your BitTorrent uploads and downloads might be monitored and limited by your ISP alongside services like Skype VoIP calls.

Providing additional security from pesky network admins at work. Did you know that many businesses have software on their network that lets your boss and/or IT guy know exactly what websites you are visiting, in real-time, as well as block access to other websites? If you’ve ever wondered why you can’t browse Facebook or Twitter at work, that explains it. They are employing something like SonicWALL Traffic Monitor, BLOXX Internet Content Filtering, Exinda WAN Optimization or a number of other solutions. Setting up a VPN will let you bypass them in most cases. Although they will be able to tell that you’re using a VPN and likely assume it’s solely for the purpose of bypassing their monitors and/or if they are using something like Apple Remote Desktop they’ll be able to see your screen, but I digress.

Access services limited by geographic region (ex: Pandora, Hulu, Spotify, BBC iPlayer)

Competitive Landscape

In the interest of writing an unbiased article, I wanted to point out that there are many VPN providers and VyprVPN is in no way the first mover in this space. Some have limitations. Some are free. Some are paid. Some are by known companies, and some look like fly by night operations. In no particular order, below are some other VPN providers, with their supported protocol types listed along the side.

Cryptocloud (OpenVPN)
WiTopia (PPTP, SSL)
iPREDator (PPTP) (run by The Pirate Bay guys)
Torrent Freedom (OpenVPN)
Black Logic (IPSec)
BananaVPN (PPTP)
Perfect Privacy (PPTP, OpenVPN)
StrongVPN (PPTP, SSL)
AlwaysVPN (OpenVPN)
AceVPN (OpenVPN, SSL, PPTP, L2TP)
PureVPN (PPTP, L2TP, IPSec)

To be clear, I have not used any of the VPN providers in the list above. I just did some research and found them. I am not implying they are in the same class as VyprVPN, which boasts its speeds and network performance just as much as their customer service.

Setup…

Now that you have an idea of VyprVPN and other VPN offerings and their uses, let’s proceed with installation and configuration. Since that all depends on your OS, I have gone through and written up install documentation with screenshots for Mac OS X 10.6, Windows 7, Ubuntu 9.10 and the iPhone.

Setup on Mac OS X (Snow Leopard)

Browse to Apple » System Preferences » Network and click the + icon found in the bottom left corner. In the drop-downs select VPN, PPTP and enter a service name of your choice, respectively, as shown below:

Adding a new VPN connection in Mac OS X

Click Create when done, then select the new connection in the left pane. On the right, enter one of the following for Server Address depending on which you live closest to:

us1.vyprvpn.com (United States — Los Angeles)
eu1.vyprvpn.com (Europe — Amsterdam)

Continue to fill out your VyprVPN username as described earlier for Account Name. You many optionally set Encryption to Maximum (128 bit only) instead of the default “Automatic (128 bit or 40 bit)” setting.

Click Authentication Settings and select the Password radio box. Supply your VyprVPN-provided password in that field and then click OK.

Set VyprVPN password – Mac OS X”

We’re almost done! Click Advanced in the bottom right corner of the window and ensure that Send all traffic over VPN connection is checked. Click OK.

Advanced VPN Settings – Send all traffic over VPN – Mac OS X

Check Show VPN status in menu bar if it is not already. Click Apply then browse to the new, odd-looking VPN icon in the menu bar and connect to your new VPN.

Connect to VyprVPN – Mac OS X

Disconnecting from the VPN connection can also be done by accessing the menu from that VPN icon in the menu bar.

Notes: OS X has a feature called VPN on Demand, listed as a tab on the Advanced page for VPN connections, that will theoretically automatically connect to the VPN when you attempt to access certain domains you provide. I say theoretically as I have tried many things to get it working without luck and have found users complaining about the same issue on Apple’s forums. If/when this issue is fixed, it will be a great way to automatically ensure you are always on a secure connection when doing things like going to your webmail account and so on.

Also, if you would like to use a different DNS provider, like OpenDNS or Google Public DNS, than you use with your primary connection, you can specify that in the DNS tab in the same Advanced VPN options page. Otherwise, OS X will inherit any DNS servers you have set on your Ethernet or AirPort connection. It doesn’t actually list those inherited DNS servers but I tested it and it still uses my OpenDNS configuration.

Setup on Windows 7

Fire up the Network and Sharing Center, most easily opened by clicking the Start button then using the search field to find it.

Under the “Change your networking settings” section, click Set up a new connection or network.

Set up new VPN connection – Windows 7

In the window that pops up, select Connect to a workplace. (If you already have another VPN connection, Windows 7 will ask if you want to use that connection. Select No, create a new connection and click Next.)

Click Use my Internet connection (VPN).

For Internet address, supply one of the following depending on which you live closest to:

us1.vyprvpn.com (United States — Los Angeles)
eu1.vyprvpn.com (Europe — Amsterdam)

Provide a name for the new VPN connection, such as “VyprVPN”, for Destination name. Click the checkbox for Don’t connect now; just set it up so I can connect later, then click Next.

Type in your VyprVPN-provided username and password and check the box for Remember this password. Click Close

Click Close.

When you are ready to connect to VyprVPN, click the network icon found at the bottom right of your screen on the taskbar. A window displaying available networks to connect to will open up. Under the “Dial-up and VPN” section, your new VyprVPN connection will be listed. Select it, right-click and then click on Properties.

On the Security tab, set Data encryption to Maximum strength encryption (disconnect if server declines). Under the Authentication section, click Allow these protocols and under it uncheck all but Microsoft CHAP Version 2 (MS-CHAP v2). Click OK.

Go back to the network menu, select VyprVPN again and click Connect.

In the next window, click Connect as well. A few small connection status windows will show up and then you’ll be successfully connected to the VyprVPN VPN service!

Disconnecting from the VPN can be done by clicking the network icon in the taskbar again, selecting the VyprVPN connection and clicking Disconnect.

Setup on Linux (Ubuntu 9.10)

Setting up a VPN connection is a bit more involved on a Linux box but for the better as you get easier access to some more advanced functionality. Start by browsing to System » Preferences » Network Connections » VPN.

If you have never setup a VPN connection before there is a good chance that all the buttons, like “Add”, are grayed out. Fix this by opening a terminal and running this command:

sudo apt-get install pptp-linux network-manager-pptp

Now go back to the Network Connections window and the VPN tab inside of it; the Add button should now be clickable. Click it, select Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol (PPTP) in the drop-down and click Create.

Type something like VyprVPN in for Connection name. For Gateway, supply one of the following depending on which you live closest to:

us1.vyprvpn.com (United States — Los Angeles)
eu1.vyprvpn.com (Europe — Amsterdam)

Type in the VyprVPN-provided password and then click Advanced.

In the Authentication section, uncheck all but MSCHAPv2. More on why we’re setting that at the end of this post.

In the Security and Compression section, check the box for Use Point-to-Point encryption (MPPE) and select 128-bit (most secure) in the drop-down below it. Then check the box for Allow stateful encryption and click OK and Apply.

If at any point during the VPN setup you see a keyring message like the one below, click Always Allow.

Restart the network manager by running this command in the terminal:

sudo /etc/init.d/network-manager restart

Now you are ready to take your new VyprVPN connection for a test drive. Click the network icon in the taskbar and click on your new VPN connection.

A few seconds later you should be successfully connected!

Setup on iPhone/iPod Touch

Browse to Settings » General » Network » VPN » Add VPN Configuration. Select the PPTP tab. Provide a name for the connection, like VyprVPN, in the Description field. For Server, supply one of the following depending on which you live closest to:

us1.vyprvpn.com (United States — Los Angeles)
eu1.vyprvpn.com (Europe — Amsterdam)

Type in your VyprVPN username and password in the Account and Password sections, respectively. Set Encryption Level to Maximum and toggle Send All Traffic to ON. Click Save.

Ensure that your new VPN connection is selected under the Choose a Configuration section. You can connect to your new VPN from this page or even more conveniently with the VPN toggle switch on main Settings page. Flip VPN to ON and it should connect shortly. VPN on the iPhone works with both 3G and Wi-Fi connections.

How do I know it’s working?

Before connecting to your VyprVPN connection, find your IP address. There are many ways of doing this but you can easily find it by going to SpeedTest.net. Your IP will be displayed in the bottom left corner. Then connect to the VPN and refresh the page. Your IP should have changed and the map will now think you are in a different location.

Performance

As to be expected when routing your web traffic through another service, your throughput takes a hit in exchange for the extra security. How big of a hit depends on a few variables — where the exit server is vis-à-vis the servers of sites you commonly visit as well as the protocol used for creating the VPN connection. (It is a myth that VPN performance depends on having a nearby VPN server. It is more important that the VPN server is on the path to the servers of websites/services you commonly interact with.) That being said, PPTP is what VyprVPN uses and there are other more robust protocols for VPN connections. It is, however, the easiest to setup, manage and is natively supported by many operating systems (can be fast if properly configured because it’s at the kernel level) right out of the box.

Bandwidth tests with and without VyprVPN in various cities

How I Tested: The test box was a Windows 7 PC connected to the Internet directly with an Ethernet cable — no router in between (Once you go past 80 megabits my router doesn’t route so well..). I fired up Firefox 3.5.6 with Flash 10.0.42.34 and went to SpeedTest.net. I did 5 tests at each location, with and without VyprVPN enabled and posted the best results from each. My Internet connection is a fiber line by DirecPath in Atlanta, GA.

As you can see, there is a noticable before and after difference in Internet bandwidth but nothing big enough to negatively change your typical browsing habits. The most important aspect is that download speeds remain high. The speed test at San Diego with VyprVPN enabled was the fastest of the VPN-enabled bunch because it is closest out-of-line location. Well actually, Los Angeles is where it exits but there is a bit of network congestion there. As the VPN-enabled speed tests get further away from San Diego, they naturally get a bit slower as they have to travel a further distance.

I should also mention that you can only connect to VyprVPN from one IP at a time, so using it simultaneously on your iPhone and laptop will not work; even if they are on the same router with the same WAN IP. I tried it and the new connection I made knocked off the other active VPN connection.

A Golden Frog Senior Engineer had this to say about speed tests, where they emphasize their support in helping customers optimize their speeds:

Speed tests are dependent on a number of factors such as the in-between network, home networking equipment, firewall and anti-virus software, and the speed-test location itself. One person’s results can be very different from anothers just by changing something simple like wireless router firmware. Golden Frog’s support staff will work directly with individual customers to get them the best speed for their specific conditions through their variety of network and troubleshooting options.

And here’s a simple test on the iPhone:

iPhone bandwidth test over Wi-Fi

In Short: VyprVPN’s network infrastructure is beefy enough to handle the needs of what you would do with a VPN — check email, surf the web, download files, consume content on sites that require a U.S. or European IP, et cetera. It would be nice to see VyprVPN add more VPN locations in addition to Los Angeles and Amsterdam.

Thoughts + Nerd Talk

In the beginning of this post I mentioned SSH tunnels. One of the problems with SSH tunnels is that if they are not configured properly your DNS requests will not go through the tunnel, easily exposing what websites you are visiting. While SSH tunnels and VPN, short for Virtual Private Network, achieve similar goals they operate at different layers of the OSI model (VPN PPP/PPTP at layer 2; compare to SSH at layer 7). VPN encrypts all traffic so you don’t have to worry about properly setting up ports with any SSH tunnels. Encrypting all traffic with VPN does come at the expense of some network overhead but I do not think this will easily be realized with a personal VPN setup.

However, that same DNS request leak issue manifests itself with PPTP VPN connections if encryption is not enabled (side note: the PPTP protocol by nature implies no encryption or authentication — that relies on the configuration of the authentication methods. Keep that in mind when reading people online say that PPTP leaks DNS requests everywhere.. all depends on the config!). I tested my Linux VyprVPN setup by running it in a VM and then capturing the packets in the parent OS. The VM used a different IP than the parent OS, instead of the typical NAT/shared setup, so I could ensure that the data I was looking at was for the Linux traffic only. With my VyprVPN connection on my Linux box, no DNS requests got through (that’s good!).

Click for larger version. On the left you can easily see DNS requests coming through (bad!) and on the right is the properly configured VyprVPN connection that did not leak any DNS requests through.

Windows Users: Windows (XP, Vista, 7) has a DNS leak issue. Read about patching it.

MSCHAPv2 is the most secure authentication method that VyprVPN supports. CHAP, MSCHAPv1 and MSCHAPv2 are all similar protocols, with the latter two being Microsoft’s implementation. They are all very old and vulnerable protocols. Security expert Bruce Schneier stated that with MSCHAPv2 “the fundamental weakness of the authentication and encryption protocol is that it is only as secure as the password chosen by the user.” Keep that in mind and change the default password provided by VyprVPN to something much longer with lots of entropy (Notice: as of this posting, passwords cannot be longer than 8 characters but will be supported out of the gate when VyprVPN reaches its final release). As for other authentication protocols we are not using, EAP is more secure but I could not get it to connect to VyprVPN with that setting. There is also PAP, which you should avoid at all costs as it sends your password in plaintext.

While I’m on the subject of security here, it should be noted that there are still some latent vulnerabilities associated with using PPTP VPN instead of IPSec (albeit more complicated to setup, manage and more resource intense). As Schneier said:

Since authentication and key-exchange protocols which do not allow passive dictionary attacks against the user’s password are possible – Encrypted Key Exchange and its variants, IPSec – it seems imprudent for Microsoft to continue to rely on the security of passwords. Our hope is that PPTP continues to see a decline in use as IPSec becomes more prevalent.

PPTP VPN connections can be compromised with man-in-the-middle and denial of service attacks that are protected against with IPSec VPN implementations. Examples of PPTP downgrade attacks were mentioned at the 2003 Black Hat Conference:

During negotiation phase
- Force PAP authentication
- Force MS-CHAPv1 from MS-CHAPv2
- Force no encryption
During re-negotiation (plaintext Terminate-Ack])
- Get passwords from existing tunnels
- Misc attacks
Force “password change” to get password hashes
- Hashes can be used directly by a modified SMB or PPTP client
- MS-CHAPv2 hashes not useful – force v1

Extra Reading
If this technical aspect of VPN interests you, Microsoft actually has some great resources: VPN Tunneling Protocols, VPN Security, VPN Overview.

In Short: VyprVPN encrypts data and hides DNS requests when properly setup. Unfortunately, the underlying VPN technology used here is PPTP that is often scoffed at by security experts for being old and insecure. I would love to see the final version of VyprVPN (it is in beta now) ditch PPTP in favor of IPSec, L2TP over IPSec or OpenVPN protocols.

Verdict

If you are looking for an extra bit of security while checking your email at the local coffee shop where you frequently work then VyprVPN is just what you’re looking for. It’s easy to setup and provides a sufficient layer of extra security. If you are trying to use the hotel Wi-Fi connection while attending Def Con, I do not recommend using VyprVPN or else your login information will end up on their wall of sheep. In that case you would want to find an OpenVPN, SSL or IPSec VPN provider.

VyprVPN is currently in beta and only available to Diamond level customers of Giganews until June 2010. They state the value of VyprVPN is $14.99 per month, so it can only be assumed that it will cost that much if and when it is offered on its own. Compared to other VPN providers this seems to be on the higher end of the scale in terms of pricing, assuming the others which I have not tested offer similar speeds. Combined with PPTP, VyprVPN will make for a hard sell for the utmost security minded folks. I hope VyprVPN will offer an OpenVPN service in the near future. This is what a Golden Frog Senior Engineer had to say when I asked them about future offerings:

We aim to be competitive with existing offerings in the space and are focused on not just providing the same kinds of VPN service, but VPN service focused on speed and reliability.

Hopefully by reading this article you have learned a few things and know how to shop for a VPN provider should you need one in the near future. The most important things to look for in a VPN provider are as follows: a secure protocol like OpenVPN or IPSec, a Privacy Policy and Terms of Service that aligns with what you plan on using that service for, a reasonable bandwidth allowance and servers near the sites you access (in general – if you live in the U.S. and visit U.S. sites often, a VPN provider with a U.S. location will suffice). Properly configured PPTP VPN connections are okay for adding a bit of security — enough to foil any random running a packet sniffer for their first time — but for anything important, avoid them:

IPREDator co-founder Peter Sunde, who also founded popular file-sharing site The Pirate Bay, told iTnews: “128-bit encrypted PPTP can probably be broken by someone that can eavesdrop on the traffic.”

iTnews – Pirate Bay’s IPREDator not a place to hide

VyprVPN gets 7.5 out of 10 Stammys with casual web surfers in mind, great support and a fast connection. The security-minded nerd side of me cannot score a PPTP VPN connection higher than that.

How do you currently browse the web when on untrusted, open networks? Have you ever used a VPN for the purpose of keeping your data safe or bypassing some ISP traffic shaping/etc limitations? Is VyprVPN something you would pay for?

Disclosure: I have a been a paying customer of Giganews since early 2008. Giganews bought me lunch at South By SouthWest Interactive last year and it was tasty. This post was not paid in any way, shape or form. I find this stuff interesting on my own and figured it would make for a great review. Some links in this post utilize an affiliate tag, which helps pay for some of my startup and living expenses as well as student loans.

Please leave a comment if you have enjoyed this post! Follow me and my nerd musings on Twitter and FriendFeed.

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How To/Review: Surf Securely with VyprVPN

Review: Blippy (“What are your friends buying?”)

Paul Stamatiou — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 21:41:13 +0000

Blippy is my pick for startup to watch this year (with Square being close by). Blippy enables people to automatically share their purchases done through a variety of services, such as Amazon, iTunes, Netflix and better yet their credit/debit cards, with their followers. At first glance many will be shocked and wonder why they would ever want to use such a service but that only brings up memories of people saying the same thing about Twitter just a few years ago. The concept behind Blippy is crazy enough that I believe it will take off rather quickly. In fact, they recently announced they are already tracking over $1M in transactions.

My Blippy Profile – Some aesthetic elements of Blippy are noticeably inspired from Facebook and Twitter, but that’s because they work well.

First off, for those worried about the security of providing such a service your bank credentials, it is no different than what Mint does; encrypt your account information and then outsource the rest to a trusted PCI-compliant and ISO 27002 certified service like Yodlee.

Rather than sounding like every other blogger being skeptical of Blippy due to privacy issues associated with sharing such financial information, I fully embrace Blippy and have linked my primary bank account in addition to my Amazon and iTunes accounts. The last decade has proven that people can safely lead completely transparent lives online. First it was blogging, then social networks and the rise of photo and video sharing sites, lifestreaming, Twitter and so on. Let’s face it — the majority of Gen Y and Gen X-ers having no problem sharing lots of information about themselves online. I believe social financial data sharing through services like Blippy is naturally the next step.

Linking accounts to Blippy

That’s not to say that some privacy elements are critical with a service like Blippy. In fact, they suggest having one credit/debit card as your social Blippy-linked card and have it linked to your Blippy account to share all transactions. I only have one card I really use all the time, so I have that linked and make use of some of Blippy’s privacy features like previewing and hiding purchases. I have found that there is often a delay before transactions appear on your profile so there’s no worry if you made a purchase you don’t want others to see; you can hide it before it goes live, or after.

Arguably the best feature of Blippy is the superior control over what is shared. You can preview and hide purchases manually at your discretion. For example, if you don’t want people to know you spent a lot of money on alcohol one weekend…

Blippy is fairly early stage, but I expect them to have a filtering feature in the near future. For example, if I never want my account to show trivial expenses that I feel would otherwise just add noise to my Blippy feed, like filling up at the gas station, or simply purchases that should not be shared for privacy reasons, like gluttonous visits to a particular bar or two, I could make a list of businesses that should never be shared. At the moment hiding purchases is a manual process for each transaction. Users may temporarily pause sharing from a particular card or account though. And of course some users may opt for complete lockdown and have a protected account that can only be viewed by approved users.

Users can see recent purchases by business/retailer

Blippy also gives you some control over purchase names and locations. You can do a quick search to add the location of the business. Unfortunately, I had to do that several times for separate purchases at the same restaurant as there was no way to make a global change to transaction names. However, Blippy does/should notice the same businesses and states how many times users have interacted there.

Blippy lets you rename purchases and add location information. Often credit/debit card purchases have cryptic and not too explanatory names. Also, probably a good idea to pause sharing on your linked accounts when visiting Vegas.

Utility

Okay so you might still be thinking “I use Twitter.. but why the heck would I use this?” Here are a few use cases. For one, you can see if you’re overpaying for anything as your friends will see what you bought and paid (certain accounts like Amazon, iTunes and Netflix provide itemized lists of what you purchased instead of just displaying price and business) and be quick to chime in if you got ripped off. They can also point you to helpful resources about that new camera you just bought. In this economy it’s a great way to find good deals through your network and comparison shop — albeit after you’ve already purchased the item. Or Blippy might end up just showing how much money you waste.

So.. does it work well?

Going back to the filtering idea, I think that will be vital to Blippy as it the numbers of users increase by orders of magnitude. If most users simply link all their accounts and don’t actively manage or utilize such an automatic filter, your homepage could become very saturated and noisy. At the moment some purchases made by the same person get clustered together and have a small expand link, but I think that’s just the beginning.

The homepage of Blippy can be a bit noisy at times with lots of nondescript purchases.

That being said, Blippy works very well with interesting purchases and conversations form around them:

And other times lots of great commentary can be found.

Want in? Here are some invites..

Blippy is currently in private beta and currently has around 1,000 users, according to my unscientific pagination math. I have secured 50 invites to give out (Thanks Ashvin!). Click through to this blog post (for those of you in RSS readers) and the invite code will in be the first comment below. Follow my Blippy account at @Paul.

Thoughts? Would you use Blippy? If so, would you share it all or just a few select accounts? If not, what do you think it needs before you would consider using it?

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Review: Blippy (“What are your friends buying?”)

Review: Kodak Zi8 HD Pocket Video Camera

Paul Stamatiou — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 10:47:15 +0000

I was recently in the market for an affordable, HD-capable pocket video camera. I knew Pure Digital’s Flip line of pocket camcorders like the Mino HD and Ultra HD were very popular in this space and as such I was just about ready to buy one. However, I decided to look around first and that’s when I discovered the $180 Kodak Zi8 HD pocket video camera. After having the Zi8 on hand for a few weeks, I believe it to be the best high-definition pocket video camera near the ~$200 price point on the market now. I’ll attempt to explain why in this review but if you’re looking for a quick answer, it’s because the Zi8 has an external microphone input, SDHC support and some interesting things I’ll get into soon.

Photo taken with D90 and my favorite lens: 50mm f/1.8

Unboxing

While the $180 Kodak Zi8 is cheaper than Flip’s 2nd Generation offerings ($230 MSRP for the 8GB Mino HD), the Zi8 requires that you provide your own an SDHC memory card. That is of course unless you think the measely 20MB of onboard storage is enough for your HD clips, which are typically 100 MB per 2ish minutes of video at the lowest HD setting (720p @ 30fps). Fair enough; SDHC storage is cheap and now with Class 10 cards, very fast. I purchased a 32GB Class 10 SDHC card (Patriot LX) to go with my Zi8 for about $100.

The unboxed Zi8 with the usual assortment of cables (A/V, HDMI, power).

On the upside the Zi8 unboxing yields more goodies than with the Flip cameras. You get a wall outlet charger, which would cost you some $20 with the Flip, as well as A/V and HDMI cables to connect the Zi8 to a TV for displaying your latest clips.

Getting to Know the Kodak Zi8

At 4.5-inches tall, 0.9-inches thick and 2.4-inches wide, the Zi8′s form factor is not unlike that of any other smartphone that might occupy your pocket on a daily basis. Also similar to a smartphone, you can charge the Zi8 over USB, a process that will take around 4 hours for a full charge or use the included wall charger to charge the Zi8 in just 2 hours.

You can’t tell in this picture but the Zi8 is substantially thicker than the iPhone 3GS.

The Zi8 sports a vibrant 2.5-inch LCD display boasting 230,000 pixels that rivals the 2-inch displays found on Flip’s current products. Unfortunately, it is not possible to turn off the display to save battery while recording. That being said, I got just 1 hour and 37 minutes of battery life when recording 720p @ 60fps. Kodak states an official battery life of 90 minutes when recording 720p @ 30fps, so my numbers seem accurate. However, shooting with EIS video stabilization enabled (pretty much all the time unless you’re using a tripod) battery life will look more like 75 minutes.

External microphone input, A/V out, HDMI, power

There are two solutions for those that require more battery life while on the go:

Buy an extra Li-Ion battery or two. The Kodak brand one (KLIC-7004) runs about $25 or you can find a cheaper, generic brand with more mAh for about half that or less. However, keeping them all charged requires charging them inside the Zi8 so it might be a good idea to get a separate charger.
Or better yet, use the USB to DC power cable that comes with the Zi8 and hook it up to a portable power source like the Tekkeon TekCharge MP1800 or MP1550. The larger of which will give you another 6+ hours of power for your Zi8 on the go.

For camera geeks: 6.3 mm, f/2.8, fixed focus; 35 mm equivalent: 61 mm (1080p), 46 mm (720p/60 fps, 720p, WVGA), 42 mm (still)

Like many other pocket video cameras at this price point, the Zi8 uses a small fixed focus lens rated at f/2.8 (compare to the better f/2.4 for the Flip cams). Fixed focus is good for these types of pocket cameras as it is fast and doesn’t have to spend time focusing on the subject you want it to focus on, arguably at the expense of some quality in different conditions. Unfortunately the way it is setup, it’s already “zoomed in” a bit from the start – 46mm for 720p videos and 61mm for 1080p videos. It just means you will have to be a bit further back from your subject(s). Flip video cameras have a similar issue which is why both the Zi8 and Flip cameras have an active community of people that modify their camera with external lenses. I plan on purchasing a 0.67X wide angle+macro, 2X telescopic and a fisheye lens to attach to the exterior of my Zi8.

On top of the Zi8 (visible in the very first picture in this post) there is a focus switch that lets you go between regular landscape mode and macro mode. Macro mode is a huge plus for me as I often record close-ups of gadgets and electronics at just a few inches away. The only downside being that it takes some effort to switch between the two and a mechanical clicking sound will end up in your video; less so if you are using an external microphone.

There is no optical zoom with the Zi8 but the 4X digital zoom works sufficiently but anything past 2X zoom and the video quality drops significantly. The zoom is twitchy and not smooth so if you’re trying to make a pleasant video you’ll want to zoom in first then begin recording. The Flip cameras only have 2X digital zoom, so the Zi8 gets some more points. Regardless, it’s best just avoid all digital zoom in any way, shape or form. Everytime you use digital zoom, a photographer somewhere in the world starts crying.

pop-out USB connector and SDHC

While I’m on the subject of battery life, it should be noted that a 32GB SDHC card will give you just over 5 hours of recording time with 720p @ 30 fps. I don’t know where Kodak came up with their “record up to 10 hours of HD video” statement, as 32GB is the largest SDHC card supported by the Zi8.

Now onto the subject of the Zi8′s Electronic Image Stabilization. EIS on the Zi8 is purely digital and not to be confused with optical image stabilization found on some more expensive cameras (for example Nikon VR or Canon IS). Kodak is the first player in the affordable pocket video recorder industry to release a camera with any type of image stabilization. This is a big deal for a camera that is likely going to be handheld (YouTubers) and not used with a tripod. Unfortunately, their Zi8 EIS doesn’t get stellar marks from me. First off, it should be noted that digital image stabilization just can’t turn a shaky handy while walking into a perfectly steady shot. That’s not the job of EIS. Instead it is supposed to turn a reasonably steady handheld clip into something with less perceived shakes. In my testing, EIS does not help much regardless of shooting style. Of course, that’s better than nothing. Kodak gets an E for Effort on this one.

Unlike the Flip, you can’t turn off the Zi8′s recording LED… no sneaky recording for you (pssst – try a small strip of black electrical tape)

The Zi8 also comes with face detection that shows little brackets around each face it recognizes while recording. Then it adjusts settings (not focus as the lens is fixed focus) to ensure the face is sufficiently illuminated.

The Zi8′s built-in mono microphone is adequate for picking up peoples’ voices from just a few feet away but any further than that and it struggles. This wouldn’t be an issue if it was possible to easily adjust microphone gain on the fly and see an on-screen measurement like in the settings. Fortunately, the Zi8 comes equipped with an external microphone input — great for people demanding a bit more in the audio department.

I tested the external audio input with a ~$50 Sony ECM-DS70P stereo mic and was quite pleased with the overall result. However, I found I had to lower the mic gain, then increase the volume in post-production to produce a less noisy final product. I would have to test with other microphones to be sure but it seems like the Zi8 has a noisy external microphone input as increasing the gain substantially increased the noise, where as this microphone is usually quiet.

Usability

I’ll be the first to say the user interface is not quite the best but it is far from being difficult to use. There’s a single settings menu with just a handful of things you can change, so it’s not like you can get lost in menus. The trouble comes more from the button feel. There are four buttons for settings, deleting videos, switching to recording mode or playback mode, in addition to a joystick that controls things like playback, recording, zoom and volume. The joystick was the first thing to annoy me on the Zi8. It’s not easy to control and you end up selecting menu items you didn’t mean to. Likewise, those four buttons could stand to be larger and easier to press.

Settings

Recording Sizes: 1080p, 720p @ 60fps, 720p, WVGA and a 5.3MP Photo mode

While the Zi8 can take 5.3 megapixel photos, something that its competitors don’t, it takes generally washed out, blurry photos that barely rival the camera on the iPhone.

Video Playback

Connecting the Zi8 to your computer can either be done by popping out the flexible USB attachment or taking out the SDHC card and putting it in a card reader. I prefer using my SDHC card reader as the Zi8′s internal USB connector is too short and bulky to fit next to or in between my used USB ports. I imagine traveling with the Zi8 itself without any cables or card readers will make me realize the handiness of the internal USB connector.

Video Quality

There are three HD recording modes with the Zi8: 1080p @ 30 fps, 720p @ 60 fps and 720p @ 30 fps. I found that recording at 30 fps 720p made the most sense as all of my content would end up on YouTube where it would get converted to 30 fps anyway, so I could save on storage space by recording in 30 fps. As for why I don’t bother with 1080p on the Zi8, it’s same argument — most of my stuff ends up on the web so shooting in 1080p is overkill and leads to longer iMovie / Final Cut importing and exporting times. It also seems that several of my clips recorded at 1080p have less smooth playback (even on my Core i7 HTPC) leading me to believe the frame rate was closer to ~20-25 fps than the stated 30. Also, recording at 1080p is like recording at the 35mm equivalent focal length of 61mm so you’ll have to stand back further than you would normally.

frame crop from 1080p video @ 100%. Click for full image.

Now for the big question, do the videos look good? Yes. The Zi8 does not like low light situations and produces considerable grain in those conditions, but everywhere else I was pleased with the video quality. However, there’s one slightly annoying issue I noticed: the Zi8 takes its sweet little time adjusting to extreme changes in lighting conditions. For example, moving from indoors to sunny outdoors or vice versa will overwhelm the Zi8 and it will take a few seconds for automatic white balance, exposure and ISO to fully adjust to the new lighting conditions.

I pointed out some of those situations with this footage video below.

Video showing off the Zi8′s 720p quality. For best experience, play on YouTube (larger video) in HD.

Files saved by the Zi8 utilize H.264 encoding and are .MOVs.

My Zi8 Car Setup

I purchased the Zi8 with the intent of primarily recording driving and occasionally autocross and track day videos. I ended up going with a strong and cheap ($14 when I bought it) suction cup mount to test out. I ended up being very pleased with this setup. The Zi8 also supports an IR remote control sold separately by Kodak so if I feel the need to mount the camera to the back window/seats I can remotely trigger recording with that control, which appears to be sold out everywhere and/or discontinued.

The microphone used is the ECM-DS70P I mentioned earlier and I am quite happy with it aside from that Zi8 mic gain issue.

Kodak Zi8, Sony ECM-DS70P and Panavise 809 mount

Verdict

Overall the $180 USD Kodak Zi8 is a fantastic pocket video camera for the price. Low light performance has always been a challenge for these types of cameras and the Zi8 is no exception; expect some grain in less than optimal lighting conditions. In the end, the Zi8 is a winner due to its superior expansion features like removable SDHC flash storage and support for external microphones, as well as 1080p and 720p @ 60 fps recording modes.

I give the Zi8 9.5 out of 10 Stammys.

Thoughts? What do you currently use for your portable video recording needs?

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Review: Kodak Zi8 HD Pocket Video Camera

Skribit Exits Beta, Gets TechCrunched

Paul Stamatiou — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 17:03:39 +0000

I always found it a bit ironic that I had less time to blog here as I started working full-time on a blogging startup. Well, my time spent on Skribit is starting to pay off. Today, Skribit finally goes out of what we’ve internally been considering our public beta — so it’s our official launch day. We have been laying low on the marketing and press front, except for my ramblings here, and now we are ready to tell more people about it. That being said, TechCrunch just wrote about Skribit (thanks Daniel!). This is the first step on our so-called “Customer Acquisition Plan”, as MBA as that sounds.

Skribit has always been in an interesting position due to our low burn rate. While I do work full-time on Skribit, I don’t take much in the way of salary as this blog has been paying for my rent and basic living expenses for a while now. You’ll see me playing and testing out different forms of advertising on this blog’s sidebar as I try to find a good combination of revenue streams.

Alright so what’s big in this Skribit release? While this is mostly a polishing-things-up update for those of you that have seen Skribit before, we’re also pretty excited about signup and login via Twitter. Big props to our Ruby on Rails intern Alex Coomans for that feature. Alex is finishing up high school and applying to colleges now; hopefully my letters of recommendation with help with that.

We’re happy about the launch and want people to take full advantage of some of the extra functionality only present in our Pro accounts, so we’re giving out some Pro accounts. Select the Pro account plan, sign up and you’ll be taken to a payments page where you can enter in promotional code “PSTAM” to redeem the account. At the time of this posting it’ll say the price is $1 — I’m going to need to hack in a fix but it should say $0 a bit later.

Thoughts?

Update 12-23-09: I wrote a follow up post on the Skribit blog called Thoughts on a Successful Launch.

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Skribit Exits Beta, Gets TechCrunched

Review: Sonos ZonePlayer S5 All-In-One Wireless Music System

Paul Stamatiou — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 07:24:02 +0000

For those of you that have been reading for a while (thanks!), it’s no surprise that I am a music fan. I wouldn’t quite say audiophile as I don’t find the need to spend sizable amounts of money on audio equipment, but I always have some music playing and enjoy a high quality audio setup. About two years ago I reviewed the excellent Sonos Digital Music System. The only problem with that setup was the price — just over $1,000 for all of the components. Since then I haven’t been able to get back into Sonos’ product line as everything was still rather expensive. Sonos hopes to change that with their new ZonePlayer S5, running at $399 USD.

What? Your kitchen doesn’t look like this?? Neither does mine. This is a press photo. Pretty sure they used fake ice for that wine.. since when do chilled wine bottles lack condensation?

What is Sonos all about?

While the S5 I’m about to review is great for small apartment dwellers like myself looking for one unit to do everything, Sonos is known for multi-room music systems. That is to say that you can get as many Sonos ZonePlayers as you have rooms in your house (as long as you have something like less than 42 rooms) and they play together nicely. You can control each so-called zone with any of their controllers and most importantly initiate “party mode” that links all of the ZonePlayers together and plays the same song/input over them.

My S5 “loft install.” With 14-foot ceilings, I simply placed the S5 on top of one of the walls and it easily fills my bedroom with music. Sonos states the S5 is “designed to sound best when placed 3 to 12 inches from a wall.”

Like all Sonos products, the S5 is an Internet-connected music device giving users access to their personal music collections (no support for iTunes FairPlay DRM, but Windows Media PlaysForSure DRM is supported) with support for iTunes playlists as well as built-in Internet radio stations, Pandora, Last.fm, SIRIUS Internet Radio, Napster and Rhapsody. I can’t stress how great these services are for music buffs. While several are subscription services, they afford users the ability to instantly find and play just about any music they want. In addition, the S5 can connect to other UPnP servers or NAS devices on the network, such as an Apple Time Capsule.

Playing a new album release with Rhapsody – Sonos Desktop Controller PC application

Going back to those built-in Internet radio stations, right out of the box the ZonePlayer S5 knows of over 25,000 Internet radio stations. I was able to give the Sonos Controller my location (Atlanta) and it listed all of the local radio stations. Stations can be searched by station name, show or host, as well as by music genre or type (Talk or Sports).

Browsing local radio station Internet streams while playing

Even with all of those streaming services, Internet radio stations and my own music collection, I still need access to less mainstream indie music, remixes or mixtapes that are easily found on sites like The Hype Machine, The Sixtyone or The Feel Good Initiative and not-yet-in-the-US-but-I-have-a-beta-account services like Spotify. That’s why it helps to have the S5 close enough to your computer so you can connect the two; at least until Sonos does some sort of Desktop Controller integration with Airfoil so you can hypothetically send any audio from your computer to the Sonos without having to run a line in cable.

Sonos Desktop Controller PC application – Line-in Settings

Backtracking a bit to the multi-room aspect of Sonos systems, equipping your house with a Sonos multi-room system can get pricey pretty quickly. Let’s say you have a four bedroom house: two S5′s in two rooms, an Ethernet-connected ZonePlayer 120 (acting as a ZoneBridge as well) in the living room with some decent loudspeakers and a ZonePlayer 90 connected to powered bookshelf speakers. Assuming you only use the free iPhone app or desktop controller software instead of one or a few Sonos Controller 200′s, that setup would tip in at just over $2,000.

That’s why I am so curious about the ZonePlayer S5. It’s perfectly poised to be a great all-in-one system for the small apartment dweller.

Details

The ZonePlayer S5 is a rather compact system measuring just one iPhone deep, two iPhones tall, about 3.2 iPhones wide and weighing in at just over 9 pounds. Beneath the unassuming exterior, the S5 packs in 5 speakers (two tweeters, two 3-inch mid-range drivers and one 3.5-inch woofer) with each controlled by a dedicated Class-D amplifier.

As with all of Sonos’s creations, simplicity comes first. There aren’t many controls on the S5 other than volume and mute. There are two LED indicators, a green LED for mute and a white LED for general system status. The status indicator LED can be turned off through the Sonos Desktop Controller application; attention to detail that is important for those placing the S5 in their bedroom and do not wish to have the ceiling illuminated by a bright LED at night.

There are all of 3 buttons on the S5, and they’re all volume related. The S5 is meant to be controlled by one of their controllers or applications.

The back of the S5 retains this simplicity, offering only a headphones jack, line in, power and a 2-port Ethernet switch so you don’t lose any of your router’s precious RJ45 jacks. Here’s a neat feature though: if the S5 is wirelessly connected, you can use those Ethernet jacks to connect other devices to your network. I turned off Wi-Fi on my MacBook Pro and connected it via Ethernet to the S5 and it instantly got online.

Rear connections on the S5

I would have loved if there was one more button on the S5 that instantly switched to playing line in. The user wouldn’t have to waste 15 seconds on the Sonos controller trying to switch to line in if they simply wanted to hook up a friend’s iPod or what have you. While on the subject of line in, if multiple ZonePlayers are linked together they can all play the same line in source connected to a single S5.

If you have a ZoneBridge already, all the S5 needs is power. The other cable was my own audio cable for connecting my PC to the S5′s line-in.

Install

My biggest beef with the S5 is that you will need to purchase the $99 Sonos ZoneBridge 100 if you plan on using the S5 anywhere you don’t have access to an Internet connection over Ethernet (assuming you don’t own any other Sonos devices). That’s a bit troubling to me because Sonos advertises the unit as “wireless”, which it is but that should be clarified with “wireless, if you already have another ZonePlayer connected with Ethernet otherwise you’ll need to buy a ZoneBridge.” Chances are that right off the bat this setup is going to run you $500.

The Sonos ZoneBridge 100 allows the S5 and other ZonePlayers to work wirelessly. It’s not necessary if you have access to an Ethernet connection where you have the S5 installed.

This is a bit out there – but I would suggest Sonos considers offering some sort of Sonos server software as part of the Desktop Controller software users can install on their 24/7-running computer that takes over the duties of the ZoneBridge 100 (so people don’t have to plunk down another $100) for those that already have a wireless network in place and only plan on using one ZonePlayer. Sonos employs a proprietary AES-encrypted mesh network of sorts — dubbed SonosNet 2.0 — to be able to let other ZonePlayers and controllers communicate with each other, analyzing link quality and automatically adjusting network routing. From what I could summize from engineer talk on their forums, it is just software on top of the 802.11b/g radios. Again, just my thoughts and it’s probably much more involved.

But I digress.

My glamourous installation of the Sonos ZoneBridge 100 with the rest of my boxes.

Despite my other criticisms, setting up the ZonePlayer S5 and ZoneBridge 100 was incredibly easy. Doing everything from unboxing to being able to control the system, less than 5 minutes transpired. In my case that involved giving the ZoneBridge power and Ethernet, and providing the S5 with power. Then I went through a simple install wizard on the controller application and it prompted me to press a button on the ZoneBridge after which it immediately saw the ZonePlayer.

Performance

With everything installed and working I first tried to setup my iTunes library with the S5. Using the Sonos Desktop Controller shown in screenshots earlier in this review I went to “Set Up Music Library” and added a path where it could find all my music. It then automatically imported my iTunes playlists. Unfortunately, it did not properly respect my iTunes playlist folders. Instead of making folders, the Desktop Controller just made a huge playlist composed of songs from each of the playlists inside of that folder. I was left with a massive list of playlists to browse through.

Slightly annoyed at that, I decided to just make a new playlist in iTunes. I went back to the Sonos Desktop Controller application to check out my newly created iTunes playlist, but alas it was not listed. I had to browse over to the Music menu and select “Update Music Index Now” then wait a minute or two for my new playlist and songs to appear. By default the music index is updated automatically every night.

Afterwards I began setting up my accounts for SIRIUS, Pandora, Last.fm and Rhapsody. No hiccups there. Browsing each of the services is intuitive with a variety of ways to browse or search for artists, albums and tracks. If I had multiple ZonePlayers setup, I would be able to control each of them individually — or all as one — with any Sonos Controller.

Does sound quality degrade with wireless distance?
In my limited testing, no. I tested the ZonePlayer S5 wirelessly connected to the ZoneBridge 100 in two settings: my small apartment where the two devices were line-of-sight and less than 15 feet from each other as well as in a house where they were 75 feet and a few walls away from each other. I was unable to distinguish any differences in S5 sound quality or behavior between the two cases.

How long does it take from clicking/tapping on a song in the controller before the S5 starts playing it?
Between 1.8 to 5 seconds for most Internet services and usually under 1 second for songs played off my local music collection (tested on two Internet connections, a fiber 80mbps line and a 15mbps cable line).

Has the S5 ever “stuttered” during playback?
Yes but only when I was saturating my Internet connection downloading and trying to play songs from my music collection on the S5, all on the same computer. This did not happen when streaming Internet radio under the same network conditions.

Is it loud enough to be my only sound system for my entire 723 square foot apartment?
The S5 is good for just one room in my 723 square foot apartment (about 400 sq ft) but anything larger than that and the sound does not travel well. For best clarity, Sonos states the S5 should be placed at the other end of the room from where you will be. Positioning the S5 such that it would fill up two rooms with sound resulted in lackluster, washed-out sound with a very “single-cabinet” and mono sound. The S5 works best in single, smaller rooms. For comparison, my Rokit RP5G2 studio monitors ($150 x 2), which use 5-inch primary woofers, are much more capable of producing sufficient bass for a larger room (although studio monitors are not meant for that), compared to the S5′s single 3.5-inch woofer.

So the S5 is properly installed in a not-too-large room. How does it sound?
While there is limited control over the S5 output (Balance, Bass, Treble and an on/off “Loudness” function), I was still happy with the S5′s above-par sound quality. The only issue is that since the S5 is a single unit there is little stereo separation. Sound meant for the left channel or the right channel all kind of mix together. This gets better as you move away from the unit as each speaker is angled slightly differently, but it does not compare to having two separately placed left/right loudspeakers.

Entire range is ever so slightly lumpy with different ranges being reproduced better than others. The S5 is superb at recreating highs through its tweeters, adding a crisp sound on top of a natural mid-range. The S5 could use some help in the bass department though. I perceived it as cold and a bit shallow. It is noticable at high volumes but at that point it becomes boomy rather than full and balanced. In short: it’ll be fine for most people at normal volumes, but this is most definitely not the kind of system to fill a room for a party.

Sonos Controller iPhone App

While there are alternative methods of controlling Sonos ZonePlayers, such as the Sonos Controller 200 ($349) as well as the aforementioned PC/Mac-compatible Sonos Desktop Controller application, I was most interested by their free Sonos Controller iPhone application.

Some screenshots of the application can be found below. In short: this is a full-featured Sonos Controller, all on your iPhone. It can do almost everything of which the Desktop Controller is capable. Small things I noticed it can’t do: turn off the status indicator LEDs on ZoneBridges & ZonePlayers and adjust line in level.

Sonos Controller iPhone App – Menus and equalizer

Nothing fancy here – briefly showing off the app and S5. Subscribe to my new YouTube account for more.

Radio station listing, alarm clock settings, top tracks listed by Rhapsody

Sonos app starting up, Pandora interface, and yes you can send out tweets. This was an autofilled tweet.

In Short: This iPhone app is well executed. I already go to sleep next to my iPhone so now I can conveniently control the music from bed.

Verdict

I will close this review up by bringing in some of the Sonos ZonePlayer S5′s competitors into the equation. These include products like the Bowers & Wilkins Zeppelin and Bose SoundDock 10, both of which are $599 and are more or less only iPod docks. At $100-200 cheaper, depending if you need to add a ZoneBridge, an S5 setup performs right up there with its competitors while offering many more useful features and support for a trove of music sources. Then there are products like the single-cabinet virtual surround sound $199 ZVOX Mini that packs a punch with a 4-inch x 6-inch subwoofer, but lacks all of the wireless connectivity and Internet music sources the S5 boasts.

Sonos is not known for making speakers but rather a brilliant wireless system ideal for easy multi-room setup. That being said, sound quality of the S5 won’t please an audiophile and needs a touch more low-end frequency response (a subwoofer out jack would be appreciated). If you are in the market for such a device, buy it for its impressive connectivity features, not jaw-dropping sound quality. Don’t get me wrong, the S5 is fantastic for adding music to a single bedroom or kitchen but that’s about it.

The Sonos ZonePlayer S5 gets 9 out of 10 Stammys — when was the last time your speakers streamed Rhapsody, SIRIUS, Pandora, Last.fm, Napster and more all on their own?

Disclosure: This S5 was on loan and sent back to Sonos after this review. Links to Sonos products on Amazon in this post utilize my associates tag and feeds me delicious coffee every morning.

Is the Sonos ZonePlayer S5 something that would be a welcome addition to your home? What kind of music system do you have in place at home or is it just your computer audio setup? Too expensive or good value?

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Review: Sonos ZonePlayer S5 All-In-One Wireless Music System